One of my best friends almost died of a drug overdose. On a car ride back from a visit to my grandparents’ house, I got a call from one of her friends that she had been admitted to EMS for taking too much Vyvanse. At the time, we weren’t sure whether or not she was going to live. She was 16 at the time, and besides her friends she had no support system and hardly anyone to reach out to who would know what to do. I was terrified that she was going to die. How could it have come to this?
In the United States, addicts and drug users are treated just like we treat murderers and rapists. This is in part because the American justice system treats drug possession and use as an issue of criminal behavior rather than a health crisis. In 2017, over 1.3 million people were arrested for drug 
possession (Drug Policy Alliance). These aren’t people who are slinging crack or dealing cocaine to those who are vulnerable; These are everyday individuals like you and me who happen to have used drugs and gotten caught. Ask yourself— what kind of culture has been been built where it’s acceptable for the police to arrest and kidnap you from your house or car? Why do these people have near infinite legal power over you— with the threat of violence and imprisonment— for possessing something that could not hurt anyone else? They do not exist to protect and serve citizens. They exist to protect and serve private property, the United States, and its unjust interests.
These unjust laws are exacerbated by the government’s ravenous pursuits for incarceration in the War on Drugs. While being interviewed on the infancy of the drug war, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman provided a damning quote on the purpose of drug criminalization.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The United States government has known for a long time that what they are doing is wrong in innumerable ethical codes of conduct, yet they have continued to double down on drugs. They also don’t have the best reputation with anyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian man. See: Our ongoing history of genocide, enslavement, white supremacy, colonialism, etc. The purpose of the drug war is just like that of the United States’ other militaristic pursuits – centralization of power and the persecution of minorities. While the government is one problem, there’s another important question to examine; Why is this attitude so present in American people?
It is like this because Americans have the problem of moralizing people who use drugs. I know we have all heard “Good people don’t do drugs” at least once in our lives, and there’s been a history of programs in the United States that treat addicts as lesser human beings. People don’t use drugs because they are morally inferior. They use drugs because they either want to have fun or they want a method of escapism. As a note, these are not mutually exclusive things. When my friend started using drugs, she was only in it for the fun. As she expanded her horizons from cannabis to prescription pills, it quickly turned into an addiction she had to feed. As she started to lose her grip on her life, her drug use transformed into escapism. The vast majority of this downward spiral was fueled by the lack of support she had. She had nobody to reach out to, and this only furthered her addiction. After witnessing this, it became even more obvious to me that the solution to drug problems is not throwing addicts in prison. The solution is helping them.
Drug addiction is not a moral crisis, but rather, it is a health issue. So what then could we gain from treating drug addiction the same way we would any other public health crisis? A shining answer lies in the country of Portugal.
After struggling to deal with the rising amounts of hard drug use in their population, they decided to decriminalize all drugs. This did not lead to a drug frenzy; it led to a notable decrease in drug usage. Coupled with public health programs like needle exchanges so that heroin users had a dramatically lower chance to contract AIDS as well as having drug users meet with a team made up of doctors, lawyers and social workers, this solution worked out fantastically. From 2001 to 2017, drug deaths decreased from 78 deaths per million to less than 10 deaths per million.
We can even see preliminary results from more progressive methods of drug policy such as drug assisted psychotherapy. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is another promising program for utilizing the positive effects of some drugs. Currently, their main focus is testing the use of MDMA (ecstasy) in combination with a psychotherapist to help treat PTSD in adults. These things are groundbreaking, but not for the reason you might think. They’re not groundbreaking because of the results – anyone who knows a thing or two about drugs understands the positive effects that some of them can have as medicines. The reason that this is groundbreaking is that it shows the United States is finally starting to head in a different direction, even if it is at a snail’s pace. Slowly but surely, we are starting to treat drugs and drug users the way they deserve.
I’d like to propose a few alternate scenarios. Alternate scenario one: Say that someone buys LSD from an online darknet vendor. While this is significantly safer than buying them in person, a lot of people run the risk of dying from unregulated drugs bought online.. This is not because drugs like psychedelics or other related substances can easily kill you. Illegally bought drugs kill people because they are frequently laced with substances that are lethal. The problem is that people don’t know to test their drugs. There are legal drug testing kits available online, and using them will save lives.
Here is alternate scenario two: Suppose someone overdoses on opioids. Currently, most people don’t even know what an opioid overdose looks like. They’d likely have an ambulance called for them, but for some folks it could already be too late. Now, imagine that all students go through a harm reduction program that teaches them signs to look for. Imagine that schools, public facilities, and other private buildings have designated areas for Narcan, a drug used to prevent people from dying of opioid overdose in emergency situations. Some students may even carry a Narcan nasal spray on them. I know I would. All the money currently put into finding and prosecuting drug users would be directed towards programs specifically made to educate everyone about different drugs and their uses and dangers.
The last alternate scenario: Suppose we go back in time to when my friend just started her abuse of prescription stimulants. She wanted to help herself somehow, but she had nowhere to turn to. Imagine that, instead of feeling lost, she could call a phone number to be directed to an addiction counselor. She could have the option of going somewhere that, rather than abusing addicts, treats them like human beings. She could go somewhere to get the help she needed without that being a euphemism for a cell. This is not idealism. It is what needs to happen nationally to save thousands of lives. Harm reduction is the only path forward.
Works Cited
Aleem, Zeeshan. “14 Years After Decriminalizing All Drugs, Here’s What Portugal Looks Like”. Mic, 2019, https://www.mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening. Accessed 18 Oct 2019.
Baum, Dan. “[Report]: Legalize It All, by Dan Baum.” Harper’s Magazine, 31 Mar. 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.
“Drug Policy As A Health Issue”. American Civil Liberties Union, 2019, https://www.aclu.org/other/drug-policy-health-issue. Accessed 17 Oct 2019.
“Drug-Induced Deaths In Portugal 2019 | Www.Emcdda.Europa.Eu”. Emcdda.Europa.Eu, 2019, http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2019/portugal/drug-induced-deaths_en.
“MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy – MAPS”. MAPS, 2019, https://maps.org/research/mdma. Accessed 17 Oct 2019.
I would try and cite these but the school recently did a blanket ban on drug related web searches, (which is dangerous, by the way I legitimately just wrote about that) so I can’t access them and get all the information needed to properly cite them.