Thanks so much for sending me the full version of your highly informative paper entitled "Stigmatize the use, not the user?"1 Having read it in its entirety, the title now makes perfect sense to me.
I find all such papers very difficult to read, however, partly because they are depressing (as when I read about the 46,082 opioid-related deaths that occurred in America in 2018) and partly because my philosophical temperament causes me to wince at the many false but unspoken assumptions behind the hate speech that one hears on this topic. I am thinking particularly of your quote from the probation officer who said:
"I would say that the perception is that people don't deserve to receive Narcan; that they deserve to die."
This quote, in fact, inspired me to post the following Tweet.
Prohibition is all about justifying hate for specific social groups. It has given a veneer of "health concerns" to American prejudices. That's why there was no crack down on elderly white suburban women who were using oxy, only on the impoverished young people who did so.
My own elderly mother was one of those white women who spent a decade on legal oxy. It never occurred to any of us family members that she was a drug "scumbag" for so doing. She wasn't even a "drug abuser" in our eyes, but simply a person with medication issues2. Had she been a minority or an impoverished young person living in the rust belt, the case might have been very different.
I agree with pastor Debra that addiction is not a sign of spiritual weakness or an ethical fault, but neither is it fundamentally a medical problem. Framing the issue that way avoids the real problem and gives prohibition a big mulligan for the problems that it causes. To catch the real forces at work here, we should be framing the drug situation in America as a result of "Prohibition Spectrum Disorder3," a category that comprehends all the negative effects from drug use that are bound to occur in a country that outlaws all mind- and mood-improving drugs while insisting that the public know as little about those drugs as possible.
If oxy is the only drug that is readily available for me to gain transcendence from a tough life, then we should not be surprised if I use oxy. The fact that we do not understand this as Americans brings me to the two big lies of the prohibitionists:
1)That there are no downsides to prohibition.
Prohibition has killed over 100,000 Mexicans in the last two decades4 and turned inner cities into shooting galleries5. It has nullified the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution and outlawed entire religions, based on the Christian Science notion that drugs are bad and therefore cannot be properly used in religious rituals - as if the DEA should be in charge of deciding if a religion is valid. Prohibition has helped authoritarians like Donald Trump win office by effectively removing millions of minorities from the voting rolls. So when the Drug Warrior says that there are no downsides for prohibition, they mean there are no downsides for the prohibitionists. Even this, however, is false, since the Drug War discourages and/or outlaws research on a vast array of drugs, some of which could be of use in fighting autism and Alzheimer's 6 given their ability to grow new neurons in the brain. But this brings us to one of the craziest assumptions behind the Drug War: the idea that a drug which causes problems for white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose, in any circumstance, ever. This is nothing less than a ban on human progress on the pharmacological front.
2) That there are no upsides to drug use.
Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance is slowly (glacially, in my book) teaching materialist scientists that "drugs" may have some positive uses after all, a fact that they might have already gleaned from history7. The Hindu religion was inspired by Soma8; the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries thrived for millennia910, and the Peruvian Inca considered the coca leaf to be semi-divine11.
Finally, it's ironic that Americans consider dependence on opioids to be so demeaning, given that 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma 1213 "meds" that they take every single day of their life14. We not only accommodate this use, but ensure a "clean drug supply," meanwhile telling the depressed and bipolar that it is their medical duty to take those drugs15. This in my view is nothing less than the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, and yet it is not even an issue for Drug Warriors, which is yet another indication that Americans are bewitched, bothered and bewildered when it comes to the subject of "drugs"16.
Thanks again, Jerel, and best of luck in your continued research on this extremely "fraught" subject!
PS In December of 2023, the Atlantic published an op-ed piece declaring that we need to double-down on stigmatizing drug users. This is wrong for so many reasons, one scarcely knows where to begin. In fact, I wrote a whole essay about it called "Stigmatize THIS!"17 and submitted it to the Atlantic as a letter to the editor, but of course, they did not publish it.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
If you're looking for an anti-Christ, just look for an American presidential politician who has taught us to hate our enemies. Gee, now, who could that be, huh? According to Trump, Jesus was just a chump. Winning comes before anything at all in his sick view of life.
Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
There was no opioid crisis when Americans were free to smoke opium nightly in their homes. Now scientists around the country are making money hand over fist by "solving" the problem in a politically correct way, without even mentioning the drug prohibition that caused it.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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