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 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 history6. The Hindu religion was inspired by Soma7; the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries thrived for millennia89, and the Peruvian Inca considered the coca leaf to be semi-divine10.
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 1112 "meds" that they take every single day of their life13. 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 drugs14. 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"15.
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!"16 and submitted it to the Atlantic as a letter to the editor, but of course, they did not publish it.
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
We westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"