Mark Kleiman discusses the idiocy that passes as thought at the NY Times regarding the use of hallucinogens in research, and it occurred to me how truly wrong all of our nation’s conventional wisdom is regarding drugs. It appears that almost everything we think, do, or fear regarding drugs is just ass-backwards, and we owe this to the hysterical drug policies our elected leaders have foisted on us over the last eighty years.
If you ask me, one of the greatest failings of the Bush adninistration has been the continuation of an untenable War on Drugs, to include the disgusting (and illegal) agitprop that you and I are funding. if you look at it, nearly everything our government has done about drugs has been wrong:
– Banning or making nearly impossible medicinal use of drugs.
– Banning or making nearly impossible research with the use of drugs.
– Lying about the outcomes of drug use and drug experimentation, which has the reverse effect of what is intended. Rather than scaring off users, it mythologizes drugs, perhaps increasing first time use through curiosity.
– Creating the incentive to spread the sale of drugs by cacking down harshly on supply, rather than focussing on demand. QUick- what happens when supplies are limited, and demand remains the same? If you say people just quit doing drugs, you are as dumb as Nelson Rockefeller.
– Imposing absurdly harsh criminal sentences on addicts and low-level suppliers, clogging jails and creating a professional criminal class. No one comes out of jail a better person, but lots of drug offenders come out of prison with a new set of criminal skills.
– Failing to spend even close to adequate funds on rehabilitation.
– Stigmatizing addicts as criminals rather than as people with a medically recognized disease.
And that is what I can think of off the top of my head- Mark can probably come up with much, much more. I recomend you peruse his writings on drug policy (which needs to be updated, Mark).
The “drug warriors” are wrong, have been wrong for years, yet they continue to dominate the policy debate and the policy design and implementation. This needs to change, or the cycle will just continue. And I say this as someone who has a heroin addict (who almost died twice) as a member of my family.