How to win the war on drugs
Stop fighting it.
I had two half-sisters who both died of drug overdoses. Both were intelligent, lovely, talented women with big, nasty gorillas on their backs. Our drug laws did not stop them from acquiring or using drugs. Because of the current legal framework, they both had their illness criminalized and both wound up dead after a life on the poverty-treadmill of feeding an addiction.
Our legal approach to drugs has made criminals richer than our governments. Those drug addicted folks break into our homes. Take up community services. Spread diseases. Cost us prison expenses. Kill innocent bystanders. Steal our cars. All so they can get money to buy dope.
Not one law has stopped that. We spend billions losing this war. We lose trillions in untaxed criminal income and nothing has stopped the drugs.
In order to understand why our laws have no impact on the drug industry, it’s important to understand the root of addiction. There are a number of paths to full-blown, living-on-the-street addiction, but often trauma and poverty or lack of social connection are major factors when tracing the etiology of an addict’s disease.
The oldest and most primitive part of the human brain, the limbic system, is believed to drive the compulsive nature of addiction. When people ask, “why don’t they just quit?” the answer is, “They can’t.”
As long as they must traumatize themselves (selling their bodies, violating their own morals, committing crimes they are ashamed of) and others to obtain their drug, their brain is not capable of making sound choices. It is only capable of medicating trauma. And the trauma is repeated daily in order to acquire the drugs, which feeds the need for the drugs.
It’s a Catch-22 spiderweb that ensnares emotionally impoverished people in a multi-billion dollar web that employs an extremely heavy, very well-paid, very well-pensioned civil servant class on YOUR tax dollar.
Our laws did not stop very dangerous people from making hundreds of thousands of dollars off helping my sisters kill themselves.
Those laws did not stop you, the taxpayer, from forking over hundreds of thousands of tax dollars trying to get my sisters to stop killing themselves. You paid for their health costs, incarceration costs, and societal costs. You’re still paying for all the other sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons who have yet to kill themselves. While tax-free money is exported to their murderers overseas instead of paying for our universities.
Our.
Laws.
Aren’t.
Working.
Because whoever wrote them did not have a basic understanding of the neuroscience of addiction. It can be treated, but the cycle of trauma-reward-trauma has to be interrupted for treatment to be effective. But that’s just what we’re facing with the current addicts in our society.
We need to take all the money we’re wasting on ineffectively trying to change the human brain and invest it in preventing future addicts. That means investing in the lower ranks of society in ways that allow them to move up: education, safe housing, supports for single parents, etc. The kid we don’t invest in now is the kid we’ll have to incarcerate tomorrow.
We might not want to pay taxes to keep single mothers at home. We might not want to pay for children who are vulnerable to predators because their mothers are too poor to live in safe neighborhoods. Too overworked to provide emotional nurturing. We might not want to acknowledge the connection between early childhood traumas and later-life addictive disorders. We might think having to pay to protect kids from poverty isn’t fair.
That doesn’t matter. Life isn’t always fair.
WE’RE ALREADY PAYING
We’re already paying to keep making the problem worse. We’re sending tax-free money to criminals and terrorists. Inner city street corners are piled high with people who are degraded and destitute because they’re feeding a habit bigger than them. This puts uncounted billions, possibly trillions, in the pockets of some very nasty, dangerous characters. People who kill people. People who kill police. People who use children as drug mules. That’s just how it plays out in the streets. The drug moguls languish in tropical mansions on tax-free billions while millions of addicts degrade themselves for the product.
It plays out at the supranational level too.
If the Afghan government had had a legitimate medical morphine export market through poppy cultivation, the Taliban would have had way less money for war. What if we had solved the root problem of underdevelopment instead of throwing 20 years of wasted military budget at the problem?
We’ll pay to make the problem worse or we’ll pay to make the problem better, but regardless of what we think is fair, we’re already paying and will continue to pay.
What do we want to pay for?
The question is do we want to pay trillions to deal with terrorism, property crime, corrections, violent crime, insurance premiums, cops, lawyers, judges, etc… or do we want to pay a few million to give druggies a safe place to use, a safe supply so they’re not stealing our stuff to put billions in the pockets of criminals who don’t pay taxes?
And hey, hey Big Pharma — this means government-administered profit for YOU, buddies… And to the investors who own shares in those pharmas, there’s your dividends, folks. You’re welcome.
One infected needle and the subsequent HIV or Hep C costs to public infrastructure run into the millions over multiple victims. Preventing even one HIV infection pays for itself. One crackhead on the street can do $50,000 in property crime in one night. Giving him free dope pays for itself. The pharmaceutical cost of producing these drugs is cheap. It’s the hazard pay to criminal organizations that makes them so expensive.
A new approach would even have the ancillary benefit of allowing addicts to live like human beings instead of having to break into cars and perform paid fellatio behind dumpsters. Once they don’t have to do that anymore, they tend to quit or die. Either choice they make will involve a lot more dignity than our current approach. It won’t involve us being robbed of our hard-earned belongings. Wasting thousands of paramedic and doctor hours on overdoses. Millions in corrections just to have criminals doing drugs in the prisons.
We lost the war on drugs the minute we decided that any money on the wrong side of the line was illegal. In making it illegal, we made it untraceable, inaccessible. We’re re-doing Prohibition-Era ineffective. And thousands of kids are dying of tainted, tax-free street drugs. Thousands of paramedics are on stress leave or leaving the business because they spend their whole shifts waking up junkies on the nod. Millions of tax dollars are buried in the ground with the addicts. Thousands of grieving parents wonder what they did wrong.
We can do better.
It takes, on average, about three years for an addict — regardless of whether it’s alcohol, cannabis, fentanyl or anything else— to move beyond acute and post-acute withdrawal into a better life. It requires an holistic approach that involves physical, psychological, and spiritual health. They didn’t get sick overnight, so a 60-day rack-em-crack-em-stack-em approach to recovery is ineffective.
Our current approach is why the relapse rates are so high: we get them off the dope, but not off the need for the dope. I never met a five year old whose dream was to grow up and become a drug addict. Most addicts have some kind of unaddressed trauma in their history that makes them use. We take away their coping mechanism, then we send them right back to whatever toxic hellhole they came from without making the time to replace the addiction with well-established, healthier coping skills.
Then we shame them for relapsing.
Whenever my youngest sister relapsed it was usually around housing or lost love. As the housing market got more expensive and she was less able to keep a roof over her head, relapse became both her escape and her prison. In the end it became her grave. It wasn’t for lack of talent, brains or beauty either. She just hated herself, which made her use more, which made her hate herself more.
The criminalization of drugs has created a disenfranchised underclass of people who have been reduced to drug-seeking animals. If you take the chase out of their game, it loses its shine. They will be won by the lure of safe housing, free pharmaceutical supply and proper medical/psychological attention. Taxpayers should be won at the idea of far lower societal costs related to addiction.
Criminal organizations exist because there’s money in existing. As long as there’s a market for the drugs, the addict’s money (often acquired through theft or prostitution) will flow to the wrong people. It won’t stop. It will flow from hardworking people to bottomless tax-pits and enormous property damage and high insurance costs.
Many people may balk at the idea of government-sponsored dope at first. Set aside the morals, the judgements, the what-you-think-is-fairs and just look at the money. The intergenerational harms of poverty related to addiction. Most importantly, the dismal failure of our current approach to win this war on drugs.
While we’re on the what-you-think-is-fair subject, let’s talk about society’s addiction to punishing the addict. OUR neurocircuitry gets high from punishing them. Which is why we keep dung-beetling up the same hill with the same broken solution over and over: we’re in addiction too. We’re addicted to feeling better than THEM. And, like any other addict, we make stupid, ineffective decisions that are destroying our society too.
Seriously, what makes sense?
If an addict can go to his local pharmacy or clinic and be administered his drug of choice for free and in safety he’s not going to steal your car. He’s not going to break into your home. Most drugs can be safely consumed with supervision and after that the addict can be trusted in the wild. Leaving them to function in the wild until they’re ready to quit is cheaper than keeping them in prison.
Two drugs I would set aside as requiring special treatment: methamphetamine and alcohol. Both of these drugs would require special regulations because of the unpredictable behavior of people intoxicated on those substances. For meth I would recommend treating with a pharmaceutical speed like Ritalin or Adderall. For alcohol I would suggest daily sales limits through a sovereign-wide POS/tracking system. (I can guarantee you there would be MAJOR pushback on dosing free alcohol because our provinces make billions in tax off it that I doubt they’d give up, but it’s what I think is right.)
There will always be people who figure a way to game the system, but it would still be an improvement over the misery I see on Main and Hastings in Vancouver. Our current drug laws have created inner-city monstrosities of human degradation — all to pour tax-free money into the pockets of people who are pure evil.
I say legalize it all, hash to heroin. Take the money from the bad people. Ensure addicts have a safe, free supply and safe housing. It’s a lot cheaper, safer and more humane. If someone’s life is so awful that they’re going to kill themselves on drugs, there’s no point degrading them and forcing the rest of us to tolerate paying for drug related crime.
Whether they get busy living or get busy dying, a prescription-based system would cost us less than a tenth of what we’re paying now.
Maybe we could use the money to hire some doctors.
