The Dehumanising Insanity of Prohibition
This is one of the best pieces I’ve read, certainly in recent times, about the war on drugs, drug decriminalisation, drug legalisation, drug addiction, prohibition, and psychology. It’s a longish piece at about 10k words based on an interview with famed (infamed?) journalist Johann Hari regarding his recent book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. but well worth anyone’s time.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/a-war-well-lost
Key quotes:
Power concedes nothing without a struggle.
It’s not your morality and it’s not your brain. To a much larger degree than we’ve ever before appreciated, it’s your cage. Addiction is an adaption to your environment.
Anywhere in the developed world, people near you are being giving loads of heroin in hospitals [right] now.
In the culture of terror created by prohibition, if you are prepared to push the moral limit a little bit further than the other guys, you gain a brief market advantage, because people will back off when they’re scared.
But ever since Prohibition we’ve known that the cure is worse than the disease. When you ban substances that people enjoy using so much that they’ll break the law to do it, you create a black market with huge profits. And since purveyors of illicit drugs have no legal way to secure their investment, the trade will be run by increasingly violent criminals. In a single stroke, therefore, prohibition creates organized crime and all the social ills attributable to the skyrocketing cost of drugs—addicts are forced to become thieves and prostitutes in order to afford their next fix.
What we do at the moment is take people who are addicted because they are isolated, distressed, and in pain, and inflict more isolation, distress, and pain on them in the hopes that it will make them stop.
You and I have probably got enough money in the bank that we could spend the next year drinking vodka and never stop. We could just be drunk all the time. But we don’t. And the reason we don’t is not because someone’s stopping us but because we want to be present in our lives. We’ve got relationships. We’ve got friends. We’ve got people we love. We’ve got books we want to read. We’ve got books we want to write. We’ve got things we want to do. Most of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life.
We can understand why the Portuguese system works so well, because it’s all about reconnecting people with the collective, with the group, with the society, giving them a purpose.
#drugs #addiction #society