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people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.” This is a key reason why, he says, “we live in a highly addicted society.” We have separated from one another and turned instead to things for happiness—but things can only ever offer us the thinnest of satisfactions.
If we think like this, the question we need to answer with our drug policy shifts. It is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds?
Everyone agrees that cigarette smoking is one of the strongest addictions: it is ranked on pharmaceutical addictiveness scales alongside heroin and cocaine. It is also the deadliest.33 Smoking tobacco kills 65034 out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using
cocaine kills four.
There is just one problem: even with a nicotine patch on, you still want to smoke. The Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of nicotine patch wearers were able to stop smoking.
Gandhi said one of the crucial roles for anyone who wants to change anything is to make the oppression visible—to give it a physical shape.
You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.
that “the war on drugs26 / is a war against hope and compassion and care.”
All doctors agree21 that medically
pure heroin, injected using clean needles, does not produce these problems.
“the pain I have now isn’t the pain of a sickness. It’s the pain of being reborn.”
you give hard-core addicts the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time.
“This program,” Jean says, “gives you the chance to recover the control you have lost,” step by step, day by day.
Swiss citizens could see now that U.S.-style drug crackdowns had brought chaos to their streets—and after the government provided a legal route to heroin, the chaos vanished. So they argued that the drug war means disorder, while ending the drug war means slowly restoring order.
When do the worst problems associated with Oxycontin and Vicodin, the ones you see on the news, start?
They begin when the prescriptions are cut off.
begin here, when the legal, regulated route to the drug is terminated.
Why did the prescription drug crisis radically accelerate in the past decade?
how could a really
powerful opiate cause virtually no addiction when given out by doctors, and an opiate that is three times weaker cause so much?
The answer doesn’t lie in access. It lies in agony.
Why are so many people starting with Oxycontin and Vicodin and ending up using heroin?
Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law.
within a few years of the introduction of prohibition, these milder forms of the drug had vanished. They were too bulky to smuggle: even though there was more demand for them, they weren’t worth the risk for dealers
under prohibition, it’s really hard to get a mild opiate like Oxy, and pretty easy to get a hard opiate like heroin.
The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
The first was that the overwhelming majority of adult drug users had no problem: they used for pleasure and did not become addicts.
The second point was that when it came to addicts, the country had already tried, João says, the “terroristic” approach pioneered by Anslinger:
João believes that addiction is an expression of despair, and the best way to deal with despair is to offer a better life, where the addict doesn’t feel the need to anesthetize herself anymore.
government gives a hefty yearlong tax break to anybody who employs a recovering
They discovered there has been a slight increase in overall drug use, from 3.4 to 3.7 percent24 of the population.
there are fewer addicts after decriminalization.
this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police.
In a true democracy, nobody gets written off.
They want to legalize drugs because they want to get them out of the hands of our kids, defend the basic values of law and order, and reduce anarchy and violence.
This isn’t a vision in which we lose control of drugs, Danny and Steve argue—it’s a vision in which we gain control, at last.
The more interesting question, he says, is how patterns of drug use will change. If we legalized ecstasy and lots of people transferred from getting drunk on a Saturday night to taking ecstasy on a Saturday night, that would count in the official statistics as an increase in “drug use.” In fact, he says, it would be an improvement.
most of us don’t object to drug use in and of itself. We worry about the harms caused by drug use.
enormous fall in overdoses. Why? There are two big reasons. The first is that at the moment, if you buy a drug from a gangster, you have no idea what is in it.
second reason is the iron law of prohibition,
happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.” Later, when I speak
drugs should be legalized not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous.
He found that one drug was quite far ahead of all the others. It had a harm score of 72. The next most harmful drug was heroin—and it had a harm score of 55, just ahead of crack at 54 and methamphetamine at 32. It wasn’t even close. The most harmful drug was alcohol.
He explains that this doesn’t tell you that these drugs are safe—merely that alcohol is considerably more dangerous than we realize.
The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.
