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“People overdose because [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”
(They put quotation marks around the word “musician,” not the word “nigger.”)
They “mature out of addiction . . . possibly because the stresses and strains of life are becoming stabilized for them and because
Most addicts will simply stop, whether they are given treatment or not, provided prohibition doesn’t kill them first. They usually do so after around ten years of use.
heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme.
Harry Anslinger always said drug addiction was infectious. It isn’t, in normal circumstances—but the system of prohibition he built makes it so after all.
“Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”
It is, the Swiss will tell you gravely, a criminal offense to flush your toilet after ten o’clock at night, because it might disturb your neighbors.
If you are addicted here and you want a higher dose of heroin, you can ask for it, and they’ll give it to you. So at first, most people demand more and more, just as Anslinger and his agents predicted. But within a few months, most of them stop asking for more and choose, of their own free will, to stabilize their doses.
the average patient will come here for three years, and at the end of that time, only 15 percent are still using every day.
Before, being addicted to heroin was violent and thrilling—you were chasing and charging around. In Switzerland today, it is rather dull. It involves sitting in clinics, and being offered cups of tea. The subculture is gone.
It is when the legal routes are cut off that the worst begins.
Has anything happened in the United States in the past decade that could be the deep driver of the prescription drug crisis? It’s not hard to find the answer. The American middle class had been painfully crumbling even before the Great Crash produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Ordinary Americans are finding themselves flooded with stress and fear. That, Bruce’s theory suggests, is why they are leaning more and more heavily on Oxycontin and Vicodin to numb their pain.
When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes.
but weed is legal now and we still only sell super potent strains
Oxy is three times more expensive than heroin—way beyond the price range of most addicts. So, he told me, they “switch to heroin, just because of the economics of it.”
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 police don’t go looking for drug users anymore, but if they stumble across you, they will write you a ticket that requires you to come here the next day. The job of the Dissuasion Commission is only to figure out whether you have a drug problem. You can be honest with them, because nothing you say or do here will ever get you a criminal record.
So the government gives a hefty yearlong tax break to anybody who employs a recovering addict.
Today, the trade in drugs consists of unknown gangsters selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, in the dark. That is the definition of a free-for-all. The only way to regulate this trade, they believe, is to turn on the lights—and the first thing they discovered is that to legalize drugs, you don’t have to invent anything new. The structures already exist, all around us.
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. Legalization is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market.
This finding suggests that there is no significant increase in drug use if a country decriminalizes possession, but some increase when they legalize sale.
What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk to getting stoned.
Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms.
Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent.
He showed me that the evidence is that, of the people who have tried crack, just 3 percent have used it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives.
The Washington campaign argued that drugs should be legalized not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous.
Mason argued that marijuana is safer than we generally think it is—especially compared to alcohol. So: Are other drugs safer than we think they are, too? Are they, in fact, safer than alcohol? Should that be part of our argument?
This, it occurs to me, is what the end of the drug war looks like. It is not a mound of corpses. It is not a descent into a drug-fueled frenzy. It is a Colorado soccer mom talking about excise taxes in a gray conference room long into the night.
opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.
Ladies’ Home Journal who this member of Congress was: Senator Joe McCarthy. Anslinger had admitted it to him and then looked away. McCarthy—the red-faced red-baiter—was a junkie, and Anslinger was his dealer.
It’s routine, for example, in drug treatment to refer to people who have become abstinent as “clean”—which clearly implies that people who are still using are “dirty.”
both the drug war and the alternatives to the drug war are intensifying.
One in 130 prescriptions for an opiate such as Oxycontin or Percocet results in addiction, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. (That makes up around 10 to 15 percent of users over time—the same ratio as for other drugs, including alcohol.)
If you want to understand why so many people are taking painkillers, you have to understand why so many people are in so much pain—and psychological pain is as real as physical pain.
The places with the biggest opioid crises are also the places with the highest suicide rates and the highest antidepressant prescriptions—which help us to see that what is really going on is an epidemic of deep disconnection.
In Switzerland, if you are addicted to an opiate, the authorities do two things. They prescribe the opioid you’re addicted to, for as long as you feel you need it. And, at the same time, they give you a huge amount of love and practical support, to deal with the reasons you are in such distress. They get you decent housing, and a job, and extensive therapy.
there is overwhelming evidence that depression, anxiety, and addiction are responses to deep social forces that are rising around us. For example: the less control you have over your work, the more likely you are to despair. Or to name another: as your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to feel insecure and humiliated, and therefore more likely to become depressed or anxious.
“social neuroscience”—your brain is reshaped by social forces.
the desire to take something complex, something human, something that requires our compassion and our intellect, and to distill it down to something really simple.
