Random Thoughts on Drug Policy

I have been thinking about writing on drug policy for awhile but have not been able to develop a framework for my thoughts so I decided to just set them out randomly and see if they organize themselves.

This is written in a Canadian context but will likely apply to other jurisdictions as well. This post is not about medical or prescription drug policy but about the non-medical or recreational use of drugs including drug addiction and what is often referred to as drug abuse.

The first thing to note is that drug addiction is the only medical condition that has been criminalized and the only medical condition that people think can be cured or controlled with only will power.

Have we learned any lessons and will we pay attention to them. I suggest we know that prohibition does not work and education does.

From 1918 to 1920 in Canada and 1920 to 1923 in the United States prohibition of alcohol sales and consumption was enacted. While well intentioned (sparked partly by the effect of drunkenness on the family resulting in families housing and food money being spent on alcohol as swell as the rise in domestic violence) it only made the situation worse by driving the production and sale of alcohol into the hands of organized crime.

On the other hand there was never any talk of tobacco prohibition, even after it’s health effects were well known, mainly due to it’s widespread use in society. What worked instead to reduce consumption was education. While some people did quit smoking the major reduction, from a large majority of people smoking to a small minority of people smoking, was from people not taking up smoking, which is why it took at least two generations to get to where we are now.

However the tobacco/nicotine industry is not ready to fade away. They have promoted vaping, ostensibly as a way for people to give up smoking and as a safer alternative to tobacco, which it may be. However it is clear their real intention is to create a new younger market of people addicted to their products. We need a serious education campaign about the tobacco industry’s true intentions here and the dangers of vaping.

What about marijuana. At one time, at least in Canada, marijuana was legally classed as a narcotic although pharmacologically it is not one. Indeed, marijuana is clearly less harmful than tobacco and arguably less harmful than alcohol. Partly for that reason, although probably more because of it’s increased middle class use, attitudes and laws have changed. It is now available through a legal market, although for purposes of the legal market the scientific name cannabis is now used and anyone with previous marijuana “marketing” experience cannot be involved in the legal sale of cannabis. That is not to say that there are no health concerns, particularly for people under 25, and education about them should be extensive, although certainly not of the inaccurate “Reefer Madness” type. Health Canada has useful and rational information on the health effects of cannabis and other drugs on it’s website.

One major thing legalized cannabis use has done is take the market way from organized crime and reduced the amount of police resources devoted to it.

Then came the opioid crisis and it seemed that people were ready to accept that drug addiction is something that happens to people rather than something they choose. But it soon became apparent that only applied to the middle class where the pushers were the medical system and the dealers the pharmaceutical industry.

We see the same class distinction with harder drugs. Cocaine use by the wealthy class at fancy parties in their lavish homes is glamorized while crack cocaine use by the poor is demonized (unless you are the mayor of a major North American city, then it is just a curiosity).

We even see harm reduction aimed at saving live attacked by the middle class.

What is most puzzling is the objection to safe injection and use sites where users can use drugs safely with clean equipment and dispose of it safely. It seems that people prefer people using drugs on the streets and in parks leaving behind dangerous needles than people being able to do it somewhere without risking their lives.

Safe supply is perhaps even more controversial but it definitely safes lives by ensuring users are using the drug they are addicted to and not given more dangerous and laced deadly drugs. It also requires them to interact with medical professionals that can help them get off the drugs or switch to safer methadone as a transition away from drugs altogether.

And of course it takes a market away from organized crime and frees up police resources and funds that can be more effectively used for health and social services.

The main argument against harm reduction seems to be the idea that the more dangerous you make drug use the more likely people will be to quit, but addiction does not work that way. It more likely just a nicer way of saying “the only good addict is a dead addict”.

This is the point where people usually say what if that was your child, or sibling or someone you know that fell on hard times, but that is not relevant. What is relevant is that drug users are fellow human beings and their lives have value.

Thoughts on the police

This post does not claim to have all the answers, or any answers, nor to be a comprehensive, or any kind of analysis, but is simply some thoughts on a subject that our society has finally been forced to deal with.

One's attitude to the police is clearly shaped by the reality one lives in. Unfortunately for too many people that reality is that the police are people who at worst kill them or their family members and at best treat them unfairly and discriminate against them. To others the police are people they depend on to protect them and in some cases to protect their privileged status in society.

Some will say this is an issue that we have imported from a racist United States. We know that to be untrue. Even those that say that know it to be untrue and the best they can argue is that it is relatively worse in the United States. Not being as bad as America is hardly a standard we should want to be judged by in Canada, particularly when strong arguments can be made that this is not true anyway, we just all wish it was.

Many will argue that abolishing or defunding the police are simply ideas that are too radical.

Indeed for untold decades suggestions for community building and crime prevention as an alternative to policing and incarceration have been met with support in principle without funding being provided, while police budgets have increased exponentially with little restraint. Indeed there seemed to have be an unspoken argument that we will find money for crime prevention when we no longer need it for the police because crime has disappeared.

We could of course reduce the need for the police by orders of magnitude if we stopped criminalizing what is a public health issue – drug use and abuse. We have done that for years with alcohol and tobacco use and cannabis just recently. There is no rational reason why all non-medical use of drugs should not been treated in the same way as a public health issue.

The funds are available to provide proper drug rehabilitation programs, sitting there in police budgets being wasted on treating a health matter as a criminal one. We could also use that money to provide mental health workers to deal with mental health crisis so the individuals receive treatment rather than being killed by police.

I dare say we have a huge amount of room to defund the police and put that money to better use.

We could put traffic enforcement in a separate organization with a greater emphasis on road safety rather than collecting fines,

What we have left within the police for traditional policing, crime investigation and law enforcement would still require major reforms. Reforms of the extent that could justifiably be argued would be best done by abolishing the police as they now exist and starting all over.

Is The War on Drugs a War on the Poor

Canada’s ideological Harper government has decided that the best way to fight crime and the drug problem is to emulate the policies of the country with the biggest crime and drug problem rather than follow the lead of countries with lower crime rates and less of a drug problem.

Despite the romanticism of the sixties left with marijuana and psychedelic drugs the dependence on drugs for escape, recreation or creativity is never a good thing. We can debate whether marijuana is no worse than alcohol or whether tobacco is worse than marijuana or whether the new marijuana is worse than the old marijuana till the cows come home.

The bottom line is that natural highs are always better than artificial ones. Getting high on life is better than getting high on drugs (or money or status, etc.).

That all being said, the criminal justice approach to the drug problem, and in particular the zero tolerance approach of the United States that the Harper government wants to emulate, is clearly a failure.

It is very clear that how we treat drug users depends very much on social class.

Although caffeine is clearly a drug, we do not treat it as one because it is the drug most widely used by all classes. People who use coffee do feel dependant on it and do report withdrawal symptoms when unable to feed their habit. Coffee drinkers and other caffeine users use it as a drug, as a stimulant, whether to study or to work long hours. But it is not classed as a drug by society because of it’s wide use, particularly among decision makers.

Alcohol and tobacco are two more example of drugs used by masses, including the middle and upper classes that are treated differently than drugs primarily used by the poor.

Alcohol is the major social drug of our society, Alcohol is a social drink, but it is also used as a drug to alter ones state of consciousness, whether to reduce inhibitions in a social setting or to just get “drunk” That altered state of consciousness can lead to a reduced ability to reason and to impaired physical functions. The biggest impact of this has been the carnage on our roads due to impaired driving.

There have been attempts to ban alcohol consumption such as during the Prohibition period in the United States, which proved to be an unsuccessful as the current War on Drugs.

Smoking was the other dominant socially acceptable drug habit in our society. It is becoming less so as fewer people smoke, and particularly as fewer people in the decision-making higher and more educated classes smoke. The decrease in smoking came as a result of learning of the health risks. However we can clearly see that legislative restrictions against smoking only came about after there was a trend to stop smoking among the decision-making wealthier classes. Once smoking became a habit of the poor, rather than everyone, it became acceptable to legislate against it.

Criminal sanctions are reserved for the drugs of the poor, the so-called hard drugs. These are drugs that victimize their users. These are drugs that destroy users lives and eventually kill them. Yet our government’s approach to the drug problem is to further victimize and criminalize those addicted to drugs. While the aim of the approach is supposedly to target those making money from the drug trade the zero tolerance approach makes no distinction between victimized and victimizer. The American approach is a massive failure yet our government still wants to emulate it.
Have we not learned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

It is not that we do not have lessons to learn from. The history of our approach to alcohol and smoking has shown us that criminalization does not work and that education does.

Our approach to impaired driving did involve increased criminal sanctions as a necessity because, unlike hard drugs where the main victims are the users themselves, impaired driving kills innocent third parties. However the transformation of impaired driving from a socially acceptable practice to an unacceptable one was mainly the result of education and the changing of social attitudes.

The massive reduction in the percentage of people smoking is clearly the result of massive public health education campaigns. We see that reflected in the fact that smoking rates decline as education levels increase.

So how do we apply these lesson to the drug problem of the poor.

First we need to examine our motives. It is clear that our motives for the War on Drugs are to address the problems drug use causes for the wealthier classes and not it’s impact on the socially marginalized poor. We are not concerned because these drugs are destroying lives and killing people. We are concerned because the addicted victims of these drug problems turn to crime to feed their habit. We see the crime as the problem because it’s victims are middle and upper class.

It is this motivation that causes society not to care that the War on Drugs only revictimizes the worst victims of the drug problem, the addicts. It seems that only the secondary victims, the middle class victims of the crimes count. Of course tackling the real problem and helping the real victims is much more difficult than fighting a war against them. More importantly these victims acre marginalized in society, have very little economic and social influence and have virtually no political power and very low voting rates.

Their very social marginalization and poverty is what makes them easily susceptible to the lure of drugs as an escape from their lives of desperation. Although the War on Drugs supposedly targets those that victimize them, the zero tolerance approach of its implementation fails to distinguish between the victims and the victimizers. More importantly the criminal justice approach of the War on Drugs fails to address the underlying social conditions that make them vulnerable to victimization.

We need a multi-pronged approach to the problem. I do not pretend to have all the answers but I do know what some of the things that need to be done are.

First we need to recognize that drug addiction is primarily a social and medical problem.

We need to find innovative ways to reach the youth in poor communities to educate them about the risks of drug use without preaching to them about how much better middle class society is than the world they live in.

We have to reach those that are addicted and provide them with the resources to overcome their addictions. Reaching them is the most difficult step. These are people that see the social establishment as the enemy, because it treats them as the enemy.

That is why harm reduction programs, such as needle exchange and safe injection sites, that reach out to these victims are so important. Not only do they save lives by reducing HIV and Hepatitis but they bring the addicted into contact with those that truly want to help them overcome their addictions.

More importantly we have to provide these desperate people with the help they need when they ask for it. All too often the window of opportunity when someone is ready to seek help is very short. Telling them they have to wait weeks or months to get into treatment is no better than refusing them treatment. We must be willing to provide the treatment resources necessary to allow people into treatment immediately. The long term costs of not doing that are much greater than the short term costs of doing it.

However, the most important thing we can do to reduce the number of addicted persons is to address their desperate social conditions. A true War on Poverty would be the most effective War on Crime and War on Drugs that ever could be.

We need to shift our emphasis from going to war against the victims of drug addiction to providing help to them.