Thanks so much for sending me the full version of your highly informative paper entitled "Stigmatize the use, not the user?"1 Having read it in its entirety, the title now makes perfect sense to me.
I find all such papers very difficult to read, however, partly because they are depressing (as when I read about the 46,082 opioid-related deaths that occurred in America in 2018) and partly because my philosophical temperament causes me to wince at the many false but unspoken assumptions behind the hate speech that one hears on this topic. I am thinking particularly of your quote from the probation officer who said:
"I would say that the perception is that people don't deserve to receive Narcan; that they deserve to die."
This quote, in fact, inspired me to post the following Tweet.
Prohibition is all about justifying hate for specific social groups. It has given a veneer of "health concerns" to American prejudices. That's why there was no crack down on elderly white suburban women who were using oxy, only on the impoverished young people who did so.
My own elderly mother was one of those white women who spent a decade on legal oxy. It never occurred to any of us family members that she was a drug "scumbag" for so doing. She wasn't even a "drug abuser" in our eyes, but simply a person with medication issues2. Had she been a minority or an impoverished young person living in the rust belt, the case might have been very different.
I agree with pastor Debra that addiction is not a sign of spiritual weakness or an ethical fault, but neither is it fundamentally a medical problem. Framing the issue that way avoids the real problem and gives prohibition a big mulligan for the problems that it causes. To catch the real forces at work here, we should be framing the drug situation in America as a result of "Prohibition Spectrum Disorder3," a category that comprehends all the negative effects from drug use that are bound to occur in a country that outlaws all mind- and mood-improving drugs while insisting that the public know as little about those drugs as possible.
If oxy is the only drug that is readily available for me to gain transcendence from a tough life, then we should not be surprised if I use oxy. The fact that we do not understand this as Americans brings me to the two big lies of the prohibitionists:
1)That there are no downsides to prohibition.
Prohibition has killed over 100,000 Mexicans in the last two decades4 and turned inner cities into shooting galleries5. It has nullified the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution and outlawed entire religions, based on the Christian Science notion that drugs are bad and therefore cannot be properly used in religious rituals - as if the DEA should be in charge of deciding if a religion is valid. Prohibition has helped authoritarians like Donald Trump win office by effectively removing millions of minorities from the voting rolls. So when the Drug Warrior says that there are no downsides for prohibition, they mean there are no downsides for the prohibitionists. Even this, however, is false, since the Drug War discourages and/or outlaws research on a vast array of drugs, some of which could be of use in fighting autism and Alzheimer's given their ability to grow new neurons in the brain. But this brings us to one of the craziest assumptions behind the Drug War: the idea that a drug which causes problems for white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose, in any circumstance, ever. This is nothing less than a ban on human progress on the pharmacological front.
2) That there are no upsides to drug use.
Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance is slowly (glacially, in my book) teaching materialist scientists that "drugs" may have some positive uses after all, a fact that they might have already gleaned from history6. The Hindu religion was inspired by Soma7; the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries thrived for millennia89, and the Peruvian Inca considered the coca leaf to be semi-divine10.
Finally, it's ironic that Americans consider dependence on opioids to be so demeaning, given that 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma "meds" that they take every single day of their life11. We not only accommodate this use, but ensure a "clean drug supply," meanwhile telling the depressed and bipolar that it is their medical duty to take those drugs12. This in my view is nothing less than the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, and yet it is not even an issue for Drug Warriors, which is yet another indication that Americans are bewitched, bothered and bewildered when it comes to the subject of "drugs"13.
Thanks again, Jerel, and best of luck in your continued research on this extremely "fraught" subject!
PS In December of 2023, the Atlantic published an op-ed piece declaring that we need to double-down on stigmatizing drug users. This is wrong for so many reasons, one scarcely knows where to begin. In fact, I wrote a whole essay about it called "Stigmatize THIS!"14 and submitted it to the Atlantic as a letter to the editor, but of course, they did not publish it.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"