1) You conclude the article by rightly pointing out that the very term "drugs" is problematic. That's all too true. I think this is the main reason why discussions on this topic give off more heat than light, because the term "drugs" is an assumption-laden term and as such has no place in a rational discourse. The term has passed its expiration date and should be replaced with a judgment-free term like "psychoactive substances." (I like to use the term "godsend substances" for it points out that there is another way of looking at Mother Nature's pharmacy than through the jaundiced eyes of the Drug Warrior.) For "drugs" is not only a hypocritical term (in that it does not refer to tobacco and alcohol, for instance), but it is an anti-scientific one, for the term "drugs": means the following: "substances for which there are no positive uses, whatsoever, for anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances." But the fact is that there are no substances of this kind in the world. Even the deadly Botox can be used rationally in the right doses for the right person in the right circumstance. And so merely to use the term "drugs" is to tacitly sign off on Drug Warrior lies and, indeed, a whole anti-scientific way of looking at the world. For the term "drugs" as used today is like the term "scab": it not only connotes a thing but it passes judgment on that thing in so doing. For this reason, I think that the term "drugs" should be deconstructed at the beginning of all articles about addiction, at least when they are addressed to the heavily indoctrinated layperson in western society.
2) Speaking of which, we may just as well refer to "drugs" as godsend medicines. They are not a scourge. Nothing that nature grows is a scourge. If substances are misused, surely it is an education problem, not a drug problem.
3) You come close to saying that an ideal world would be one without drugs, but this is a Christian Science preference, not a logical truth. If one were to grow up in a hypothetical rain forest surrounded by psychoactive medicines, I do not think it would ever occur to one that they had a moral duty to renounce the use of the substances that surround them. Rather, you would consider it your duty to learn how to use them safely for good purposes. I wish that the Uvalde shooter Salvador Ramos HAD actually used drugs -- namely ecstasy -- for he would then have been far less likely to have found the stomach to kill grade schoolers.
4) As always, it's depressing to read articles like yours because even the good news it reports is usually bad. For instance, the 2000 Runciman report sounds positive because it suggests punishing cannabis-related offenses less harshly than those involving buprenorphine -- however, the report authors apparently still assumed that the only way to deal with "use" is to punish it -- not to educate users as to how to avoid addiction, say, or how to find better drugs to achieve the transcendence that the users were seeking.
5) Speaking of transcendence: Human beings have sought self-transcendence since caveman days. Much of the use that we decry today as hedonism can be equally well understood as a search for self-transcendence, an escape from the psychological limits that have been placed upon one by nature and nurture. Even if we feel that hedonism should be outlawed (a problematic view in itself) it sounds tyrannical to deny human beings the right to self-transcendence, especially considering that the kinds of substances we demonize today have inspired entire religions, as coca was an Incan god, mushrooms inspired religious cults in South America, and the Vedic religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of Soma. Is not then the Drug War an attack on religion -- nay, an attack on the religious impulse itself?
6 I would argue that "addiction" is a political term. Consider America before 1914. Perhaps as many as 10% of the population were opium habitues (compared to the 1 in 4 American women who are chemically dependent on Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime as a direct result of the Drug War giving psychiatry a monopoly on mood medicine). These pre-1914 opium users were habitues, not addicts. Opium-loving Benjamin Franklin was certainly not considered an addict. Then the Harrison Narcotics act was passed and, hey presto, America was suddenly full of addicts. Gee, how did THAT happen?
7 This leads naturally to item 7, the fact that the Drug War causes all of the problems that it purports to solve. In 1915, America suddenly had an "addiction" problem, perhaps, but it was "addiction by fiat," since the government had effectively made Americans addicts -- by forcing them to go cold turkey and/or to seek illicit supplies of their drug of choice. (We would have a new addiction problem today if we outlawed coffee -- or alcohol, or tobacco, or antidepressants.)
8 Ecstasy is one of the safest drugs on the planet. Yet while liquor kills 95,000 a year in America, beer-swilling politicians eagerly seek out anecdotal stories of a handful of deaths caused by ecstasy -- like the death of British raver Leah Betts, which was clearly caused by a lack of safe-use info which was a product of the UK's focus on punishment over education. The UK's crackdown on Ecstasy turned the once-peaceful dance floor into the Wild West, where concert organizers suddenly had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace.
9. The term "drugs" is a scapegoat for all social problems, giving politicians the free pass they need to avoid spending money on real education of the young and fixing up inner cities. Politicians are not skinflints, mind: they just want to spend their money on prisons and policing, not on educating folks and therefore possibly giving them ideas of their own about what constitutes the good life. The people's "good life" may not involve consumerism, after all.
10. The Drug War steals elections for conservative politicians. There is no way that Trump would have been elected had not the Drug War removed hundreds of thousands of black felons from the voting rolls. Millions of others were effectively removed since many US prisons do not allow inmates to vote.
11. In a world with mass shootings, in which we're living under a nuclear sword of Damocles, someone should be arguing that we NEED drugs like Ecstasy, to remedy the fatal flaw of Homo sapiens, namely their ability to demonize and hate "the other," a term which nowadays includes "drug dealers," whom we feel free to address with terms that were once reserved for the Jews in Nazi Germany: "scumbags" and "filth."
12. Speaking of which, rather than worrying about drugs, we should be worrying about the Drug War movies in which vigilante justice is glorified, as in "Running from the Devil," in which the cigarette-smoking DEA agent hangs one "drug suspect" from a meat hook and shoots another in cold blood at pointblank range. Trump's election is small surprise when one considers the popularity of such films. The problem is, Americans think they can have democracy and the Drug War too, but that's not going to happen. Indeed, if Trump wins another turn, he's going to start executing the disfranchised blacks that previous Drug Warriors had been content merely to marginalize.
These notes aren't all about addiction, of course, but this is all interrelated.
Hope my thoughts on this subject were of interest to you, and thanks for your time!
Addiction
"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the Drug War censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the Drug War, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both Drug War ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.