On Drug Use

As I've gotten older, I've been exposed to more and more admissions of illicit drug use. From Cannabis to cocaine to misuse of prescription narcotics and stimulants, it seems everyone is doing drugs. I don't know for certain what constitutes “hard drugs,” but if tobacco and alcohol are the soft ones, drug use has incredible prevalence. And while these things at least have a restricted market, it appears that anyone with a few dollars can get access to sleep suppressant caffeine. How can so many different categories of things you can drink, swallow, snort, or smoke be defined in one umbrella term? What makes something a drug? According to Dictionary.com, the pharmacological definition of drug is “a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being.” That seems a rather positive description for something widely-considered “bad.”

So is that why we are all on drugs? DrugFree.org lists stress, boredom, mental illness, and self-medication among their reasons people try drugs. We live in a world of real action and consequences, even when it's also a world of imagined communities with markets of contrived values. People get sad and angry and lonely, and some of us have chemical or hormonal imbalances, or have suffered traumas, which give us a sort of handicapped way of thinking. I don't mean these experiences merely make us stupid and reckless. I mean that, as the WHO has found in studies, mental illness is very prevalent, and often undiagnosed. A friend of mine once said that “Dumb people shouldn't do drugs. Smart people [sometimes] need them so that they can feel alright long enough to get stuff done.” There is some evidence that depression and anxiety, as well as divorce and alcoholism, are correlated with high intelligence or thoughtfulness.

But why do we self-medicate rather than trust licensed physicians and psychiatrists to act with our best interest in mind? Why are we – to quote a friend – “using a stoned sledgehammer instead of a licensed scapel?” Americans don't trust their doctors enough. There is certainly some reputation of legal dope pushers beholden to Big Pharma. While this is a gross oversimplification and demonizing professional healers does us no good in the longterm, this perception is important beause it impacts reality. One of the best people I know is a therapist with a Bachelor's in psychology and a Master's in marriage and family counseling. At her practice, if you don't have insurance, depending on your income, you're paying between $60 and $95 per session. These are competitive prices. In New Orleans, where weed costs considerably more than in, say, Las Vegas or Los Angeles, you could get between 4 and 8 grams of decent quality bud between those price points. Depending on your rate and method of consumption, that could stretch from a full day's high to a supply for a couple of weeks to a month. If you're not sure there's a such thing as “better,” it makes more financial sense to pay for an attempt at numbness.

For what other practical reasons do people use drugs? For one thing, we have a preponderance of focus-related stimulants. Doctors overdiagnose hyperactivity disorders and overprescribe the relevant medication. The kids prescribed them have more than they can very well use, evidently, and so they flip the pills to their friends, who use them primarily – albeit not exclusively – as study aides. So beyond the hazard of overmedicating the hyperactive, we've got hundreds of thousands of young adults taking speed-derivatives to get all their homework done. Or stay up through the double they're pulling at their service industry job to pay for the necessities of school or the frivolous acutrement of entertainment. Reasons for the overdiagnosis include expanded definitions in the DSM and the relative age of students diagnosed. i.e., the later in the school year your birthday is, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with a hyperactivity disorder because you're biologically mentally less-mature. This nonmedical drug use is not exclusive to college students, though it is largely a young adult phenomenon. Abuse is prevalent and addiction to prescription amphetamines is dangerous. It can alter your brain chemistry and it is damaging to the body's natural filtration system.

What is our solution?

As Chris Rock once said, “All drugs should be legal... because people wanna get high.” There is an intellectual dishonesty in any attempt to apply a “just say no” policy. It doesn't work with sex and it doesn't work with drugs. Theocratic moralizing does not work in this country, and is a waste of the energy and time of all the engaged in and affected by it.

Our incoming Attorney General has pledged to step-up enforcement of federal drug laws, apparently in response to a nation-wide push by state legislators to decriminalize or legalize the marijuana plant. It seems reasonable to me to legalize this particular drugs among all others, because of research showing its positive effects, despite the DEA's claims to the contrary. It seems especially reasonable if you decide to take the trade out of the hands of black market dealers and put the money in the hands of a government which can utilize it to improve society. Colorado made $70 million in 2015 taxing legal marijuana. This is definitely the case if you believe in democracy and free market economics – informed voters and consumers making their own decisions in their own interests. Frankly, the legalization of weed is one of the few places where I see this play out how it's supposed to. I'm afraid that a nationwide rollback is just going to eventually lead to market suppression until the Phillip Morris family and their ilk can patent a weaker-but-poisoned and chemically addictive variant to corner the market, as they have with tobacco.

Personally, I do think all drugs should be legal. We have sufficient proof that the War on Drugs is a failure. New street narcotics are contrived all of the time, we have the greatest rate of incarcerated citizens in the history of the world, and people are being killed directly or indirectly by the drug trade. Our rhetoric engenders a myth of “controlled substances,” but they're currently all out of control because instead of taxing and regulating them we allow cartels to control their flow into our country. Besides relatively-harmless weed coming from a combination of legal clubs and incredibly-harmful traffickers, our drug trade includes much-more-deadly heroin funding terrorism. Since the millennium, our national opioid epidemic has spiraled completely out of control – twelve states have more opioid prescriptions than people, and heroin and opioid overdoses have far-outclassed cocaine in drug deaths, and we are failing as a society to combat the issue. And besides the pharmaceutical industrial complex selling you Oxycontin and Vicodin and Percoset and Codeine, if you live to see rehab after you graduate to heroin you can be hooked on Methadone for the rest of your life. Luckily the DEA is hitting some drug wholesalers with penalties for their participation in the opioid epidemic, but one wonders if it's too little too late.

A Step Toward Education

There are a few recurring cultural memes/running jokes about drugs that I want to briefly address. “Marijuana is a gateway drug,” which translates to normal people speech as “marijuana causes people to try other drugs” is exemplary of them. While it is true that most people stop by weed between alcohol or complete sobriety and, for instance, cocaine and LSD, this reductive perspective is derived from the lack of education expressed in our shortsighted “just say no” approach. For one thing, drug abuse is not married to one substance or another. Drug abuse is subject to a genetic predisposition to psychological dependence on substances. So, even if cannabis were never cultivated for its mild hallucinogenic properties, people that enjoy or are beholden to altered states of consciousness would still find other stimuli.

Beyond that, if you tell kids that weed is going to make them lazy and useless or crazy and violent, and then they find out all of their favorite musicians and the last three Presidents of this country all burned, you instantly lose credibility as an authority figure or an educator. Thereby, they no longer trust your opinion on what is good or bad for them, which can be very dangerous once they encounter something that can actually hurt them.

My grandfather once told me that one should avoid weed because dealers might lace it with adulterants in an attempt to get clients addicted. While lacing weed with PCP or even cocaine is not unheard of, it's not exactly smart business practice to poison your customers. That might work for Big Tobacco, where you've got an oligopoly ruling the market. But it doesn't work in such a widespread and diversified black market. Moreover, cocaine at least is way more expensive than marijuana, so it's no kind of efficient. My mother once told me that cannabis usage can negatively affect male reproductive organs. Infamous pothead and legendary musician Bob Marley died with 13 kids of record, and there are allegations that the actual number of his progeny is much higher.

Misinformation abounds. It replicates without correction until it becomes disinformation and creates social polarity. We have begun as a society to breach the topic of drug abuse as a public health issue, but we need to go further and see it as a public education issue. Drugs will kill less people if they're moderated for purity and studied with an objective scientific approach. We have to do away with the taboo of drug use. Too many people do drugs too regularly for our society to continue to take a strictly punitive approach. A complete absence of drug use is an unrealistic goal, but minimizing dangerous drug use and increasing safer drug use is something I have every faith we can accomplish.

What we need is real drug education. Teachers need to be outfitted with the resource necessary to provide adequate drug education. They have to equip students with the tools to make responsible decisions about drugs. We have to continue teaching kids the risks that drugs pose to their physical and mental well-being. However, we need to do this in a more honest, less hyperbolic way, and we need to be realistic about what – if any – benefits “controlled substances” have. The only way to do that is to more-thoroughly and -effectively research these drugs in an unbiased fashion. Places like Erowid have begun to do this in a ground-up manner, but as a society we need to pool our resources to fight the problems of mis-education that lead to abuse and destruction.