"Early in use, all of the positive things that are said about cocaine are true. As use continues, all the negative things become true" - Frank Gawin.
"I prefer the natural sky to an opium eater's heaven" - Henry David Thoreau.
Some people say that the way drugs remove inhibitions reveals the real person. Actually, drugs can only ever reveal the mind-altered person. Mind-altering drugs distort us. They often erase our humanity.
Yet Americans in the tens of millions continue to get high and space out.
Why?
True, we may have no expectations. We may act out of habit. But we always act in the hope of achieving some outcome.
People take drugs in the hope of distorting their awareness of the world.
Whatever anyone may say about higher planes of consciousness, mind-altering substances change the functioning of our greatest survival tool: our brain. Although brains are not truth detectors, they are finely honed danger detectors. Our brains keep us alive. We screw with our brains at our peril.
Many drug abusers have dangerous issues they are afraid to face. They use drugs to control their worlds.
The drugs they take only create more chaos.
Many people start out experimenting with drugs. They take them for fun. But what starts out as fun usually ends up as what amounts to a disease. Whether we call it a disease or not, addiction affects physical and mental health. Addiction is a serious medical problem.
These facts are well known. But the motives of drug users - no different than our own on a basic level - are worth repeating in our current atmosphere of lies. The drug culture and those claiming to fight that culture in a so-called War on Drugs have distorted the evidence in front of us so much that it's easy to feel we are on drugs ourselves. Our government policies in particular are so disconnected from reality and so counterproductive it's as if our policy makers wanted to keep us on drugs.
Contrary to the opinions we have heard from our "leaders," people don't use drugs because they are bad or weak people. People don't sell drugs because they are evil either. People buy, sell, and use drugs for the same reasons people do anything: to control their world. For a payoff.
What To Do?
Once addicted, people lose control of their lives. They lose power. They lose hope. Many don't believe they have any chance of living fulfilling lives again. Even if they have an end in mind, they don't have the means.
To stop drug abuse, it takes programs which encourage and empower the addicted to manage their lives in healthy ways. Once people see a better way to meet their needs and desires, they can change. But they will change only if they believe they can.
We believe we can change, and we start to change, only when we see a clear path to change.
When our problems are deep-rooted, we may need support. By "support," I mean people in trouble need independence-building tools and hope. Many of the tools troubled people need are just different ways of thinking. With tools and hope, addicts don't need to be given financial support. They can get that themselves.
In short, we need to personally empower and encourage addicts.
What Are We Doing?
Instead of empowering and encouraging addicts, we the people are dis-empowering and discouraging them.
We keep drug users from success by saddling them with criminal records, and with the de-educating experience of jails and prisons. We also foist stigmas on them that hurt their chances of finding jobs, housing, even healthy friends.
We treat the suffering of addiction as a crime. We pretend that people choose to get addicted. Or else we treat the bad decisions that lead to addiction as if they could never be forgiven.
We also mix up the crimes some addicts may commit with drug use. Yes, drug use can lead people to harm others. But drugs themselves only harm the user. Yet we criminalize drug use.
So addicts go to jails and prisons which don't have much in the way of recovery and rehabilitation programs. What these jails and prisons do have are many opportunities and incentives for addicts to become truly criminal.
Once released, convicts find staying sober and crime-free even harder. Only the most determined addicts can fight through perverse drug policies to get and stay clean.
We the people do not want the addicted - we do not want anyone who has a criminal record - to rejoin society as productive, responsible citizens. We want them to keep failing at life.
What Now?
Let's treat drug abuse like the public health problem it is. When addicts do commit real crimes, let's treat that as a separate issue ... but an issue that still needs to be dealt with by rehabilitation, not an eye for an eye.
Yes, crimes demand stiff consequences. But our end goal should be to stop crime, not perpetuate it by creating resentment and by punishing convicts even after they have served their sentences.
And drug addiction is not a crime, no matter what the government calls it.
Let's stop helping addicts to stay addicted. Let's help them recover instead. Many addiction treatments have been proven to work. Let's use them.
