Spurred by comments from Richard Branson at The Atlantic’s Summit on Mental Health and Addiction, readers grapple with the question of whether all drugs, including heroin, should be decriminalized. Join the debate via hello@theatlantic.com, especially if you have a personal connection with addiction.
Your reader Ethan wrote: “Even small-government conservatives like myself believe in government intervention when critical for safety, and it’s not challenging to argue that the ‘hard’ drugs aren’t safe under any circumstances.” And there you have much of what’s wrong with American democracy. “Yes, I see the evidence, but I just don’t care, because my common sense tells me something different.”
The use of hard drugs in Portugal has gone down, not up. Drug-related deaths in Portugal have gone down, not up. Drug-related HIV infections in Portugal have gone down, not up. Is that not the definition of “safer”?
A bit of Googling indicates the picture on drug-related crime (robberies, etc.) is murky, what with the collapse of the Portuguese economy since drug legalization. But there doesn’t seem to be any solid evidence that drug-related crime has gone up.
Not to mention—OK, I’m gonna mention it—that the drug-cartel wars in Mexico [between the years 2006 and 2012 saw an estimated total number of homicides reach as high as 125,000], not including an estimated 25,000 missing. That also doesn’t include the drug-gang wars in other countries of Central and South America. Are these people, and their friends and families, not human beings? Does their suffering count for nothing?
Excuse me, I think I need a drink.
On that note, another reader asks, “What about alcohol and tobacco?”
I believe that those two drugs are far more harmful and addictive than all of the other illegal drugs out there. The ravages of alcohol and tobacco are well known, yet they are still socially acceptable. So where do we draw the line?
I just feel that no matter how we slice it, people will continue to use drugs. Why not bring it all out into the light?
[Branson] believes that focusing on domestic American reforms would reduce the global policy will to criminalize drugs and would provide strong momentum for pushing a goal that seems well beyond even the outer limits of the American policy imagination. “Decriminalizing and regulating all drugs is going to be the answer,” he proclaimed.
Branson leans heavily on the international example of Portugal as evidence for the efficacy of decriminalization. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs, replacing jail and prison time with fines or rehab appointments for those caught using drugs in public. The results have been dramatic, with drug deaths and addiction both falling by large margins over the years, an example which has convinced Branson and the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “The amount of people taking heroin now has gone down by something like 80 percent,” Branson said.
Branson’s cause is intriguing to me. I see it as a near inevitability that in the next 10-15 years marijuana will be legal nationwide. “Hard” drugs, though? Knowing the potential for addiction and fatal overdose of cocaine, meth, heroin ... I find that dubious at best. Portugal’s experimentation notwithstanding, I don’t see the appetite even among the hardcore “legalize it” crowd, let-alone the moderates it’d take to make meaningful progress on that here in the U.S.
Even small-government conservatives like myself believe in government intervention when critical for safety, and it’s not challenging to argue that the “hard” drugs aren’t safe under any circumstances. Therefore, they’re an infinitely harder sell than marijuana, which even the most critical of studies paint as being minimally harmful to long-term health and functioning.
What do you think? Drop us an email and we’ll get a debate going. Or if you’d simply like to share your story of addiction (anonymously if you prefer), or your experience with someone who’s had an addiction, please let us know.
I shared some of Ethan’s skepticism toward hard-drug decriminalization until I delved into Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream, one of the best books I read last year and can’t recommend enough. Hari goes into great detail about the Portugal example Vann cites, as well as other successful battles against heroin addiction in Switzerland and Vancouver, British Columbia—battles that approach addiction as a health problem, not a crime.
For example, here’s one of the most intriguing policies from Portugal: The government offers businesses major wage subsidies if they agrees to hire recovering heroin addicts, the logic being that addicts usually turn back to drugs because they’ve lost a sense of purpose and connection to society due to criminalization and stigmatization. The program has been really successful; participating businesses tend to keep on the employees even after the wage subsidies end.
I’ve noted this before, but here’s a great animation that gets to the heart of Hari’s thesis—that addiction has little to do with chemicals, but rather a lack of human connection:
One of the best books I read this year was Chasing the Scream, in which author Johann Hari persuasively argues that most people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of drug addiction—how relatively little of the draw is due to the chemicals themselves, even the most powerful ones like heroine. To get a wonderfully distilled version of the book, check out this animation created by a fan:
If you want to listen to a longer version of this argument, Hari did a popular TED talk this summer. And of course for his full argument, buy the book. I compiled a bunch of reviews, favorable and otherwise, here. For instance, Miranda Collinge of Esquirecalled the book a “fascinating, extensively researched and heartfelt contribution to a debate over drugs policy that continues to rage today”:
It’s a pattern Hari observes again and again through the decades: a zealous, misguided or sometimes deeply prejudiced person in power decides to eradicate the social blight of drugs, forcing, even offering, the drugs trade to criminals, while the hopeless and the helpless are caught in the crossfire. He meets scientists, counsellors, addicts and dealers who point out the folly of this approach, which he backs up with studies of murder rates, the workings of the human brain and, particularly memorably, self-fellating rats.
Drunk elephants, stoned water buffaloes, and tripping mongooses also make an appearance. From the book:
The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate — dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.
Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.
