Tri-Contribution (A Commentary on Drugs)
Related Article 1: Death Penalty 101
Related Article 2: Stop Hanging People!
Related article 3: Death Penalty as Deterrence - The Easy Way Out
I think there needs to be more support for the cessation of the death penalty, which requires wide-spread education of the people, and also a downplaying of 'misguided' fears and misconceptions about the nature of drugs and their associated drug effects. This recent topic was also brought to my attention two weeks ago during a discussion with my peers, and I have decided to paraphrase my argument (along with theirs), as I think it's time to approach this controversy topic as a layman. The above two articles have contributed a lot to dispelling the myths about drug harm, which is valuable and crucial to understanding the debate (I really stress that you read them), thus I really can't add much more substance to it. So I will approach my view of the topic with a different focus, for what I am interested in is: Are there valid reasons to justify the widespread fear of drugs?
Before I begin my point, let me address this vexing issue. In every discussion about drugs, the individual is regularly posed the inescapable fundamental question about his/her position: are you for drugs or not? So before you wish to read my commentary, let me establish my stance: I disapprove of drug use. In fact, you will find that I adopt a more extreme position than other drug prohibitionist: I disapprove of legal forms of drug use, i.e. alcohol and tobacco. However, I am just as quick to recognise that these pleasure-seeking activities do not warrant, nor in any justify, the taking away of a human life, and neither do they even warrant the coercive punishment, such as imprisonment. What I like to argue is that as much as we may dislike, loathe or hate these kinds of activities, that doesn't give us any right to sanction the practices that probably do more in exacerbating the kinds of harm that we are afraid of. I shall elaborate on these further.
What is the first intuitive notion people have about drugs? Very quickly, people are able to answer the following: they are "bad" because they are "addictive"; they are responsible for crime; they only encourage and facilitate the tendencies of people to indulge in time-wasting, insolent and loafing behaviour; they are a social "nuisance" who threaten to break up the community and etc. My intention here, is not to bring up every single imaginable objection to drug use, for I just as much recognise some of the legitimate concerns here. Hence, I do agree that overall, there is a disturbing trend that drugs are related to crime; that they do seem to cause addiction; that they are used primarily for pleasure maximization and perhaps they could even be detrimental to health.
However, there are also many misconceptions regarding these statements as well. Drugs are not the cause of crime; by that, we mean that people do not engage in criminal activities simply because they have started their use of drugs. The ironic relationship here is that if drug use is constituted as an illegal activity, then we have directly misapplied the label of "criminal" on an activity that need not otherwise be. The other facet of this relationship is that first-time drug users eventually get acquainted with the criminal justice system, and through their inevitable imprisonment, and association with other deviants, they have become "criminal" because of the practices of the state to send them to a place where, for better or worse, drug users become familiar with the world of crime. We should also do better to take note (and this is an empirical fact) that most drug users have no history of criminal records until their entrance into the criminal justice system.
Even if that were the case, however, a lot of people point to the 'addictive' nature of drugs as a possible precursor to the relationship: after all, isn't the vicious cycle of drugs-> money -> crime -> drugs all too commonsensical by now? To a certain degree, that is true, but what gets ignored is why ? Why do we forget to ask why are they addicted to drugs, when we can readily explain why people are addicted to alcohol or smoking? While addiction to smoking and alcohol is explained as "relieving stress" or "getting drunk", in all three cases, the social contexts becomes sidelined and ignored. Is this perhaps a sign of plain ignorance or deliberate evasion of the obvious indicator: that just as much as drugs could be potentially addictive, when people are pushed to the margins of poverty, unemployment, social isolation and marginalization (partially because of low education or other social factors) , their recourse to drugs become an escape from their brutal reality. But video-gaming, and movie-watching, just as they are also forms of activity that promote the "escape from reality", don't get the big stick. And that's even if you are addicted to them.
What also becomes apparent is that addiction is not a socially neutral concept. Addiction, much like drug use, are socially contextual activities, and are dependent on social and historical circumstances1. We can easily talk about shopping addictions, eating addictions, sex addictions and all other forms but we also need to easily recognise that they all constitute different relationships: there is no biological basis for having a shopping addiction, just as much as there isn't one for internet addiction. There is a tremendous misunderstanding that the addiction to drugs carry very little scientific evidence: scientific evidence have shown consistently that narcotics use, even regular use, does not directly lead to addiction. For instance, Hanson et al (1985) found that "heroin users also participate in many conventional activities", and also "make use of a wide variety of drugs, and not only casually or in desperation". In fact, even from the high number of men who came back from Vietnam, in which they were highly addicted to heroin during the war, only 1/8 became readdicted to heroin again. Contemporary events also confront us with this same fact, as we find high elite 'productive' members of society, such as media celebrities (excuse those who were not found guilty), chefs, advertising agents, continue to make use of coccaine, and yet get arrested for it.
Why then are we so afraid of drugs? Perhaps it is because we think they are 'sick', or we think they are 'sinners' or we think they are 'evil'. But none of that can be further from the truth of the manner, that drugs-taking has always been a normal activity throughout history. Whether we talk about the ancient opium-smoking days of the Chinese, the heroin drug use during the Vietnam War, or the use of psychostimulants for American soldiers to boost their stamina, the definition of drugs as 'legitimate' or 'illegitimate', 'proper' or 'improper' are socially constructed. Despite the widespread fear of substances like coccaine and heroin, they have never caused death, whereas alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal and belong to the markets of big companies, have been responsible for lung cancer and liver/kidney failure. We also can not ignore that certain social conditions, or cultural circumstances, such as unemployment or the anorexic image of female beauty, all contribute to developments of the use and abuse opportunities (Kellehear & Cvetkovski, 1998).
What, in esence, am I arguing for here? Namely, that just as much as the use of death penalty is an arbitrary decision, and one that is substantiated by invalid moral, social or even empirical explanations (which all the above articles have shown), our ideas about drug use are just arbitrary as well. There is no doubt that some degree of social harm does arise from the phenomeon of drug use, and I do think there are legitimate concerns about how drugs can be abused, such as in rave parties and etc, but we need to get our act straight. We need to examine the reasons for drug use, the political economy of drugs (which includes alcohol and tobacco), the right kinds of treatment for drug use, and even understanding the relationship between social harm and its precursors. Unless we get this right, executing people on the basis of an arbitrary definition of what's "socially harmful" makes for a worse crime (as defined under UN International law standards) than drug use itself.
Footnotes and References:
1 Stanton Peele, a reknown psychologist, has written much about addiction and narcotics. Refer to his website for more on his writings.
Kellehear, A. and Cvetkovski, S. (1998). Grand Theories of Drug Use in Drug Use in Australia: A Harm Minimisation Approach. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Hanson, B., G. Beschner, J. M., Walters & Wish, E. (1985). Life with Heroin: Voices from the Inner City. Lexington: MA.
Related Article 2: Stop Hanging People!
Related article 3: Death Penalty as Deterrence - The Easy Way Out
I think there needs to be more support for the cessation of the death penalty, which requires wide-spread education of the people, and also a downplaying of 'misguided' fears and misconceptions about the nature of drugs and their associated drug effects. This recent topic was also brought to my attention two weeks ago during a discussion with my peers, and I have decided to paraphrase my argument (along with theirs), as I think it's time to approach this controversy topic as a layman. The above two articles have contributed a lot to dispelling the myths about drug harm, which is valuable and crucial to understanding the debate (I really stress that you read them), thus I really can't add much more substance to it. So I will approach my view of the topic with a different focus, for what I am interested in is: Are there valid reasons to justify the widespread fear of drugs?
Before I begin my point, let me address this vexing issue. In every discussion about drugs, the individual is regularly posed the inescapable fundamental question about his/her position: are you for drugs or not? So before you wish to read my commentary, let me establish my stance: I disapprove of drug use. In fact, you will find that I adopt a more extreme position than other drug prohibitionist: I disapprove of legal forms of drug use, i.e. alcohol and tobacco. However, I am just as quick to recognise that these pleasure-seeking activities do not warrant, nor in any justify, the taking away of a human life, and neither do they even warrant the coercive punishment, such as imprisonment. What I like to argue is that as much as we may dislike, loathe or hate these kinds of activities, that doesn't give us any right to sanction the practices that probably do more in exacerbating the kinds of harm that we are afraid of. I shall elaborate on these further.
What is the first intuitive notion people have about drugs? Very quickly, people are able to answer the following: they are "bad" because they are "addictive"; they are responsible for crime; they only encourage and facilitate the tendencies of people to indulge in time-wasting, insolent and loafing behaviour; they are a social "nuisance" who threaten to break up the community and etc. My intention here, is not to bring up every single imaginable objection to drug use, for I just as much recognise some of the legitimate concerns here. Hence, I do agree that overall, there is a disturbing trend that drugs are related to crime; that they do seem to cause addiction; that they are used primarily for pleasure maximization and perhaps they could even be detrimental to health.
However, there are also many misconceptions regarding these statements as well. Drugs are not the cause of crime; by that, we mean that people do not engage in criminal activities simply because they have started their use of drugs. The ironic relationship here is that if drug use is constituted as an illegal activity, then we have directly misapplied the label of "criminal" on an activity that need not otherwise be. The other facet of this relationship is that first-time drug users eventually get acquainted with the criminal justice system, and through their inevitable imprisonment, and association with other deviants, they have become "criminal" because of the practices of the state to send them to a place where, for better or worse, drug users become familiar with the world of crime. We should also do better to take note (and this is an empirical fact) that most drug users have no history of criminal records until their entrance into the criminal justice system.
Even if that were the case, however, a lot of people point to the 'addictive' nature of drugs as a possible precursor to the relationship: after all, isn't the vicious cycle of drugs-> money -> crime -> drugs all too commonsensical by now? To a certain degree, that is true, but what gets ignored is why ? Why do we forget to ask why are they addicted to drugs, when we can readily explain why people are addicted to alcohol or smoking? While addiction to smoking and alcohol is explained as "relieving stress" or "getting drunk", in all three cases, the social contexts becomes sidelined and ignored. Is this perhaps a sign of plain ignorance or deliberate evasion of the obvious indicator: that just as much as drugs could be potentially addictive, when people are pushed to the margins of poverty, unemployment, social isolation and marginalization (partially because of low education or other social factors) , their recourse to drugs become an escape from their brutal reality. But video-gaming, and movie-watching, just as they are also forms of activity that promote the "escape from reality", don't get the big stick. And that's even if you are addicted to them.
What also becomes apparent is that addiction is not a socially neutral concept. Addiction, much like drug use, are socially contextual activities, and are dependent on social and historical circumstances1. We can easily talk about shopping addictions, eating addictions, sex addictions and all other forms but we also need to easily recognise that they all constitute different relationships: there is no biological basis for having a shopping addiction, just as much as there isn't one for internet addiction. There is a tremendous misunderstanding that the addiction to drugs carry very little scientific evidence: scientific evidence have shown consistently that narcotics use, even regular use, does not directly lead to addiction. For instance, Hanson et al (1985) found that "heroin users also participate in many conventional activities", and also "make use of a wide variety of drugs, and not only casually or in desperation". In fact, even from the high number of men who came back from Vietnam, in which they were highly addicted to heroin during the war, only 1/8 became readdicted to heroin again. Contemporary events also confront us with this same fact, as we find high elite 'productive' members of society, such as media celebrities (excuse those who were not found guilty), chefs, advertising agents, continue to make use of coccaine, and yet get arrested for it.
Why then are we so afraid of drugs? Perhaps it is because we think they are 'sick', or we think they are 'sinners' or we think they are 'evil'. But none of that can be further from the truth of the manner, that drugs-taking has always been a normal activity throughout history. Whether we talk about the ancient opium-smoking days of the Chinese, the heroin drug use during the Vietnam War, or the use of psychostimulants for American soldiers to boost their stamina, the definition of drugs as 'legitimate' or 'illegitimate', 'proper' or 'improper' are socially constructed. Despite the widespread fear of substances like coccaine and heroin, they have never caused death, whereas alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal and belong to the markets of big companies, have been responsible for lung cancer and liver/kidney failure. We also can not ignore that certain social conditions, or cultural circumstances, such as unemployment or the anorexic image of female beauty, all contribute to developments of the use and abuse opportunities (Kellehear & Cvetkovski, 1998).
What, in esence, am I arguing for here? Namely, that just as much as the use of death penalty is an arbitrary decision, and one that is substantiated by invalid moral, social or even empirical explanations (which all the above articles have shown), our ideas about drug use are just arbitrary as well. There is no doubt that some degree of social harm does arise from the phenomeon of drug use, and I do think there are legitimate concerns about how drugs can be abused, such as in rave parties and etc, but we need to get our act straight. We need to examine the reasons for drug use, the political economy of drugs (which includes alcohol and tobacco), the right kinds of treatment for drug use, and even understanding the relationship between social harm and its precursors. Unless we get this right, executing people on the basis of an arbitrary definition of what's "socially harmful" makes for a worse crime (as defined under UN International law standards) than drug use itself.
Footnotes and References:
1 Stanton Peele, a reknown psychologist, has written much about addiction and narcotics. Refer to his website for more on his writings.
Kellehear, A. and Cvetkovski, S. (1998). Grand Theories of Drug Use in Drug Use in Australia: A Harm Minimisation Approach. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Hanson, B., G. Beschner, J. M., Walters & Wish, E. (1985). Life with Heroin: Voices from the Inner City. Lexington: MA.
posted by Douglas Evans at 8:09 PM
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