A War We Can’t Win

Five nights a week I shave my face, hop in the shower, get cleaned up, slick back my hair, throw on my black polo and black jeans, lace up my shoes and head off to work.

I am a drug dealer and people come from all over to gather at my doorstep. They wait all day until we open, and then file in one by one or in groups ready to partake in my drug. They never stop coming. They meet friends or sometimes make new ones, and some even take too much and have to go on their merry way.

I am a bartender and the drug I peddle happens to be the Number One recreational drug used by Americans. In fact, the top five recreational drugs used in America are; Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana,Vicodin, and Adderall. Not far behind are Cocaine, Oxycontin, and Xanax.

The simple fact is that human beings have a long history of recreational drug use that dates back 50,000 years ago when Neanderthals still roamed the planet. In 10,000 BC Cannabis, as well as coffee beans and tobacco, were being cultivated. In 3,000 BC there is evidence of cannabis cultivation in Eastern Asia. In 1450 AD there was widespread use of coca leaves by the Inca people. And in 1850s, New York City bartenders created the drink commonly known now as “the cocktail”.

For 65 years, America has led the world in a failing war on drugs that has seen no success and no end in sight, but countries like Portugal and The Netherlands may have found solutions off the battlefield and in the research departments of science and psychology.

The statistics alone prove the failure of America’s war on drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance, a coalition for drug reform, reported that in 2017 over 1.6 million Americans were arrested for drug law violations, helping to make America the highest incarcerated country in the world with over 2.2 million citizens serving jail time. This means that over 50 percent of American citizens in jail are for a drug law violation, according to the Alliance.

With such high incarceration rates and scientific theories published in professional journals about the negative effects of incarceration, one might want to stop and question if incarceration is the answer to drug law violations. Some of the effects of incarceration are; disruption to the nuclear family and prison induced mental health problems, which have common links to suicidal thoughts or suicide. Suicide accounts for one-third of prisoner deaths in the United States, according to The British Journal of Psychology.

It was in the early 1970s when the language used in the war on drugs shifted to demonize its victims. The verbiage went from treatable social disease to criminal activity and started being addressed with aggressive criminal justice policies. This has had a long-standing impact on the perception of addiction globally, but attitudes are finally starting to change. Two countries and 90 percent of Americans are now changing their tone and are shifting the perception and solutions to the global drug problem.

The solution: realizing that there isn’t a global drug problem. As history tells us drug use is inherent to who we are. Portugal took a radical approach and decriminalized all drugs, and saw a drop in its drug use by about 10 percent, but not only did drug use go down so did incarceration, transferable drug-related illnesses, and drug deaths. Instead of turning single time users into criminals they created a system that evaluated the person’s use and implemented community service summons or invitations to treatment centers where sick patients are allowed to get the treatment they need to get better.

The Netherlands took a similar approach to the treatment of drug users offering safe spaces and clean tools to consume their narcotics with.

Any psychologist or communication scholar could tell you that humans inherently crave what they are not allowed to have, it is rooted deep down in our genetic makeup. So if you tell a teenager drugs are bad, you can’t have them, they will, in fact, want them even more, which has been the driving force of over-consumption and abuse globally. It’s time to demystify drugs as glamorous and show drug addiction as it really is–a disease that requires treatment and prevention programs.