Destigmatizing Drug Use Has Been a Profound Mistake
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Given the extent to which many people stigmatize criminality in and of itself, they're not entirely separate things.
If you have 5 people who are going to use opioids, you want them to be together when they do it and you want narcan or similar available to them, if you do truly care about saving lives.
They aren't, but in today's world, there appears to be an actual slippery slope going from decriminalization to destigmatization and maybe even to celebration.
> Even with legalized marijuana we're not encouraging people to consume it.
"We're not"? Marijuana is a legitimate business in many states now, so it will get promoted.
The advertising campaign was part of an ongoing national effort by activists and health officials to [encourage "safe"] hard-drug use on the theory that doing so would lessen its harms. Particularly in blue cities and states, that idea is having a moment. The general message carried by the San Francisco billboard appeared as well in the New York City health department's "Let's Talk Fentanyl" campaign, which last year told subway riders, "Don't be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely," and further counseled them to "start with a small dose and go slowly.""
Except the article gives plenty of reasons why these taboos exist, and details some of the real harms associated with the lack of these taboos. On the contrary, your comment seems to be the one to want to hand wave away the concerns expressed in the article.
I wouldn't have used that picture myself, but I also am not convinced it by itself is going to lead people to believe that doing fentanyl is a fun activity.
The value of culture is 1) the material prosperity it creates, 2) the emotional fulfilment it generates, and 3) how well it self-propagates.
Hard drugs destroy the first two, and by killing the user and innocent bystanders early, it interferes with the third. Much of America’s falling life expectancy can be blamed on drugs.
Yes, these all describe the same phenomena. Your anathema/taboo/cliché, is mine too. Probably.
The Sacklers are currently before the Supreme Court, negotiating a deal that will shield them from further civil action by paying a $6 billion dollar fine (leaving them a few billion ahead)[1]. While I don't think we can extract justice from punishing one responsible entity, articles like these give cover to people, companies, and systems that created this crisis.
1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-sac...
A random coworker might talk to you about some new strain of pot they found, but they definitely aren't going to talk to you about heroin they shot up last weekend that they bought on a street corner.
Personally, as someone who was strongly in favor of decriminalization, my mind changed a bit a couple years ago when I went through the pedestrian mall in downtown Denver. I have nothing against weed use, but walking down there was like "zombieland": tons of people walking around completely stoned out of their minds.
This doesn't mean I'm for "recriminalization", but public use was never legalized (at least in CO), but those rules are now all but completely ignored.
Our city currently boasts of having a 'four pillars' drug strategy https://vancouver.ca/people-programs/four-pillars-drug-strat...
...but then really only built maybe two and a half of those pillars. We built a wobbly chair and then wonder why people keep falling off of it.
...but the url is quite a mouthful. My intuition is not to put stress on our mothership (also known as archive.org), am I right in this?
My sense of self preservation is just too high to alter my state of consciousness in an unsafe environment
Well duh.
Stigma on its own has never brought anything positive, any progression or any 'fixes' for problems. All it does is introduce friction in discourse, and that is never the solution. It's just so people can not only ignore problems or pretend they don't exist, but try to make it society-wide means everyone else isn't allowed to talk about it either.
Perhaps if the author didn't try the cover-up route but instead went the "talk about it, but don't use or encourage it" way, there would have been a point to it all. But just trying to deaden public awareness, that's the worst of all options.
Not involving yourself is a choice, but trying to make everyone else also not get involved, that's just human failure.
It turns out that when you threaten people with prison for drugs, sometimes they shoot at cops. And sometimes, when shooting at cops, they accidentally hit bystanders. And when you tell heroin users they can't scrub toilets for minimum wage, despite your inability to detect that they use heroin without a piss test, they steal copper wiring out of empty houses and otherwise generally make a nuisance of themselves. And the people who make these drugs, make the absolute worst possible version of them, like, does anyone believe that if the typical drugs (heroin, cocaine, meth, pot, lsd) were legal that you'd have jackasses huffing gasoline and paint and whatnot?
Please keep in mind that legalization alone doesn't fix everything, we must also ban piss tests for all occupations where it isn't critical.
No matter how pure, hard drug abuse is in itself the problem.
Drug use isn't *the* problem, it's just *a* problem, and a tiny one compared to prohibition. When there's a crackhouse in your neighborhood, that's because no one can buy this at the liquor store.
And that's the main problem.
If you don't agree, just take some walks through neighbourhoods with a large number of drug addicts.
On my street everything from petty crime to casual assault to literal stabbings have skyrocketed. It doesn't matter where the drugs come from; it matters where it ends up, and where it ends up is inside the brains of our brand-new underclass.
If you're wanting to curb ingestion of things that cause harm to the human body, sugar is a far bigger killer in the western world than booze.
Either prohibition works perfectly and we can also ban ethanol, or it does not work at all and we should just go ahead and legalize everything and treat everything equally.
Just having public health facilities available for users doesn't do anything either if they're not going to them. Extended, proactive, pervasive engagement with those users in a way that helps them climb out of the hole they've ended up in is also key.
Every opioid addict I have met is ashamed of their habits already.
> People that are addicted to fentanyl are already in a situation where they are past caring (or able to act on that caring) about society as thinking of them as losers.
Maybe stigmatization is not a tactic to help existing addicts, but rather to discourage other people from getting to that state?
My understanding is that the science aligns with my anecdotal experience, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5846593/
It's not like pot or shrooms or similar. People aren't doing it for fun or to broaden their mind.
And that this risk is so great that they give out free training so that people who do the drug can be potentially saved from death.
That all seems fairly fact based and scary to me, as someone who has no experience with fentanyl, and whose desire to try it is in no way enhanced by this giant warning of death.
But wouldn't that issue largely go away if there were regulated legal avenues for obtaining drugs?
> But wouldn't that issue largely go away if there were regulated legal avenues for obtaining drugs?
No. If a drug is too powerful to be used responsibly, legal access won't make that issue go way.
The biggest acute risks from drug use are largely overdose related. Having ready access to narcan solves some of it. But issues with actual potency being incredibly unreliable are another huge risk factor that kills a lot of people, and regulated and tested drugs solves that.
Legalization makes huge headway on the acute overdose related risks. It doesn't solve all of the issues, but neither has criminalization and prosecution. I am skeptical of societal taboos doing it either, because I have seen people in my life fall into opioid addiction, and all of them were ashamed about it. I have spoken to people on the street about it, and they're ashamed to be living in tents with any money they come into going straight into more drugs. It's anecdotal, obviously, but it has been so universal that I find it incredibly unlikely that piling more shame on top of people who are already deeply ashamed of their current state in life is going to force any significant number to suddenly clean up their act.
Opioids aren't like pot or hallucinogenics or even cocaine - there's no glamour associated with them, at least not since the opulent opium dens have long since been shuttered. People can and do use them while functioning, but people mostly fall into addiction through not being able to get off of opioid based painkillers after having been prescribed them, or by their life falling apart to the point where they are medicated to an extreme extent. Will there been individuals who use if it is legalized that wouldn't otherwise? Of course. Will it be in significant quantities? I don't believe so, and don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that this would happen. The question is if the benefits can outweigh the downsides and result in overall harm reduction.
If anyone has some credible evidence for where harm reduction doesn't work, please reply!
I first heard about it from late night comedy hosts who, at the time, took ten seconds out of their day to stop going on about Trump to talk about this.
Boy was I wrong.