Drug prohibition fuels society’s ills

If you put a rat in a cage with a lever that dispenses a drug like heroin, the rat will keep pressing the lever to get the drug and forget to eat. Everyone knows that, but did you know that if you also put some other rats in with him and a wheel and other things to do, the rat will eat and play instead?

The original rat experiment is offered as proof that drug addiction is a disease. The disease theory of addiction holds that addiction is a brain disease that is incurable and can only be survived by total abstinence. The preferred treatment for the so-called brain disease is not medical, but a spiritual 12-step program that requires the addict place himself in the hands of a higher power because he is helpless in his addiction!

The war on drugs has created an iron triangle between the drug laws, the judicial system and drug treatment centers. Drug courts are supposedly humane as they steer drug abusers into treatment rather than prison. The sword of prison sentencing still hangs over any relapse. This is coerced treatment, which may be appropriate only if the individual has committed real crimes to supply his habit.

Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman recently died of a heroin overdose. Shortly before he died, he told a stranger that he was a heroin addict. Why did this accomplished man believe that he was a helpless addict? Could it be that he was told that by the politicized treatment industry? In fact, abstinence-based drug treatment kills. Hoffman joined Amy Winehouse, the Celebrity Rehab Four and others on a long list of celebrities who died of an overdose after falling off the abstinence wagon during treatment. Artists often have drug problems. Some do die young. But Keith Richards, William S. Burroughs and many more live long lives. The government-approved treatments tell addicts they are helpless and will always be uncontrollably addicted. But the government’s own studies show that most addicts quit or moderate their habits on their own. In Northern Nevada, the drug court refers drug users to treatment centers like Bristlecone Family Resources, which follow the National Institutes of Health disease/abstinence model.

The media breathlessly tells us there is a new heroin epidemic. Is there? Although raw numbers are up slightly, the rate of heroin use is holding steady at about two-tenths of a percent of population. Where are all the previous media-driven drug epidemics? Crack cocaine, the scourge of the 1980s that would engulf middle class America and lead to a “lost generation” of doomed crack babies is now just the stuff of comical Canadian mayors. Similar scares regarding methamphetamine, caffeine energy drinks, cannibal bath salts and flesh-eating krokodil are pushed by the media to frighten us and keep the money for the drug war flowing.

If government says you are diseased, then the state can appear compassionate by offering treatment rather than jail. It would be more humane for the state to stay out of the lives of peaceful addicts altogether. Nevada needs a Good Samaritan Law to indemnify drug users at the scene from prosecution if they call 9-11 to save a friend from overdose death. We also need to make Naloxone, which stops drug overdoses, more available. Harm reduction, which leads to reduced death and disease from addictions by decriminalizing the environment around drug use and then the drugs themselves, is the opposite of the disease theory of addiction. It is far more humane to recognize that any habit can be managed with moderation, not state-imposed abstinence.