Author: Obinna M.
From coffee and red wine to fentanyl and MDMA, Drugs are a significant part of society whether we like it or not. The quick boost stimulants like a robust Americano can give you and the relaxation depressants like a nice evening Rosé are common uses of these “dangerous” substances we call drugs. Although not a hot-button issue, Drug Decriminalisation should be an important issue to liberals and small government conservatives; to libertarians and socialists; to everyone in between.
Prohibition: A Lesson from the Past
The problems of Drug legalization mirrors the lessons we learn in high school History classes as to why the Prohibition movement was wrong, ultimately failed, and did not create long-lasting change. Prohibitionists were trying to make a moral argument against alcohol and use the government to enforce it. However, alcohol has its benefits and its costs. This movement – like many others to come before and after it – demanded government intervention in a problem they saw in our Nation. Unlike other movements, It sought the power of police and the federal government to fully criminalise the usage and distribution of a common drink that affected the personal lives of essentially every American. It opened up Pandora’s Box by ballooning organized crime and creating a black market problem in America in the 1920s. Although Prohibition aimed to force more responsibility into the populace, it turned every who wanted to have a simple drink into wanted criminals and revoked their autonomy of what they could keep in their cellars.
By labelling everyday citizens as criminals of a victimless crime and establishing syndicates, Prohibition ended up doing more evil than good by creating more unnecessary criminal activity and hindering a simple freedom that should be left up to the people.
Nowadays, we regulate alcohol and we place the responsibility on the people while informing them of the dangers. Giving people this liberty while removing the criminality aspects allows for a support system for all alcohol and substance abusers alike. Even if someone believes that drug consumption is immoral or something that we should not strive to do as a society, criminalisation of drug use creates more headache and problems than the system of policing drug use we have in place today.
Policing
What do you think of when you think of a drug addict? You might think of a hippie or a hooded figure in the distance, concealing their hands from public view. You might think of Breaking Bador Narcos as the glorified portrayal of drug dealing. Nevertheless, stereotypes of drug addicts and drug dealers influence society’s collective conscience on who are afflicted with substance abuse and how police end up policing our communities. Their perception of who uses and abuses drugs affects how and when they enforce these laws and ultimately which populations are truly criminalised. Like any person, if cops have an idea of who does a specific crime, they will simply just seek out and enforce laws on people that fit this preconceived image. One example of this discriminatory policing is exhibited with Stop-and-Frisk practices implemented in New York.
It is a “practice of temporarily detaining, questioning, and at times searching civilians and suspects on the street for weapons and other contraband” that disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities due to the implicit bias that every American has.
In 2019, 59 percent of Stops in New York City were of Black people and 29% were of Latino people while white people composed 9% of Stop while occupying a plurality of the City’s population. If the predominantly image of a drug dealer is Black and Latino people, then those will be the types of people stopped and investigated, populating the crime statistics of drug possession. In our colorblind system today, only minority communities are affected by anti-drug legislation and drug criminalisation when the law should affect everyone, even though rates of drug use are nearly identical across race. As civilians are applying political pressure to defund police departments in the wake of George Floyd’s untimely death earlier this June, victimless crimes of drug usage are simply a waste of time and limited resources the police have to protect us.
Portugal: A Model for Reform
Drug legalisation can come in different forms but a more radical yet consistent approach of total decriminalisation could prove to provide a long-term, compassionate solution to our nation’s opioid crisis. An interesting model has come out of Portugal at the peak of their HIV and opioid crisis in the 80s. In 1999, they decided to make a big change to “.decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances.”
“Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might be given a warning, a small fine, or told to appear before a local commission – a doctor, a lawyer and a social worker – about treatment, harm reduction, and the support services that were available to them” (Ferreira 2017).
Treating people suffering from addiction as patients in need of health care and therapy versus criminals plaguing our treats minimizes negative impacts of the environment that drug addicts are forced into, allows for proper re-integration of substance abusers, and cultivates the re-establishment of positive relationships in an addict’s life with their family and community. A big problem concerning addiction is that substance abuse is an attempt to fill in a void where purpose or care should be. Subsequently, a life of addiction often erodes their personal support network of friends and family while pushing them further and further into a negative community and out-of-sight of mainstream, public light. Portugal’s change from punitive punishment towards rehabilitation dramatically shifted important statistics surrounding addiction like lower rates of HIV/AIDS transmission due to a needle exchange program and reducing drug-related crime as people had a substance treatment public service widely available to treat both their addiction.
Setting up public service infrastructure to address the root cause of why people became addicted in the first place is an investment Americans need to make to each other to heal from the devastating effects of archaic legislation. Decriminalising the use of drugs, treating drug addiction as a public health crisis versus a matter of Law & Order, and extending a rehabilitative hand out to those in need will create a more nurturing society that brings people in the fringes back into the arms of their community.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City