Drugs: Just say maybe

The U.S. has a big drug problem. And the principle cause is dishonesty. But I'm referring less to the illegal drug business as it is normally thought of and more to the basic dishonesty that is part of our approach to drugs in general.\nFirst, there is basic personal hypocrisy. It is truly astonishing to look at how many people have used (or use) illegal drugs themselves, then turn around to create, defend and enforce punishment for illegal drug users. The generation in power is a particularly good example; let's say those people between 35 and 60 years of age. Did you know that illegal drug use peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s? That's right. Not the '60s. Thanks to annual, anonymous surveys, we know illegal drug increased throughout the 1970s and didn't start declining until the early '80s. In short, the decade for toking, snorting and popping was about 1975 to 1985. And we're not talking about a small portion of the population. In 1979, for example, about 40 percent of people ages 18 to 25 said they had used an illegal drug in the past month. And about 20 percent of those 26 to 34 years old said the same. Where are those people now? Hmm. Let's see, if they were 25 in 1979 that means they'd be 46 years old now... Hey! Those are your parents! They're our political representatives, our dark-suit executives, our judges, our military commanders, our sober administrators (our last two U.S. presidents). They're the ones who solemnly tell us that illegal drug users should be arrested, fined, fired, expelled, denied financial aid and imprisoned? Peeuu! I smell a big, dead, hypocritical rat.\nBut it would be wrong to single those folks out for personal hypocrisy. How about all of us who are drug users but happen to use legal drugs? Alcohol, and tobacco, for examples. They cause a staggering amount of injury and death -- far more than do illegal drugs. Tobacco alone causes about 450,000 premature deaths a year, more deaths than all other drugs combined, legal and illegal. Many of those are from second-hand smoke, including infants and children. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. can be traced to smoking. Alcohol causes another 100,000 to 150,000 deaths each year. All illegal drug use, on the other hand, including illegal use of prescription drugs, causes about 25,000 deaths a year. And that's a lot. But the bottom line is that you simply can't distinguish alcohol and tobacco from illegal drugs, on the basis of the danger they pose to us, physically and emotionally. And as a society, the bigger drug problem seems to lie with the two legal drugs, not all the illegal ones.\nBut why stop at alcohol and tobacco? A prevalent argument against the drugs above is that, apart from any physical impact they might have or any physiological risk they pose to health, there's just something unhealthy about needing to escape reality, about using some chemical substance to increase enjoyment of life. OK. But what about anti-depressants? Anti-anxiety drugs? Pain relievers? Allergy medicines? How often do we really need these? Aren't most of us just escaping reality? Shouldn't we just learn to enjoy life without them? It seems to me that the same argument applies to these drugs, so if you buy that argument, be honest and admit it. And clean out your medicine cabinet. Deal with reality.\nFinally, we can't escape the everyday dishonesty of just ordinary citizens. Us. We use illegal drugs. We have used illegal drugs. We use legal drugs in illegal ways ("I've had a couple, but I\'ll just drive more carefully..."). Or we have friends and family who do. Yet we are untroubled that during the past two decades the proportion of people incarcerated for drug offenses has increased more than ten times. The United States now holds almost 2 million people in jails and prisons (according to officialnumbers, a greater proportion of our population than in any country except Russia), and about 500,000 of them are there because of drug offenses. Compared to most other crimes, even violent crimes, we throw the book at drug offenders. If you think that's just, please contact law enforcement and become an informant. Because we all know someone who violates the drug laws that can get you put behind bars. And that someone probably includes you.\nIn truth, I'm not calling for a stop to the use of alcohol and tobacco, or medical drugs. And I don't think you should simply turn yourself or anyone else in for drug offenses. Instead, I think drug use can be a good thing, and it can be a problem. More than anything else, decisions about drug use should be left to individuals and families.\nDrug use should not be illegal, nor should their manufacture and sale. Basically, as a society, we should inform people so they can make their own decisions, should help identify abuse when it occurs and should offer assistance to those who abuse (it's typically cost-effective for us to do so). Punishment fails too often, and incarceration should be a very last resort. I'm sure many of you think I'm naive, that the resulting increase in drug use and abuse would be tremendous. I agree there would be problems. But would they be greater than the hypocrisy we now live with, the illegal (and deadly) drug industry we sustain and the enormous economic and human costs of incarcerating millions of people? I think not.