Addiction

TV crime dramas, a category which includes your nightly news, are full of images of drug addicts. They're always getting smacked down by your favorite detective hero as criminals or witnesses to the depredations of fellow low lifes. Your elected officials, vying every 2 years or four years to outdo each other in getting tough on crime, have filled the jails at your expense (about $35,000/year per guest of the state) with drug addicts. Eighty percent of the people in prison and jail have one or another form of substance abuse problem, and most of them are guilty only of drug related crimes or of non-violent property crimes related to their circumstances as addicts. BTW, the psychoactive chemical most frequently associated with violent crimes is alcohol, which is a drug, but is legal.

A conventional, politician's analysis of the problem of addiction is that there are bad chemicals out there, which tempt morally weak people to consume them, plunging them into a life of depravity. It's actually considerably more complicated.

People have used "drugs" -- including opium, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and hallucinogens -- for thousands of years, probably longer than that but the historical and archaeological record won't take us back much more than 10,000 years on this particular subject. For the most part, these substances have not constituted serious social problems. Some of them definitely do today, and we have also invented some new drugs which can be problematic. But the problems are not because the chemicals are evil, or because the people who become addicted are depraved. This is a long story which is probably not blogworthy, at least not in one piece.

But I'll begin with one important point: many people use drugs with the potential to be addictive, but only a minority become addicted. Some chemicals have a higher potential for addiction than others, although it can be difficult to sort out the properties of the chemicals themselves from the contexts in which they tend to appear. But people who have a reason to get up on Monday morning and accomplish tasks that require sobriety are at much less risk of addiction than those who do not. Conversely, people who suffer from trauma, depression, or serious personality disorders or psychoses are at high risk for addiction. Both of these statements remain true regardless of which chemicals the people try at one time or another.

One more important point to start with: the majority of the negative social consequences resulting from drugs of abuse result directly from the legal prohibition of those substances. If possession of certain drugs was not a crime, there would instantly be half as many criminals in the United States. Let's take it from there.