Addictions & Restriction

The war on drugs has become a national joke. The Drug Enforcement Agency, (DEA), wants ever tougher laws and tighter regulations put on prescription drugs. They think that pharmaceuticals are the gateway drugs that lead to the addiction of numerous street drugs, and these tougher laws are their solution to the problem. History however has shown us that tougher drug laws have failed miserably. They neither deter drug use, nor help people who have addictions. Prohibition of alcohol worked much the same way. Prohibitions do nothing but drive up prices and create cartels.

The tougher laws mean doctors can’t effectively treat patients for pain now for fear of losing their license to practice. People who live with chronic pain must just suck it up and suffer. I am one of those people, and I fail to see this helping with addiction problems and frankly, I don’t like being blamed for these problems and having to pay for them, and there are many in my shoes.

Let’s take a look at addictions and what causes them and what are the effects of environment on them. Why can one person take pain medication after surgery and not become addicted, and another person does? Are all addictions created equal? I have been on every side of this subject. I have lived with an alcoholic, I have been addicted to more than a couple things myself and battled back from it, and I have four years of psychology under my belt.

While in school, my research revealed that countries who did not enforce drug laws, did not see the addiction problems that the US has, not even close. My findings are that, the predisposition to addiction starts in childhood. Preteen trauma is the worst but trauma, both emotional and physical have huge negative lasting effects, like depression, PTSD, and of course a predisposition to addiction. That is bad enough on its’ own but then you add in tough drug laws and that is where it tends to get worse. When the US has twice as many prisoners as China, with half the population, you must stop and look for the monster in the closet and expose it.

What I am about to tell you usually lands me in an argument, and makes some people get very angry with me, but it is the truth. If you decriminalize all drugs, you can watch the drug problem start to take care of itself. Because the biggest cartels in our country are government, and because the pharmaceutical organizations would lose money, we may likely never see this as a fix.

Think about this for a minute; the recreational drug user, hurts nobody! The recreational drug used does not push drugs on others, nor make a living selling them or manufacturing them. The recreational user does not affect other people at all in any way. So that is not creating a problem. The addict is however a problem. Once laws are removed, those people will hit bottom and seek help, and because they are no longer a criminal, but instead, a sick person, they will be treated differently, and giving there is an adequate mental health program available, then just like magic, the cartels are not making the big bucks anymore, the prisons and jails do not have to house people with particular mental health issues; the courts, cops, and DEA don’t have to deal with something they don’t have the education to handle, and the band played on…

All addictions are addictions. They are sick fixations on things to make the person with the addiction feel better. It is an illness. You have all heard the term, “self-medicating;” they are usually referring to drugs and alcohol, but may be any number of things that give comfort and/or cause an endorphin flood in the brain. Cigarettes, food, or any eating disorder, to name a few, but the truth is, hording is an addiction. The cat lady who lives with 40 cats, and the guy who can’t throw his garbage away, to the gazillionaire with so much money he could never spend it but keeps racking in more. Because a long ago wound left a gaping hole in the heart and mind, the addict applies their personal medicine to sooth pain, to not feel, to get an endorphin flood, to not feel alone, or to feel love.

When you take an illness, and criminalize it, you are effectively pushing that person to the fringes of society where they almost never get help. Why are some addictions against the law and others acceptable? The answer is always money! Criminalizing an illness brings in profit for the cartels, the court system, the jails and prisons, keeps the cops on the payroll, and even created a new organization called the DEA. That’s allot of revenue. Now I have to ask you, would you slam your diabetic grandpa with a sugar jones in jail for eating candy bars? Then don’t do it to your drug addicted child, or sibling.

All of the western world are living in a plutocratic consumerist society. When you value things more than people, you get an emotionally and mentally unstable population, and for most of them it is not condemned and some are actually held up as shining examples of we are all supposed to strive for, like the people with more money that they can spend in a lifetime, who still have an insatiable need for more. Things are things, and people are people. Vilifying a percent of the already broken ones never fixes anything, it just creates new problems much like what war does. I guess that is why they defined it as a war in the first place. I find it sad that this has to be explained to so many, and even then they do not get it.

Open minds, open hearts, and empty pockets are my tribe.

We are the light.