Topic analysis: Drug abuse

Resolved: The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice.

I instinctively agree with this as stated, but not because of any elaborate (or, for that matter, elementary) thought process. It just sounds right. Drug abuse is a problem, of course, but off the top it seems to be more of a problem for the abuser than for anyone else. If I decide to start smoking crack in the tabroom, I am endangering my health, both mental and physical. There are, presumably, two ways to get me to stop (per the rez): put me in such a frame of mind that I no longer endanger my health through the powers of public health, or forcibly take away the drugs through the powers of law enforcement.

Of course, the above paragraph is filled with nonsense.

I don’t think I would like to see the rez twisted into arguments for or against legalization of marijuana, which is certainly an issue du jour, because the language does not support the idea that drugs ought to be legalized. That is, it states very clearly that we are dealing with illegal drugs. Asserting that some drugs should not be illegal, and then arguing about them as legal entities, would be pretty lame an approach, but nonetheless, one that I fear. This is the Pavlovian response: you hear illegal drugs, you argue something about legalization, even though that’s not the issue. Oh, well. I won’t discuss at length misreads of the rez, which would be, on my part, an incredible internal contradiction.

So, back to it. The idea that drug abuse is private is not true, just like the idea that suicide is private is not true. At the very least, others are affected. In the drug abuse situation, others are also responsible. That is, it is pretty hard for me to take up crack smoking in the tabroom all on my lonesome. I need a source of the drug, to begin with. And the sources of most illegal drugs tend to be complex trade systems, to wit, organized criminal organizations, although with plenty of freelancers at the bottom of the distribution chain. Marijuana is, perhaps, a little different, as unlike other controlled substances it requires no processing: you grow it, and there you are. No chemistry sets, in other words. (The lack of criminal network would seem to be part of the pro-legalization movement.) The point is, my drug abuse is dependent on a system of drug production. You can’t have one without the other. So, the logic of dealing with the problem as a law enforcement issue is pretty straightforward. The user is the final link in the chain of illegality, so you start there and work backwards.

The problem is, this doesn’t work very well. The statistics of imprisoned drug users or smalltime dealers is frightening, and the reason these folks are imprisoned is because of mandatory sentencing, where the punishment is written into the statute and not at the discretion of the judge. These rulings do not seem to affect the illegal drug trade; they simply punish the least important cog in the machine, with disturbing additional social affects (racial imbalance in prisons, ridiculously large prison populations, etc.). They nonetheless are popular political approaches to the problem because they appear successful: you do get lots of arrests when you target users or smalltime dealers. But that’s all you get.

So maybe this approach doesn’t solve the problem. Since we’re only asking about abuse, period, the argument that a different approach is better seems simple enough. And this is my problem with the resolution, because this seems so manifestly true to me that I wouldn’t want to argue against it. There are so many disadvantages to a justice system approach to the drug problem at the user level that I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim it’s a good one. I guess what you’d have to do is demonstrate that the health mechanisms are no better. Since every disad I see is endemic to the actual system, one could perhaps make claims that the actual systems of public health are no better at solving, and somehow worse, presumably in their ineffectiveness overall. Perhaps.

I’m not sure if what I’m saying here just scratches the surface or is, more or less, the whole shooting match. I’m a little afraid it’s the latter, and the way I see it, there isn’t much of interest here for good arguing. Even granting even sides, what are we arguing about? The best way to deal with drug abuse. Granted, it’s a problem, but it has no great depth beyond a cursory retributive justice discussion. I’m not taken by it.