When I was growing up, the drug war was raging. I saw “This is your brain/This is your brain on drugs” on television; cops came into my elementary school to lecture us about the dangers of marijuana as a gateway drug.
I thought their efforts failed because most kids I knew tried at least one drug (not counting the ones we all tried, nicotine and alcohol) before high school was through, and even the straight-edge among us mocked D.A.R.E and “Just Say No” as hopelessly out of touch.
UNDOING DRUGS, by journalist Maia Szalavitz, made me understand that while I thought I was smarter than the rhetoric of the era, there was a lot, from that era and beyond, that I had swallowed without question as truth. To name only a few of my assumptions:
The only way for an addicted person to be “cured” is to completely stop taking any kind of drugs, including alcohol.
Certain drugs are instantly addictive.
It’s impossible to be a heroin user and function in family, work, and society.
The crackdown on opioids has been reasonable.
Szalavitz covers the entire history of harm reduction in her fast-paced and fly-on-the-wall book (as both a former injection drug user and a journalist who covered the drug war, the AIDS crisis, and much more, she is highly qualified to write this history), but I want to talk about the above assumptions here because of how thoroughly she shattered them for me.
The only way for an addicted person to be “cured” is to completely stop taking any kind of drugs, including alcohol. Harm reduction, with its motto of “any positive change,” rejects the twelve-step recovery insistence that a person is only cured of their addiction if they abstain forever. Szalavitz wisely points out that this theory includes many pitfalls, including the idea that once a person falls off the wagon and has one drink, smoke, etc., they’re likely to feel like they failed and say “fuck it,” and go on to imbibe dangerous levels of substances. I understand that mentality well - I often decide I’ve failed if I don’t adhere to a rigid, unrealistic standard.
Certain drugs are instantly addictive. Szalavitz provides empirical evidence that thoroughly rejects this notion. It is one element of the drug war that I’ve quietly assumed, despite having personal knowledge, based on my own drug use, that it’s not true! It is way past time that I tossed it out.
It’s impossible to be a heroin user and function in family, work, and society. Szalavitz interviews and profiles many people who regularly use heroin or other opiates and maintain employment and a family life, not in spite of their use, but because not using is a worse alternative, given withdrawal symptoms and the strength of their addiction. Many of these people work in needle exchange programs and in the harm reduction movement, or live in societies in which doctors legally prescribe heroin to users in small doses, and while it’s not an easy life, it’s better than the alternative.
The crackdown on opioids has been reasonable. So much of the media attention on the opioid crisis portrayed doctors as little better than drug dealers who made people into users in order to exploit them, and I was one of many who cheered the crackdown on these doctors. I hadn’t given enough consideration to all of the people living with chronic pain who relied on opioids to live a functional life, and how the prosecution of their doctors led to more pain and to buying opioids on the street, which often meant they couldn’t control dosage, not to mention the dangers of acquiring illegal drugs. I’m now following the activists who are working to ensure that pain management is realistic and accessible, and also questioning assumptions I made about the wisdom of prosecuting dealers for overdose after Szalavitz points out that many people buy drugs from their friends, or have been in a position to sell drugs to friends.
If you grew up in the drug war but think it didn’t impact your thinking, UNDOING DRUGS will force you to reconsider. It has changed my thinking permanently, and I look forward to the growth of this movement and hope that we can do a better job for the next generation.
Hachette (2021)