The fact I even have to mention this in an article on a social justice speaks volumes.
What do you see when you hear the words “drug user” or even “addict”? Do you see a person in tattered clothes? Do you see someone with blood shot eyes mumbling around? A criminal?
Why are these tropes so common about drug use and addiction? Why do we as a society demonize and later on abuse drug users and addicts? Why is drug use so closely tied to morality?
Lets start with the facts first, because those will expose the dark under belly about why we tie drugs and morality together.
First, the War on Drugs was enacted by Richard Nixon in 1971, however America has a long history of the prohibition of mind and mood altering substances. The most famous of these prohibitions being the 1923-1933 ban on all alcoholic beverages and the criminalization of cannabis in the 1900. Both movements for prohibition and criminalization stated that their motives were to preserve public morals, health, and in the case of cannabis, disenfranchised and punish people of color. However, this has never worked. In the case of the alcohol prohibition, organized crime rose.
Secondly there is a clear racial bias in who gets arrested for using and/or dealing drugs. For example 14% of african-americans are drug user, but make up for 37% of drug related arrests and serve the same sentence as a white person would for committing a violent crime such as murder. Latinos also serve longer and harsher sentences fro drug related crimes. Meanwhile white Americans make up the highest number of drug users, but serve less severe sentences and are less likely to be charged. There is also a clear bias towards women of color, in fact 72% of women in federal prisons are in there for drug charges only.
Thirdly, around a third of all people with mental illness and around half of people with severe mental illness have a dual diagnosis. This means they both are mentally ill and have a substance abuse problem. In many cases this is the result of self medicating. Besides this people with dual diagnosis have to deal with both the stigma of being mentally ill and an addict.
So what do these facts expose? That society correlates drug use with people of color, being a woman, and being mentally ill. In fact this exposes that we indeed do correlate drug use with morality, and that morality being white supremacy. The fact that we choose to punish drug users, a majority of them women, people of color, and mentally ill, shows that we wish to cast these people out of society, or at least have them learn their place at the bottom. As a society it is time that we admit that the way we tie drug use to “good” morals is fundamentally wrong and dangerous. In fact the very way drug education is structured to perpetrate that myth and encourage “straight edge” culture (which in of its self is sexist, classist, ableist, and racist), instead of harm reduction (which recognizes drug use will continue and that it is better to reduce the physical harm and stigma around it), is further proof that our morals often mean: only the white, male, and able deserve a good quality of life. Everyone else deserves and needs to suffer.
So maybe instead of the stereotypes of drug use maybe its time for new images: How about how the system failed your grandfather and let him die of lung cancer? How about your friend who smokes pot to cope with their anxiety and self-loathing? How about all the people of color who had their lives ruined and taken away from them for trying to get by? Those seem more accurate don’t you think?
