Getting high, in one form or another, is a part of the human experience. Children get highs from sugar or by spinning each other around until they reach a dizzy daze. Animals eat and enjoy substances that naturally produce drunks and highs. Drugs, up until the introduction of chemistry, were all first used in completely natural forms. Some drugs still are. With these cases in mind, we can begin to understand how getting high and altering our experience can be a natural part of life.
Consider an ordinary, relatable scenario: starting the morning with coffee or tea. Caffeine is a drug, though comparably mild to some, that is commonplace and that we are all exposed to on a daily basis.
Who are we to decide the way others experience their morning? Who are we to decide the way others should experience the world around them, especially when that decision is simply a different drug of choice? To clarify, caffeine is not meant to be equalized to other drugs, and by no means is this suggesting to start taking a dose of acid with your bacon and eggs everyday.
From this perspective, prohibition and criminalization of drugs take away an individual’s freedom to choose the way they wish to experience life, what they put into their bodies and their states of mind and consciousness. With criminalization has come stigmatization. Drug users are viewed as morally wrong and deserving of punishment, as if seeking pleasure, enlightenment and healing are wrong to pursue. Should these pursuits be criminalized? Should personal choices be governed to the extent that prohibition has taken?
Fundamentally, prohibition is supported by the risks that drugs inherently bear on users and society alike. The argument rests that drugs are dangerous, so they should not be legally available. However, research done by Professor David Nutt, former chief drug advisor to the British government, has shown that the two legal recreational drugs, alcohol and tobacco, are the most dangerous to users and society as measured by 16 criteria including damage to health, mortality, economic costs and crime.
While there is no denying the risks in which any drug use can result, the idea that illegal equals dangerous is not supported by research. Further, the potential risks would inevitably increase by placing drugs on the black market. Still, our policy remains such that the evidence is ignored and the risks remain unnecessarily high.
Users are now placed at greater risk from adulterated or imitation substances that are produced through unregulated channels. Resources are spent on law enforcement rather than treatment for abusers and addicts who fall victim to the risks that we are supposedly being protected from. The repercussions of mass incarceration on individuals and families are often more detrimental than the effects of the drug itself.
Communities and countries are subjected to violence and corruption that cartels ravage with the power of their supply. Finally, the lack of research and education on illicit substances results in societies lacking crucial understanding of effects and safe usage both medicinally and recreationally. Following the ripple of effects that prohibition has created, the harmful impact expands much further than drug users alone.
Despite what we have been taught to believe, prohibition protects no one. Drug user or not, the drug war has denied knowledge, choice, safety and the pursuit of happiness to people across the world and from all walks of life. As such, prohibition has violated the rights of users, non-users, abusers, addicts, families, communities and our global society.
Karen Walker is a senior majoring in business administration and the president of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.