Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs is essentially a futile struggle against the dopamine reward pathway? Addicts need treatment, not incarceration.
This article remains one of the best things I've read on the failures of American drug policy.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
When it comes to substance abuse disorders, public health and the public at-large are hardly on the same page — in fact, they’re not even reading the same book. And that’s a serious problem for sustaining and strengthening efforts to treat addiction and advancing effective public health policy.
“We…
The Economist is a right-of-center weekly from the UK that I like quite a lot. While I'm on the other side of the political center line, the writing is extremely clear and the arguments usually cogent. Even when I don't agree, it's thought provoking and the articles are not over long. Even so, I…
Ben Wallace-Wells, in Rolling Stone, recently wrote a fantastic and tragic article on America's War on Drugs:
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used.…
Everyone knows that HIV is American prisons is a huge problem, but we don't hear much about it. There are several reasons for that. For one, prisons are unpleasant places, and for the most part, we don't want to think about what goes on there. For another, many people figure that whatever happens…
Thank you for bringing up this important topic.
You make it sound like drug users are all addicts.
The vast majority or drug users I know smoke pot every now and then. What they need isn't treatment, it's for the government to stop trying to ruin their lives and let them live in peace.
And obesity, alcoholism and everything else that involves the rewardsystem - are these also illnesses? No, calling an unhealthy lifestyle an illness is silly. Unless you can find some real brain damage causing the behavior. And with obesity on the rise that seems unlikely. Have people's brains all been damaged quite recently and coincidentally at the same time as large amounts of food has become available to the vast majority?
Clearly the problem lies in a mismatch between the human brain and the modern environment.