Drug abuse is a serious social issue, so it’s a shame we don’t treat it like one. As recent efforts to deal with an increasingly popular, and in many places legal, drug named Salvia demonstrate, we always have the same response on drug issues: prohibition. Banishing drugs however, is taking the easy way out—politicians feel like they’re doing something about the problem when they’re not, crossing the drug issue off the docket and moving on without even beginning to grasp its many dimensions. It’s time to get serious about drugs. That means letting go of the prohibition security blanket and looking at other models.
Understandably, people worry when you talk about alternatives to prohibition. Drugs can be dangerous. They destroy families, plague low-income neighborhoods, fill the coffers of terrorists in Afghanistan, and fuel international cartel violence in Latin America. No one wants to see open-air drug markets in their neighborhoods, and parents are terrified to think of their kids buying heroin after school. But note that the above conditions already exist–prohibition hasn’t prevented any of them. And in some cases, particularly those relating to the unregulated drug economy that allows violence to flourish, the policy is actually causing more problems than it’s fixing.
Prohibition has blinded us. This fear driven one-size-fits-all response to a complex social challenge prevents us from pursuing any other policies, or even seeking to understand all of the causes and effects behind the prevalence of drugs.
To put the situation in perspective, let’s apply our current drug policy to another inconvenient but inevitable reality—extreme weather. With prohibition, we’d be saying, “Let’s not worry about building levies and cyclone shelters, or tracking climate patterns. We’ll just take care of our weather problems by outlawing them! Then we don’t have to figure out how to reduce the harm they do, or investigate the science behind them.”
So before we apply the same old drug policy to Salvia we should reconsider prohibition and look at other options. Let’s craft drug policies that are as nuanced as the issue itself—active policies that carry out their desired effect and don’t inadvertently harm society. Until we do that, we’ll be just be standing in a lightning storm without even a raincoat, ignoring the danger because we already banned it.
