The Kebilsphere

The war on drugs is a war waged on ourselves. It is a fact that the vast majority of people have tried some drug of one kind or another at sometime in their life. And lets face it, alcohol is one of the most hardcore drugs there is, it can ruin people just as much as heroin or cocaine. Most people who try drugs once, or several times, or even lots of times, most of these people never develop a drug problem. Unfortunately, there is a proportion of the population who do develop a problem with drugs. By and large, these people already have problems in their internal lives. By far, the people most likely to end up with a drug problem are people who have mental health issues, anything from anxiety to depression and schizophrenia. Why do we pretend that the way to help these people is by throwing them in jail? We don’t through alcoholics in jail, and we don’t think that by threatening alcoholics with jail sentences would keep them sober.

The primary reason that drug use is associated with crime is that they are illegal. What I mean is that drug users resort to criminal means to get drugs because we have made them so expensive to get. Drugs themselves are not expensive to make. Poppies grow naturally in huge fields. Marijuana is called weed because the plant itself grows like a weed. It is only because we make selling the drugs obtained from these drugs illegal that drugs are expensive. If they were not so expensive, drug users would not need to resort to crime to feed their habits. If they were not illegal, drugs would be cheap. They could be taxed by the government. The could be regulated by the government, this would make them safer and cleaner, and it would do away with all the crime and illegal activity that is associated with drug addiction. This would give the government money. And all the money the government saved from halting the war on drugs could be used to help treat people with drug problems. Almost all people with drug problems want to quit. Drug use is only fun for a short period of time, then it changes from being something a person does for enjoyment to something a person has to do to keep from feeling awful. Once a person is addicted, they feel enslaved. They are chained to their habit. They want out, but by this point they have lost most everything in their life, they don’t have anything left to live for. They can’t see any way out of the hell they have made of their life. They don’t need to be punished for their actions, they are living their punishment. They need help. They need support. A jail term will just make everything worse. Having a criminal record will just make it harder for a person to get a job, to be able pick up the pieces of their lives, to recover.