Scary Stories and Demon Drugs

Scary Stories and Demon Drugs

The views expressed here are my own and may not be shared by any organization I am affiliated with, but they probably should be.

Scary stories drive large portions of the world economy and it's not hard to see why. People don't sit through the evening news (is there still such a thing) let alone stay glued to a 24 hour news cycle to hear good news. They don't need mindless sitcoms to escape when they are happy.  While depression may drive a few people to the mall the real money is in fear. The same goes for politics. People don't rush to the polls because everything is alright, they vote because everything is going to Hell and the other guy or gal will only make it worse. Unfocused fear is as useless as joy to the entrepreneur so every good fear monger has to point the finger, a good target is usually found in criminals, minorities, communists, other countries, big pharma, or "incompetent" teachers, judges, and in this case doctors. But nothing makes a better target than a Demon Drug. Teachers and doctors have organizations to speak for them, big pharmaceuticals have billion dollar marketing campaigns, but a   Demon Drug, especially an illegal drug, can't speak out for itself and it makes a frightening antagonist for both the 24 hour news cycle and for a luxury rehab who will gladly help save you and your loved one from this monster, but not for free. 

The current Demon Drug is heroin but I'm old enough to remember when marijuana made the list. Heroin seemed like old news during the methamphetamine scare in the 1990s and early 2000s. The stories are always similar. The drug is incredibly addictive so much so a single use might ruin your life, it's deadly in the short term but if you manage to survive long term use will ruin both your physical and mental health, but most importantly it's coming to your neighborhood, it's coming for your children. Woven into the narrative is the idea that though things may be bad, we may even be on the brink of societal collapse, things would be much worse if the drug were legal. Law enforcement standing behind tables covered in the Demon Drug De Jour or hauling haggard looking drug dealers away in cuffs are cast as the only thing saving us from the brink. It's a thrilling story, but it's fiction, and we are suffering the consequences of 100 years of fiction driven policy.

 Any study of illegal drugs and drug users will always have a big margin of error, but the data that exists indicates between 1 and 2 people out of 10 who try heroin will have a problem with it. If you include legal opiates the number is much lower.  Oddly enough the number is about the same for meth and crack cocaine. Only 3% of all the people who have ever used meth or heroin have used it in the last 30 days. If the substance is as addictive as we are led to believe shouldn't the numbers be much higher? I've seen some make the argument "even if these numbers are true, we shouldn't make these drugs legal. If 10% of the people who try the drug become addicted to it, making it legal will cause more people to try it and that will make more addicts!" This is usually followed by some math assuming a 20% addiction rate followed by more scary numbers, but rarely do these story tellers realize that there is another Demon Drug that was legalized and there is no call from from the media, politicians, law enforcement, or judges from any part of the political spectrum to outlaw the drug again.

If any drug deserves to be demonized it's Alcohol. Alcohol related deaths dwarf those of any illegal drug. Long term alcohol use can be tied to early dementia and other mental and physical illness even when used in moderation. People using alcohol often become violent and foolhardy putting themselves and others at risk. There is no medical benefits from alcohol that can't be achieved through safer methods while heroin and methamphetamine both have legitimate therapeutic uses. But heroin, meth, cocaine, and if you're old enough marijuana are bad, alcohol is not.

But didn't heroin cause the current heroin epidemic? Doesn't that prove how much more dangerous it is? The answer is NO. The truth is we are not experiencing a heroin epidemic, we are experiencing an addiction epidemic. Yes heroin deaths are up but so are deaths from alcohol, the reason nobody is panicking is that alcohol deaths are always very high and the current uptick doesn't look so dramatic. Legalizing heroin would actually make it possible to reduce the overdose deaths. The truth is heroin addicts aren't dying from the drug they are dying from the drug war and the real horror story is the way we treat them. 

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