Thinking Clearly

The New Weed Whackers

by: Maia Szalavitz at The Fix

...

In fact, I can’t really get my head around why people who have suffered addiction would support criminalization — especially people like Kennedy whose top talking point is that addiction is a disease. For one, isn't the very fact that they themselves got addicted evidence of the failure of current drug policy? If prohibition worked as prevention, illegal drug addicts wouldn’t have a story of their own to tell.


Second, if arresting and incarcerating users is essential to effective treatment, why argue that addiction is a disease? No one says we should arrest diabetics for failing to take their insulin or heart patients who don’t exercise. Nor is anyone calling for jailing obese people caught within 500 feet of a McDonald’s or criminalizing the possession of non-diet soda, despite New Yorkers' complaints about Mayor Bloomberg's "nanny state." 

.... 

Ironically, people susceptible to mental illness, even one as general as depression, are the very group Kennedy says he seeks to protect. Since those who use drugs to self-medicate due to emotional problems are more likely to relapse and to fail to meet the requirements of treatment—particularly if they do not receive adequate care—a system that puts marijuana users under strict supervision and punishes relapsers severely will simply pull more of the mentally ill into the prison system. And prisons are already the biggest provider of mental health care—if it can be called that—in the country.

Instead of hanging on to tools that are too, dare I say, blunt for the job, we need to take marijuana use out of the justice system entirely and treat addiction as the public health problem that it is. Kennedy, above all, should know that taking the same action and expecting different results is not the way to get better, in either addiction or drug policy.