Humans have taken drugs to alter our perception of ourselves and the world around us for millennia. We have used substances for a host of reasons including to socialise or escape, medicinally or ritually, to enhance productivity or creativity.
According to the 2019 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, an estimated nine million (43 per cent) people aged 14 and over in Australia had illicitly used a drug at some point in their lifetime and an estimated 3.4 million (16.4 per cent) had used one in the previous 12 months.
This occurs across virtually every profession and every socioeconomic status. Many drug users are educated, healthy and productive individuals. Yes, there are police, doctors, lawyers, fitness instructors even health influencers and parents who take drugs.
That’s before we consider socially acceptable, legal drug use: 79 per cent of Australian adults drink alcohol, although it’s not the most popular drug we consume.
In his new book, This Is Your Mind On Plants, American journalist Michael Pollan notes: “Something like 90 per cent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda). We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use of it as an addiction, but that is only because coffee and tea are legal and our dependence on them is socially acceptable.”
Pollan also points out that, “the war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.”
This is true in Australia too.
“Most people assume drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. But the reasons aren’t related to their relative risk or harm,” said Professor Nicole Lee of the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University and Jarryd Bartle, a sessional lecturer in Criminal Law, RMIT University in The Conversation.
Lee and Bartle reference a 2010 study where experts ranked 20 legal and illegal drugs in terms of the harms they caused the user and the community, including the health impact, economic cost, and crime.
Alcohol topped the list with heroin and crack cocaine in second and third places while MDMA (ecstasy), LSD and mushrooms were ranked down the bottom.
None of this is to deny that drugs come with risks and can wreak devastating havoc on some people’s lives. Around one in 20 Australians has an addiction or substance abuse problem. The most commonly abused substances in Australia are tobacco and alcohol (followed by cannabis and amphetamines) as well as the use of prescription medicines, like painkillers or sedatives, for non-medical reasons.
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But, when we act shocked and jump on our moral high horse when someone like Bartel allegedly takes drugs, well, stones and glass houses and all that.
The private actions of a vast number of Australians conflicts with the public rhetoric and, as far as the public rhetoric goes (drugs are bad, people who take drugs are therefore bad and drugs should be illegal), it’s obsolete.
The experts on drugs don’t judge those who take them (recreationally or otherwise) and believe reform is essential. The “tough” stance, as a government spokesperson called it recently responding to inaction on the 109 NSW Ice inquiry recommendations, helps no one.
We can sniff at the Bartels of the world, while we sip our lattes, and judge those who have serious problems with either legal or illegal substances. But it’s not 1900 anymore, and perhaps we’re smarter now? Perhaps it’s time for all of us to change our minds.
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Source: | This article originally belongs to smh.com.au
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