Unlike Prohibition, which was a failure at abolishing alcohol because rates of alcohol use were by the Seventies back to pre-Prohibition levels, social programs to eliminate tobacco were extremely successful and should be applied to another addiction problem, those of illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. The soft approach to the very harsh reality of drugs which diminish the capacities of the users and plague the neighborhoods whereby drug financed gangs engage in drive by and random shootings and seem incapable of becoming resolved are programs that do not require Supreme Court decisions or major legislation, while the abortion debates seem never to end and environmental debates on air pollution and fossil feul emissions remain a quandary despite efforts of legislation to control them. The soft model is large scale reeducation of the population and making drug use simply inconvenient. Tobacco use was everywhere present in 1965 in that 42% of Americans used cigarettes and cigarette encouragement was everywhere in TV and print advertising. Cigarette companies had major lobbies so as to maintain their power. But by 2018, smokers were now down to 14% of the population and, even more, only 8% of those between the ages of 18 and 24, suggesting that the younger cohort of the population were using even fewer smokes, that defined as daily or every second day use, and so the habit was dying off. This happened, even though it took half a century to accomplish, because there was widespread publicity of the report of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1965 that smoking led to cancer, and lawsuits by state Attorneys General to sue tobacco companies for providing cancer killing products, and also, perhaps most important, restrictions by municipalities, one by one, to make cigarette smoking more difficult. Public buildings were barred from smoking, and so smokers congregated on their plazas during work breaks. Then universities and colleges barred students and teachers from smoking, and then restaurants. It just became just too difficult to manage. Rather than treating personality problems to be the cause of addiction, with studies showing how useful tobacco addiction is to well-being, there was the development of operational shortcuts to avoid smoking, such as tieing a box of cigarettes with rubber bands so that it took time and effort to get at a cigarette. People eliminated ashtrays, much less cigarette boxes, on their coffee tables and side tables. And so cigarettes are largely over. Solution accomplished. What next for a public outcry, this time against heroin and cocaine, that is beyond the political, that sidesteps the political?
The Liberal policy for dealing with cocaine and heroin is rehabilitation programs because they work and because the remedies are non-punitive, addicts regarded as the victims of their addictions rather than the perpetrators of their own addictions in that users are encouraged into the practice by drug dealers swaying the young and a culture of poverty so pervasive that people self-medicate drugs to alleviate their despair. There are even drug rehabilitation programs designed precisely for those who have lapsed into drugs after having been rehabilitated, and those too work in curing the victims or at least keeping people abstinent. Liberals also think it unfair to punish people with crack because they tend to be poor people of color rather than have the lesser penalties of cocaine, which are used by middle class and professional people, even though the crack users are more dangerous to the society in that children of those on crack suffer and crack sufferers don’t earn an income, contributing to social disorganization in the poverty community, while Wall Streeters who get high during their lunch breaks go back to the business of roiling money, whatever is the actual social value of that enterprise. These high rollers stay clean and mannerly. The trouble with rehabilitation measures is that it is a defensive posture in that there is an acceptance of wide scale drug abuse that can be attenuated rather than abolished. Even if successful, rehabilitation is a minor improvement on the drug situation while the attack on tobacco, the case in point, was almost totally successful in freeing the nation of this scourge.
Traditional conservatives and moderates like Joe Biden were punitive or became so at the height of the crack epidemic of the Eighties, journalists predicting that a generation of young people, down to the preteens and babies, would have long term mental deficits from having been exposed to crack. Some emergency measures had to be done and putting people in jail, blaming those who offended, was an easy short term action though it did nothing to alleviate the new quantity introduced, which was crack itself. But the fairness of long sentences for minor offenders becomes questionable and changing sensibilities again took to regarding victims as not blameworthy and led to ethnic clashes and so Biden changed his mind as did the population, now that crack turned out to be less ominous than forecast, and so people are furloughed from long sentences and some are right back into the problem of what to do with a recurrent drug problem.
Free market advocates take a different approach on how to decrease drug overdoses and drug related deaths. They propose the legalization of cocaine and heroin. The idea is that big pharmaceutical companies will take over the market and so consumers will get purer drugs that can be regulated for evenness of quality and potency just as is the case with other regulated legal drugs. Prices will go down and drug dealers will be eliminated just as numbers runners and bankers were eliminated when gambling became legal. The drug kingpin and their henchmen would be eliminated, including the children who serve as couriers or drug deliverers who keep the illegal industry going and become engaged with the production and delivery of illegal drugs and will end up dead in not a very many number of years. Yes, a lot of people would still be using drugs, but it would be their own choice, like any other consumer product, but this time using in a way that would be less harmful as well as less expensive.
The trouble with legalization is that doing so makes those purchases legitimate and so would result in increased usage and probable addiction to drugs in that a certain percent would abuse the drug just as some percentage of gamblers become in a way addicted to gaming and so go beyond the losses that they can handle, Gamblers Anonymous a rehabilitation technique alongside drug rehabilitation as something difficult to avoid. That begs the question that we are back with the rehabilitation model. Moreover, the idea that the pharmaceutical industry can be relied upon to provide a safe and steady and low cost product is dubious. The opioid epidemic was the result of legal painkillers promoted by detail men and doctors to pharmacists in numbers of does far more than required by the population so as to make money on volume and so the problem of having to police the free market so as not to see its excesses would still have to be controlled. Legalization would just increase the problem of drug users so as to fall back to controlling the factories and their suppliers rather than the product itself. A legal victim is still a victim, the idea as old as when Teddy Roosevelt introduced the Food and Drug Administration to control beef and other agricultural production, the consumer recognized as a potential victim rather than as a customer who had to beware on his or her own of the nutrition and cleanliness of the product.
A social movement against heroin and cocaine can be done by invoking the programs that abolished tobacco. It can also depend on pivotal advertising and small actions that make drug use more of a burden. There could be a host of billboards and posters saying “Drugs Kill!” plastered on walls of the areas of high drug use. Sure, gangsters can kill a mother organizing to stop drugs in the neighborhood, but torn down posters can be replaced so as to make clear that drug dealers are not heroes who give free wares to the young as well as provide other gifts but are a scourge on the population, the villains that the major community rightly abhors. There could also be drives to rid areas of drug use from needles and moving along people who congregate there. There could be police action to harass the people engaged in the actual drug connection: those who hold the stash; those who receive the request for a drug transaction and take the money; those who deliver the goods, and those who supervise the transaction. Too many people are involved so that they would find it difficult to manage if they were constantly being moved along or even detained in police custody and then quickly released. Go after the small buyers rather than the big ones who have enough money and muscle to protect themselves.
The essence of the program is who to identify as the victims and who are the victimizers. The fight against tobacco treated smokers as the victims, They were seen as people who were naive and had been exploited by advertising about the benefits of cigarettes and by tobacco companies which had, correctly, hidden the fact that cigarettes caused cancer and were nothing more than a nicotine addiction vehicle, not worth the pleasure of the experience. But, in fact, what cigarettes did to users were dangerous and unhealthy before the discovery that cigarettes included carcinogens, which seemed to be the one that shifted cigarettes from being a good to a bad thing. Users knew that smoking led to shortness of breath and coughing fits. Even the advertisements admitted it when the slogan of Old Gold cigarettes was “Not a cough in a carload”. Why say there is little coughing if coughing was not a problem? All the ads said was that adverse effects were mitigated by this particular brand. The benefits of smoking were also clear. It provided not just a taste but a mild but satisfying experience that soothed the nerves for people when they need that and focussed their attention when that was needed.However, tobacco users were left off the hook so that they could be recruited, scot free, for their bad ways. There was no twenty four hour arrest attached to a smoke user, even though there was punishment for marijuana or hard drug use later on.
The same pattern of treating users as victims or at least as non-villainous happened with the treatment of those who refused to take covid vaccines even though that refusal detracted from the effort to achieve the long stated goal of “herd immunity” as the way to end the pandemic. Politicians like Biden chided those who refused to vaccinate as misbegotten or finding vaccines difficult to access and made subject to a higher power, that of patriotism, to enlist them in their ranks, rather than thinking of them as bad. Non vaccinators are now regarded as confused rather than mean spirited, while vaccine mandates just make it too much of a nuisance to avoid getting a shot in that their jobs depend on it and so airlines employees and teachers get very high compliance without blaming them for their tardy acquiescence, which suggests that non-compliance was not really a principle, just a way of displaying obdurance, an easy virtue quickly dispensed with.
The same is true with inner city drugs. They too can be annoyed into not sustaining a drug habit, users always having reduced the amount of drugs consumed because of prices going up or for a time availability down. So don’t go deep into the addiction personality; just bother people til they stop. Reduce the demand and the supply will dry up on its own.