The harder you push against a drug, the bigger the threat to the user. Abruptly end the supply of oxycodone, and fentanyl emerges. Stop students and soldiers from using pharmaceutical tranquilizers, make heroin popular.

The Poison Control Center has found the latest example of this treacherous policy of harming the public health by pretending they can order drugs users to stop taking a drug and blame the user when that doesn’t work. According to government scientists, drug users are using a compound at poisonous levels to maintain a high and prevent a withdrawal from an opiate or to get high because no opioids are available. The attraction of these substances is that they are sold at gasoline stations, convenience stores, and smoke shops, according to a report in the New York Times.

A pattern of compulsive use has been found, reports the Poison Control Center, that is highly dangerous. “They will set alarms to wake themselves every two hours to take tianeptine pills so they do not go into withdrawal. And then they have to keep taking more and more just to stay functional.” How much this is the actual practice and how much this is conventional anti-drug hyperbole is unknown.

Clearly, the health of these users would improve dramatically if a medical team could help them avoid these dangerous practices. It is almost criminal to deny medical care to drug users who live with this reality.

 Getting high on drugs is not a crime. It should be a private manner between a doctor and a patient, yet American law imposes restrictions that constantly second guess doctors’ judgment about how to treat drug users. A far wiser and humane system of laws would allow patients and doctors to devise a treatment plan. Government oversight should be the exception, not the rule.

Changing personal habits doesn’t respond well to an order of “Stop that and stop it now!” People who lose weight often go on food binges while they struggle with their compulsive eating habits. Nobody threatens to call the cops when this person has a setback. Drug users deserve the same respect. Normally a medical report wouldn’t name the patient, but not in this case. Authorities released the name of the young man who collapsed under acutely embarrassing circumstances; his overdose occurred minutes before a parent-teacher conference.

For centuries it’s been an established fact that Americans get high. A prohibition dramatically increases the chance that this habit will become fatal. More people have died from drug overdoses in recent years than died in the Vietnam War. Most of these deaths were preventable. The drug users deserve an open-door policy with medical services. One simple step. Allow drug users to get high under the watchful eye of a nurse or public health worker. Should a user overdose, intelligent intervention is only a few steps away. Yet federal courts have ruled that current law prohibits safe-injection sites from opening in the United States. In nation after nation, cities supervise injection programs, and their users don’t die from an overdose.

In truth and in fact, America’s harsh drug laws deny drug users their right to medical care, a human right that should be available to all.