Posted on by Nathan Riley

Drug Use Is No More Addictive Than Overeating

Since World War II, caring people have rejected stigma, recognizing its cruelty.

Freedom Democrats enthusiastically join in the fight against stigma. The latest group to hold its head high and say, “We are doing nothing wrong,” is drug users. It has become increasingly difficult to accept the stigma that using hard and psychedelic drugs is always harmful and should be illegal. More and more drug users reject the hostile conclusion that getting high must be destructive behavior. Some people have problems with drugs, just as some people have problems with overeating, but the growing body of evidence makes it clear that many people use drugs and have fulfilling lives. It is mean to look down on drug users.

In the United States black people were stigmatized before and after slavery. Black workers were stigmatized as lazy and stupid. Whites were often surprised by blacks’ intelligence and shrewdness. Written before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography was greeted with skepticism. No black, the stigmatizers said, could write that well; a white person must have been the actual author.

When it comes to stigma, the unfair treatment of blacks has lasted an extraordinarily long time, but other stigmatized groups have shed their negative labels since World War II. Historically homosexuals were mocked, occasionally locked up, until the nation went crazy. Immediately after World War II, gays became a national threat. They were considered security risks. Homosexuals could stay in the closet, but if their loves became public, they lost their jobs. It became illegal for Uncle Sam to provide employment to LG persons.

During this gruesome period, supporters of homosexuals helped lesbians and gays stay in the closet. These heterosexuals, like my parents, thought it was helpful to call lesbians and gays “sick.” Sick people deserved compassion and treatment. Psychiatrists thought that gays could become heterosexual with treatment. In other words, lesbian and gay people could become “healthy” by just being like straights. Men chasing women was considered “normal.” “Sick” had turned into a stigma.

During this same period, women fought stigmas that labeled them overly emotional flibbertigibbets who created confusion until men straightened out the problems. Men were the smart, rational backbone of government and society. Women took care of the home. This prejudice was stupid. Virtually every open-minded person understood that some women were smarter than some men and that women often had better solutions to problems. Feminism blossomed and so did the view that women are equal to men.

By the 1960’s, a growing population across the globe realized that labeling groups as “inferior” was wrong. Stigmatization demeaned same sex love, women, blacks, Spanish speaking, and in the northern United States southern whites were stigmatized. It took George Wallace running for President to demonstrate that some whites in the North were just as racist as some whites in the South.

The battle against stigma was widespread in the United States after the upheavals of the 1960’s. As the times changed even the military, long considered a deeply conservative institution, adopted anti-stigmatization policies. Gay and lesbian soldiers opened doors that allowed the transgendered to work in the military. Women, blacks, and Spanish speaking people became senior officers whose rank required them to command white men. Stigma didn’t disappear, but it became dubious and presumptively illegal in the eyes of the law.

This social change is attacked by the Donald Trump administration. Diversity is damned, and employees are dismissed for supporting it. It will be a hot-button issue as long as Trump is president.

Nonetheless, the battle against stigma is being fought on a new front. The latest group fighting stigma is drug users. Slowly but surely, it is being recognized that drug users are not sick nor demented.

In fact, much if not most of drug users’ pain is caused by stigmatizing drug use. Change has been painfully slow. In the 1960’s, using marijuana was considered dangerous. It led to laziness, opened the door to stronger drugs like heroin, and demonstrated a contempt for law. This argument failed. Marijuana use became widespread, and its users did not become drug addicts. Stigmatizing people is dangerous, wrong, and causes harm.

World War II and the German Holocaust had exposed the dangers of racial categories. Their acceptance could justify horrific acts. As the lesson of World War II became clear, segregation in the army and the classroom became illegal. The battle to give blacks the right to vote and end Jim Crow practices created interracial friendships. Smoking pot was not only fun, it was a form of solidarity with the victims of racism.

Pot use skyrocketed and by high school teenagers had been to parties where some people got stoned. It became impossible to claim pot was dangerous. The menace of drug use had been disproved. Zero tolerance, or the goal of making America drug free, became absurd extremism.

In city after city, all over the world, it became recognized that some people did drugs, always had and always will. Policy makers were forced to answer the question, what is the harm? If it was the spread of disease from needle-sharing, then it became obvious that drug users should have a steady supply of sterile needles. Though by no means universal, harm reduction became a public health objective. Cities like San Francisco boasted of their accomplishments in reducing drug related harm. Other cities kept their policies lowkey and faced attacks if their harm reduction programs became public knowledge.

Harm reduction is a major step forward, but like supporting homosexuals because they are “sick” it doesn’t dispute the belief that drug use is dangerous and inferior behavior.

A growing chorus of thinkers now argue that drug users are not sick and those who have problems deserve help. It is generally understood that gambling can become addictive and lead to financial disaster. In fact, most gamblers watch their pocketbook and stay within a budget. Gambling is fun, and that is why people like it. Drug users are just as sensible.

The argument that heroin is dangerous because it is addictive has become suspect. Gambling can be addictive for some but not for others, the same is true for heroin. Bankers, plumbers, and college professors use heroin without harming their careers. A Columbia University professor came out of the closet about his drug use. Carl Hart makes this argument in his book Drug Use for Grown-Ups. Consider this observation: lock-ups in cities all over the United States don’t help heroin users going through withdrawal. For some, it is horrible agony, but for many it’s just a challenge and they “tough it out.” Don’t think you know about heroin’s effects because you read newspaper stories or saw antidrug movies. The effects are individual, and they vary with the individual, just like gambling and drinking. Some people get great pleasure from eating and preparing food; other people overeat. You can’t generalize about drug use anymore than you can generalize about eating.

Addiction is a troublesome concept. Using heroin, methamphetamine, is a problem for some but not everyone. That is the lesson that Freedom Democrats are learning and disseminating.

In a free country, no judge should be allowed to tell a person you must go into treatment. It should be up to the person to decide if they want help. Nobody should be allowed to shout “Don’t do this! You will go to jail!” That is not freedom; it is stigmatizing and ignores the right of persons to make their own decisions about how they live their lives.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Give The Doctors A Chance

“To me it makes sense to give fairly wide latitude to the doctors and their patients, as they would know best what helps them and how to integrate cannabis into their care.”

This is the expert opinion of a specialist in addiction treatment who overcame his addiction to heroin and has his own website offering advice for dealing with the good and the bad in marijuana legalization and the use of “harder” drugs. Dr. Peter Grinspoon’s book Seeing through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana (p. 100) covers the waterfront. It offers an in-depth examination of drug use.

Most of the book is accessible to any reader, but in parts it is intricate. These sections are addressed to physicians in the hopes of creating a dialogue between doctors who look favorably on legalization and other physicians who think this is a dangerous road to travel.

One of his major purposes is to dispel the shame that often sits heavily on the drug user. Another objective is to make physicians aware that patients who use drugs are competent persons who are all too often misdiagnosed and considered driven by uncontrollable compulsions.

As the advice offered at the start of this article, he lays great stress on the doctor-patient relationship, a key proposal of Freedom Democrats. The book lends professional support and wise knowledge to this political objective of making the doctor-patient relationship a private matter.

In his opinion, addiction is a clinical judgment made after a consultation between a doctor and a patient. It involves an understanding of the patient’s goals and the doctor’s care. He eagerly tries to educate physicians on the use of marijuana as medicine. He is equally opposed to physicians who believe that drug users can’t be trusted and pain medication must be used sparingly. A patient suffering pain with a drug history is often refused pain medication or given such low doses as to provide no real relief for the patient.

The book is filled with suggestions for patients and doctors about finding a common perspective that permits the doctor to work without fear that they are enabling addiction. It is way too easy for a doctor to believe that drug use is laced with such harms, and that the worried physician ignores other gains that are tied to drug use.

In other words, a patient’s marijuana use or other drug use may bring real benefits. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians weigh the good and the bad. He reminds us that the bad is often dubious. Medical research has focused on negative outcomes without looking at the real-world gains experienced by users. Such gains should be an objective of the doctor patient relationship.

His book is a polemic against biased research that makes illegal drugs look dangerous, even if the same drug in a hospital or medical setting is used daily. He finds study after study that weights evidence to reach the conclusion that drug use is harmful.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s hopes is that a common language and approach to evidence can bring a productive dialogue. Unhappily the history of drug research often reveals shoddy methods that bias results. Anyone who has followed the history of drug legalization will not be surprised, but the facts and names of these biased studies are easily found in this thoughtful overview.

While Dr. Grinspoon is often angered by “scientific research” that claims drugs are dangerous, he patiently outlines steps that can make studies fair. One favorite point he hammers home is the popular belief that marijuana interferes with short-term memory. Even studies that make marijuana seem dangerous must admit that this is a temporary condition. While high, a user may have memory difficulties; these disappear as the effect of marijuana dissipates. This conclusion is well established, but all too often the news stories issue unfounded warnings about pot and memory.

Dr. Grinspoon insists that objective research would look at the gains that a person might experience, making the memory lapse insignificant. A user might find his appreciation of a book increases and discover conclusions that would never be found if the person had not used grass.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s objectives is to make the real-world experiences of drug use be an integral part of scientific research. He is not alone; there are unbiased studies discussing the positive impacts of drug use. He wants the scientific and medical community to find a common set of standards that will permit unbiased research to become the norm.

To be sure, there are dangers surrounding drug use. Dr. Grinspoon softly but firmly wants the banning of sweet edibles that could attract a child, who munches the drugs thinking it is candy but in fact produces massive overdoses. The positive effects of drugs can lead to mistaken beliefs. For example, that a drug will cure cancer.

This is a wise book that takes the guess work out of the growing legalization of drugs by state legislatures. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians can and should play an active role in this new legal environment. Physicians can offer real assistance to patients, and he wants the help to increase.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Stranger Danger

          Joe Biden’s troubles shouldn’t change Freedom Democrats’ minds. We support him even with health problems.

Stranger danger is one reason for staying away from Republicans. It’s a basic Republican principle that strangers should make decisions that in a free country should be the responsibility of one person.

Becoming a mother is a responsibility that lasts decades. It should be the mother who decides to accept this responsibility, but Republicans insist that government—that is, the strangers—law enforcement, and churches should be equal partners. Although the fetus never expresses an opinion, right-to-life sympathizers inject themselves into a decision that realistically is the responsibility of the mother. These strangers believe they know what will protect the child and in fact that they can ignore the mother’s choice.

This is absurd. Consider a good thing; a referendum proposal in Arkansas that would permit  abortions up to sixteen weeks and in cases with special medical needs. This is a good faith effort to find a middle ground between pro-choice advocates and right-to-life diehards by permitting a procedure. If the bill gets on the ballot, it should be supported.

However, four months is a reasonable period for an adult comfortable with her body, but what about a fourteen-year-old girl who has an irregular menstrual cycle? She could easily take more than four months before she recognizes her pregnancy. These types of problems are aggravated by stranger danger. At least to my mind, I don’t want a child to become a mother unless her family is willing to accept the responsibility. This is just one of the dozens of real-life examples that make it difficult, if not impossible to write rules about the complexity of human relationships.

In a free society, the mother should choose. Strangers have no business making rules about complicated problems like this. It’s already a difficult decision, and allowing strangers to make it more difficult is destructive and impinges on freedom.

This is only one of the areas where thoughtless government officials and their public supporters allow private matters to become the business of strangers.

These decisions can be fatal. When it became clear that OxyContin was making some users have a compulsive habit, little help was offered to them, and public wrath was unleashed on pharmaceutical companies for making the drug.

Users were simply told, “Stop!” To nobody’s surprise, while some stopped others entered the illegal market. Politicians thoughtlessly expanded crime. Nobody tells a heavy person, “Stop eating!” But the powers that be, without thinking, huffed and puffed and said, “No more. You can’t get this drug. We’re going to make it illegal.” By doing this, the government forced drug users to enter the illegal market and get close fentanyl. Thousands have died because strangers thought they could tell a person what pills they can use.

What’s worse is that the strangers are accepting magical beliefs in the power of these illegal drugs. People who use drugs have individual reactions to their choice of highs. Some drug users go to work, live responsible lives; others get wrapped up in depression, and the law cruelly magnifies their problems. Very few homosexuals are child-molesters, and the number of drug users whose lives are ruined  by their high is far smaller than lawmakers claim. Once again, strangers who have little experience are making life-and-death decisions that properly belong to the individual and his doctor.

Sex work also runs the gambit of human behavior. Some are graduate students working on their PhD. Others are homeless and distressed. Making their life illegal allows strangers to interfere in private concerns, when the object in a free society would be to help people live their lives even if they rent their bodies, abort their pregnancies, or choose to take drugs.

Obviously, the Democrats are only occasionally helpful on drugs and sex work. They almost universally want to keep strangers away from decisions about pregnancy.

The key difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is a willingness to learn. At one time, many Democrats were against abortion-law reform; today, the party is nearly unanimous. In the areas of drugs and sex work, many Democrats are open-minded. Democrats are far more willing to consider stranger danger than Republicans, who self-righteously insist they know how individuals should live their lives.