2022 will go down in history as the watershed year when the world’s figurehead of sane drug policy inadvertently surrendered to the other side.
Well-intentioned, compassionate, but academically removed from the drug prevention and recovery coalface, Dr Nora Volkow, the Director of the world’s most preeminent drug prevention agency, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), crossed the single bright line between sanity and San Francisco.
NIDA’s role has always been to push back against the greed and vested interests of the unprincipled predators, criminal or otherwise, who see the inelastic demand of substance addiction as a veritable gold mine. They are less concerned about the unacceptable harms of illicit drugs, harms attested to by the very nomenclature of the worldwide ‘harm reduction’ industry assisting illicit drug users, drawing mostly from taxpayers’ pockets.
The assumption that divides drug prevention from exploitation is simple – the libertarian notion that people should be allowed to freely do as they wish … unless it harms others. The international consensus for the last 110 years, since enacted in United Nations’ Drug Conventions, recognised that illicit drug users have around them a whole constellation of others harmed by their use – partners, children, their children’s grandparents, siblings, friends, workmates, road users – suffering considerable emotional and financial costs.
The grandparents of a drug user’s children, for instance, often bear the financial burden of their schooling and care, costing them tens of thousands of additional dollars while losing any hope of retirement. Steal that amount from them and you’d go to jail. So why should a parent’s drug use, which does the same, be tolerated?
In her 2022 blog Dr Volkow laments the 100,000 US lives lost to illicit drugs the previous year, but rather than expanding funding for proven strategies, she urges the adoption of the very same strategies, pet programs, and attitudes promoted by the deep-pocketed businessmen who want to exploit drugs for obscene profit.
It is a disappointing conclusion to reach when productive initiatives are well known. The first international Drug Conventions back in 1912 were spectacularly successful, with their codification of an international consensus that specific drugs cause unacceptable harms. Bearing those agreements out, 1 in every 100 dependent heroin users still die of overdose every year and heroin still typically makes 60-70 per cent of users dependent on welfare. Such was the success of these restrictions, an immense 1998 study of 88,000 US respondents across all generations dating back to 1904 shows zero to residual illicit drug use from 1912 through to the mid-1960s.
Contrast today’s rampant drug use and horrifying body counts and the causes become abundantly clear. Elated by the clean-slate naivete of generations never confronted with drug use reality, pro-drug opportunists launched a 60s counter-attack, promoting illicit drugs as the mystical path to personal enlightenment. As artists and musicians further positioned drugs as good clean fun, societal use, and associated deaths started their ascent towards the appalling figures for 2021.
There is the objection, of course, that the old policies can never work again. Sweden ended that argument. As the most drug-liberal European country during the 60s, moving to a restrictive drug policy in the 70s, Sweden, an island in a sea of drug-liberal countries, achieved the world’s lowest drug use by the 90s. With 96 per cent of Swedes solidly backing their three-pronged approach of school education, thoughtful policing, and mandatory rehabilitation, there are absolutely no mysteries about what works.
Yet many experts’ ruminations on what we must do never look to the proven. Rather they optimistically reproduce the counterfactual talking points, adulterated science, and political capitulations that gave San Francisco the mess it is in, all as solutions.
In some equivocations about abstinence being too hard and too perfect, experts fail to recognise that wiser generations, from cold hard experience, had determined that crossing that one bright drug policy line will inexorably lead to our current predicament. While the Left constantly ridicules any argument of a slippery slope, their dissembling covers the fact that their favored strategy of ‘incrementalism’, that’s their word, is precisely the same. Once any society relinquishes the territory bounded by the bright line, human nature, and license will ensure the steady march to oblivion.
An assumption is a powerful thing. Too complex to defend in a sentence, and so easily susceptible to the well-described reductionism of the five blind men describing their separate experiences of an elephant, an assumption always carries the seeds of what it will bring to fruition. Just as any social Darwinism premised on survival of the fittest will inevitably produce a politics of tyranny and death which the 20th Century communisms and nazisms only taught us too well, so the downplaying of drug harm to others will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the societal fabric. But remember it takes cold hard experience to change one’s assumptions.
Today, international drug policy has been hijacked and railroaded by billionaire financier George Soros, joined in 2016 by the wealthy World Economic Forum. Soros is famous for his pro-drug stance, ‘If it were up to me, I would establish a strictly controlled distributor network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available.’ Most distressing is how many in the industry, likely unconsciously, have accepted so much of the downstream concretisations of his philosophy and associated largesse.
Their endorsement of methadone maintenance, which comes straight from the pro-drug playbook, ignores up to 60 per cent of patients still co-using heroin, with the 2009 gold-standard Cochrane Collaboration review concluding that methadone programs failed to reduce opiate overdose deaths and criminality – the very two outcomes they were expected to reduce.
Likewise, such advocacy for drug consumption rooms appears unaware that the only study demonstrating they actually save lives was exposed in 2012 as being either inept or fraudulent, with conclusions not following from the data. A 2020 evaluation of a Melbourne Australia facility records 102 times greater overdose rates than on the street. Ex-clients in rehab asked about the astronomical overdoses replied that clients customarily experiment with drug cocktails and higher doses of opiates knowing that staff will revive them if needed. With overdose rates ignored by the evaluation, which also glibly dismissed increased deaths in the community post-commencement rather than decreases, the adulterated science so often supporting harm reduction interventions becomes evident.
Returning to Volkow, as the head of an agency that should be across the science, she appears to position cannabis as less harmful than other illicit drugs. This seems to ignore the latest massive population studies which demonstrate what’s been known for decades from in vitro and animal studies – that cannabis is genotoxic and mutagenic. It causes more than twice as many cancers as tobacco. It is likely causal in 89 of 95 birth defects tracked by the European Medicines Agency. It accelerates ageing by 30 per cent. Causes 30 per cent of new psychosis diagnoses in London and 50 per cent in Amsterdam. Not to mention the suicides, violence, homicides, and road deaths…
Siding with the current Leftist boutique campaign which condemns stigmatising drug use, thus tacitly promoting it, is perhaps the last straw. Predictably, worldwide media now actively censors any public complaint even about a partner’s illicit drug use, such is this suppression.
The error here is in thinking that stigmatisation is a leftover of a severe prohibitionist past. Alcohol is not illicit while alcoholism is most certainly stigmatised, demonstrating that it’s a natural societal reaction to gratuitous harms caused by one to another. Remember, too that the Left happily stigmatises anyone not parroting their LGBTQ+ gender agenda – just another little hypocrisy.
Experts object to the perfect becoming the enemy of the good. But in crossing the single bright line between sanity and San Francisco, they allow the imperfect to cultivate the 100,000 deaths they deplore.
