I sent the following letter to the editor of my local newspaper, The Oregonian, after I read an article about a trip that a delegation of various political, law enforcement, and others from Oregon who went to Portugal on a fact-finding mission into Portugal’s approach to the decriminalization of drug use and preventative measures to prevent and/or treat drug addiction. I don’t expect this article to be published in the paper. But I wanted to send it just the same.
The way to fix a problem is to know what it is, define it, and come up with a comprehensive plan to fix it. I commend all of the leaders who recently went to Portugal on a fact-finding mission to better understand that country’s approach to decriminalizing drug use and providing treatment for addicts. I have confidence that the delegation from Oregon is on the right track for solving the problem of drug abuse in Oregon.
The insights that some of the members of this team mentioned in interviews with the Oregonian may have provided them some “ah ha” moments. Some of the questions that arose from this fact-finding mission were: Should the focus of responding to the drug problem be police enforcement of laws that target the possession by individual users of illegal drugs? And how should those laws be written? Or should the focus be more heavily skewed toward preventing the distribution of those drugs and more emphasis placed on capture and prevention of drugs entering into the community? And, what combination of the two would be ideal and should be clearly codified and consistently enforced by law and the police?
As a society and culture, Americans still do not have a full understanding of drug abuse. What is it? Why does it exist? Is it simply a set of illegal behaviors, or is it some kind of a reaction to life that needs to be better understood? And, what about the behaviors and/or conditions often found associated with drug abuse: scuffles with the law? offensive and inappropriate behaviors, including threatening behavior or assault? homelessness? And the lack of resources that often may mean that drug abusers can become and remain dependent on the government to provide them the assistance they need, sometimes for long periods of time? How should that be set up, paid for, and sustained?
One of the components of decriminalization of drugs in Portugal has been to crack down on drugs coming into the country and on drug dealers at the local level. The question I have for us are, why does the United States, at all level of government from federal on down to the local city and community agencies, not have a unified drug policy that stops illegal drugs from getting into communities? We know, for instance, that the fentanyl that we get is manufactured in China and Mexico and imported from those countries and probably via other countries as well. If we can know that, why can’t we know how to stop it? The DEA probably already has a pretty good understanding of drug pipelines and major players. But there is not a consistent, clear policy for the elimination of this flow of drugs from those sources. Why is that?
The last thing I would like to address in this note is the drug users themselves. Yes, they have a myriad of problems. And, yes, drug overdoses claim the lives of a lot of them. Socially and culturally, suicide, and the private matter of what people do with their own bodies and their own lives are almost always seen by lawmakers and policy makers as problems that necessarily require state intervention when the resources to address even the most basic and fundamental components of the problem itself are quite limited to begin with. How much of the total resources available to fight the problem of drug abuse should be allocated for the prevention of overdoses? I agree that some money, time, energy, and resources should be provided to help prevent deaths through drug use. But I think we also need to ask how much of a concentration of resources and energy should go into saving lives in the prevention of overdoses by people who abuse drugs when the result of saving those lives does not necessary do anything to change or solve the problem of drug abuse in the community?
So, what is drug abuse? And why does it exist? What are the reasons that people abuse drugs? To those questions we should also try to find an answer, culturally and socially, to the question of whether or not drug use should be considered a private matter. If it ever is considered a private matter, would that change the ways in which we as a culture treat the problem?
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