Drug Prohibition and Public Health: It's a Crime*
| Author | Ernest Drucker |
| Published date | 01 December 1995 |
| Date | 01 December 1995 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00048658950280S109 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Drug Prohibition and Public Health: It’s a
Crime*
Ernest
Druckert
The purpose of this essay is to explain and justify a shift in the paradigm we
use to understand drug addiction
-
specifically a shift away from a criminal
model. While the many social and psychological problems associated with
addiction to heroin and cocaine have been recognised for over a century, it is
only since the appearance
of
AIDS (in
1981)
that these forms of drug use have
been seriously addressed as a public health issue
-
and
drug
policy thought
of as
health
policy. The use of these illicit drugs
-
especially their injection
-
is directly responsible
for
HIV’s rapid spread through some
of
the poorest
communities of the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Brazil. AIDS
is now a leading cause
of
death among young adults in each of these societies
and addiction is well understood as the driving force of the global pandemic
that already affects
120
countries. Thus AIDS had propelled drug use into a
most powerful position for adversely affecting public health.
Further, because the trade in illicit drugs is the linchpin
of
a huge criminal
economy and the growing prevalence of drug use a surrogate for more
intricate and important problems of the modern era (eg poverty, racial and
ethnic tensions, class conflict) many societies now find that the “drug
problem” is rapidly becoming a significant agency for social transformation.
The demonstrably ineffective application of legal and criminal sanctions based
on prohibition
of
drug use appears to only amplify this potential for social
disruption.
We know now that it is the policy of drug prohibition that determines the
economic structure and social contours
of
the drug marketplace
-
acting via
the huge profit margin involved in the trade in illicit ‘drugs. While the
all-too-human appetites for the range of experiences associated with drug use
per se are are important (eg the relief from pain, escape from misery,
or
desire
for pleasure) it is the ways in which drug entrepreneurs exploit these appetites
(especially among the poorest, most marginalised groups) that creates the
fundamental mechanism driving the rapid global spread of drug use.
Inevitably, under these circumstances, we see growing rates of addiction
extending worldwide in the 20th century. AIDS merely rides
this
wave.
But while these adverse effects are directly attributable to the policy of
prohibition, it is the drugs themselves and, of course, drug users that
are
blamed. The demonization of drugs and the public’s hostility towards the drug
user are often deliberately cultivated by politicians for opportunistic purposes
and are responsible for much of the prejudice and the exclusion that drug users
commonly suffer. The criminal behaviour addicts engage in to acquire the
substances they are dependent upon is predictable. And this behaviour leads in
*
Based on a presentation at the ANZ Criminology Conference
at
the University of New South
t
Professor of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center,
Albert
Einstein
Wales, Sydney, Australia, September
1994.
College of Medicine, Bronx, New
York,
10467,
USA.
67
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