Marijuana?

I always find discussions on substances rather annoying for two reasons.

Firstly, it has emotive responses that creates passionate sides within the debate, and this ultimately leads to the sides bashing each other over the head accusing people of 'government overreach' or 'promoting self harm' yadda yadda. When discussions always lead to that, it descends into this heartless discussion that is in no way truly objective and educational. It just becomes a series of ad-populist arguments and a battle on who can shout the loudest.

Secondly, it's full of misinformation. The reason my previous point said 'truly objective and educational' is because those who do attempt to refer to research and studies often do so with a very skewed agenda that only furthers their own narrative. It's similar to the way that the Family Research Council and other anti-gay organisations latch onto certain research that have found negative consequences of being gay etc. It's very selective.

The reality of a drug like Marijuana is that there's ample research to support it being harmful and not harmful, and there's not really much consensus because of this to take from it. As a result, those who support its legalisation will cite the studies which claim it to be relatively harmless to justify legalisation, whereas those opposed will cite the studies that indicate it may trigger mental health illnesses and have other negative impacts on your health.

My position on this has actually evolved since working at a substance misuse organisation as a Recovery Worker, so working with drug clients is what I do on a daily basis. As a result, I've come to the personal conclusion (i.e., not taking any sides within the wider discussional discourse) that the ban on illicit drugs is rather counter-productive to the work that I do, and forcing vulnerable people into an underground world full of exploitation and harmful substances is the most challenging thing to overcome when helping them. I've also come to realise that many of the clients that I have worked with who have died have been alcohol clients, and this applies for my work colleagues too. Alcohol is the biggest killer out of all the substances that fall into mainstream addiction recovery, and many organisations report that alcohol alone kills more of their clients than the various sub-categories combined that drug clients fall into.

However, whilst I feel that legalisation would help make it easier for addicts to obtain support, the lack of compassion given to addicts in wider society is something that annoys me, and this debate too ignores the wider impact of what drugs and alcohol do to people. When people become dependent on a substance, it is overwhelmingly because of community and lifestyle factors that are oppressing them, and their substance of choice becomes a coping mechanism for that oppression. On an environment like EC, many of us have (and continue to have) similar oppression within our daily lives, and because of that we're at risk of also turning to such substances as a coping-mechanism. In that regard, when somebody comes to me with an addiction, I honestly couldn't care less about the legal status of the drug they are taking. It doesn't bother me that Marijuana is illegal and that there are people on both sides frothing with anger that their agenda has dissent, because ultimately it doesn't matter. These people don't care if drugs are legal or not, as they'll get them either way. All that we do when politicising such issues is sideline the people who actually are affected by it daily.

I actually don't know where I'm going with this, but these were the thoughts floating around in my mind as I read this thread. There's a lot of passion for your own views, but the only time the victims of substances are referred to is when used as a way of highlighting the deviance and undesirability that addiction leads to. If the only concern people have for drugs is whether or not they should be legal then I'm afraid people need to remove the toilet roll from their eye and look at the wider picture. Whether cannabis is illegal or harmful is irrelevant. There are many clients within the young adults department who come in because of problematic use of Marijuana, and an addiction is easily developed when you take that substance because it seemingly offers you a release from problems in life, resulting in the psychological dependency. However, people can get a similar dependency on sugar, food, caffeine etc.

So yeah, I am personally in favour of drugs being legalised to take the burden off substance misuse work. However, if mainstream debate on this issue doesn't evolve in the forseeable future then I'm quite frankly scared about what educational understanding people will have if and when any form of legalisation does occur, and my experiences of people's understanding of drugs (and their views on it) indicate to me that substance misuse work is only going to become more demanded within society when we lack such holistic values when attempting to understand the complexity of human behaviour that causes people to take drugs or alcohol.

On that note, I'm tired so you'll all be glad to know I'm shutting up.

 

From a psychological perspective, the professionals that work with addicts do have data to support the idea that psychological/emotional growth tends to become frozen at the age at which drug use starts. I'm not certain if this is *any* drug use, or habituated/substantial drug use (I'd be inclined to assume the latter.) And what I've seen from working with addicts is... the addiction gets in the way of developing and maintaining basic life skills, everything to coping strategies, to effective communication, to decision making.

As for the legality issue... that whole discussion is sort of stupid in my opinion. There are lots of things that are legal that are unwise to do. Martin has a point that legalization would make some aspects (particularly the entanglements with law enforcement) easier to deal with when working with addicts, but legalization also sends a "stamp of approval" that sends the wrong message to a lot of people.

It's sort of a no-win. What we really need is a lot, lot more quality education... not insultingly stupid things like "this is your brain on drugs", but real-life discussion of the consequences, and hearing from people who've run into trouble. And, coupled with that, major spending on mental health services so that everyone who has a psychological issue for which marijuana, alcohol and drugs serve as a coping mechanism can get real help. That alone would make an enormous difference in the lives of a lot of people.