What misperceptions perpetuate addiction?
- A frequently heard idea is that legalizing drugs would generate revenue and solve the drug problem. It’s not that easy; remember H.L. Mencken’s warning, “For every complex problem there is a solution which is neat, simple and wrong.’
- Eliminating legal penalties for drug crimes removes accountability for users and forfeits law enforcement interventions that can lead to sobriety.
- Ideologies that encourage medicalizing illicit drugs or establishing medicine by popular vote not only undermine the protection that government regulation provides but also become a pseudo-intellectual front for those who just want to make their drug of choice legal.
- Providing ‘safe’ places to use drugs and distributing clean needles are cheap and easy ways to appear compassionate to drug users when true compassion dictates that we help them in treatment to find a drug free life.
- The notion that everyone does drugs is completely inaccurate – barely 8% of Americans over 12 and less than 5% globally for those 15 or older – and misleads the most impressionable to think that their drug free lifestyles are out of sync, when the opposite is true.
- Confining addiction to one socioeconomic group or geographic area denies the fact that drug use is present in all social strata and conveniently relegates the problem to someone else.