'Drug Use For Grown-Ups' Serves As An Argument For Personal Choice : NPR - 0 views
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In his new book Drug Use for Grown-Ups, the Columbia University professor of psychology and psychiatry zealously argues that drug use should be a matter of personal choice
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"The practice spread widely...Many women and young girls, as also young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise."
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Soon enough, however, articles appeared widely that tried to make a connection between African American cocaine use and criminality.
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one of the book's most eye-opening aspects is its challenge of the long-running association between drugs and addiction.
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It must also interfere with a person's job, parenting or personal relationships. Other indications of addiction may be high tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, or persistence in repeated failed efforts to quit.
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"What about the notion that drugs led to poverty and crime in my neighborhood?" he asks. "Well, that is simply an ugly fantasy, an incredibly effective one to be sure.
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that it's a pre-existing kind of personal vulnerability — psychological and/or circumstantial — that precedes the drugs themselves that can lead to addiction.
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There are no cures in psychiatric medicine. We don't have a cure for depression, nor do we have a cure for schizophrenia or anxiety.
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We merely have medications and therapies that treat symptoms, and this allows patients to function better, despite their illnesses."
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"such issues affect only 10 percent to 30 percent of those who use even the most stigmatized drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine."
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but also because it seemingly provides a simple solution to complicated problems faced by poor and desperate people.
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But he also so importantly emphasizes that anti-drug laws have disproportionately ruined the lives of people of color;
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What we have now, instead, is racist mass incarceration and social shame prevailing (and drugs hardly scarce anyway).
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He persuasively argues for us, as Americans, to chart a more humane course for how we see drugs in our society — a course rooted in personal freedom without social stigma.