Drugs & the traumatic threshold: the gateway to addiction in Buy a Ticket, Take a Ride

If the effects of drug propaganda are better studied, I think we will confirm what some of the data already shows, that in drug war propaganda we have created a situation analogous to abstinence-only education.

People in general, but especially young people, who are told to avoid risky things altogether are not only more likely to do the thing… they are more likely to do it without any safety precautions. They are more likely to lie to families and support people who are punitive.

The harmful consequences of the drugs are moralized, but it could be better viewed as an equation of risks that can be mitigated. But when our culture demands purity or sobriety, the expectation is not only unrealistic, but sets into motion an awful, deadly trap, far more deadly than any of the drugs involved– even the scariest ones.

The reach of anti-drug propaganda is changing when it comes to our public perception of weed, but other more scary drugs continue to be stigmatized. I think there’s a counter-discourse pushing the understanding that the “gateway” to harmful addictions is always trauma, and I love to see it.

I also think we have a complex profiling and social class system which relegates to some people abuse. This traumatic stereotyping builds the gateway to drug use and profiles them as drug users based on the characteristics of that trauma before they might ever personally care to touch a drug. We have, by stereotyping trauma, doomed certain people to drug use and addiction. This blood of overdose deaths & despair is collectively on our hands when we perpetuate these stereotypes.

Others who are not doomed move across the threshold… not doomed, but vulnerable. They are less vulnerable if they practice harm reduction and are not further abused just for being vulnerable. Harm reduction is what anyone with any type of opinion on drug use should be promoting and defending.

Part of the traumatic gateway to addiction is a door that swings both ways. By pushing an addict, we might succeed in moving them to the other side of threshold. But when we act patronizingly, with ignorance and with disregard of consent, this inevitably inflicts further abuse. Punitive measures & stereotyping deepens wounds and widens the traumatic gateway.

The actual gateway never goes away, regardless of whatever recovery from addiction has occurred. Put another way: when we scare and manipulate drug users in an attempt to control their habits and coerce their abstinence or their quitting, this harmful enforcement without actual consent always creates more trauma and increases the chance of relapse and long term harm.

What I am describing is punitive, operates as a force of control on everyone’s relationship with drugs, regardless of the safety of the drug habit itself. The risk of stereotypes and punitive measures are always more than the substances themselves.

See also: Rat Park, the animal experiment on addiction you possibly never heard about.