Review of Drug Problems

Summary

1. Humans have used drugs of various types since prehistoric times. Alcohol has been a common drug in the US since the colonial period, and opium, cannabis, and heroin were common legal drugs in the late nineteenth century.
2. Our ideas about legal and illegal drug use and their consequences are socially constructed. They vary across time periods and are constructed in ways that reflect social inequalities. The distinction between legal and illegal drugs today lacks a logical basis, and has roots in racist thought.
3. Harmful drug use involves the use of a drug negatively impacting a person's life, family, or community. Whereas addiction refers to the physiological or psychological reliance on a drug, health professionals today prefer the language of substance use disorder, the medical diagnosis to describe the uncontrolled use of drugs despite harmful consequences. 
4. Sociological approaches to explain harmful drug use and harmful drug policies focus on how structural inequalities like racism or economic inequalities influence their consequences. They also attribute harmful drug use to peer and cultural influences. Thus, they focus on social contexts rather than blaming individuals.
5. Structural functionalists view harmful drug use as having dysfunctions for society as it interferes with individuals' abilities to fully contribute to society. Conflict theories focus on social inequalities such as how the criminalization of Black people is a form of racialized social control, as well as how corporations are responsible for harmful drug use as they engage in problematic practices in order to increase profit. Symbolic interactionists emphasize how people become harmful drug users through their social interactions, as well as the symbolism and labeling or stereotyping of drugs and drug users. 
6. The use and consequences of drugs are socially patterned, with variation by age, race, gender, social class, and other areas of social location. Outcomes of drug policies such as the war on drugs also vary by social location, with more adverse consequences for people in marginalized groups, particularly Black people and other people of color.
7. Examples of the consequences of drug use and harmful drug use include individual health complications including death, impacts on families such as stress, financial costs, and relationship strain, and impacts on society including poorer population health, high economic costs, more housing insecurity, and other consequences. 
8. The war on drugs is a punitive approach to the problem of drug use or harmful drug use, which criminalizes drug use rather than taking a public health approach. Critics of the war on drugs strategy say that it does more harm than good, and they urge that serious consideration be given to decriminalizing or legalizing certain drugs.
9. Taking action to reduce harmful drug use and harmful drug policies requires improved treatment programs, changes in drug policy, and individual agency and collective action. Promising strategies include supporting harm reduction programs, funding community-based treatment programs, implementing successful educational prevention programs, raising taxes on legal drugs, and fighting racism and other systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. 

  

Questions

1. Were you surprised to read that racial prejudice helped lead to bans on opium, cannabis, and cocaine, and why or why not?
2. Do you agree or disagree that the distinction between legal drugs and illegal drugs is not logical, and why?
3. Find an older video, print, or social media ad that is selling or against selling a mind-altering substance (e.g., prohibition, smoking in old movies, medical cannabis, etc) – how did this ad capture the beliefs or opinions of the drug at the time, and how have the views changed over time?
4. Taking into account the variation in drug use and abuse by age, gender, race, social class, how would you use this information to understand your own level of use (or nonuse) of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and other drugs or the level of use of your peers? 
5. How do biology, psychology, and sociology explain harmful drug use in different ways, and how might they complement each other rather than being only in competition?
6. Per the harm reduction approach, do you think that the US should make sterile needles and syringes freely available to people inject drugs, and why?
7. How can we see mass incarceration as a social problem related to the racialization of drug use?
8. Do you think that the war on drugs has done more harm than good or the reverse, and why?
9. What are the advantages and disadvantages of legalizing currently illegal drugs?
10. Which drug treatment services are available in your community, and are they community-based, medical, or carceral? Which do think are most effective?

  

Action Steps

1. Use your sociological imagination: Next time you have or hear a judgement about people who engage in harmful drug use or have a substance use disorder, describe how their use/disorder may be connected to social causes. 
2. Support nonprofits and similar organizations: Volunteer for a local agency or group that provides wraparound support to individuals with substance use disorders or utilizes harm reduction approaches. 
3. Use your individual agency: Start or join in efforts on your campus to encourage responsible drug use over harmful drug use such as for drinking and vaping, or reach out to your state representatives encouraging the state to raise taxes on alcohol and cigarettes to help reduce their harmful use. 
4. Engage in collective action: Research local or national groups that are engaged in organized action around improving drug policy in ways that don't perpetuate social inequalities, select one, and figure out how to get involved in their efforts.