Before World War II, neither England nor the United States had large numbers of drug addicts:
They used different methods, but both were far more successful than we are today.
Beginning with England before the war, anyone who was addicted could get a certificate of addiction, and using it he could go the a doctor for drugs by prescription. The doctor was theoretically treating him with the intention of his eventually stopping drug consumption. The addict, however, could normally find a shady doctor who would simply give him as much as he wanted. The addict was a highly profitable patient since he paid his fee without putting the doctor to much trouble.
The drugs purchased on the prescription would be cheaper than the smuggled product and of greater purity. Thus there would be no market for the illegal drugs and the illegal drug trade would (and did) disappear. There would be no one who could profit from addicting any one, and hence no trade. The total number of certified addicts in the whole of England was around 100; most of them were medical personnel who had succumbed to temptation to sample their own supplies. In essence the procedure sacrificed the existing addicts to prevent the creation of more.
The United States followed a different and more expensive method. Drug addiction was a crime and any one arrested for it was sentenced to one of two special institutions maintained by the federal government. They were called hospitals, but were actually rather unpleasant prisons. The addict would spend about a year being gradually dried out by slowly decreasing doses. This was the standard cure method then and was very unpleasant. At the end of the cure the former addict would be released. He would have lost his physical addiction, but not his physiological one. Most of them simply stopped taking drugs at this time.
The police would watch the former addicts and if they saw signs of addiction, would arrest and test them. I am told that addicts can be detected by observation. In any event there is no great harm in being tested if the former addict is genuinely “former”. He would have lost his contacts with his suppliers while in detention, and the suppliers would know that he was being watched and likely to once again cease to be a customer shortly after they resumed the relationship. Under the circumstances, the drug trade was small, and unprofitable. The Mafia stayed away. The total number of addicts was a small part of the number at present. In both nations the “drug problem” was minor compared to today.
Adopting these procedures today in the United States would be possible, but I think very unpopular. The English procedure would involve certifying literally millions of people as addicts. The illegal trade would shrink or die, but there would be millions of certified addicts at large. Gradually they would either die of or stop their addiction voluntarily. It would, however, take a long time. The total number of addicts would be less than today, but they would be more conspicuous. My guess is that politically the procedure would fail.
The system is no longer working in England due to a peculiar by product of the National Health Service. Doctors in the service are not paid by the call. They have a list of clients and provide medical services for them as needed without specific reimbursement per time. With this fee system, the drug addict is an unprofitable customer. The doctor must give him prescriptions fairly frequently and is paid only by the year he has him on his list. Under the circumstances the doctor is likely to actually try to cure him by gradually reducing his dose. Thus there is a market for the illegal supply of drugs and a trade is gradually developing.
Attempting to apply the pre-war methods to the United States would require the building of many, many specialized prisons and training medical personnel. The cost would be immense and it seems most unlikely that it would even be feasible. Thus although these two methods worked before the war, we must either let people freely take drugs (the course I favor) or continue our present ineffective methods or turn to something new.
The reason why America has had so many more opioid addicts over the past decade has a lot to do with Say’s Law. The supply has created its own demand.
The drugs are now mostly coming from Mexico. The porous border has allowed heroin to flood into the country, much more than when Asia was the main source.
Since the drugs have fewer stops along the way, the supply is purer and more damaging. Overdoses are becoming an epidemic. Medical supplies won’t be able to compete on potency.
The best answer is interdiction and quarantine. It sounds harsh, but if you believe the free and open flows of commerce are the source of a successful market then cutting off supply is the way to kill that market.
Current drug policies are especially tragic, comical even, because they achieved the almost impossible, they succeeded in combining only the worst elements of both worlds. Drugs are readily available and getting cheaper, like if they were legal, except without any quality control or tax revenue, you know, the good parts.
Nor came anything positive from the ongoing war on drugs, it’s not like it actually achieved the goal of removing drugs from society, if this was true, if cocainized negroes threatening white women were gone from the streets, one could even support it!
I also recommend the Joe Rogan Experience podcast #469 with Dr. Carl Hart, an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University. He is known for his research in drug abuse and drug addiction, who dispels a few drug related myths…
Best answer is interdiction and quarantine? Wow… That’s a hell of a solution, and one that’s worked every so well in the past.
I think that’s how we got here, isn’t it?
Sad to say, I think that the only real solution lies in breeding the addiction-prone genes out of the population. You are not going to stop the addict from getting their drug, via any external force or solution. The only thing that’s going to work is the addict gaining the realization that they’re killing themselves, and then quitting on their own. Until that point, the only real solution that doesn’t sacrifice the rest of our civil liberties in the name of saving the unfit from themselves is to make drugs in general legal and easily available. I’d be for allowing the sale of things like heroin and other “hard” drugs only to those who voluntarily undergo sterilization, but the bleeding hearts of the world won’t like that idea.
You can’t legislate morality or moral fortitude; either a population has it, or they don’t. About all you can do is what we’ve been doing by insulating these people from the consequences of their actions, and that’s to gradually erode the idea of civil liberty and free will. Addicts are gonna addict, and you can’t fix that. All you can do is ameliorate the effect, and in order to minimize the effect on general society, hasten the breeding of that trait out of the population. Hell, I’d consider putting free heroin distribution sites up on inner-city street corners, and let the population prone to abusing drugs eliminate themselves. You want a long-term fix? That’s actually the most humane one I can think of–Let them go out on a wave of opioid bliss. Just ensure that they’re not having any kids with the same issues, so if you want your free drugs, there go your reproductive rights. Give it three generations, and we’ll solve the problem humanely, and still have our civil rights along with it.
The only other way to avoid the problem would be a draconian regime of killing every addict and dealer in the country, and I just can’t see that going into effect. Half-measures don’t work–We can see the effects of those, all around us. Either it is legal to do what you like with your body, or it isn’t. If it is, which is what the implications of liberty actually are, then the only path is full legalization. If it isn’t, then we need to enact the same measures the Communist Chinese used in fighting opium addiction, which means killing a lot of people. You only get to pick one, I’m afraid.
“The only other way to avoid the problem would be a draconian regime of killing every addict and dealer in the country, and I just can’t see that going into effect.”
The current War on Some Drugs is strong enough to destroy civil liberties, but not so strong that it can hurt drug use.
A serious War on Drugs, where addicts were euthanatized, would be super-effective at killing off the drug consumption problem.
But no government could resist that kind of power. They would keep the moral panic going, they would announce that their personal political enemies were secret drug addicts, they would end up killing everyone who looked at them funny.