American adults cannot handle drug legalization OR drug criminalization
By Mike Males
Just in the last five years, a staggering 771,000 Americans ages 21 and older have died from drug and alcohol abuse. That’s the entire adult population of a major city like Jacksonville, gone.
It doesn’t matter what a drug’s legal status is – illicit; prescribed; regulated; legal. American authorities have failed to devise any strategy in decades of efforts that prevents disaster.
- Oregon tried reform: legalizing nearly all drugs with minimal regulations, reducing total drug arrests to 3,400 in 2022 (including 700 for marijuana possession), with just 800 in prison for drugs. Result: drug abuse skyrockets (up 790 annual deaths and 142% by rate since 2018).
- Louisiana, with a similar population and the nation’s toughest “war on drugs” laws, generated 25,700 drug arrests (including 14,600 for marijuana possession, with 3,650 people in prison for drug offenses. Result: drug abuse skyrockets (up 1,197 annual deaths and 108% by rate).
These staggering discrepancies illustrate the vastly greater law enforcement resources states that criminalize drugs expend and their obsession with punishing low-level marijuana users (43% of all drug arrests in Louisiana; 14% in Oregon).
Drug legalization advocates should be frustrated at the hypocrisy of official and media crusades condemning increased drug deaths in liberal Oregon while ignoring repressive Louisiana’s similar increase.
Unfortunately, there’s a larger disaster. Everyone is wrong.
Hardline drug warriors tried their dream in the 1980s and 1990s, set forth in their certifiably lunatic 1989 National Drug Control Strategy: arresting and imprisoning millions for simple drug possession and sales while neglecting addicts because, left on “display,” they warn the public about drug dangers. Result: catastrophe.
The 2000s brought widespread reforms, led by decriminalization and legalization of marijuana in 38 states and reduced drug sentencing regimes. Most states bumbled along in between criminalization and reform. Result everywhere: catastrophe.
Bottom line: today’s numbers (still being compiled for 2022) show the highest levels of drug-abuse deaths ever recorded in every state and the nation.
Contrary to reformers’ promises, legalized marijuana has not displaced alcohol problems. Deaths from abuse of alcohol, legal for adults, have skyrocketed. Among Americans ages 21 and older, privileged with more access, alcohol-related deaths have risen 210% over the last generation and drug-related deaths leaped 334%. Drug and alcohol deaths are concentrated at mountainous levels in the age 30-59 populations experts assure us are of mature mind and physique able to handle drinking and drugs.
Everything about American drug policy, reform, and age limits has proven a bad joke. So, if nothing works, why keep wasting exorbitantly costly policing, prisons, and human capital arresting and caging people for drugs? An even more alarming question looms.
What is wrong with American adults and adulthood?
America lacks all four requirements crucial to preventing endless drug/alcohol scourges: (a) individual self-restraint; (b) community norms that reinforce restraint; (c) science-respecting political and public health authorities dedicated to honest analysis and policy, and (d) fundamental caring about one another’s well-being.
While most Americans, most of the time, can handle alcohol and drugs either by abstaining or moderating use, grownup Americans have for decades abjectly failed in our fundamental obligation to implement the strict regimes necessary to avoid forcing deadly crises on ourselves, our communities, and kids. American overdose deaths would fall by half if at Canada’s rate, by 80% if at Australia’s rate, and by 85% if at the United Kingdom’s rates – countries that themselves rue rising drug deaths.
Americans’ refusal to manage our out-of-control calamities makes us global terrorists, fueling violent, corrupt supply networks that de-stabilize the entire planet from Afghanistan to South America. If other countries had America’s military power and attack-who-we-like attitude, they would invade the United States, imprison our authorities, and impose draconian controls.
A radical proposal
We need a way out of this, and it will not be an extension of conventional cliches. Blaming stigmatized behaviors like addiction on feared, powerless outgroups like minorities, immigrants, and youth must yield to hard science. Abolishing the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, and related shape-shifting charlatans that have spread destructive lies about drugs for decades to profit major interests is essential.
Consider a comparison of immediate, self-inflicted overdose deaths (excluding long-term deaths) in two equal-sized populations, straight out of the latest CDC tabulations:
Overdose deaths, 2022-23
Age 16-19 (teens)
Illicit drugs 2,193
Alcohol 27
Total 2,220
Age 46-49 (parents)
Illicit drugs 12,225
Alcohol 291
Total 12,516
Every death indicates scores of injuries, hospitalizations, arrests, treatment, and other disruptions. The midlife parents of a high-schooler/college-undergrad (who also can easily and quickly obtain whatever they want) are six times more likely to overdose on illicit drugs and 10 times more likely to poison themselves from binge drinking.
The reason you never see such comparisons is American health, political, and research leadership has lied to us for decades that we grownups are mature and responsible while teenagers are the worst abusers, requiring draconian restrictions and hundreds of thousands of “underage” arrests every year. In reality, America’s worst drug and alcohol abusers are grownups well into late middle age, whose habits also foster and perpetuate problems in their kids.
The radical proposal: legalize drugs and alcohol for Generation Z teenagers while imposing strict, European-level regulations that abolish over-21 bars and sales and establish family- and pub-type settings. It is time to rethink the moral panic over teens using alcohol and drugs that has created America’s catastrophic “adults only” hazards. It is also past time to invite young people to participate in implementing policy reform.
This is now feasible because Gen Z has shown, by massive reductions in crime (down 87%), school dropout (down 70%), and early parenthood (down 80%), and strikingly low rates of drug/alcohol demise even amid today’s crisis (persons under age 20 comprise just 1.5% of drug/alcohol overdoses), that it is a different, much more responsible generation. Conversely, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials have demonstrated we cannot handle drugs and alcohol personally or politically.
As long as today’s attitudes persist, Americans will die from drugs and alcohol by the millions every decade and millions of kids will suffer addicted parents no matter what legal regime prevails. That American adults and authorities from top to bottom are indifferent to mass death and injury is the larger crisis neither Oregon’s liberal drug legalizers nor Louisiana’s harsh criminalizers can solve. We can now explore reasoned, science-based solutions that will appear radical, or we will continue to fall apart as a society.
Mike Males is senior researcher for YouthFacts.org .