Tattoo provided by Sloane Empke
Stop Punishing Pain
Essay by Linds Belchior
Taking the metro to school, I see multiple folks using drugs, the remnants of drug paraphernalia, people out on the street struggling with addiction and various other issues struggling to survive in a harsh, unforgiving society because they are not afforded the help they deserve. While celebrities rack up lines of cocaine and mix pills at the MET gala afterparty, our community members, friends and families are criminalized, demonized and made to be seen as less than humans and as those who do not deserve help. If drug dependability is what makes someone an addict then I’ve been an addict since I was 13 from using antidepressants. Drug use is so heavily stigmatized in today’s society that people often forget that the person on the street struggling with addiction is someone’s child, someone’s friend, they are someone, but the world shoves them into a box of being an addict with no redeemability or life.
Recently, the White House invited multiple harm reduction and overdose prevention organizations to be acknowledged for their hard work on reducing overdoses and implementing different forms of harm reduction to make their communities safer. Founder of This Must Be The Place overdose non-profit William Perry was to be one of the many recognized for his hard work and dedication. The White House, being the White House, upon seeing Perry’s criminal record turned Perry away at the door, barring him from an event he was invited to and being honoured at. Even after founding a harm reduction organization that saved many people from overdosing, the fact that Perry was a former incarcerated drug user stopped him from being acknowledged at the White House for his work in overdose prevention, showing the stigma and exclusion that both former and current drug users face throughout their lives.
Criminalizing drugs criminalizes and harms users. It is the criminalization of drugs that kills our loved ones, community members, families and friends. Criminalizing drugs labels those who take them as criminals, instead of human beings, disallowing them to seek the help they may want due to fear of being imprisoned for their ‘crimes’. It is the act of criminalizing drugs and its users that kills our community members, not the drug itself. If we want drug related crimes and illnesses to stop, we need to decriminalize them so that people can get the help they deserve instead of being imprisoned and forced to withdraw, which has many adverse effects on users, especially those who are dependent or use drugs to cope.
Doctor Mofokeng, who recently presented a report to the UN General Assembly, detailed the importance of the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. Mofokeng emphasizes that, “Law and policy can themselves become a conduit to harm, by either enhancing or generating it” which is exactly what we see in terms of the criminalization of drugs and its users. Imprisoning people with drug issues does not solve an issue, it only makes them larger. People are taken away from their communities, stripped of their drugs which to many are their coping strategies only to be thrown in a harsh, cold, often violent hyper-masculine cell block, leaving you to withdraw and deal with this newfound forced sobriety on your own. Once released people fall back into the same habits due to the often traumatizing experiences while incarcerated. Because their drug use is what got them incarcerated, people don’t want to get help or admit to those who can offer help that they use drugs for fear of being criminalized again.
The criminalization of drugs and thereby its users is what stops people from getting help and keeps producing the public idea of ‘if you use drugs, you end up on the street’ because if someone is caught using drugs, they are imprisoned without proper treatment, left to withdraw from the drugs they take, and left on the street once more with no other help from the system. I believe that if you don’t want to see drug users on the street, then decriminalize drugs, set up frameworks that allow for these people to get proper help and attention. Too often society forgets that the houseless person on the street is someone’s family member and believes that since they are on the street they deserve it, they chose this life of suffering, when in reality they are often just someone in need of help and compassion. Start treating other humans with the care and compassion that you demand for yourself.
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