To win the war on drugs, end the war on kids

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Updated: March 23, 2012 8:06AM

After 10 years of war in Afghanistan, Americans are weary of it and, because 80 percent realize it can’t be won, want it to finally end.

After 98 years of the war against drugs, Americans are still energized and, although 80 percent realize it can’t be won, seem to want it to go on forever.

It’s easy to understand why we can’t win the war in Afghanistan, but it’s much more difficult to understand why we can’t win the war on drugs. After all, there’s nothing good about drugs; they destroy what kids like about themselves, their relationships with those they love, and their only chance for a decent future.

And all the laws we have passed since the Harrison Act in 1914 have been based on solid reasoning. Prior to 1914, heroin and cocaine were freely available and many thousands of people, from housewives to industry captains, were hopeless addicts. Since then, drug laws were used to close the border with Mexico, destroy the psychedelic culture of hippies, and eliminate dangerous, inner city “crack heads.”

When you imagine what a different country this would be without drugs, it does indeed make you want to declare war on them. And when you read Denise Crosby’s excellent columns on the use of heroin by young people it simply makes you want to cry. Hopefully, she has made the heroin issue real to parents, but why isn’t it yet real to their children? Why is heroin use going up?

This is just my opinion but, for one thing, I don’t think they believe us. If you tell kids a one-inch long plastic knife is the same as a switchblade, and penalize both equally, they won’t believe anything else you say. If you tell kids giving a classmate an aspirin is the same as dealing Vicodin, or that marijuana is as dangerous as heroin, they will know you’re lying because it’s not even close. Most kids believe that everything they’re told about drugs is an exaggeration or a lie to scare them.

Heroin addiction is a death sentence for at least half of young addicts.

Kids get to heroin through their parents’ prescription opiates, like Oxycontin, or as a way to come down from cocaine. Yet most kids say they would not have tried heroin if they had known about, or believed, the facts about physical dependency and the truth about withdrawal.

In my opinion, the only way to win the war on drugs is to end the war on kids. If we put middle-aged men under the same psychological pressure as we do our kids, they’d be dead in a year. Today’s kids are tremendously overscheduled, mercilessly overtested in exams that make no sense to them, and too often psychologically neglected by parents with high expectations who, while incredibly demanding, are all too happy to let the schools raise their children.

Kids’ peer pressure is no longer confined to lunch hour or a call after school. It is relentless 24-hour stress by ubiquitous social media in a crude and often cruel subculture. They have the pressure of unrealistic expectations they’ll never be able to satisfy, and the fact that their entire future, one they may not even want, hangs on a trick question or a whim. And deep down they fear that nobody knows or even cares how they feel.

And this all happens right at the time that their brains, not yet mature, are unable to make good judgments. If their mental health is strong, they may survive it. If it is weak or marginal, those kids often desperately need to escape, because that’s what drug use always has, and always will, be about, oblivion. Well, we made the life they want to escape from, and we could make it different.