drug war – Points: short & insightful writing about the long & complex history of drugs & alcohol

Roundtable: Confronting the Drug War: Drug User-Oriented Harm Reduction and Drug Policy

May 9, 2023 by Points Editor

Yale’s SU x COVID Data Collaborative’s Policy Working Group is hosting activists who use drugs and harm reduction researchers to discuss drug policy reformation, structural inequities in drug treatment and harm reduction systems, deconstruction of the disease model of addiction, and alternate ways to think about drug use in a multi-part series, Confronting the Drug War: Drug-User Oriented Harm Reduction and Drug Policy.

This month, the collaborative invites you to join Nancy Campbell, Sterling Johnson, Anne Kveim Lie, and Nicole Luongo as they deconstruct the brain disease model of addiction utilizing a historical context to discuss the impacts this model has had on the experiences of people who use drugs. This session will include time for a Q&A with our roundtable discussants, moderated by Helena Hansen. To register for the event, held May 23^rd at noon Central time, please use the following link: https://bit.ly/_CTDW.

Transdisciplinary Approaches for Psychedelic Experiences Lecture

October 25, 2022 by Points Editor

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Pharmacy is hosting a reading group and lecture featuring Dr. Kwasi Adusei on October 26, 2022 as part of the Borghesi-Mellon workshop series. Registration is open at this link: https://go.wisc.edu/7aufbn

Some people like to shoot dope: Ideology and pragmatism in the film ‘Methadone: An American Way of Dealing’

May 22, 2022February 24, 2022 by David Frank

Author: David Frank

People on methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) are in a difficult position. I should know since I’ve been on it for close to 20 years. They are caught in the space between a program that helps them in a way that is primarily pragmatic – by providing access to a safe and consistent supply of opioids outside of the difficult and dangerous conditions created by prohibition/criminalization – and our culture’s need to frame everything drug related through the ideological narrative of “addiction” and “recovery.” In short, MMT enables criminalized drug users to decriminalize their opioid use, and yet, like the emperor who wears no clothes, it must publicly masquerade as a “treatment for addiction” so as to not disrupt the War on Drugs ideologies that require firm distinctions between “drug” and “medicine”; “addict” and “non-addict”. It’s no wonder that people end up a little confused.

Methadone: An American Way of Dealing captures these contradictions playing out in real time.

An American Way of Working

May 22, 2022February 22, 2022 by Jeremy Milloy

In Methadone: An American Way of Dealing, work is everywhere. Dayton, Ohio, the film’s primary location, is introduced to us as a “manufacturing community” beset by crime. These two types of work—factory and crime—come up again and again while we are in town. Straight work, at GM, or at a foundry, leads to getting high just to bear it, to “paint over the factory,” as one young worker puts it, and get through another soul-killing shift. Staying in the plant and getting by on methadone instead is tough. We meet only one worker doing this; he is trying to taper off and not making it, missing shifts for the first time because he feels so low. We meet many workers who have chosen to stay outside the factory, period, and stay high all the time. They claim they are living a better, more real life than their fathers did, trooping into factories every day with their coveralls and lunchboxes, “sheep” meekly accepting their slaughter. As the film notes, with its passing shots of street preachers and sex shows, the straight life is studded with its own addictive consolations. Dayton, we are told, has “1000 bars and just one [methadone] clinic.”

Points Interview—Helena Barop, Poppy Wars: US Global Drug Policies, 1950–1979

January 28, 2022December 21, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Today, we’re pleased to interview Dr. Helena Barop about her new book , Mohnblumenkriege. Die globale Drogenpolitik der USA 1950-1979—or Poppy Wars: US Global Drug Policies, 1950–1979. Dr. Barop recently received her PhD from the University of Freiburg.

The War on Drugs: From Book to Website

January 28, 2022December 14, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is from Dr. David Farber, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Modern U.S. History at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of the recently published, War on Drugs: A History (NYU Press, 2021).

Over the last 36-and-a-half years I have done what research-oriented history professors of my generation were supposed to do: I wrote books and published articles. What I did not do—until now—was produce a website. Defying the ageist canard about old dogs and new tricks—albeit admittedly in collaboration with my much younger colleagues Clark Terrill and Marjorie Galelli—I’m happy to report that the War on Drugs Project website is now live.

“Blah Blah Blah”: The Fallacy of United Nations Drug Summits

November 18, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Stefano Tijerina, a lecturer in management and the Chris Kobrack Research Fellow in Canadian Business History at the University’s of Maine’s Business School.

“Blah Blah Blah” was the conclusion of environmental activist Greta Thunberg after the recent 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. As Thunberg’s response indicates, thirty years of constructive climate dialogue has resulted in few changes—just the kicking of the status-quo can down the road—even though twenty eight climate summits since 1995 have spent billions of dollars on travel, salaries, marketing, public relations, lobbying and other resources. All of this with little to show. Dreams drowned in “empty words and promises” and no concrete results, as Thunberg said.

The same lack of progress could be said about the United Nations and its conferences about drug control. Instead of using children and young adults for their propaganda machine, though, they exploit the victims of the illicit drug trade in developing countries to advance their anti-drug rhetoric and empty promises.

UN 1965 opium tracking — At the laboratory of the Division of Narcotic Drugs of the UN Secretariat, located in Geneva, Dr. Olav Braenden (Norway), Chief of the Laboratory (left), and Mrs. Jane Beck (United Kingdom), indicate the regions where opium is produced in 1965. Image courtesy of the United Nations. UN Photo/PP, (Unique identifier: UN7632427).

What We Left Behind in Afghanistan

September 16, 2021 by Points Editor

After twenty years of nation-building in Afghanistan, the United States leaves behind a country in shambles. It might be argued that we slowed down the momentum of terrorist cells and that we kept the Taliban in check for two decades. But there seem to be few positive long-terms stories to highlight—perhaps the empowerment of Afghan women; but that might not last very long under renewed Taliban rule.

Afghanistan is rich in natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious/semiprecious stones, and arable land [1]. But, during the American presence, the country was not targeted by the Western private sector to harness these potential economic development capabilities. The only real area of growth over the last two decades was opium production—that is perhaps our legacy in Afghanistan.

According to the most recent “Afghanistan Opium Survey” report of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan is the largest opium producer in the world [2]. UNODC also reported that the Taliban was the biggest buyer of opium and the biggest collector of opium production taxes as well [3]. Moreover, “sales of opium and poppy derivatives constituted the main source of income” for more than half of the population, and the “gross income from opiates exceeded the value of the country’s officially recorded licit exports in 2019″ [4].