ILLEGAL DRUG USE IS ABUSE AND NOT 'FUN'

My Word

I agree with Kathleen Parker's viewpoint in the Sentinel last Sunday that
much of the effort to bring down drug abuse should be focused on prevention,
education and treatment. Indeed, Gov. Jeb Bush's approach to cutting illegal
drug use in Florida in half identifies prevention as the strategic linchpin,
supports treatment for the addicted, and balances the overall approach by
cutting supplies and going after the traffickers.

But I cannot agree with much of what she offers in her too-glib-by-half
rendition of the "truth" as to why illegal drug use is not abuse and, as she
puts it, "often quite a lot of fun. . . ."

Ask the 21,000-plus children and 119,000-plus addicts in state- supported
treatment services in Florida about the "fun," or the hundreds of thousands
more trying to get treatment, their parents, spouses and children, and the
victims of their drug-induced "choices." By the time they are into the
snorting (up the nose) and injecting (into the veins) that Parker associates
with fun, they report that their lives have become overwhelmingly miserable,
and so it seems by every measure.

While marijuana does not directly kill (as does heroin, crack and other
drugs), it is hardly the benign drug described in her article. In Orlando,
the major treatment centers report more than 50 percent of the children they
treat are addicted to marijuana. This is true around the state.

Moreover, the correlation between marijuana use and bad behavior is stark;
violence, truancy, vandalism and so on all go up in direct proportion to pot
smoked. Parker argues that marijuana use does not always lead directly to
other drugs, and she is correct, just as drunken driving doesn't always lead
to car crashes. But the probabilities go way up -- 80 times over, according
to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. So, too, does the correlation
between marijuana use and delinquent behaviors.

And what about Parker's argument that the use of illegal drugs grows because
of the very fact that it is forbidden, which leads to her surmise that if
some were made legal but "controlled" for youth, the attraction would
diminish?

Alcohol and tobacco are legal for adults (but illegal for children); their
usage rates by kids are three and two times, respectively, the marijuana
rates. This is hardly a reassuring sign that making marijuana legal but
"controlled" will lower youth use.

Experts, such as Dr. Robert Dupont, author of The Selfish Brain, and Dr.
Mitch Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House, the largest treatment system in
the United States (and both giants in the field of addiction and treatment),
believe that both use and addiction will expand if harmful drugs are made
legal.

Parker calls for truth, and with that I could not agree more. The truth is
that it is the illegal drugs, and not the laws that curtail their use, that
cause the greater harm.