Pubdate: Sat, 04 Feb 2012
Source: Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA)
Copyright: 2012 The Spokesman-Review
Contact:  http://www.spokesman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/417
Author: Shawn Vestal

A TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY APPROACH TO THE WAR ON DRUGS

Dr. Michael Reznicek has one thing in common with your stoner friend 
- -- or self -- from college.

But just one: He wants to legalize drugs.

All drugs. Even the hard ones. Pot, coke, meth, smack...

"I know it's radical," Reznicek said. "The solution is to go back to 
the way things were before 1914."

It's not often you hear yearning for the blissful days of 1913, 
before the country's prohibitive mania took over. But Reznicek's 
argument -- which is being made in a book published this month, 
"Blowing Smoke" -- is that we've taken the wrong approach to 
narcotics, primarily in viewing drug use as a disease. We'd be much 
better off to simply let people do what they want, impose 
consequences for crime, stop funding rehabilitation and rehab-linked 
services, and tax and regulate narcotics, he said.

"I approach this from my experience with addicts," said Reznicek, a 
53-year-old clinical psychiatrist from Spokane who has worked in 
prisons, state hospitals and elsewhere. "They are perfectly capable 
of controlling themselves."

In this, Reznicek is outside the mainstream, to put it mildly. He 
believes his book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is the first to 
seriously advance this idea in an academic forum. He says that when 
he raises his criticisms of the disease model within the psychiatry 
community, he is treated as a pariah.

"In almost all cases, I was just looked at like, 'What planet are you 
from?'" he said.

A lot of us who are somewhat open to legalization arguments also like 
the idea of treating drug addicts rather than imprisoning them.

"The debate seems to be do we punish or do we treat," he said. "(But) 
most of the punishment through the courts is to force people into 
rehab. So the punishment arm works very closely with the therapeutic arm."

He said that we should consider drug abuse a habit, not a disease 
over which the user has no power, and argues that the science for the 
disease model -- which is extensive, at least in terms of the sheer 
volume -- is unpersuasive. People have habits of varying degrees and 
intensities, and a lot of factors, including social pressures and 
opprobrium, influence their decisions.

"People practice habits as long as they provide comforts or a reward, 
and they give up habits when they start to cause pain," he said.

Lots of scientists disagree with him. Lots and lots. Reams of studies 
are cited in support of the idea that drug use alters brain chemistry 
and biology, changes behavior in long-term ways, and causes 
compulsive behavior with destructive consequences. Genetic variations 
linked to addiction are being discovered, according to the National 
Institute on Drug Abuse. The NIDA doesn't suggest that the disease 
model is equivalent to, say, cancer, or that addicts are powerless. 
It says self-control can be "seriously impaired."

It's hard to argue with that. The true wreckage of addicts' lives 
would seem to belie the notion that they have a mere habit -- 
addicted people often pursue destructive behaviors over and over 
again, long past the point of understanding why they shouldn't and 
long past the point of crashing through the walls of their lives.

"Why would someone deliberately ruin their lives?" asked Grace 
Creasman, director of addiction studies at Eastern Washington 
University. "Why would anyone do that to themselves? Why would they 
lose their jobs, their husbands or wives, their whole lives, unless 
there was something more to it?"

Reznicek is not unfamiliar with addicts. The vast majority of people 
he treated in prison -- not directly for addiction, but as a 
psychiatrist -- had substance abuse problems. He believes that 
society's efforts to treat them, and state-funded rehab in 
particular, actually enables them by softening consequences and 
teaching them they can't control themselves.

His arguments are not necessarily simplistic, but they have a 
simplistic appeal: People who do not struggle with addictions often 
underestimate how hard they are to fight. So it's easy for them to 
wonder why the addict can't just apply some willpower.

Reznicek notes that cigarettes are among the most addictive products 
around, and that tens of millions of people have quit smoking. He 
also points out some of the unquestionable downsides to prohibition, 
including the fact that it creates an outlaw culture. Smoke a joint 
and you step across that line; someone who's gotten deeply into 
addiction has gone well into a criminal culture that may have as much 
to do with their problems as the drug itself, he said. It's 
prohibition that creates that culture.

"If you are a young addict in the meth scene, you have walked down a 
very dark road to get into the subculture," he said. "It's not just 
the chemical properties of meth."

The lure of legalization, in various guises and forms, is strong. The 
war on drugs seems to make little sense. Our marijuana laws -- and 
medical marijuana in particular -- are insane. Reznicek is very 
persuasive on the problems of prohibition, and some of the limits of 
the disease model.

It would be surprising, though, if all the answers to the problem 
were found a century ago.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom