After Andre Agassi’s recent confessions in a tell-tale book about his use of crystal meth during his playing days, Richard Gasquet, who recently made it to the Wimbledon semifinals has just tested positive for cocaine.

He says he was contaminated with the drug when he kissed a woman who was using it.  Right. Unless the woman was covered in an inch thick layer of coke, or unless Gasquet drank about a pint of her heavily intoxicated saliva, we all know that’s a lie. I’m pretty sure the committee now deliberating will come to the same conclusion.

Drug use in our society

The bottom line is that drugs are everywhere, including our star athletes, night-club hopping starlets, and big-time business executives. And in case you haven’t figured this out, they’re not going away. The best we can do is to keep researching the problem so that we can:

1. Educate the public (educational and dissemination research).
2. Identify risky users earlier (assessment and genetics research).
3. Figure out the most effective ways to get them into treatment (intervention research).
4. Discover the best methods to treat them (clinical and pharmacological research).
5. Repeat the cycle.

That’s it! That’s all we’ve got. Recreational drug use will most likely continue forever, and I for one think that’s the wrong problem for us to be focusing on.

Interdiction – Our current solution to drug use

Limiting the drug supply, which is a big part of how our government currently deals with the problem, drives up the price of street drugs. This in turn reduces their purity (dealers have to make money) and gets in the way of recreational drug use. So far so good. But guess what?

Addicts don’t care about the cost of drugs.

Trust me, I used to sell them and use. I used to know a lot of other people who did too. Addicts are not making rational decisions based on economic realities. They’ll sell their stuff, lie cheat and steal their way to more drugs. Their brains are no longer depending on rational thinking when it comes to their drug use. That’s pretty much the definition of addiction.

Decriminalization – Our next step

I’m going to write a post soon about the notion of decriminalization. Decriminalization is different from legalization. Making drugs legal is like sanctioning their use – making citizens think the drugs are okay. For the most part, they’re not. But decriminalization would take addicts out of our prisons and give them the treatment they need. I think it’s time we faced the music and dealt with drug use problems at their core, with the people most often negatively affected by them.