This may warrant it's own thread, perhaps here in DC or even P&S ... I notified mods ...
I can't agree with that. If we're talking about "sins" such as stealing (or anything of the sort) in order to feed a habit, then it's not a moral failure.
That's completely delusional. As I said before I've been involved with armed robberies (I will leave the details and extent of my involvement vague for obvious reasons but I will say that I was not actually the one holding the gun but I did do some amount of harm to others, including collateral damage, and profited from it) for the purposes of obtaining drugs. Pretty sure I'm not absolved of the sins of traumatizing the pharmacist, hurting his business, hurting the people who had to miss their meds for a week or whatever, making his insurance premiums go up, whatever.
I stole $40 from my mom when I was about 14 which I think is possibly the larger sin. Other than that and the aforementioned, I have never stolen for drugs. I've worked my ass off hustling, mostly, during my heyday, selling other drugs to buy my drugs of choice. I made a lot of money. Most of it went up my arm. Drug dealing might be a sin or it might not in your view; if it was a sin, which I believe somewhat grudgingly, I committed it, and willfully. I viewed theft as a bigger sin, or at least a low down, scummy, low class thing to do, so I set my mind never to do it, and never did. If I was broke, desperately sick, and had no other recourse, I probably would have (specifically, probably another armed robbery.) But I would have been culpable. My most recent relapse was funded by a ~$20k loan I had taken out against my pension for entirely different purposes. Spending that has no victim other than myself but it still makes me an asshole. It is something bad and I should feel bad about it. I have Suboxone now. But I digress.
If you have to resort to crime to get drugs, then you are a criminal. You are not somehow a victim. That is a sickening attitude and goes really to the heart of the incredible entitlement and victim-mongering so prevalent in society today. If you have to resort to theft, then you're a thief. If you have to resort to violence, you're a violent man. If you steal from your family, you're scum. Drug addiction may be a motivating factor, but they do not exculpate you from sin, moral failure, whatever you want to call it. Of course there is forgiveness, reparation, repentance, and so forth.
Attributing moral failures and sins (or wrongdoing, if you prefer a secular term) to addiction is a denial of the addict's moral agency and an externalization of blame which is wrong, pathetic, and unlikely to lead anyone to a healthy relationship with their past. People talk about addicts "in denial," the "recovering addict" who doesn't consider things that he may have done in the course of his addiction which are wrong, to be, in fact, wrong, and he responsible for them, is perhaps in the most denial of all. The denial of moral agency is not only wrong, but it's demeaning to the addict. I own my sins, and others must too, if they want to get on with life.
It is, as willy33 said, a result of the War on (some) Drugs. I'm sure you know very well how hard it is to resist doing something that hurts somebody else when you're in hellish withdrawals and your only hope is that dose which you can't afford.
I've had several-thousand-dollar-a-week heroin habits before. I never stole anything in my life to pay for heroin (literally speaking; the pharmacy robberies were really long in my past tbh before I got seriously into heroin
per se.) Going back into pharmacy-robbing, or identity theft, or big ticket shoplifting, or whatever, would've been no less or more wrong than had I not had such a habit. Full stop.
Had the drugs been cheaper, or drug-replacement maintenance services more available, a big portion of addicts wouldn't have to resort to crime to avoid withdrawal. Most addicts don't steal just because they want to, but because they need the money to fix themselves. This is one of the reasons why WoD is such a big failure. It makes otherwise normal and moral people behave as criminals.
To borrow from the legal concept of entrapment, if you're going to steal because one is an addict, you had it in you to steal before. I got out of the drug game because I was in a situation where I would have had to kill a man in order to protect my money and my reputation. I didn't do it, because I didn't have it in me to kill a man, or some might say I was a coward and afraid of prison, or whatever. A man owns what he does and doesn't do. Externalizing blame is for the weak.
And, practically speaking, to address some of the specifics of your post, methadone is, to the majority, quite easily accessible. If drugs were legal/cheaper then things would be different, of course, and I agree, better for everyone. To say that the fact that this is
not the case and drugs
are difficult to access, and therefore some people resort to crime and/or sin (not necessarily congruent, but often overlapping, concepts), victimless or otherwise, to obtain such drugs, does not diminish liability, and, in the case of crimes with victims, one's having done wrong to another human being.
To be honest, I'm somewhat appalled by your post. Drug use itself doesn't make one amoral, and the notion that it does is a big problem, because it results in social stigma that only worsens the situation for the addict (which lessens the likelihood of recovery).
I said nothing about the morality of drug use. I'm somewhat uncertain about it myself, but I certainly judge no-one for their drug use. I do, however, judge people who do wrong (or even obnoxious) things under, or to be able to be under, the influence. I don't hang out with low-life junkies who steal. Big ticket shoplifting or even doing robberies or ID theft is one thing, I have friends, I guess, who've been into that sort of thing, but anyone who'd steal from friends and family is not worth my time, and deserves whatever they get: violence, prison,
whatever. They still have moral agency. And to deny them that is not only to let them get away with stuff but actually to dehumanize them and, even if in sort of a counter-intuitive way, strip them of a very fundamental aspect of human identity and dignity.
Even when I was a junkie I didn't like to hang out with them although of course sometimes I did because in our scene we ran in packs and that was the best way to get drugs. If, while I was an addict, I had somebody middle-man for me and he pulled a runner, and I found him later, I'd beat the shit out of him. He would've had it coming. Because he did me wrong.
Wrong. Not just some symptom of the alleged "disease" of addiction.
I understand that you're religious and I don't want to get into a debate about it (because it's fruitless), but I urge you to consider that what anyone does in their spare time is none of your business as long as they don't hurt anyone, and it is not a question of morality. Whether somebody likes to relax by reading a book, having sex, hiking, or consuming psychoactives is up to them.
Nothing to do with anything I posted, just to make it clear. I'm not talking about drug use
eo ipso as a moral failure, in fact I more or less explicitly said so in my OP, I'm talking about the fact that most drug users, or at least most drug addicts, are or become moral failures during the course of their use/addiction.
Bottom line is, psychological support is very important in recovery, and labeling addicts amoral and whatnot is counter-productive. I wouldn't otherwise write such a long post about it, but I see the way of thinking you're proposing as a pretty serious problem.
If you weren't aware, I do this for a living (not specifically substance abuse, but psychiatry in general which involves a lot of substance abuse issues.) I don't label anyone as amoral (except those that are, the true psychopath is a rarity though); in fact, I would argue that I treat them as
moral beings more than you do. You deny them agency, I insist upon them understanding their own agency, their motivations, and, should they wish to change their patterns of use, try to help them build strategies to do so; should they wish to continue, I provide harm reduction; should they make know their intention to return to a life of crime, I don't coddle them and imagine that it's somehow not their fault.
I also wrote a pretty long (tl;dr?) post because I see
your respective way of thinking as a pretty serious problem, albeit one which has a fair amount of mainstream support which is gaining steam. I don't agree with it whatsoever, I think the term "disease" is misapplied in speaking of addictive "disorders" (a slightly better term IMO), and I don't believe that addiction somehow transforms ordinary people into degenerate criminals. It does not. There
is however, a lot of selection bias here—people who turn into addicts are more or less definitionally not "ordinary," as the ordinary person doesn't do drugs, or if he does, he doesn't become addicted. Whatever characteristics addicts share it does not remove their moral agency.
OT: perhaps one of my most serious sins is having sex with another woman while drunk and thus cheating on my significant other.
A pretty big sin, I'll agree, and one I've committed more than once, not always under the influence of alcohol and/or other drugs. But the influence did not diminish the sin; which is more or less what I've saying throughout, if we extend "influence" to a more literal sense of "the
influence of drugs upon one's life;" the essential diagnostic characteristics clinically for addictive disorders usually revolve around this, or what might even be called one's "
relationship" with one's drug of choice.
