LogicSoDeveloped
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2010
- Messages
- 3,429
You probably know one or two of Britain's "hidden" drug users, and may even be one yourself. They are often young, highly educated, working, sociable and sporty. They feel healthy, happy in their relationships, and confident about the future. They take cannabis, cocaine, MDMA (ecstasy) and, lest we forget, a fair amount of tobacco and alcohol.
They are, by and large, the drug users you rarely hear or read about, at least not in the social affairs pages. You won't find them in a crack den or breaking into your home to fund their habit. Their use of illegal drugs is a lifestyle choice: it doesn't define or consume them like some heroin and crack addicts. They don't register as an alert on the public health radar, or as a headline on the law and order agenda.
It is easy to imagine many of them as smart, respectable, economically productive, holding down jobs in – or preparing to enter – the professions, business, banking, public service, the law, even politics. It's easy to think of these "happy" drug takers as unproblematic: as rational, self-regulating, middle-class "consumers", who are relatively discreet and (on the whole) discriminating in their drug use, and who tend to tidy up after themselves.
This view, the Guardian/Mixmag survey reveals, is implicitly shared by the police. The status, and perhaps age and skin colour, of our "hidden" drug users means they are not a target – unlike, say black, inner-city youth. They do get stopped and searched, sometimes busted for possession. But the survey suggests the law is pragmatically uninterested, on the whole, in criminalising their misdemeanours.
It also confirms truths that often get lost in the hysterical media discourse around drugs and public health: that taking drugs is, for many ordinary people, as normal and pleasurable a part of their lives as drinking or smoking.
source/the rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/15/hidden-drug-users
They are, by and large, the drug users you rarely hear or read about, at least not in the social affairs pages. You won't find them in a crack den or breaking into your home to fund their habit. Their use of illegal drugs is a lifestyle choice: it doesn't define or consume them like some heroin and crack addicts. They don't register as an alert on the public health radar, or as a headline on the law and order agenda.
It is easy to imagine many of them as smart, respectable, economically productive, holding down jobs in – or preparing to enter – the professions, business, banking, public service, the law, even politics. It's easy to think of these "happy" drug takers as unproblematic: as rational, self-regulating, middle-class "consumers", who are relatively discreet and (on the whole) discriminating in their drug use, and who tend to tidy up after themselves.
This view, the Guardian/Mixmag survey reveals, is implicitly shared by the police. The status, and perhaps age and skin colour, of our "hidden" drug users means they are not a target – unlike, say black, inner-city youth. They do get stopped and searched, sometimes busted for possession. But the survey suggests the law is pragmatically uninterested, on the whole, in criminalising their misdemeanours.
It also confirms truths that often get lost in the hysterical media discourse around drugs and public health: that taking drugs is, for many ordinary people, as normal and pleasurable a part of their lives as drinking or smoking.
source/the rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/15/hidden-drug-users
