the drug war continues

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080904/ap_on_re_us/drug_abuse

There's several key points that are easy to mock.

"The earlier you use drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, the more likely you are to have a lifelong problem," Walters said.

Since I have a doctor parent, I've long since known this is incorrect, at least slightly. The actual likelihood for having a lifelong problem is typically inherent to your person and genetics. It has nothing to do with when you pick up a drug habit, whether it is at 12 or 47. If you pick it up at a young age, you are more likely to continue, but not because you were young when you started. It's simply a matter of whether you are the type of person that becomes addicted to substance(s). Usually this is easily determined from family histories. It does mean that if you start as a child and are this type of person you will have a difficult lifelong problem to deal with. There are vast, overwhelming numbers of experimental teens and young adults who never again try these substances. I think that suggests there's something else that makes a drug habit appear other than when one experiments with it. The fact that someone who is in charge of the administration's drug policy (Walters) thinks otherwise bothers me, because it isn't consistent with the facts.

"A World Health Organization survey of 17 countries this year showed that people in the U.S. were more likely than people elsewhere to have tried illicit drugs. The U.S. tied New Zealand for the highest rate of marijuana use and far outpaced other countries on cocaine use, the survey found."
-- Duh. I'm not sure if the survey included England or Holland (presumably). But my own studies of those countries found that their progressive treatment/distribution attitudes actually resulted in far lower drug abuse levels than we have here and, more importantly, less crime as a result of drug abuse and drug trafficking. England and Switzerland give out methadone or even heroin to addicts (and in far greater personal quantities than we do) and have far less heroin users than we do. More importantly, they're usually functional people capable of having jobs or conducting daily affairs because their addiction is being monitored and more or less under control.

"higher levels of alcohol...a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries" -- I still don't understand why alcohol is considered a separate agent from narcotics. It has distinct physiological effects, yes, but the sociological ones are roughly similar (if one considers what happens when say alcohol distribution is banned or restricted). More importantly, the fact that alcohol consumption is illegal at those younger ages puts a higher contact rate with other illicit activities (such as those illegal narcotics). As I've put forth previously, it would be a far wiser course to bring up children with a sense of moderation as it pertains to substances. If they don't like them, so be it. If you (as a parent or concerned citizen) don't want them to partake, you are welcome to that opinion and are free to express the reasons for such restraint. I'm not sure that it's always necessary to totally abstain. I personally find drunk/stoned people annoying, but there are other anti-social factors involved in my determination, meaning there are probably times where it can be an exercise of relatively harmless fun for other people (and not around me). There are similar social problems as far as human sexuality. A topic for other times.

"More than half the people who tried drugs for the first time in 2007 used marijuana"
The only reason alcohol or marijuana is at all a 'gateway' drug is because it creates market connections with people who sell other varieties of mind-altering substances. If not directly, then certainly by proxy (such as wandering through the neighbourhood to find the pot contact). The type of people willing to experiment with harder substances would have done so anyway (see addiction studies). One would expect a much higher number of variations of drug use if marijuana was somehow 'not good enough' for the average drug user as the gateway theory implies. The average drug addict, perhaps. In the average drug experimenter, it seems to work just fine.

There are reasons to be relatively concerned with the amount of narcotics and alcohol individuals consume. There are plenty of social problems which I see cause for alarm or disdain (not least of which is because I don't participate in such things). That doesn't mean our first line of defence should be interdiction and distributive bans. Or that our defensive tactics should ignore basic medical knowledge about drugs/drug addiction and the extended social consequences of our policies. There is greater danger in asserting that abstaining from such substances, even by force, is the correct method of living. Not everyone feels/thinks that way, for reasons which are too numerous to elaborate on.