You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (46 page)

Youth
—Not only are older people much less likely to become dependent on something,
⁵³
they are also much more likely to end dependencies. In line with this, addictive personalities weaken over time. Older adults report being less impulsive, sensation-seeking, and risk-tolerant than their younger peers.
⁵⁴

The idea that addiction is for life is a myth. The vast majority of addicts “mature out” of their addictions and most of them accomplish this without treatment.
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Maturing out is so pervasive that a national 2010 survey found that only .1 percent of people sixty-five or older had abused or been dependent on an illegal substance in the past year. The highest level was reached by nineteen-year-olds (9.3 percent), from which the number rapidly decreases.
⁵⁶

The popular perception is that illegal drugs are highly dangerous. As a public defender I stood by countless people convicted of drug charges and listened to the judge justify the state’s harsh sentences ad nauseam with fearsome words such as “This stuff will kill you.” The judge was locking the defendant up and ruining the defendant’s employment opportunities because if she did not, the defendant would surely die.

This categorization of dangerous and benign chemicals is a myth. The way a chemical affects the nervous system depends on the amount administered. For example, drinking too much water can become deadly by lowering blood sodium levels and engorging brain cells. Fatal water overdoses periodically occur.
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In contrast, minuscule amounts of the deadly poison arsenic have been used as a recreational drug in the past and have recently been approved for the treatment of leukemia.

The only reason illegal drugs are so deadly is
because
they are illegal.
⁵⁸
Because the market is underground, drugs come with adulterants and users have difficulty knowing the amount of the drug they are taking. In addition, drugs only come in their most concentrated form. If illegal drugs were decriminalized, deaths from overdose would be as rare as those from legal drugs such as alcohol.

Even on the black market some drugs are virtually impossible to consume to the point of permanent damage. Some of these innocuous drugs are marijuana, LSD,
and mushrooms (psilocybin).
⁵⁹
(When damage does occur from “using” these drugs it is almost always because something else was taken, for example, a toxic mushroom.)

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between a substance’s actual deadliness and its perceived deadliness as wide as with the “killer drug”—heroin.
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Most heroin overdoses are the result of uncertainty about potency, which could be avoided with legalization.
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,
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Additionally, fatal heroin overdoses usually take over an hour,
^63
,
64
and they can be counteracted by an antidote—Narcan (naloxone). Narcan acts within minutes and is so effective that sometimes people near death will receive it and promptly “get up and walk away.”
⁶⁵
Despite there being no danger of Narcan overdose, Narcan is illegal and so tightly controlled that strict limits on its use by paramedics have cost lives
even when
paramedics were present.
⁶⁶

Cocaine’s deadliness is also greatly exaggerated. Deaths from recreational use occur but are extremely rare, particularly when the drug is not injected.
⁶⁷
The safety ratio of snorting cocaine is fifty percent higher than that of drinking alcohol.
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Cocaine is still used medically as an anesthetic, and a survey of intranasal cocaine administrations during surgery in amounts comparable to recreational use found a .005 percent fatality rate.
⁶⁹
For comparison, aspirin is deadly to .08 percent of people taking it for more than two months.
⁷⁰

Most American fatality figures are based on cocaine-related deaths. Whenever someone dies with cocaine in their system the death can be deemed cocaine-related.
⁷¹
One review of 935 cocaine-related deaths in New York City found that less than twelve percent were even
possibly
related to the pharmacological effects of cocaine.
⁷²

State totals of annual cocaine-related deaths can break one thousand, like the total cited in a 2006 Florida article.
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The European Union, which tightly defines cocaine-related deaths as “acute deaths in which cocaine is present without opiates,” estimates its annual total at several hundred.
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The European Union’s population is over fifty percent larger than that of the entire United States.

The media seems completely ignorant of this massive disconnect between using a drug and being killed by a drug. The above-mentioned Florida article—in a section entitled “A Silent Killer in Suburbia”—cites the “cocaine-related” death of one male mortgage broker in his fifties who was hit by a car while jogging at night.

Lastly, cocaine strains the heart and should not be used by those with weak ones.
In 2007 the rocker Ike Turner died. The headlines read “Cocaine Killed Ike Turner,” and articles focused on his past drug usage, even though at the time of his death he was so weak from advanced emphysema that he could barely move around.
⁷⁵
If he died straining to climb stairs would stairs have killed him? If he died after downing several Red Bulls would caffeine have killed him? (Excessive caffeine intake can cause heart palpitations.)

As with their legal brethren, popular illegal drugs are not unhealthy with occasional and moderate use. One of the most corrosive drugs in the public’s opinion is heroin. The heroin junkie sits at the core of the taboo on drugs. Governments are fond of showing a series of mug shots that progress from a person’s first arrest until their last. The visual transformation is provocative, disturbing, and extremely misleading.

First, this degradation is not from heroin. Outside of being chronically impotent and constipated, opiate addiction is “minimally injurious to the body.”
⁷⁹
In fact, with measured administration the typical addict is “able to function quite well and live a long and normal life.”
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This is a sharp contrast to lifelong addicts of the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco, which destroy, respectively, the liver and lungs.

The internal degradation of the body comes from the impurities found in black-market heroin. Common adulterants include sugar, starch, talcum powder, baking powder, or powdered milk.
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,
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This is problematic when heroin is injected. Injectable legal medications are sterile and dissolve easily in blood. Street drugs are not sterile and are often crushed by the user.

Uncrushed fragments and insoluble contaminants can lodge in tiny blood vessels in the heart, brain, and eyes, and cause hemorrhage, stroke, and blindness. Many intravenous users try to remove these fragments by filtering the drug through a piece of cotton. This results in tiny cotton fragments entering the bloodstream, causing a strong immune reaction called “cotton fever.” Cotton fever begins ten to twenty minutes after injection and causes miserable side effects for twelve to twenty-four hours. Repeated injections of contaminants lead to debilitating diseases and infections.

Not all illegal drugs are as harmless to the human body as heroin. However, this extends to legal drugs and food as well. One merely needs to listen to American pharmaceutical advertisements to know how many
possible
side effects accompany the ongoing use of any drug.

The health dangers touted with recreational drugs are usually based on extreme use over many years. To see how skewed this portrayal is watch
Super Size Me
! (2004), a documentary that follows a man who eats only at McDonald’s for
just
one month.

I would suggest that on average, people who eat at McDonald’s every day will be substantially less healthy than a person who uses a drug such as crack, heroin, or methamphetamine once a week. It is unlikely this premise will be touched in the mainstream media or scientific circles any time soon.