Through my years of personal experience working with drug abusing and dependent people, humans will find a way to get their candy, no matter what form it comes in. For a millennium it has been shown that attempting to control and prevent people from obtaining drugs is pointless and impossible. People will always find a way. Prohibition does not work and has been shown to be far more costly and dehumanizing than practical holistic alternatives.
The systems that promote institutionalization and incarceration have been a failure. In fact the war on drugs has created more problems than it has fixed. The biggest example of this is the expansion of large global crime networks, black markets, and organized gangs who control most of the illegal manufacturing and distribution of drugs around the world. Most of the money from those drugs goes to support human trafficking, criminal activity, and terrorism (domestic and foreign). With the legalization of medical marijuana in most of the United States, the money that was going to those gangs and criminal organizations is mostly going to education, infrastructure, healthcare, and after-school programs.
The decriminalization of marijuana offers a real life social experiment illustrating that drug dependence, abuse and addiction only affect a small portion of drug users. Over 90% of people that use or even abuse drugs or alcohol will not become addicted to them.
Why hasn't marijuana use skyrocketed in those states that legalized medical and recreational marijuana use if drugs themselves are the problem? Because drugs and alcohol are just a symptom. Treating the symptom may be advantageous for business, especially the addiction treatment and incarceration industries, but it does little to address the real issue.
It has been reported over and over again that we have an opioid epidemic in the United States. This is true when the leading cause of death for people under the age of 50 is an opiate overdose. As of this writing, on average, 160 people will die of an opiate overdose today in the United States. Globally, on average 80 people die everyday worldwide from some form of terrorism, domestic or foreign, and in the United States that number is 0.04 people. For approximately every 4000 people that die from an opiate overdose in the United States, 1 person dies from terrorism.
In Recovering the Seed, Paul Stiles Randak explores the root causes of addiction and how to transform your life by changing your personal narrative. You will learn how to transform your victim stance to one of personal accountability and to live a sober life through creating healthy and wholehearted connections.
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