Marcia Powell was tossed into an Arizona prison after being charged with prostitution. She sold herself to satisfy her drug addiction, but the system had a solution. They decided to cast Powell away from society and punish her. On May 19, 2009, Powell was thrown into an outdoor cage with no water or cover to shelter her from the rising temperature. The desert heat made her beg passing guards to give her some water, some relief, some compassion, something other than the excruciating agony she was living. She screamed like a madman; she crumpled and cooked from the heat and dehydration. She died covered in her own excrement. No charges were filed for Powell’s inhumane death.
But addicts are people too, right?
The war on drugs has shoved the people that need help the most away into an environment that addiction thrives in. Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander studied the effects of addiction in different social settings. Initially, Alexander put a solitary rat in a cage with a morphine-laced water dispenser and a normal water dispenser to drink from. Alexander also placed a community of rats into a cage, referred to as Rat Park, that had toys for the rats to play with, allowed the rats to interact with each other as much as they pleased and even had the same drinking situation as the lone rat. The rat that was all alone would drink the morphine-laced water until he eventually died from obsessing over this escape from his bleak cage. The rats in Rat Park would try the morphine-laced water but instead choose to drink the regular water. This study shows that a lack of healthy relationships in one’s life leads to a life of addiction, while people with healthy relationships are not so prone to become victims of drug abuse. Drugs and the addictions they cause are terrible, but decriminalizing drugs would allow the U.S. legal system to focus on helping drug addicts instead of punishing them.
Hospitals have a powerful painkiller called diamorphine, or more commonly known as heroin, which is more pure than any street heroin. Patients are on diamorphine for weeks or even months, but they do not get addicted. This is due to the fact that they have their own parks to go home to. Instead of helping addicts find their own parks, the current legal system of the U.S. puts people in dire need of help into cages. This system has proven itself enormously ineffective.
Some believe legalizing drugs would increase drug use, but Portugal proves otherwise. After 14 years of the decriminalization of drugs, Portugal has not collapsed into a country filled with barbaric drug addicts; instead, Portugal is doing well since 2001. The number of people who continually used drugs dropped, HIV rates among drug users dropped and drug-induced deaths also dropped from 2001. Even imprisonment for drug-related crimes dropped and health clinics received more people wanting help with their addiction.
As a society, we need to band together to help those still stuck in the cages of addiction. Instead of pushing addicts away from society, we should embrace addicts as people that need help. Should not we, as a society, strive to raze cages to the ground and build parks in their place?