“We’re here! We’re high! Get used to it!” This was what Garth Mullins’s girlfriend was yelling at a protest in the late 1990s in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mullins—who was, at the time, trying to “keep a low profile,” which “isn’t easy for a six-foot-four albino with a hollering girlfriend”—describes this moment as a turning point. He went from someone who saw “heroin as a medication, not an entire identity,” to someone who wanted to lead a movement for the decriminalization of drugs. The chant, Mullins writes in his book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, “had broken the tension, and people laughed. One by one, then en masse, we took the street. It felt amazing—a legion of drug users—not embarrassed or ashamed, but proudly marching and chanting slogans.”
Much ink has been spilled in recent years over the question of whether addiction is a disease, the extent to which drug users have a choice, or whether their addiction is a kind of biological inevitability. Recent books like Owen Flanagan’s What Is It Like to Be an Addict? have offered a more complex picture of addiction as a “psychobiosocial” disorder. But there didn’t seem to be much dispute that no one wants to be an addict and that (all things being equal) using heroin was not a good thing.
The original phrase “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was used by ACT UP and was intended to make the point that being gay was the moral equivalent of being straight and that other sexual orientations should be accepted, and even embraced, by society. Now, here is Mullins saying not just that drug users deserve public respect, but that drug use does too.
Mullins grew up in a loving family. In addition to his lack of skin pigmentation, he was mostly blind. His parents did their best to equip him to handle the challenges he would experience in the world. “For my birthday, Dad made pancakes and gave me a bike,” Mullins recalled. His father told him, “Better a few broken bones than a broken spirit.” Indeed, he says, “I wiped out a few times, once leaving a four-inch gash down my leg. But I loved it.”
Things were not easy, though. Mullins was bullied in school. His teachers were not accommodating of his disability, and he struggled academically. A babysitter sexually abused him. It was not long before he started experimenting with drugs to numb his psychological pain.
“For years,” he writes, “it had felt like I only had two choices: I could give up and accept that I was some kind of congenital fuck-up, flawed from birth. Or I could struggle to overcome who I was and become someone else.” Instead, Mullins found a third option. “I could just accept myself. On heroin, I didn’t feel ugly. I didn’t feel stupid. I didn’t feel unlovable. I felt like nothing at all.”
Mullins’s attempts to kick his habit over the years had limited success. A doctor told him that he was likely to be suffering from addiction in one way or another for the rest of his life. She puts him on methadone, explaining that “physical dependence is different from addiction.” Mullins wonders whether this is a distinction without a difference. “Did it just boil down to ‘illegal drugs are bad, legal ones are good’”?
Yes, of course, as Mullins notes, methadone and heroin are both opioids, but methadone doesn’t create the same kinds of reactions. It blocks the euphoric effects of drugs like heroin. People who are using methadone do not behave like people who are high on heroin. There are plenty of reasons methadone is not a cure-all for drug addiction—most importantly, people don’t like the way they feel on it. But to suggest that giving out heroin to people is the same as giving out methadone is odd.
It’s true that, historically, some countries—including the United States and Britain—have given out heroin to addicts. During a stint studying at the London School of Economics, Mullins discovers the program used to be larger but then “[Margaret] Thatcher’s austerity, the global drug war and doctors’ preference for methadone had squeezed the program down to only a few hundred patients.”
For Mullins, this is the ideal policy. He wants drug addicts to be able to get drugs when they need them legally. And the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), the organization he helped to found back home in Vancouver, was determined to find ways to accomplish that. Like many who want to legalize or at least decriminalize drugs, they worried about drugs that were laced with fentanyl causing overdoses, that dirty needles would transmit diseases that would kill people, and that people’s lives would be destroyed by the criminal activity and incarceration that result from trying to get drugs illegally.
To save people from these fates, DULF even ordered drugs on the dark web, tested them to make sure they were not contaminated with other drugs, and then distributed them to people who were chronic addicts. Why can’t government do this?
For one thing, it has proven very difficult to restrict access to drugs once they are decriminalized or legalized. Mullins assures readers that his movement will not provide drugs to new users or “weekend warriors” or kids. But that’s not how things work. The cannabis decriminalization movement of the 1970s resulted in a significant increase in adolescent and teen use of the drug. Once parents realized the extraordinary rates at which their children were engaged in drug use, they launched a movement to push back against it.
Mullins assures readers that kids will use drugs no matter what. “The mere availability of something isn’t what causes people to get wired.” That is true and so is his assertion that the internet has made all this easier. But the same laws of supply and demand that make drugs easier and cheaper for adults also mean that kids and people who want to experiment can also obtain them more easily. In any population of children (or adults), there will be a certain percentage who will use drugs and a percentage who will never use drugs. Public policy must address the people in the middle—those who are influenced by the availability, price, legality, and social stigma surrounding drugs.
“When I was coming up, I learned a street code,” Mullins writes. “It included principles like never introducing anyone new to heroin and never leaving rigs around where they could stick someone.” Do most heroin addicts live by this “code”? I have no idea, but how are we supposed to, at the same time, believe that addicts would do anything for a fix or the money to buy drugs and also that they would turn down the opportunity to get money by introducing someone to heroin?
Mullins suggests that “there was also a respect for children in the code.” He writes that “when you see a family with children walking down the street,” you should yell “kids on the block,” to warn everyone. And everyone will immediately stop. Maybe this is a Canadian thing, but many parents in American cities would certainly attest that their children have witnessed drug use and other “sketchy activity” as Mullins describes it. There should be a certain amount of skepticism that drug addicts adhere to an honor code of any sort—not because they are bad people, but because drugs make people do things that violate their most sacredly held principles and hurt people they don’t want to hurt.
Mullins is right that the War on Drugs both here and in Canada has had significant costs, both in terms of the effects of crime and the effects of incarceration. But like many advocates for decriminalization or legalization, Mullins keeps moving the goalposts. He wants people to be able to possess small amounts of drugs without being prosecuted. But when his friend is arrested for “making a couple of small deals on the street,” he objects to penalties for that, too. The truth is that our prisons are not filled with people who have been convicted of drug possession or even low-level, non-violent drug offenses.
Whatever problems have resulted from drug prohibition, policymakers and most of the public believe that substance abuse is a problem and that it should be strongly discouraged. When Mullins enthusiastically describes a street fair where people are giving out hamburgers and donuts, doing tarot card readings, and dressing up as Willy Wonka—all encouraging addicts to come out and claim their free heroin—he will lose any audience he has for his message.
Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs
by Garth Mullins
Doubleday Canada, 275 pp., $24.95
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.
