To make weighted political decisions concerning drug use, it is essential to understand the major stakeholders and the roots of the issue. One of the communities that suffer significantly is African-American people, whose illicit drug use rate is higher than of whites, Asians, and Hispanics (Van Wormer & Davis, 2016). In his TED Talk, Carl Hart, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University who studies drug addiction, exposes a relationship between racism, poverty, and drugs and provides revolutionary ideas on how society should tackle this issue.
Hart knows about sedative abuse in the African-American community from his own experience. Growing up in a poor neighborhood in Miami, Hart witnessed poverty, crime, and drug abuse (Hart, 2014). He chose an academic career to discover ways to eliminate drugs since he believed that they were to blame for poverty and crime in such communities. He thought what one hit was enough to form an addiction. However, his research proved that no drug was immediately addictive (Hart, 2014). He emphasizes that poverty and crime would still exist without drugs – people use it merely as a way to distract themselves from sorrows (Hart, 2014). Hart claims that drug laws are not enforced fairly, leading to African-American people being convicted more often than white users (Hart, 2014). His ideas are supported by Ethan Nadelmann, who claims that drug laws were initially directed at specific racial minorities to keep them under control (Big Think, 2014). Hence, the danger of drugs is not in the drugs themselves but in why people turn to them.
Hart suggests three things society can do to solve the drug problem. They include providing people with attractive alternatives such as meaningful employment, decriminalization of drug possession, and allowing science to drive policy decisions fighting misconceptions, and providing education (Hart, 2014). The decriminalization of drugs is a very controversial topic, and, to some extent, it makes many people, including me, uncomfortable. However, I have to agree with Harts point that it would be naïve to hope to eliminate all drugs and that we need to take not such a black-and-white approach to this problem.
References
Van Wormer, K., & Davis, D. R. (2016). Addiction treatment. Cengage Learning.
Hart, C. (2014). Lets quit abusing drug users [Video]. TED. Web.
Big Think (2014). Ethan Nadelmann: The War on drugs is racist | Big Think [Video]. YouTube. Web.