You Can't Save Addicts by Arresting Their Dealers and Enablers

it doesn't work that way

prosecutors address Perry arrests, AKA cops talk about cop shit

You will have no doubt seen that various people were arrested yesterday for their involvement in procuring drugs for actor Matthew Perry, who died of an overdose last year, including doctors, drug dealers, and his assistant. As just about everyone has said, this would never have happened with someone who wasn’t famous. Nor should it ever work this way; I object to the whole premise here. You can’t save addicts by arresting their dealers and enablers. You can’t save addicts by arresting every dealer and enabler in the world. They have to beat their addiction, as profoundly unfair as that is, and if they don’t then they can either survive with their addiction or they can’t. Addicts trying to quit need help and they need healing, and more than anything they need to want to be healed. You can’t solve drug addiction by criminalizing the distribution of drugs any more than you can solve suicide by criminalizing tall buildings. You can only help at the source.

Yes, we have laws that regulate the purchase and distribution of drugs, and I understand that the justice system will attempt to enforce them. This enforcement is certainly selective, and the broader effort has failed - ketamine use is normalized and ketamine is fairly easy to get your hands on and if that stops being true people will move on to new drugs, as they always do. It will not surprise you to learn that I don’t think that this effort is worth undertaking, in general. But setting aside the broader law and policy, there’s the simple human reality that this sort of approach couldn’t save Matthew Perry or anyone else. A celebrity who still receives thick residuals checks is going to find someone to sell him drugs and an assistant who will be willing to go pick them up. The great overarching lesson of the Drug War - that where there is demand, there will be supply - applies on the individual level as well as the societal level. Perry suffered under the weight of a terrible addiction problem that had haunted him, and his reputation, for decades. Addiction hijacks the mind, manipulating our brain chemistry in a way that makes it difficult to make the best decisions. Until and unless he received effective support to combat that reality, he was vulnerable, no matter how many dealers were arrested.

I certainly don’t mean to say that Perry is simplistically responsible for his own addiction or his own death. Not all. I am saying that when you’re looking at a man who has struggled with drug use since the mid-1990s, you should feel compelled to consider the problem as something bigger than his immediate networks. I am also saying that the idea of punishing the people who supplied the drugs, out of anger over the tragic death, is not constructive. Because the only thing that could have saved Perry was Perry getting and staying clean, once and for all. As long as he failed to get and stay clean, he was at risk of death. The fact that he clearly tried many times to achieve sobriety makes this more tragic but doesn’t change the basic calculus of how he might have been saved and why he was not. And while it’s been pointed out many times, it’s worth repeating: the stance that drug users should not be punished but drug dealers should be is morally incoherent.

I lived with someone who struggled under the weight of crippling addiction for the first fourteen years of my life. And like everyone who lives with that proximity to addiction, I received an object lesson in the endlessly tangled relationship between the addict and the addiction. Like mental illness, addiction hijacks the mind and robs us of our usual tools for making good decisions. And I can tell you, again from experience, that while the decision to get clean is necessary, it is not sufficient. Many people want to get clean and fail. But the decision is still necessary. I think it’s one of the most consistent, universal realities of addiction, that no one can save an addict from themselves. All we can do is to support the addict in their efforts to save their own life. This isn’t about some sort of narrow attitude of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, but rather amounts to a recognition that struggling people have to focus on what they can individually control. And the only thing that the individual can control is their own decisions and their own efforts. None of us can rely on the world staying safe from temptation for us; we can do our best to make ourselves safe in the world, while building the kind of society that makes access to treatment and support easy and accessible. After all, if we really did eliminate every dealer and enabler, new ones would pop up the very next day. That’s what the past hundred years have taught us.

As with mental illness, there are no conveniently clear and universal rules for assessing individual agency and responsibility when it comes to the behavior of those addicted to drugs. We are forced to muddle through, as best we can, providing accommodations where appropriate and doing our best to assign personal blame where need, always through a lens of compassion. No one deserves addiction and no one causes their own mental illness. But within the life of an individual addict, the problem is never the dealers; the problem is their neurochemical attachment to what they’ve been dealt. And while it’s emotionally understandable to want to find villains and pin the blame on them, out of grief for all of the people who have lost their lives to addiction, it does nothing to address the real problems. Because, yes, addiction has root causes, and those causes can’t be thrown in a jail cell.

After decades of progress when it comes to the criminalization of drugs, we’ve seen something of a backsliding lately. Some of this is understandable if not sensible; it’s true, for example, that broad decriminalization in Oregon had negative social consequences. In worse news, there’s been setbacks for using psychedelics in a therapeutic setting, with psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA as medicine running into regulatory walls that appear unbreachable, for now. The inevitable outcome, of course, is that people who want these drugs will endanger themselves by procuring them from the black market, without the aid and care of a therapist. This is all a part of a broader American sprint away from left cultural issues, the whiplash-inducing backlash against “woke” politics that has the Democratic presidential candidate running as an anti-immigration warrior. But drug policy is a perfect example of why such broad and crude movements are so unhelpful - drugs really did win the drug war, and no amount of changing political fashion can make prohibition work again. The wisdom that we’ve gained, about the ineradicable demand for drugs and the inevitability of supply to match that demand, risks falling apart thanks to short-term thinking derived from transitory attitudes towards permanent problems. And behind it all lies a sentimental attachment to the idea that we could have saved someone like Matthew Perry, had we locked the bad guys up, a pleasant thing to believe in a world in which someone with so much could fight, and fight, and still lose.