PRESS RELEASE: Racial Justice Requires Ending Drug War, Say Leading Bioethicists
PRESS RELEASE: Free all non-violent criminals jailed on minor drug offences, say experts
Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics.
More than 60 international experts including world-leading bioethicists, psychologists and drug experts have joined forces to call for an end to the war on drugs which they argue feeds racism.
All drugs currently deemed illicit – even crack cocaine and heroin – should be decriminalized as a matter of urgency, according to this new alliance. Legalisation and regulation should then follow with restrictions on age, advertising and licensing, they say.
They have analysed evidence from over 150 studies and reports, concluding that prohibition unfairly affects Black and Hispanic people, damages communities, and violates the right to life as illustrated by the killing of medical worker Breonna Taylor in March last year.
“The ‘war on drugs’ has explicitly racist roots and continues to disproportionately target certain communities of color,” say lead study authors Brian D. Earp from Yale University and the University of Oxford and Jonathan Lewis from Dublin City University.
“Drug prohibition and criminalization have been costly and ineffective since their inception. It’s time for these failed policies to end.
“The first step is to decriminalize the personal use and possession of small amounts of all drugs currently deemed to be illicit, and to legalize and regulate cannabis. Policymakers should pursue these changes without further delay.”
Their research adds to growing calls for drug policy reform at a time of renewed focus on injustices faced by Black people, and cannabis legalisation for recreational use by a growing list of US states.
The study is based on evidence from existing research into how drug prohibition affects users, communities and human rights, and the impact of decriminalisation by governments.
The authors found that prohibition creates conditions for individuals to commit offences such as burglaries to fund their habit. This lowers life expectancy because people end up in prison, and triggers a ‘multitude’ of health-related costs from unsafe drug use.
Communities are damaged by illicit markets which undermine drug purity, with Black and Hispanic men more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. The war on drugs makes people more vulnerable to violations of their rights including what they choose to put in their bodies.
In contrast, the study highlights the liberal approach of countries such as Portugal where drug-related deaths have fallen and where users are encouraged to seek treatment.
An estimated £43.5bn ($58bn) could be generated in federal, state and local tax revenues through the legalization of drugs, according to the findings. This compares with an annual federal, state and local spend of more than £35bn ($47bn) on prohibition.
The authors stress that non-violent prisoners found with a small amount of illegal substances should be released.
Further Information
The study’s senior author Carl L. Hart was Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor of sciences. He is open about the fact he uses recreational drugs and his book Drug Use for Grown Ups is set for publication in January 2021.
For an interview, please contact:
Brian D. Earp (brian.earp@yale.edu), Jonathan Lewis (Jonathan.Lewis@dcu.ie), or Carl L. Hart (c.hart@columbia.edu)
For a copy of the paper, visit: https://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com/embargoed-releases/
For a copy of the journal article, please contact:
Simon Wesson, Press & Media Relations Executive
Email: newsroom@taylorandfrancis.com
Tel.: +44 (0)20 701 74468
Follow us on Twitter: @tandfnewsroom
The article will be freely available once the embargo has lifted via the following link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2020.1861364
Is Addiction an Expression of One’s Deep Self?
By Doug McConnell
Chandra Sripada (2016) has recently proposed a conative self-expression account of moral responsibility which claims that we are responsible for actions motivated by what we care for and not responsible for actions motivated solely by other desires. He claims that this account gives us the intuitively correct answers when used to assess the responsibility of Harry Frankfurt’s Willing Addict and Unwilling Addict. This might be true; however, I argue that it provides a counterintuitive assessment of real-world cases of addiction because it holds people struggling to recover morally responsible for their relapses. Continue reading
Evil Online and the Moral Fog
The following is based on a brief presentation at the launch of Evil Online, by Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven and published by Wiley-Blackwell, in Bendigo, Australia, on 20 September 2018. It was an honour and a pleasure to be invited to speak, and I thank Dean for the opportunity. Continue reading
Video Interview: Richard Holton on Addiction
Is addiction within or beyond our control? What turns something into an addiction? What should we do (more of) to tackle addiction? In this interview with Dr Katrien Devolder (philosophy, Oxford), Professor Richard Holton (philosophy, Cambridge) discusses these questions.
Addiction, Desire, and The Polluted Environment – Richard Holton’s 2nd Uehiro Lecture
By Jonathan Pugh
In the second of his three Uehiro lectures on the theme of ‘illness and the social self’, Richard Holton turned to the moral questions raised by addiction. In the first half of the lecture, he outlined an account of addictive behaviour according to which addictive substances disrupt the link between wanting and liking. In the second half of the lecture, he discusses the implications of this account for the moral significance of preferences, and for how we might structure environments to avoid triggering addictive desires.
You can find a recording of the lecture here
Womb Transplants and Child-Centred Surrogacy
Julian Savulescu
Womb transplants are again in the news as Richard Paulson, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), said there was no reason to believe that the treatment could not work for transgender women at recent conference in Texas.
The ethical issues of performing a womb transplant for a transgender women are substantially the same as the issues facing ciswomen.
The most important ethical consideration in the UK for a womb transplant is distributive justice. Limited health care resources should not be used for womb transplants because there are more cost effective methods of assisted reproduction available. However if an individual wishes to use their own funds for such a procedure, they should be made aware of the risks (which are very significant), and the alternatives, such as surrogacy.
The best interests of the future child is another critical consideration. The moral status of the fetus is a topic of much debate. However, even if we consider abortion to be acceptable, and deny that the fetus has a moral status that accords it its own interests, in cases where the mother plans to carry the pregnancy to term, the fetus represents the future child who does of course have interests (albeit that they are to be weighed against the mother’s own interests, and that the mother is responsible for making decisions on their behalf).
Guest Post: “Gambling should be fun, not a problem”: why strategies of self-control may be paradoxical.
Written by Melanie Trouessin
University of Lyon
Faced with issues related to gambling and games of chance, the Responsible Gambling program aims to promote moderate behaviour on the part of the player. It is about encouraging risk avoidance and offering self-limiting strategies, both temporal and financial, in order to counteract the player’s tendency to lose self-control. If this strategy rightly promotes individual autonomy, compared with other more paternalist measures, it also implies a particular position on the philosophical question of what is normal and what is pathological: a position of continuum. If we can subscribe in some measures of self-constraint in order to come back to a responsible namely moderate and controlled gambling, it implies there is not a huge gulf or qualitative difference between normal gaming and pathological gambling. Continue reading
Guest Post: Must we throw out the brain with the bathwater? Marc Lewis on addiction
Written by Anke Snoek
Macquarie University
When neuroscience started to mingle into the debate on addiction and self-control, people aimed to use these insights to cause a paradigm shift in how we judge people struggling with addictions. People with addictions are not morally despicable or weak-willed, they end up addicted because drugs influence the brain in a certain way. Anyone with a brain can become addicted, regardless their morals. The hope was that this realisation would reduce the stigma that surrounds addiction. Unfortunately, the hoped for paradigm shift didn’t really happen, because most people interpreted this message as: people with addictions have deviant brains, and this view provides a reason to stigmatise them in a different way. Continue reading
Guest Post: ‘I don’t want to die, but I am too scared to be anything different’: The role of identity in mental illness
Anke Snoek
Macquarie University
If you break a leg or have a cold, it probably wouldn’t affect your identity at all. But when you have an invasive, chronic illness, it will probably change your way of being in the world, and the way you perceive yourself. Our body is the vehicle with which we interact with the world. There are many personal accounts in the disability bioethics literature on how a chronic illness affects one’s sense of being. For example, in the work of Kay Toombs, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or Havi Carel, who was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare lung disease. Both describe how their illnesses gradually changed their identities, their senses of being.
Stripping Addicts of Benefits – Coercion, Consent, and the Right to Benefits
The UK government has announced plans to review the possibility of stripping drug addicts, alcoholics and obese individuals of benefits if they refuse treatment for their conditions. In support of the review, a consultation paper claims that the review is intended to “. . . consider how best to support those suffering from long-term yet treatable conditions back into work or to remain in work.”
One concern that has been raised against the plans is that stripping these individuals of their benefits is unlikely to be effective in getting them to seek treatment, with the Mirror reporting one campaigner as suggesting that “(this strategy) didn’t work in the Victorian times, (and) it’s not going to work now”.
In this post, I shall consider a challenge to the lawfulness of the proposals that is based on the claim that they would coerce individuals into accepting treatment. This is in fact a challenge that Sarah Woolaston, chair of the Health Select Committee has herself raised.
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