Kenzie Stewart

Health 1050

Professor Cham

April 27, 2021

families, and individuals struggle with drug abuse and it is a constant global issue. In an article

called , “International Drug Reform: Medicalized Harm Reduction, Cannabis and the Global

Legislative Reality,” by Daniel Linn White, he says, “Despite being the global legislative reality

for more than half a century, when it comes to the control and management of illicit drugs, there

is still a sharp academic divide between strict prohibitionists and open access legalizers, with

both sides claiming supremacy in their ability to reduce the harms drug users face,” (White,

2018). All around the world, many countries have come up with and enforced several different

laws to regulate drug use and to decrease the use of illicit drugs. In the article by White he also

says, “Spanning these opposing academic extremes, governments around the world have

experimented with, or put into practice a range of alternatives to prohibition that generally hold

harm reduction as a centrally guiding principle,” (White, 2018). He continues that, “However in

the realm of drug control, harm reduction is not a simple utilitarian problem and is often clouded

by a number of moral aspects that will seemingly continue to frustrate prospects for consensus

among the various drug control stakeholders for the near future,” (White, 2018). In his article,

White talks about the alternative methods to reduce the use of illicit drugs all around the world

and how to implement those methods into the communities, although the issue of drug

prohibition is a very divided topic, White says, because ever countries, state, and community has

their own rules and laws to abide by as well.

In the same article, White says, “Broadly speaking, the prohibition of illegal drugs refers

to a set of legal sanctions used by governments to criminalize the production, distribution,

possession and consumption of certain types and classes of psychoactive plants, plant derivatives

and chemicals in an effort to prevent or reduce harm from their use,” (White, 2018). White also
mentions that majority of the issue about drug prohibition is centered around the effectiveness of

criminal prohibition in reducing or preventing harm compared to alternative measures envisioned

by proponents of depanelization, decriminalization or legislation, (White, 2018). White also talks

about how there are multiple sides to the argument of drug prohibition because of multiple forms

or principles that people follow, and honestly, the government isn’t usually focused on

preventing self-harm on activities and instead, to prevent harm on others, (White, 2018).

Something interesting within this article is that according to White, “Among Western

nations, the Netherlands is often noted for its long-standing resistance to criminalizing drug use,

though the two decades after World War 2 did see relatively harsh anti-drug measures enforced

there.” And “Largely due to a lack of internal incentives, both the political left and right within

the Netherlands have been able to pursue relatively ‘neutral’ drug control strategies that resulted

in a largely depanelized system for cannabis rooted in the Dutch concept of ‘gedogen,’ which

basically holds that while an activity may retain in illegal status, it will not be treated as such in

practice,” (White, 2018). Along the same lines, White found that Portugal decriminalized the use

and possession of all illegal drugs in 2001, and that Portuguese experiment is interesting because

the country was along a major transit point for drugs entering Europe, though drug use

prevalence was actually quite low until the spike in heroin use during the 1990’s. White

continues that, “However, that heroin spike struck Portugal with particular intensity, with large

increases in drug related death and disease rates, the latter rising so quickly that by 1999,

Portugal led the EU in drug related HIV infections,” (White, 2018). Also, “These and other

factors eventually led to decriminalization, where perhaps unsurprisingly, proponents and critics

have since gone to some lengths to manipulate data from Portugal’s drug regime to fit their
respective agendas, often arriving to completely opposite conclusions from the same evidence,”

(White, 2018).

In the same article, in the section where White talks about cannabis, he says, “Within the

spectrum of drug control strategies, one of the more unusual regimes is ironically found in the

United States, which is still rhetorically following the strict prohibitionist stance, it has been

championing for the better part of a century, despite a large number of states passing laws that

allow for medical and recreational use of cannabis within their borders,” (White, 2018). In

conclusion to this article, “When it comes to international drug control policy, it has become

rather clear that the ‘difficulty of creating international cooperation, the inevitably suboptimal

outcomes of diplomacy, and the view that suboptimal cooperation is massively preferable to non-

cooperation or a breakdown of cooperation,’ will continue to frustrate wide scale reform efforts

for the near future.” White continued that, “This is not to say the global prohibitionist framework

is destined to remain predominant, and as has been demonstrated throughout this article, there

are a variety of innovative methods that countries around the world are using to try to reduce the

harm from illicit drug use, especially in regard to the unique challenge faced by intractable,

chronic users of ‘hard’ drugs such as heroin,” (White, 2018). In many cases, we have found that

illicit drug use is a major issue not only in the United States, but all around the world, and we are

in the process of trying to change the issue with illegal drug abuse all around the world so that

we can lower the death rate with illegal drug use.

In the article, “Reasons for Drug Use among American Youth by Consumption Level,

Gender, and Race/Ethnicity: 1976-2005” By Yvonne M. Terry-McElrath et. Al, the authors

mention that, “A better understanding of the motives behind drug-using behavior is important for

aiding the development of effective prevention and intervention policies and programs: if we can
understand the ‘why’ of adolescent drug use, perhaps we can do a better job of reducing,

delaying, or preventing it altogether,” (Yvonne M. Terry-McElrath et. Al,). In that same article,

the authors found that there were four main motives to drug use in adolescents, which were:

enhancement (positive moods), social (social rewards), coping (to decrease negative emotions),

and conformity (to avoid social rejection), (Yvonne M. Terry-McElrath et. Al,). Which makes

sense because many adolescents create bad habits based on peer pressure, I have also noticed that

it is easier for adolescents to be influenced by the actions of others because during their teen

years, these kids are trying to find themselves and learn to love themselves all while trying to

please others and fit in, and because of that constant battle, it makes adolescents very easy to

manipulate.

Another topic that this article brought up is the racial and ethnic differences in adolescent

substance use, the authors found that “Among approximately 1,000 adult heroin and cocaine-

using patients in an inner-city hospital, significant differences by race/ethnicity were found in

degree of difficulty in functioning. Higher levels of problems in both drug and psychiatric

composite scores were found for White than for African Americans; Hispanics had higher levels

of problems than Whites related to drug severity. Among a sample of adult male street-based

heroin users in the San Francisco Bay area, significant differences were found between White

and African American men in drug use methods, social backgrounds, and self-identity,” (Yvonne

M. Terry-McElrath et. Al,). Although the authors noticed differences within race and ethnicity,

there wasn’t a major issue within the subject.

In a third article I found, “Factors Associates with the Physical and Mental Health of

Drug Users Participating in Community-Based Drug Rehabilitation Programs in China,” By

Wenyi Lin and Wenchao Zhou, they mention how drug abuse has become a big public health
concern worldwide but, “The number of drug users in China has increased rapidly, by the end of

2017, a total of 255.3 million drug users were recorded in China and of those 60.2% are synthetic

drug users, 38% are opioid drug users, and 1.8% use cannabis, cocaine and other narcotics

(Office of the National Anti-Drug Committee of China),” (Lin and Zhou, 2020). In the article,

the authors mention how drug abuse damages the user’s nervous system and immune function

which can cause serious physical and mental harm, they mentioned that “In addition, drug abuse

destroys relationships in the families of drug users and thus leads to the emergence of family

crises that result in additional drug related crimes and public safety risks,” (Lin and Zhou, 2020).

Based off the article I have reviewed today, it’s easy to confirm that drug use and abuse is an

issue that isn’t just in the United States, throughout this course we have reviewed a lot of

information of drug abuse issues all around the world, it is very effective to understand the

impact drug abuse has on countries, communities, families, and individuals and this information

shows exactly that.

1. White, Daniel Linn. “International Drug Reform: Medicalised Harm Reduction,

Cannabis and the Global Legislative Reality.” Journal of Drug Policy

Analysis, vol. 11, no. 2, Dec. 2018, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1515/jdpa-

2018-0002.

2. Terry-McElrath, Yvonne M, et al. “Reasons for Drug Use among American Youth

by Consumption Level, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity: 1976-2005.” Journal of

Drug Issues, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2009,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2902005/.

3. Lin, Wenyi, and Wenchao Zhou. “Factors Associated with the Physical and Mental

Health of Drug Users Participating in Community‐based Drug Rehabilitation

Programs in China.” Health & Social Care in the Community, vol. 28, no. 2,

Mar. 2020, pp. 584–590. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/hsc.12891.