In recognition of the importance of readers’ contributions to the letters page, the newspaper each week selects a Letter of the Week, with a book prize courtesy of Penguin Random House. This week’s winner is Evan Alty, of Lake Hawea.
Your feature ``Making peace with drugs'' (ODT, 8.10.16) featuring drug campaigner Tuari Potiki makes an excellent contribution to the debate on where to from here.
My view is that a further step is needed, from criminal issue, to health issue, to social issue. Such a change would focus the debate on where it needs to be, that is, on the ``why'' of drug use/abuse? If that hole can be plugged, the supply chain will collapse. President Nixon in 1969 was deluded in thinking that if the supply could be halted the problem would go away. It is the demand that must be managed.
My experience as a student, a parent and a lawyer is that people use recreational drugs to fulfil a need. A student often drinks too much because she/he can; it connects with student life and usually without serious consequences. For other young people, often without academic potential, with worries associated with employment, health, social standing, housing, troubled family life, to name a few, and with a future that poses so much more uncertainty than for those like me who went through it in the 1960s, they are the victims of a social dislocation in our society.
Recreational drugs appeal because they mask the pain and delay the need to address the cause. Echoing the words of Tuari Potiki to the UN: ''If there is to be a war ... it should be a war on poverty, on disparity, on
dispossession ... ''
