Seven ways to create a drug epidemic

Seven ways to create a drug epidemic

On the evidence of history, there are seven common ways in which to destabilize a drug ecology and create a drug epidemic. Each wrecking tactic has been tried and tested in the field, and comes with a warranty. Read the evidence the other way round and we have here a pretty reliable set of ideas on how to protect the drug ecology from bad happenings.

1. Submit the fabric of the intended target population to an intense strain of a kind to damage family and social relationships, fragment that society and create sectors of great poverty and contrasting wealth, destroy the old community gods and build no new values, leave youth adrift, create the soil for the epidemic and the wind is likely to blow in the seed to take root.

2. Make your chosen epidemic substance, whether it be licit or illicit, intensely available, have it on sale at every grocers, keep the price low, abolish all controls, leave drugs to the free play of the market and treat them like every other consumer commodity.

3. Build a climate of acceptance. Persuade people that everyone uses the drug and non-users are deviant. Secure a massive advertising budget, and if that is nor possible for illicit drugs, count on the endorsement of opinion leaders and the support of the media to market these substances. Associate alcohol with images of sport, cigarettes with Grand Prix motor racing and cocaine with the penthouse lifestyle, it's all the same game.

4. There can be a special benefit in getting the medical profession to take up the drug, prescribe it with abandon, declare it to be non-addictive and leak the drug to the streets. A century or so back this greatly helped to create a favourable image for alcohol, but doctors have also been very helpful in the epidemic spread of many other drugs - opium, heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, amphetamine, LSD, benzodiazepines. It is an amazing roll-call of medical intemperance.

5. Look out for innovative opportunities to market a new drug in a more dangerous form or by a new route of use. Get the population to believe that sniffing cocaine is safe and then slam them with crack, have them drink a little laudanum and then pull a syringe loaded with morphine from behind your back, let them get used to their snuff and cigars and pipes and then bowl them clean over with the deadly cigarettes.

6. Embed your operation as far as is possible in a mutuality of greed. For licit drugs, count on a complicity between the manufacturers and the tax-taking state, for illicit drugs find infinitely replaceable poor people to fill the lower ranks in the distribution chain and the top cats will grow ever fatter on the profits.

7. Try to ensure that the media portray drug taking as lying entirely with the individual: 'their flawed genetic make-up', 'addictive personality', 'woeful moral bankruptcy'. Keep the discourse at this individual level, and at the same time screen from public perception any awareness that drug misuse is in part caused by social environment.

Source: Griffith Edwards: Matters of Substance. Drugs: is legalization the right answer – or the wrong question? Penguin Books, London, 2005. (Introduction, page XXV-XXVI) www.penguin.com