The detrimental effect of formal drug policies on self-regulatory mechanisms among illicit drug users
Political and legal responses to drug use are largely underpinned with the ubiquitous belief that illicit drugs generate dependence which, in turn, creates chaos. However, our common knowledge about varying use patterns of licit drugs, and an extensive array of scientific studies on controlled use of illicit drugs and natural cessation of illicit drug use challenge the widely held belief that drug use inexorably tends towards loss of control. In order to understand how and why certain users have lost control over the drug or drugs they are using, we need to tackle the all-important question of how and why many others manage to achieve control and maintain it. The social setting, with its capacity to develop new informal social sanctions and rituals (informal controls), and its transmission of information in numerous informal ways, is a crucial factor in the controlled use of any intoxicant. Unlike the situation with licit drugs, the opportunities for learning how to control illicit drug consumption remain extremely limited. One of the weightiest external stimuli that affect the natural processes of informal self-regulation is the social definition of drugs and their users, embodied in formal drug policy. The current drug policy, with its mainly repressive characteristics, fails to reinforce safe use and even to a large extent obstructs the development and communication of safe standards. The present forms of formal control create the preconditions for deviant subcultures of illicit drug use, generates and reinforces the stereotypical negative image (junkie, criminal, violent), and impedes the dissemination of controlling rituals and social sanctions about drug use in general.