People use drugs because they're there.
From the moment someone pass first pull the plants out of the ground,
put it in his mouth and felt good,
people have used drugs.
People use drugs I think for a whole range of reasons.
People use drugs sometimes to treat pain.
People use drugs because they find some relief from mental or physical suffering.
People use drugs because it feels good.
We all use various drugs on a regular basis from caffeine, to sugar,
to alcohol, to drugs that are actually treated in
many countries of the world as criminal substances.
We often use them for the same reasons;
to be more wakeful,
to be more sleepful, to be relaxed,
to be energized, to feel relief from pain, to feel pleasure.
That is the human condition that we use substances to alter how we feel.
People use drugs for a number of reasons.
I think these are very complex and varied.
What we tend to do in society,
we tend to separate these into two distinct reasons.
The dominant view is it's either a criminal issue,
and it's due to people having a lack of moral compass.
For this reason, the rationale is they should be locked up and kept away from society.
The second dominant view is people who use
drugs have a medical condition or some type of medical problem.
This is the so-called deficit model,
which is where people use drugs that take them out of the reality,
which is not a very nice reality.
I think the models that are not given
so much attention or so much weight within society really deserve looking at.
Some of these the social structural issues,
which we'll see in the last couple of years.
There's been a range of literature on
this particular concept of drug use or drug dependency,
and these are Bruce Alexander's,
The Globalization of Addiction,
which really argues that addiction is a matter
of people's isolation or when they're upheavals in society,
then there'll be a rise in drug dependency.
I guess a second book that's gotten a lot of attention is
Johann Hari's, Chasing the Screen.
So, that links people's drug use or drug dependency to trauma.
So, Johann Hari locates the issue of drug dependency towards
someone's childhood or a matter of a lack of something in their childhood,
lack of emotional meeting of their emotional or physical needs.
So, we have an additional model.
But I think there's other models or other reasons that we
tend to discredit such or ignore such as the pleasure dimension.
At the end of the day,
people will use drugs unless they feel they get something out of it with some benefits.