The debate over the so-called war on drugs is usually framed as a contest between those who want to end it and those who want to intensify it. But for one writer, the argument is not abstract. Drugs, the writer says, tore apart a family piece by piece, killed a father, and left behind mental illness, broken relationships, and a childhood stripped of normalcy.
In a personal reflection published on a blog devoted to recovery, the writer acknowledges the case for ending the war on drugs. There are, the writer concedes, many things that are not working. People are being criminalized for offenses that should not carry criminal charges, and lives are being ruined by legal consequences that may not be justified. That position, the writer says, is fully understood.
Yet there is another side. The writer describes a father whose involvement with drugs — supplied by others and later supplied to others — caused damage that extended far beyond himself. The substances, described as a few stupid white and brown powders, killed him and shattered any sense of stability for those around him. The writer recalls wishing that the person who provided the father with drugs could be charged, or at least made to see the extent of the harm caused. But the writer does not blame that person alone. The father had a choice, the writer notes, and could have gone elsewhere. He did not.
The reflection turns to what might have happened if the father had been charged earlier, or formally held in a facility. The writer says it is physically ill to think about how many people the father supplied and about the dangerous behavior he displayed around children, including the writer. A charge, a lockdown, a forced rehabilitation, or psychological treatment might have gotten his attention. It might have given him a chance. No suspended sentences, no mercy — just something. If the war on drugs had then been what it is now, the writer says, there might still be a father. Maybe not. But maybe.
The writer is careful not to dwell on what cannot be changed. Life, the reflection notes, has to be accepted as it is given. But the writer asks those who criticize the war on drugs to pause for a moment and consider the might-have-beens. Those possibilities, the writer argues, would have changed many lives — lives like the writer's own.
The piece does not offer policy prescriptions or statistics. It offers a single testimony from the side of the debate that is often reduced to a slogan. For the writer, the question is not whether the war on drugs has failed in the aggregate, but whether the harm it was meant to prevent has been felt in families that rarely get to speak in the public argument.