1. The Best Solution Is, Apparently, To Decriminalise Them
How do you stop people taking drugs? Prison time? Hefty fines? The threat of social, legal and professional shame and isolation? Well, if you happen to be in charge of Portugal, you decriminalise them. At the beginning of the 21st century, Portugal had some of the worst problems with drugs in the EU, with 1% of the population on heroin (compared to 0.1% in the UK at the same time). Rather than do the usual thing of ramping up the political rhetoric about the "War on Drugs" and throwing users in prison, they decriminalised possession and poured all of the money they would have used to lock the perpetrators up into proper, meaty rehabilitation schemes. This didn't just consist of getting the local priest to go into a prison once a week and talk about "Why Drugs Are Bad, 'Kay?", they actively got the recovering addicts back into society by paying employers to take them on. This change means that we essentially turn those drug addicts' cold, lonely cages into Rat Park, reintegrating them into society and allowing them to do normal things like go to work and not have a group of friends that recurrently shoot up under a bridge. And the mind-boggling thing is that it seems to be working. Injecting drug use in Portugal is down 50% and they now have the second lowest drug-related death rate in the EU (including a drop in HIV). Look, drugs are very powerful substances, and I'm not saying that people don't get chemically addicted to them. The point is that if someone is addicted to heroin or crack or whatever, and their real life has become so awful that the heroin is the better option, they're gonna take the frigging heroin. Surround them with things that are nicer than being an addict (as opposed to, say, prison time and a criminal record), and they might just choose life over drugs. The best way to not get addicted to drugs is not to do them in the first place. Maybe get a hobby or something.
