When I was young, I was one of those strait-laced kids that other “cool” kids were weary of, though they needn’t be.  In the high school dorm where I boarded during three years of high school, I suspect some of them, at least before they got to know me better, feared I could be a snitch because I wasn’t a “party” person and neither drank nor indulged in any drugs (back then and over there, the drug du jour was marijuana).

Drinking never appealed to me for one simple reason: I never liked the taste of it.  Through my life I’ve tried all kinds of liquors, from beer to vodka to champagne to rum to whiskey…but as I said, the taste never appealed to me and therefore I never pursued it.  It’s quite possible that in my entire life I’ve drunk maybe five or less beers.  Curiously, as little as I like the taste of beer as a drink, I do enjoy some foods cooked with beer.  For whatever reason, the taste within food “works” for me even if it doesn’t as a drink.

As for drugs (the smoking kind, anyway) and cigarettes, I thank the Gods I didn’t get into them as when I got into my twenties I developed issues with my nasal passages and turbinates specifically which resulted in a strong allergy to cigarette smoke and drove me to the brink of…

…well, suicide.

I’m not kidding.

I won’t go too deep into the gory details but the suicide fixation occurred, ironically enough, after the third (and, as it turned out last) time I got a nose operation to try to fix the various symptoms I was suffering from because of my nose problems.  One of the biggest of the problems was an including inability to sleep a full night without the interior of my nose becoming painfully inflamed.  I spend nearly a decade without being able to sleep through a night without being forcibly awoken by at times painful nasal swelling and having to get up until this swelling eased.

Immediately after that third -and successful- operation, I was incredibly tired and wanted nothing more than have a good night’s sleep.  I was prescribed codeine to ease the pain from the operation and I took one the night after the operation in the hope it would allow me a restful sleep.

Big mistake.

The drug created a weird, hopeless feeling in me that was almost overwhelming.  All my anxieties were heightened while, curiously, another part of my brain knew I was having a bad reaction to the drug.  Yet that other half of my brain insisted this latest operation, like the two previous, was a failure and I would never be able to sleep normally again and I just couldn’t take it and therefore it was time to end it all.

It was 2 A.M. in the morning and with a bloody bandage over my nose I stepped out of the house and walked around the block twice in the hopes of getting those overwhelming feelings out of my head.  When I got back home and sat down I was suddenly bathed in sweat as the drug exited my body.  The bad feelings left me and, needless to say, that’s the first and last time I’ll ever take codeine again.

I present all this information to point out that I’m a very “straight” person when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.  Partly its because of taste (the alcohol) and partly its because of issues regarding my body’s reaction(s) to these items but the bottom line is I’ve spent my life very clean.

I nonetheless know many others who don’t or can’t.  I know drugs and alcohol can become addictive and breaking the addiction can be an incredibly difficult thing to do.

I am also sanguine enough to know that we’ll never stop the use of these things.  Like prostitution, drug use has existed since the dawn of human-kind and to think one day, through regulation, we’ll simply wipe it away is both arrogant and silly, IMHO.

Thus I came to the conclusion that the best way to treat drug use -and, for that matter, prostitution- was to legalize it, tax it, and use the monies collected from those taxes to either improve the living conditions of those who fall into these vices and treat them and their issues directly.  One can do this through medical attention, education, addiction treatment, and improved job opportunities.

It certainly is better than making these things illegal and criminalizing and ruining peoples’ lives.

In recent years, several states here have approved the use of medical marijuana while others have decriminalized its personal use.  The Global Commission on Drug Policy is going a step further.  In this article by Amanda Holpuch and presented in theguardian.com, she points out the latest recommendations from that body, which is presented in the article’s title:

It’s time to decriminalize drugs, Commission report states

Perhaps one day.