Low Times

Drugs are actually bad for you:

On the West Coast, we didn’t just decriminalize hard drugs; we also ratified drug use as an acceptable lifestyle choice. One billboard, funded by the San Francisco city government, showed a group of healthy-looking young people partying and laughing. “Do it with friends,” the billboard advised. The aim is a worthy one, to destigmatize drug use in order to improve outreach and save lives, but the implication is that cool people have fun with drugs. Dwight Holton, executive director of Lines for Life, a Portland-based organization that aims to prevent addiction, draws an important distinction. “It’s not OK to stigmatize drug users,” he told me. “It is imperative to stigmatize drug use.”

Put the stigma where it belongs...