Illegal Drugs

The Individual, Addiction, and the Unanswered Question

One of the central questions Project Daylight must confront is what should happen to an individual found possessing or using drugs obtained outside a lawful system.

My own experience helps explain why that question cannot be answered simply by treating every person, substance, transaction, and circumstance as identical.

Even Within Disorder, I Sought Order

When I used drugs, I intentionally chose dealers who were what I called “mom-ready.”

By that, I meant they arrived dressed appropriately, were punctual, remained coherent, and did not bring disorder—or people creating disorder—to my home. I made those choices deliberately. I did not want someone arriving at my home intoxicated, behaving unpredictably, or accompanied by people who could create problems.

I wanted order.

The dealers I chose treated what they did as a business. That does not mean the activity was lawful, safe, or free from harm. It means that even within an illicit market, I recognized meaningful differences in conduct. I made decisions based on reliability, self-control, boundaries, and respect for my home.

I also believed that if an adult chose to drink alcohol, use drugs, take medication, or consume another substance capable of altering the mind or body, that person had a responsibility to remain capable of caring for themselves and protecting the people around them.

The substances and their legal status may differ, but intoxication should never excuse violence, intimidation, exploitation, or harm to another person.

Recovery Required More Than Removing Drugs

My recovery was not built solely around the instruction to stop using drugs. It required me to change the conditions, relationships, decisions, and sense of purpose surrounding my life.

In his TED Talk, Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, Johann Hari argues that addiction cannot be understood only as a relationship between a person and a chemical. He asks us to consider the effects of isolation, trauma, disconnection, and the absence of a meaningful life. His central message is that recovery depends heavily upon human connection—not simply punishment or forced separation. Watch Johann Hari’s TED Talk.

I followed that principle in my own recovery.

I had to build connection. I had to establish order. I had to accept responsibility for my decisions while also creating reasons to make different decisions. Sobriety could not be only the absence of drugs; it had to become the presence of relationships, purpose, work, contribution, and a life I believed was worth protecting.

Tony Robbins approaches human behavior from another direction in his TED Talk, Why We Do What We Do. He argues that human action is driven not only by knowledge or logic, but also by emotion, decisions, meaning, and the needs people are attempting to meet. Those needs include certainty, variety, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. Watch Tony Robbins’s TED Talk.

I followed those principles in my recovery as well.

I replaced the unstable certainty provided by drugs with routines, boundaries, and responsibility. I sought connection instead of isolation. I pursued growth by learning, building, and creating. I found significance through work that mattered to me, and I found contribution through efforts intended to help other people and create opportunities in communities that have too often been overlooked.

Recovery required more than telling me what I could not do. It required building a life that gave me reasons to do something different.

That experience shapes how I see drug policy today.

Why Punishment Alone Is Incomplete

If addiction is connected to isolation, trauma, unmet human needs, and the absence of purpose, then punishment alone may intensify the very conditions that keep a person trapped.

Removing someone from housing, employment, family, and community may impose a consequence, but it does not necessarily create recovery. It may deepen disconnection, increase vulnerability, and leave that person with even fewer lawful ways to meet basic human needs.

That does not mean individuals have no responsibility for their conduct. Recovery required me to accept responsibility. But responsibility and abandonment are not the same thing.

An effective response should ask both:

• What did this person do?

• What would allow this person to become safe, responsible, connected, and capable of contributing?

Project Daylight should recognize that accountability, treatment, connection, economic opportunity, and public safety are not opposing goals. Properly structured, they can reinforce one another.

The Market May Also Be Changing

Why am I sharing my experience with the people from whom I once purchased drugs?

Because the policy question is larger than whether drugs are legal or illegal. It concerns the conduct society is trying to prevent, the people it is trying to protect, and the difference between personal use and predatory exploitation.

I am concerned that parts of the illicit drug economy may no longer depend primarily on earning money through individual drug sales. Extremely inexpensive drugs, unstable street markets, and shrinking retail margins may create incentives for criminal actors to obtain money and property through intimidation, harassment, coercion, theft, and exploitation.

I am particularly concerned about a possible model in which drugs are used to impair a person or create dependency; that person is then isolated, discredited, destabilized, or removed from a home; and property or control of the home is taken during the resulting disorder.

Older adults, people with disabilities, people experiencing addiction, and people without strong support systems may be especially vulnerable.

I am not presenting this concern as proof that every dealer or criminal organization operates this way. Nor am I claiming that every loss of housing or property involving drug use has the same cause. I am saying that the possibility is serious enough to require investigation, evidence, and safeguards.

A public-policy framework focused only on possession could miss the more dangerous conduct happening around the person who possesses the drugs.

What Should Happen to the Individual?

If someone is caught possessing drugs obtained outside a lawful system, what should happen to that person?

Should possession itself be the primary conduct punished? Should the response address health, treatment, housing, connection, accountability, or protection? Should enforcement focus more intensely on adulteration, unauthorized commercial activity, sales to minors, violence, coercion, elder abuse, theft, and the deliberate use of drugs to gain control over another person or that person’s property?

Project Daylight should not pretend that these questions have simple or predetermined answers. They require legal analysis, public-health expertise, law-enforcement experience, community participation, and meaningful input from people with lived experience.

The project’s purpose is not to excuse harmful conduct or legitimize the illicit street market. It is to distinguish between the individual possessing or using a substance and the person or organization using substances, dependency, intimidation, or disorder as instruments of exploitation.

My recovery taught me that people need responsibility—but they also need connection, meaning, growth, and an opportunity to contribute.

The law may ultimately respond differently to possession, personal use, addiction, unauthorized sales, and organized predatory conduct. Whatever response is chosen, it should recognize that the greatest threat may not always be the substance found in someone’s possession.

Sometimes the greater threat is the person or organization using that substance to obtain power over someone else.

That is the human question Project Daylight must help bring into the daylight.