"The popular narrative today suggests illegal drugs are the villain ruining lives. The real villain is our economic system that neglects the poor, causing the susceptible among them to become addicts."

OPINION: In New Zealand and most of the rest of the world, the legality of a drug bears little correlation to its harm or benefits.

With the upcoming referendum on recreational use I want to highlight this distortion by comparing cannabis to our most popular legal drug - alcohol.

When determining the potential harm of a drug there are three main factors: physical harm to the user, the effect on families, communities, and society, and tendency to induce dependence.

Alcohol is a Group 1 Carcinogen, according to the World Health Organisation. This is the most severe classification we have and puts it on the same level as asbestos, cigarettes, and sunbeds. Cannabis, in contrast, is biologically well-tolerated.

When considering the effect on families, communities, and society we learn that alcohol is a factor in half of violent violent crimes and causes more deaths than most illegal drugs combined. It also causes billions of dollars of damage. Cannabis barely registers on both these counts.

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Alcohol is the second most-addictive drug after heroin, according a study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. Conversely, the likelihood of addiction to cannabis is slim.

When it comes to the effects of each drug we also see paradigm differences. Alcohol tends to numb the senses, making us more self confident and extroverted, while cannabis tends to enliven the senses making us more self aware and introspective. Alcohol quietens the voice in our head whereas cannabis amplifies it. This is why cannabis can cause anxiety for many people - particularly when apprehensive about using it in a crowd they’re not completely at ease with (the situation in which most young people experiment with the drug).

While a drunk person is like a steam train ploughing through its surroundings, the high person is like a bike weaving in and out of traffic. Cannabis can be both terrifying and exciting to a far greater extent than alcohol. The path it takes us down is determined by the dosage, set, and setting when using it. According to a recent study, with the right mix cannabis can produce increased appreciation of the arts (particularly comedy and music), joviality, improved metacognition and creativity, deeper abstract and philosophical thinking, enhanced episodic memory, increased sensuality, increased awareness of sensation, and increased libido.

There’s a fine line between positive drug use and negative drug abuse and we need to do everything we can to be on the right side of it. Laws are the most popular tool for addressing this issue today but they’re proving counterproductive.

The failed war on drugs in the US demonstrates the futility of trying to address drug abuse with laws. At the other end of the spectrum is Portugal’s approach to preventing drug abuse. They’ve decriminalised all drugs and redirected money spent on drug enforcement toward education for the young, rehabilitation for the addicted, freedom of choice for everyone, and punishment or incarceration of very few.

Drug abuse in Portugal has almost vanished while in the US, it continues to get worse. That’s because laws are ineffective at driving drug use in the right direction. A strong educational framework within a supportive social environment works far better.

Drugs enable us to alter our perception of reality and explore different realms of our own consciousness. This idea of taking a psychoactive substance to temporarily alter our own reality transcends cultures and eras worldwide. As far back as ancient Egypt, gods were commonly depicted holding hallucinogenic plants. It conveyed status much like our selfies out drinking do today.

Ronald K Siegel's book Intoxicated: The Universal Drive for Mind-Alterring Substances argues that the urge to alter ones consciousness is as primary as the drive to satiate thirst, hunger, or sexual desire. We see evidence of this in our earliest years as children where we spin, swing, and slide to manipulate different states of mind. The idea of a law that restricts our ability to explore our own consciousness would be outrageous if it wasn’t already so.

The current criminalisation and scaremongering surrounding cannabis encourages negative drug abuse at the expense of positive drug use. Negative drug abuse, unlike positive drug use, is heavily concentrated in our poorest areas and it is those with fragile mental health who tend to be affected. Conversely, the likelihood of individuals without pre-existing vulnerabilities (physiological or economic) succumbing to long-term addiction is slim.

The popular narrative today suggests illegal drugs are the villain ruining lives. The real villain is our economic system that neglects the poor, causing the susceptible among them to become addicts.

Rather than instituting laws that punish addiction, we need to address the social and economic conditions that cause it.

While we don’t have the power to address those conditions in this referendum, we do have the power to shift the dial in a sensible direction. It’s a small change but it’ll positively affect those who need it most.