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“It’s not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems [drug addiction]… what’s hard is to decide to do it.”                                                

Robert Downey Jnr (2004)

This is where assisted decision-making is imperative. The drug addled brain has corrupted processes due to the presence and interference of psychotropic toxins. The Judicial Educator effectively used, is best placed to be actively engaged through problem-solving courts as a key circuit breaker needed to help facilitate the exit from this capacity and agency diminishing haze.  Punitive action is not necessary, if coercive mechanisms are able to recalibrate the dysfunction posture, through drug use exiting recovery processes. This is just one reason why 'legalizing' drugs is a very bad idea, as it eliminates this vital, individual and community benefiting intervention and it is also a care-less action for a society with increasing drug use induced harms.

Why Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use, is Really Not a Care-full Agenda! Anti-drug laws were always meant to be a vehicle to protect Community, family and our most important asset – our children – from the harms caused by permission models that ‘grown ups’ believe they have the right to exercise around the use of psychotropic toxins.

These proactive and protective laws have not been used in any real punitive context for decades now and our families and communities are paying the price for this so called ‘progressive’ agenda.

It’s time we tasked these protective laws again in their most proactive framework – As the ‘Judicial Educator’.

The law used (not in a punitive context) but as with Problem Solving Courts, to facilitate not only exit from drug use, but entrance into productive, safe, health and community benefiting narratives, that are drug free. 

You don’t have to change or remove laws, but you can task that legislation to facilitate rehabilitation and recovery, as is being done more and more to great success.

The existing criminal codes don’t need to be weakened, or worse erased, through legalization or even depenalization. They can be used, as mentioned for diversion, but still have the coercive potential of criminal sanctions if the drug user choices to carelessly re-offend, often with harms to those around them.

No criminal records need to be recorded if the diversion path is embarrassed to its effective end.

The pro-drug lobbies completely fallacious meme of ‘war on drugs has failed’ only has traction for the uniformed. There has been no ‘war on drugs’ in this nation since 1985.  However, the ever growing ‘war FOR drugs’ continues to look to remove genuine tools that can bring best-practice drug use exiting outcomes, by mislabelling and propagandizing.

The Judicial educator is the perfect bookend for the other bookend of health and education. Together these will see, not further ‘permission’ for drug use and the ensuing uptake that always precipitates, but rather, as with Tobacco, a community with One Voice, Once Message and One Focus – the cessation of humanity, dignity, agency and family devastating drug use. That should be the agenda of all drug use reduction vehicles.

The excising of any vehicle that can assist with that proactive and productive end, is not only non-sense, but also only adds to the harms that drug use does to our communities and their families.

Once psychotropic toxins are an intrenched part of the behavioural mechanisms of an individual, whether it be short-term intoxication, or long-term dependency, the risk to health, safety and well-being of that individual and more concerningly, those around them requires more than a ‘doctor’ for change. Secure welfare engaged for rehabilitation continues to prove the safest and healthiest vehicle to assist that change.

We seem to care more for Tobacco users, than illicit drug users – Don’t the latter deserve the same passionate enabling to exit drug use, with no voice of permission or approval in the marketplace?

There must be a thorough enabling, equipping and empowering of drug users to exit drug use, even more importantly before the inevitable dependency takes hold.

Any permission model – decriminalisation, legalisation or depenalization – does not add to that capacity of drug users to move out of drug use. However, it has and will continue to do so, if the only proactively coercive vehicle – The Law – is removed, further normalizing drug use and the inevitable entrenched harms this will bring.

The Judicial Educator At Its Best – Law for Recovery + Drug Courts + Secure Welfare = Rehabilitation!