440 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 it originated as a way to demonize Black and Brown people. My journey in understanding Diondre’s context led me to the realization that from their inception, most drug laws in the United States were aimed at demonizing Blacks for the purpose of incarceration. According to Baum (2016), President Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman revealed this very motive in a 1994 interview, in which he stated that the war on drugs had begun as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize Black Americans and the antiwar left: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. (LoBianco, 2016, paras. 2–3) Understanding that policies enshrined in the war on drugs originated with a malicious animus against Black bodies made me realize that a system was in place that continued to propagate the dehumanization of Black people through unwitting yet complicit participants, including me. This knowledge increased my awareness of what I was doing and laid bare my biases and how they influenced my work with Diondre. Counseling Implications Although counselors can impede and be complicit in perpetuating systems that are deleterious for Black youth who use cannabis, they can also be crucial allies in supporting their needs. First, counselors need to educate themselves about how addiction occurs. Some counselors may hold on to debunked theories about addiction, such as the choice theory, which erroneously posits that addiction is a choice (Heyman, 2009), or the moral theory, which posits that addiction entails a moral failing (Kennett & McConnell, 2013; Pickard, 2017). Both of these views blame the person with an addiction for their problems, justifying judgmental behaviors toward them, such as my initial approach to working with Diondre. But these views are not consistent with current research and best practices. Many researchers and government agencies have increasingly come to understand addiction as a brain disease that affects every demographic and that treatment rather than punishment is a much more effective approach in helping people with SUDs (CDC, 2023; Goldstein & Volkow, 2011; R. Johnson, 2021; National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA], 2020). Counselors who understand addiction as a disease can provide insight and understanding about the plight of Black youth who use cannabis to cope and can create an environment of empathy, healing, and capacity rather than punishment. Second, counselors need to understand that many of the drug laws in the United States were not developed based on sound scientific research and a clear understanding of how addiction happens. Rather, they were built on racist ideologies that demonized Black Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities (Flowe, 2021; Hickman, 2000; Waxman, 2019; E. H. Williams, 1914). Combined with flawed addiction theories (e.g., the aforementioned moral model and choice theory), drug laws were designed to penalize instead of treat people battling addiction, especially racial and cultural
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU5MTM1