Mark Haden is a drug educator. He has spent the last twenty-five years providing public education on drugs and working with addiction counselling services in Canada. Today he works as a supervisor at the Pacific Spirit Community Health Centre in Vancouver.
Haden knows that the Canadian Federal government spends approximately six million dollars a year educating parents, teachers, young people, law enforcement and communities about the risks and laws surrounding substance use. He also knows that drug education plays a key role in defining our relationships to mind altering substances.
“We have overemphasized the harms of drugs, we have neglected to mention the benefits of certain drugs and we have omitted mentioning the harms that drug prohibition causes….”
Reflecting on the complexity of the relationships we have to drugs, Haden feels that we do a disservice to young people by perpetuating certain myths and maintaining a system that fails to achieve healthy results. During a brief interview in his office, Haden suggested a number of regulatory tools that could be useful in redefining our relationship to drugs and drug education. He advocates for a public health approach that is rooted in human rights and harm reduction and proposes an alternative to prohibition and criminalization.
Haden is adamant that it is time to explore alternate regulatory frameworks that will actually make certain drugs harder to attain for young people, not easier. He admits that different drugs have different properties and risks and suggests that we consider each one separately, with different approaches taken to reducing the harms of each drug.
Haden believes that if we can open up discussion about drug use and create public health policies, we can also begin to develop healthy social norms that can minimize their associated harms. “We don’t drink alcohol with breakfast,” he says. If we stop the violence of prohibition and start telling the truth about drugs, then we can begin to develop healthy social habits around drug use.
Mark’s website has an extensive list of regulatory tools as well as many more resources for understanding and shifting our relationship to drugs towards a public health approach.
