Many still don't understand the drug problem

Local government authorities have finally agreed to stop the shame campaign against drug suspects, which some local officials tried testing in a few places. The campaign first involved the posting of notices on houses that indicated them as dwellings of drugs suspects. Later it was modified by posting notices on houses that described them as drug-free.

The reason for the cancellation of the campaign was that it tended to violate the rights of people. While there is no dispute that the rights of people were clearly violated by the campaign, human rights shouldn't have been made the sole measure for the initiative. Human rights, while concededly vital in every undertaking, should be treated as a separate measure by which initiatives are weighed.

For example, it is wrong to say that the shame campaign had to be stopped because it transgressed the rights of people. To say so obscures the many other pertinent reasons why the campaign was untenable from the beginning. And when a particular matter is obscured unnecessarily, it deprives everyone the chance to fully understand a problem and appreciate each and every potential solution.

In other words, to say only that the campaign was scrapped because of its tendency to violate human rights effectively diagnoses a disease solely on the basis of one symptom to the exclusion of the many other manifestations that indicate a potentially even greater disease. If that is the attitude to be adopted in any future campaign, then any and all such future campaigns are doomed to fail.

There is an even more sensible and practical reason, in addition to being violative of human rights, why the campaign just cannot go on. And it is that a shame campaign just does not work on people zonked on drugs. These people are gone. They no longer know shame. No shame campaign can ever work on those who no longer know what is going on in the world. And those who initiated the campaign were no better. They clearly did not know what they were dealing with.

And yet things are going to get even worse. A group of lawyers has just gone to the Supreme Court asking it to stop the war on drugs itself. Apparently these lawyers also just don't get it. They seem to think that if the drug war is stopped, everything will become all hunky-dory again, as if nothing happened. Well, there is no going back to wherever. This country is so deep into the quagmire it will be devoured whole the moment we treat the problem as if it was as dainty as cotton candy.