"Don't call drug users Junkies" campaigners say

Daily Mail ^ | 10th January 2018 | Steve Doughty

[Ennis85]

Users of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are victims of discrimination and should no longer be called druggies or junkies, an international drug legalisation pressure group declared yesterday.

It called for an end to negative language for drug users and their habits in order to ensure their human rights are respected.

As part of the drive to persuade people to think differently about drugs, the words addict and even drug user must be thrown out, a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy said.

It urged newspapers and broadcasters to encourage more positive attitudes by calling a drug user a ‘person who uses drugs’.

Instead of calling someone addicted to heroin a junkie, they should be said to be someone who ‘has a heroin use disorder.’

A recreational drug user should be referred to as a ‘person with non-problematic drug use’ and a former addict should not be described as clean, it said.

Even the word addict itself should go, to be replaced by phrases such as ‘person with substance use disorder’, the report said.

The Commission, launched six years ago by financier George Soros with the aim of legalising drugs, has British members who include former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg and Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson.

Publication of its report, Countering Prejudices Against People Who Use Drugs, was Sir Richard’s second intervention in the drugs debate within a week.

Last Friday Sir Richard posted a message on the Virgin website calling restrictive moves on cannabis law by Donald Trump’s administration ‘a throwback to the worst days of the failed war on drugs.’

The Commission report said: ‘Commonly encountered terms such as junkie, drug abuser, and crack head are alienating, and designate people who use drugs as others – morally flawed and inferior individuals.

[GSWarrior]

Ha! Never seen that before.