How is whales – how is drug users? By Street Lawyer Nanna W. Gotfredsen, 2013.
A TV-program described how in the 1950s a marine biologist wrote a ground-breaking book about whale behaviour based on several years’ observation of the creatures from a boat in the ocean.
This book established the dominant paradigm for understanding the behavior of whales for decades, until other researchers noticed that whales are near the surface of the ocean – where they are observable to humans in boats – for less than five percent of their lives.
Many of the long-held assumptions about whale behaviour that were based on the small part of the time they spent near the ocean’s surface turned out to be wrong, and marine biologists were forced to re-evaluate their paradigmes.”, see more here: http://harm.live.radicaldesigns.org/downloads/spring1996.pdf
Learning drug users to know would in this terminology require, that we put on ourselves a diving suit – and, not least, that we show that we tolerate find ourselves there, below sea level, that we there, deep, deep down, is worth have close contact with.
If we actually knew drug users, also those who due to stigma and criminalization remains below the radar, we would like them.
We would understand them.
Understand their wealth of reasons to use drugs. We would include them.
We would immediately stop criminalizing and punishing them and be ashamed that we had ever done so.