Does addiction make you un-American?

Should Prince Harry be deported from the United States due to his past drug use?

That’s what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump recently claimed, based on an ongoing legal battle between Prince Harry and the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned think tank. The foundation argues that Prince Harry’s candid conversation about past drug use in his book “Spare” should disqualify him from living in the United States because, if he had disclosed this during the visa process, he should have been denied entry.

The foundation’s lawsuit brings to the forefront broader issues within the U.S. immigration system, particularly its inappropriate and degrading treatment of individuals who use drugs or have an addiction — policies that continue to equate drug use with immorality and are out of step with a broader understanding of addiction as a chronic disease.

Title 8 of the United States Code (U.S.C) section 1182 deems people who use drugs or have an addiction inadmissible and denies their entry into the United States. While a minor update in 2010 attempted to align the assessment of people seeking admission to the U.S. with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in practice, people in these categories can be denied admission to the U.S.

The attention to Prince Harry’s entry to the U.S. shows that this policy remains problematic and outdated. According to the results from the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health data, 169 million people over the age of 12 used tobacco products, alcohol, or illicit drugs in the past month in the United States, and so would be denied entry to the country. The drugs Prince Harry admitted to using that spurred this moral outrage are widely consumed in America — cannabis (42.3 million), hallucinogens (2.3 million), and cocaine (2.0 million). And the national survey indicates that approximately 47 million — nearly 17% of the population — had an addiction or problematic drug use in 2022.

Neither drug use nor addiction are character flaws. Addiction is a treatable health condition protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which aims to ensure that individuals with an addiction have their rights respected.

Government-created discrimination against people based on drug use or addiction is blatantly contradictory to other protections afforded by the government. It is also inconsistent with the country’s founding principles of liberty and opportunity.

So why does drug use or addiction disqualify someone to immigrate to America?

Since federal immigration policies began in the late 19th century, U.S. immigration policy has been rooted in racism and stigma. Immigration policy is closely aligned with eugenic principles which support social stratification and reject basic human rights. Drug use is included because it was thought that individuals who use drugs could not take care of themselves. Drug use was also widely seen as affecting mostly “undesirable” non-white groups. It is here where immigration policy became intertwined with similarly racist drug policies that were starting to take root at the same time.

In the early 1900s when these immigration policies were enacted, psychology, psychiatry, and general medicine were nascent scientific fields with few answers to the pressing issues surrounding drug use and addiction. The temperance movement was surging and the laws developed at the time attempted to exclude those deemed “lunatics, idiots, or any persons unable to take care of themselves without becoming a public charge,“ as the Immigration Act of 1882 put it. Since then, science has created a much deeper understanding of how to treat addiction and, with it, the awareness that drug use alone is not a character test. Still, much of the framework from the 19th century remains in place. The country’s current immigration laws still refer to people who use drugs or have addiction as ineligible for visas or admissions based on health-related grounds because they “may pose a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others.”

This is not the first time outdated immigration laws have placed an undue burden on people seeking to live in the U.S. and where morality opposed science and human rights principles. In 1973, the DSM removed homosexuality as a mental illness, yet it took until 1990 for immigration law to update its exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people from becoming citizens. Similarly, the HIV epidemic of the late 20th century prompted immigration restrictions on people living with HIV/AIDS that were finally changed in 2010. Both of these examples relied on scientific advancements and advocacy efforts that led to the removal of these discriminatory laws.

As with the LGBTQIA+ ban, using immigration policy as a misplaced “moral” policy is out of step with the human rights principles the country ostensibly strives to uphold. The DSM is not a citizenship exam. As have emerged for HIV, many new evidence-based approaches are now used to treat addictions and have excellent outcomes. Much like HIV, addiction is a treatable and preventable disease where recovery is a likely outcome.

Reversing the policies against LGBTQIA+ people and those with HIV/AIDS shows that there is a way forward. It is time to revise and update existing immigration laws to reflect contemporary scientific understanding of addiction and focus less on drug use as a misguided character test.

The escalating rhetoric surrounding Prince Harry’s ability to live in the U.S. is more than just a legal fight about one person: it highlights the need to overhaul an antiquated immigration system that fails to align with contemporary scientific understanding of health care issues and human rights principles. The country needs to move past outdated ideologies around drug use and addiction that lack scientific rigor and violate basic human rights. The country has an opportunity to adopt an immigration system based on science, compassion, and empathy. Doing so will allow Americans to come closer to the country’s founding principles of inclusivity, respect for human dignity, and exchange of cultures and ideas.

Giorgi Minasovi is an addiction policy scholar and advocate based in Washington, D.C. Jonathan JK Stoltman is director of the Opioid Policy Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and co-director of Reporting on Addiction, a national collaboration of addiction science experts, professional journalists, and journalism educators.