Legalizing Drugs?

Having spent the better part of two years in a relationship with a heroin addict and seen the level of destruction and dysfunction an intelligent and compassionate person can reach, I find myself having a visceral physical reaction whenever the drug is mentioned.  I guess prior to watching that process I had lulled myself into thinking of it as just a more intense opium high.  Now I understand what Terrence McKenna meant when he wrote in Food of the Gods that addiction creates an absolute algebra of need, in which a person's entire intention and consciousness can become focussed on a single need.  And I understand the powerful use of heroin and cocaine as population control agents.

Of course it is criminalization that makes it possible for so many of the elements of heroin and cocaine related population control to be fully implemented.

I've also found myself greatly disillusioned about the so-called treatment system in this country, which for the most part seems to me to be a system of glorified brainwashing -- isolation, reprograming, and the shifting of dependency from a chemical to the twelve step cult.  

The most fundamental failure of so-called treatment is its failure to address the root issues behind addiction.  There is a strong correllation between opiate addiction and post traumatic stress disorder (one of the reasons why soldiers in Vietnam became such reliable customers for the CIA's cartel and why they brought it back to neighborhoods where trauma brought on by the systemized violence of racism and classism (Oscar Olivera's "war of everyday life")w as pretty much a collective and universal experience.)  For many trauma survivors shutting down the pain receptors in the brain is the most effective means of preventing the resurgence of repressed trauma and the first thing they find that lets them sleep through the night.  The failure to really address trauma and its related mental health issues keeps people plugged into the treatment system for life -- whether through methadone and suboxone administration or through the twelve step system.  This of course serves the ruling class well, preventing people from addressing the political dimensions of their trauma, and keeping them relatively dependent and pliable.

Of course the mindless opposition of the substance abuse establishment to any drugs other than caffeine, sugar, and tobacco also serves to limit options.  Behind closed doors mental health professionals have admitted to me the useful role of ganja in helping recovering addicts take the edge off the anxiety and desperation of their cravings.  And I think that in theraputic and shamanic settings, psychedellics have tremendous potential as tools for trauma work.

But really  what the treatment system today amounts to is a diversionary program to keep middle and upper class drug offenders out of prison and to make the drug control regime appear more humane.  Only shifting the discourse about addiction from the realm of criminal "justice" to the realm of public health will bring about any kind of serious discussion of what works for really breaking addiction.

One more twist in my rant -- and that is that I think that we in the counterculture need to take responsibility for creating a nuanced and informed discourse around the many kinds of chemicals that we can use to change our consciousness and both the positive and negative aspects of those possibilities.  I think too often we emphasize the "counter" and forget the "culture" -- the role we have in passing on our own knowledge and experience and creating an oral tradition around experimentations in consciousness.

Just as with sexuality loving and conscious polyamory is a truer opposite to monogamy than the complete obliteration of responsibility that many define as the only alternative to monogamy, wise and informed use of plants and their chemical derivatives and synthetic analogues is a much truer alternative to mindless prohibitionism than the anything goes mentality that gets posed as the only alternative.  I am not talking about legal regulation of any drug.  As Ammon Hennacy used to say "Awww judge what good are your laws? The bad ones don't follow 'em, the good ones don
't need 'em."  What I am talking about is a culture of truth telling.  Abbie Hoffman wrote about the distinction between "mind drugs" and "body drugs."  Terrence McKenna wrote about the liberatory potential of psychedellics and the ability of heroin, cocaine, alcohohol, sugar, caffeine, and television to enslave.  I think we need to anchor ourselves firmly in that tradition. (I realize of course that by invoking Terrence and Abbie I am wading into territory where Al has the potential to rhetorically kick my ass.  But if such an ass kicking is warranted, bring it on.)

"I just don't believe you'll be able to sell this to the American public..."

And specifically about cocaine he writes:

"I am one who spent many nights chopping cocaine until my eyes would not focus, my heart racing to the point of quitting, yet chopping away nonetheless. Unless you have experienced this, you cannot understand the power this drug can have over people.

I know it has medicinal uses and should be legal for such. But if legalized, you might as well throw away the entire system of drug control, prescription medication, etc...

These are two distinct arguments and, for purposes of clear thinking, I think it is advisable to pull them apart.

1. Political and Strategic Questions

"I just don't believe you'll be able to sell this to the American public," are words that every change agent has heard about any worthy cause. They said it to Martin Luther King about ending legal racial segregation. They said it to Susan B. Anthony about women getting the right to vote. They said it, in fact, to John Adams, the extremist radical who pushed the rest of the landed gentry to declare independence from colonial rule (it took Thomas Paine and his pen to, indeed, "sell" not just independence, but a willingness to fight and die for it, to the then-fledgling "American public.")

But there is another very relevant example in North American history: the repeal of alcohol prohibition.

The story of how alcohol prohibition was repealed is fascinating and a must-study for modern-day drug prohibition opponents. Funny, though, only one coherent book was ever written on the theme (when it comes to drugs and prohibitions, a druggy kind of amnesia sets in after the mistake is acknowledged and the nation "cleans up" from its addictive and harmful policies).

That book is Repealing National Prohibition by David Kyvig (1974, U. of Chicago Press), and its chapters were recently posted online by the Shaeffer Drug Library (ignore the annoying "pop up" ad in the corner if you haven't already set your browser to block them.)

Believe it or not, there once was a time when it seemed that you could not sell repeal of alcohol prohibition to the American public.

But if you read Kyvig's book with some "class analysis" perspective, you can see how, back between 1918 and 1932, the demographics of the "American public" changed from an electorate dominated by protestant tea-totallers to a surging working class made up of Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Catholic, etcetera, new immigrants with distinctly different lifestyles and attitudes concerning alcohol. They became the backbone of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's coalition, and pushed Roosevelt to change his prohibitionist stance to one of pro-repeal at the Democratic National Convention of 1932.

It all happened so fast back then.

And so it will be soon, again.

The demographics of the United States are changing. Withing a a few decades, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and other "minorities" will become a majority. And this is certainly not to say that "white folk" don't include a significant number of prohibition critics and opponents! (Indeed, so much of the problem with the 2004 "election" in the United States is that the underclass is still effectively excluded from voting... but that will work itself out over time.... The question is, how soon? The sooner the better, in terms of the human misery index.)

But that's a political-strategic question of the feasability of a cause.

Don Henry also addresses the matter of what is right, or good policy, with his concerns about what could happen if cocaine were legalized...

2. Is It Good Policy to Legalize Cocaine and Heroin?

Don Henry writes eloquently and honestly of his own bad experience with cocaine. And yet, his portrait of a drug that is impossible to quit using is disproven by the fact that he writes of his own experiences in the past tense.

The fact is, most cocaine users do stop using! And I argue that the prohibition policy acts to impede this natural process of use-to-abuse-to-graduation from the addictive behavior associated with that drug:

• The prohibition raises the price of cocaine to levels that a heavy user, earning a normal salary, cannot afford.
• That high price thus pushes many cocaine abusers into having to sell the drug to have enough around to satisfy their own desired dosage.
• Once inside the cycle of making money off cocaine under prohibition, one is now caught in the most basic of ways: one "has" to have it, not just to snort or smoke or inject, but also to keep making a living.
• For the addictive cocaine user who is not selling the stuff, a "scarcity mentality" sets in: one can never get enough. And has two impacts: First, it creates physiologically painful gaps in the drug's availability for the user, thus intensifying the desire and the fear of going without, literally reprogramming the psychology of the user-abuser to think of nothing else but procuring the drug. And, second, it prolongs and delays the process by which, as drug dealers or rich people for whom there is no scarcity of the cocaine have found, a user naturally evolves to dislike the drug's debilitating health effects over time. Thus, the prohibition policy, in fact, delays and impedes the process of "graduating" from the idea that one "needs" the drug.
• There is an entire "addiction industry" that is dependent on people having the attitude that a drug is "all powerful," that they are "powerless" over their use-and-abuse of a drug, legal or illegal. So much of it is fueled by junk science paid for by those economic forces that benefit from those attitudes. For an alternative point of view, I recommend the work of my friend Stanton Peele; his book, The Diseasing of America, which documents the fact that most "drug abusers" (including of alcohol) who successfully stop abusing do so without entering treatment clinics or going to jail or to 12-step programs! I recommend Stanton's entire website and body of work to anyone seeking a better understanding of the up-to-date true science and data about how addictive behavior works.
• The real problem with "addiction" (I prefer the term "addictive behavior") is economy and class differences...

And so it was, almost a century ago, with alcohol.

Finally, the term "legalization" means different things to different people. Alcohol and tobacco are "legalized" but the quality of those drugs is also regulated, and there are still "dry towns" and "wet towns" in various states of the Republic: a policy, really, of local autonomy or "home rule" that I believe is the solution to the prohibition problem. There indeed can be regulation hand-in-hand with "legalization" and one need look no farther than the pharmaceutical industry to see both good and bad in that concept.

The problem with the United States population is something bigger than attitudes about drugs: It's the idea that there must be "one solution" for every "problem." Imposing a blanket "legalization" on every community repeats the problem caused by imposing a blanket "prohibition." In a democracy, every locale must be able to determine its own policy... dry towns/wet towns... smoking/no smoking... the fight must be waged on the local level. And for that to happen, drug prohibition on a national scale must be repealed, just as alcohol prohibition was. The feds should just get out of the business of criminalizing (or medicalizing) drug use. And even conservative Americans can hear something in that message that is consistent with their own basic values.

Yes, actually.  I've known some drug addicts well.  Some too well.  But despite the horrors I've seen, I don't think any addict is better off because of prohibition.  Quite the opposite.  
But I'd rather talk about another addict I knew well.  No law tried to save him and I doubt any could have.  In his last years, my father drank himself to death.  Like any addiction, alcoholism is complex beast and he'd been that way for many years.  But toward the end he'd gone to a whole new level, drinking as never before.  I'd like to say I'd have done anything to save him, but there was nothing I could do.  Perhaps turning South East Michigan into a prohibition police state with the rotting corpses of executed bootleggers lining every road would have done the trick.  But anything short of that would have just caused him to drink black market booze.  
I'm glad he didn't have to.  It hurt me deeply to lose him like that, but my Dad was a good man.  Why should he have been forced to risk arrest or blindness from a bad batch of wood alcohol?  Why should his neighbors have been forced to suffer a return of alcohol prohibition and the Purple Gang just to protect him from himself?  
No, of course you don't give guns to kids.  Children need to be protected and every parent knows part of that is protecting them from themselves.  But children and adults aren't the same thing.  No good comes from treating all of humanity as children.  That's exactly what prohibition does.
If you're my friend and you've let me know that you've quit drinking but you're having troubles with it, I'm not going to bring a bottle to your house.  Sure, I'll give you a hand protecting yourself from yourself, but you're a grown-up.  I'm not going to suffer the death of freedom in my world to keep you on the wagon.  That's on you.  
My plea to every opponent of legalization is to please accept that you just can't protect people from themselves.  The determined will always find a way around your protection.  Instead, let's protect people from the things they have no control over.  For many many millions of us it's prohibition itself, with its militarized enforcers, its overflowing prisons and its dangerous crime that we really need to be protected from.