Better Than Sex: The Problem of Pleasure and the "War
on Drugs"
Sex and drugs and
rock-n-roll is all my brain and body need.
Ian Dury & the Blockheads
Whether it's caffeine, tobacco,
alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy, Prozac,
Valium, or any of the other mind-altering
substances we love to drink, snort,
smoke, swallow, inject or otherwise
consume, our appetite for drugs
is immense; bigger even than our
desire for the other two members
of the infamous trinity—sex and
rock-n-roll—combined.
The pharmaceutical, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol companies—what
we might call the legal drugs trade—are some of the biggest
businesses in the world, but even these Leviathans are dwarfed
by the trade in illegal drugs. The United
Nations Drug Control Program estimates that worldwide
commerce in banned drugs is worth somewhere in the region
of $400 billion, or about eight per cent of world
trade. To the embarrassment of the anti-drug lobby this astounding
figure reveals an unpalatable truth: a lot of people like
to get high. And if you're unfamiliar with the effects of
'recreational' drugs and are wondering why so many people
take them, consider this: some users claim that their experiences
while high are better than sex.
Western governments, evangelically
led by the United States, continue to throw a lot of money
at stopping the illegal drugs trade. According to their standard
"just-say-no" argument, drugs are evil and those
who have anything to do with them are evil, and that's pretty
much that. But as anyone can see if they bother to look into
the matter at all, there must be more to it than this because
the vast majority of (illegal) drug users—which is an enormous
number of people—commit no other crime, and typically lead
normal, productive lives (Ref).
The drug warriors' usual response
to observations of this kind is to trumpet their central argument:
"drugs kill!". And sadly some people are killed
and hurt as a result of drug use, but not nearly
as often as we are led to believe. The boffins at The
Economist—hardly a ferment of pro-drug opinion—have
shown that riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than taking
most drugs, and that flying in a plane is nearly twice as
deadly as taking an ecstasy tablet (see here
and here).
Governments thus grossly exaggerate the risks of drug taking,
and their relentless, simplistic moralizing sounds rather
like the warnings issued to previous generations about the
hazards of masturbation—another unstoppable activity that
was the target of prohibitionist forces for generations.
Why then, do the authorities continue to
lie to us?
As in the story of the Emperor's
New Clothes, sometimes so much political capital gets staked
on a "truth" that it becomes an unchallengeable
dogma. Reason and fact find themselves playing second fiddle
to ideology and we're all expected to sing along. So it
is with drugs, and nowhere is the madness worse than in Washington,
where the mere suggestion of an alternative drug strategy
is little short of apostasy, as Jocelyn
Elders, former US Surgeon General, found out to her cost.
She suggested that because the war on drugs is unwinnable,
a discussion about the future direction of policy should take
place. A reasonable idea you might think, but not the sort
of thing one says publicly in America, because to say that
the drug war is lost is tantamount to saying the Emperor is
indeed naked. Heads roll for such temerity and in December
1994 Ms Elders lost hers. In Britain this psychology is perhaps
less apparent, but is no less reprehensible. The recent hand wringing
and hypocrisy over cannabis reclassification is a typical,
regrettable example.
All of which suggests that "the
drug problem" our leaders go on about so much is really
their policy problem—they simply don't know what
else to do. They can't just ignore the whole issue, because
they're the ones who keep reminding us how bad things are,
but neither can they do the obvious thing—something different—because
as we've just seen, that's political suicide for whoever suggests
it. The result is a kind of stasis—more of the same—and people
suffer as a result.
People
suffer in a variety of ways: physically,
psychologically, financially and socially—both
from drugs and from drug prohibition.
Many of the deaths attributed to illegal
drugs, for example, are accidental poisonings
and overdoses caused by unscrupulous
dealers and unregulated supplies. Who
can tell what black market drugs really
contain? Users can't be sure what they
are taking or how much. Worse, users
who would like help often don't ask for
it out of fear of criminalization. There's
also the problem of secondary infection:
for want of a few dollars' worth of clean
needles, many thousands of people could be
saved from infections like HIV and hepatitis
each year. (more on this here)
The hysterical warnings about drug-taking that we are all
so familiar with have been belted out for decades now, with
no discernible effect. A billion dollars will be spent on
street drugs today—that's a lot of people taking a lot of
gear—so prohibition is clearly not working.
What few politicians will admit,
both because it's "off message" and because it's
supposed to be none of their business, is that the question
of drug-taking is really a question of pleasure—and private pleasure at that (as
was the issue of masturbation a generation or two ago...).
No one drops an ecstasy tablet or smokes a spliff in order
to feel bad, and clearly drugs (like masturbation)
can make one feel extremely good. The prohibition of drugs
is thus in part the prohibition of pleasure, and it's ironic
that this crusade should have originated in America, where
the "pursuit of happiness" is apparently a "god-given",
"self-evident", and "inalienable" right.
Of course in practice the kinds
of happiness that Americans (and most of us in the west) are
allowed to pursue are strictly circumscribed by two thousand
years of religious teaching that has consistently equated
earthly pleasure with mortal sin—a nasty piece of psychological
propaganda that has left its mark on supposedly secular governments
everywhere and still goes unquestioned in many minds today.
The pursuit of happiness through mood-altering substances
is scorned precisely because it offends this barely secularized
article of faith. As an example of how deeply ingrained this
belief is, the 1997 Encyclopedia Britannica entry
on alcohol and drug consumption includes the following:
It is simply judged not "right,"
"good," or "proper" for people to achieve pleasure
or salvation chemically. It is accepted that the only legitimate
earthly rewards are those that have been "earned" through
striving, hard work, personal sacrifice, and an overriding sense
of duty to one's country, the existing social order, and family.
The careful elision in this
passage is of course any reference to God. According to this
puritannical ethic, a high value is placed on the willing
acceptance of suffering and denial, which are somehow supposed
to be good for us, while anything that smacks of unholy fun
is damned for imperiling our spiritual and social welfare.
American politics has long been driven by this kind of religious
conviction. The Harrison
Act of 1914 was the first legislation to ban psychotropic
substances. The misery of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s
was another consequence of this doctrine; and President Nixon's
disastrous "war on drugs," with its childish rhetoric
and ever more punitive enforcement is the latest, sorry incarnation.
Could this ideological
madness, and the brutality it engenders, ever
change? Might the edifice of American drug
policy collapse as dramatically as alcohol
prohibition did two generations ago? Well,
don't hold your breath, but there are a few
signs that things are stirring. The White
House, no less, admits that while more
people are taking more drugs than ever, the
substances in question have become more plentiful,
purer, and cheaper than ever—despite
the ever-increasing harshness of the penalties (this is true in the UK too - see here).
In the face of Federal opposition, several
US states have begun to introduce reformist measures, and
growing numbers of powerful voices, such as
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, ex secretary
of State George Schultz, and international
financier George Soros, have either declared
the drug war lost, or are actively calling
for reform. In Europe, several countries have
now abandoned the American approach of "tough"
action on drugs in favor of a more humane and
far less costly strategy of harm
reduction, and the results look much more
promising. (But this could change - see here)
Not surprisingly,
US drug-warriors see things rather differently, because for them the war is a spiritual matter.
They are the new crusaders, battling the infidel
in pursuit of their New Jerusalem—the
"drug-free society." They serve the
highest and noblest cause, and are thus exempt
from many of the obligations of accountability
that are required in almost every other area of public life.
Thomas
Szasz, professor of psychiatry at Syracuse
University and a noted critic of prohibition,
says that it is precisely because the war on drugs is
seen by its proponents as something of a "jihad" that relies
on identifying and demonizing certain "evils"
("drugs," "addicts," "traffickers"
etc), that those who fight these evils can
do no wrong—no matter how disastrous the
outcome. As Szasz says, "[Their] very effort
is synonymous with success."
With all this talk of holy war, we might do well to recall the original
crusades, still bitterly remembered in the Arab world, in which
Christian kings gathered their armies and blundered about at tremendous
cost, doing appalling things to people who held different views—including
their own countrymen. They justified it all, as many Christians still do, by appealing to the righteousness
of their Holy War, which in 1244 they finally lost.
