DRUG LAWS AS CULTURAL LOBOTOMY

by John Dentinger

Liberty, September 1995, p. 27-30

The first casualty of the war on drugs

Since it is customary in articles about drugs to recount one's personal
struggle with the demon, I will begin with a personal anecote.
My drug addiction began in Wisconsin in the late '60s. I didn't
think it was serious at first. I just took a nosefull of the stuff with a
high- school chum. Later I increased the dose. I was buying it every
three weeks. I didn't know the nasal congestion I suffered was a
withdrawal symptom, but I did know the stuff cleared it up. It wasn't
until years later, when a doctor told me, that I realized I was addicted.
To Neo-Synephrine. An over-the-counter nasal decongestant which I
took for hay fever. What I didn't know about the nose drops was that my
friend was taking far more than he needed; and following his lead, so was
I. What I needed to protect me from Neo-Synephrine addiction was not laws,
but information.
Drug laws keep society from learning anything from the drug use
that occurs; they foster lies to fill the silence; and this discredits
valid warnings about the real dangers of drugs. This silence and
disinformation, this never-ending cultural lobotomy, is the most subtle,
the most ignored, and yet the greatest cost of the war on drugs.

Silence and Disinformation

My Neo-Synephrine experience coincides with recent findings cited
by Arnold Trebach in "The Great Drug War:" that honest, credible drug
education may increase drug use -- but decreases drug abuse. No one claims
education would eliminate abuse, but some commonplace examples indicate why
it would reduce it: because much abuse is due to ignorance. Many common
legal products are allergenic or harmful to a hypersensitive few:
allergists often cite sulfites and monosodium glutamate in food, as well as
ingredients in Irish Spring soap and Tide laundry detergent. Caffeine is
an elusive cuause of insomnia, heart palpitations, and other alarming
symptoms.
Now, a lot of the use of these products results in needless
anxiety, time lost from work, and doctor bills. And how does our
government respond to that waste? By requiring warning labels on these
products?

No. Rather, it busies itself outlawing drugs, many of whose users
are far better-informed of their effects than is the average user of the
caffeiniferous Coca-Cola. By subjecting users to a black market,
government makes them less informed about, and thus in greater danger from,
what they are ingesting. Sometimes it even pollutes the drugs itself:
spraying poisonous paraquat on marijuana, as it adulterated alcohol with
poisonous methanol during Prohibition.
One need not be in battle fatigues to take pot-shots at the truth;
one can be a sort of civil defense worker, like Janet Cooke was when she
wrote her Pulitzer-winning fabrications about an "eight-year-old heroin
addict." As Thomas Szasz noted, lies on the subject of drugs are so common
that if Cooke had not also lied about her academic credentials, she
probably would have gotten away with it. Another classic tale told as true
came in 1968 from then-Governor Raymond Shafer of Pennsylvania: six
college students had gone blind staring at the sun while on LSD. The
governor later recanted when his source, another goernment official,
admitted he'd made it up. I mention this old hoax because (a) we all
remember its tenacity, and (b) it illustrates the self-fulfilling
husteria about "bad trips," thereby guaranteeing that first-time LSD
users would be more susceptible to them.

I can attest to this personally. In the summer of 1972, I did once
what friends had done numerous times: I took LSD. I went into the
experience with the wrong attitude, and had a very bad trip. The public
hysteria did two monstrous things simultaneously: it made me fear that I
had permanently damaged the only asset I had -- my mind -- and it made this
unfounded fear something I could not confide to anyone. I finally went to
the student health service, which referred me to a psychiatrist, whom I saw
once. His answer to my problems: Valium, 10 mg., several times a day.
I had no idea what a high dose this authority had prescribed.
One-tenth or one-twentieth of that would have provided a crutch. The
prescribed dose, which I took, was an emotional strait-jacket. I needed
the plain truth, and I got chemical repression. All of the harm here came
not from drugs but from silence and lies. Much the same, I suggest, is
true of our culture.

The Trials and Errors of Drug Laws

Society advances, in Karl Popper's phrase, by a process of "trial
and the elimination of error." Hindering either of these two steps in the
name of soct-cutting or risk-aversion does not hamper the commission of
error, merely the elimination of error. It disconnects the ratchet of
social progress.

For example, the backfiring of the attemp through regulation and
tort law to produce a risk-free society is becoming increasingly clear.
Had heavier-than-air flight been made even heavier with detailed regulation
after the first plane crash, we would not have developed a means of long
distance transportation far safer than any alternative. Transportation
would be costlier and riskier, but ten thousand back-page car crashes don't
have the impact of one front-page plane crash. And a rat overdosed with
cyclamate warrants a headline; extra human deaths from obesity do not. In
innumerable areas of life, safety-at-any-price exacts a high price not only
in dollars, ut also in safety.
The same analysis applies to drugs. Illegal drug "experiments" go
on constantly, but we learn little of or from the good or bad experiences
of drug users, since they may be arrested if they talk about them.
Celebrities thus arrested may be able to escape prison if they agree to go
on the lecture circuit and recant their heresy. In this, our sole advance
over the Inquisition is that heretics do not need to be shown the
instruments of torture: viz., prison and the press. In any case, the
resultant testimoy can hardly be considered reliable.

Drug companies have no incentive to invest in developing safer
psycho-therapeutic or "recreational" drugs, since these would simply be
outlawed. The government's hostility to safe drugs was noted by Durk
Pearson and Sandy Shaw in "Life Extension:" the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms "forbids the addition of anti-oxidant vitamins such
as B-1 to booze, although medical experts....agree [it] would significantly
reduce alcohol-induced brain and liver damage." An even better solution,
they note, "would be to develop new recreational drugs which provide the
desired alcohol high without the damaging side effects. There is, in fact,
such a drug. [It has already been tested, but it] is not FDA approved, and
it is not likely to be approved in the foreseeable future."

Likewise, the prescription drug diphenylhydantoin "has been used
successfully to allow smokers to quit without withdrawal symptoms," but of
course, it is not FDA-approved for that purpose. "In fact," noted Pearson
and Shaw, "since smoking is not a disease, the FDA may never approve any
treatment, no matter how safe, specifically for the purpose of stopping
smoking."
This show of concern for the health of even legal recreational drug
users is no less that we could expect from those wonderful folks who let
thousands of AIDS and other patients die while awaiting the nirvana of the
perfectly effective drug, and the chimera of the perfectly safe one. These
examples of costs imposed as savings, of danger and death imposed as
safety, could be -- and still are -- multiplied ad infinitum.

The Blinding Sucess of Drug Laws

In particular, the law "protects" us from the effects, both
maleficient and beneficent, of coca and cocaine, amphetamines, psychedelic
drugs, and cannabis (a legal medicine until 1937). But as Lester
Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, both of Harvard Medical School, note in the
Pacific Institute's anthology "Dealing with Drugs," all of these have
medicinal uses.
To take one example, as recently as 1985, psychotherapists from
around the country offered the DEA testimony to the therapeutic efficacy of
MDMA, a mild, then-legal psychedelic drug. (The term "psychedelic" may
be misleading; MDMA -- unlike alcohol -- does not cause hallucinations,
even in substantial overdoses.) The drug, they said, vastly increased the
very bases of therapy: motivation, empathy, and depth and extent of
communication. Dissolving the fear or embarrassment or inertia associated
with new self-insight, the drug helped to break through the sticking points
of therapy. Success stories abounded: a woman who was the victim of rape
and torture and was still suicidal after six months of ordinary therapy was
able to face the past and begin living a normal life again. The positive
mental attitude it helped encourae seems to have aided another woman'r
remission from an otherwise fatal cancer. And so on. Disastrously,
however, the was nicknamed "Ecstasy," a term so reeking of hedonistic
heresy that no product could bear the name and not be outlawed, not even
dog food or suppositories.

The medical case for marijuana is even clearer, to the point where
even the government can't deny its efficacy in treating nausea, glaucoma,
and other conditions.
Rick Morris, a truck driver in Tennessee, lost three-eights of his
body weight while on nauseating chemotherapy. Like many chemotherapy
patients, until Morris began smoking marijuana, even the smell of food
would cause him to vomit, his attorney said.
Attorney? Oh yes, Morris was convicted in 1988 of possession of
marijuana.

Two million Americans suffer the progressive eye disease of
glaucoma. An eighth of those have serious vision impairment already, and
7,500 people a lyear go blind from it. In 1972, Robert C. Randall, aged
24, was told he had glaucoma and could expect to be totally blind in three
to five years. He found by chance that smoking marijuana completely
restored his eyesight and arrested the progress of his ailment. When lhe
grew these medicinal plants, it was he himself who was arrested. Naively,
he called federal drug bureaucrats to get permission to use marijuana as
medicine -- and found they already knew of its unique value in treating
glaucoma, and never bothered to tell the public. After tremendous battles,
he won the right to use marijuana (supplied from Uncle Sam's Mississippi
pot farm), which the bureaucrats tried to make subject to Randall's
conceding to keep quiet about it. He refused to accede to this, and they
capitulated. But later the "liberal" Carter White House drug policy
chief, Dr. Peter Bourne, threatened to cut off Randall's marijuana supply
because he insisted on appearing in the press, telling people the truth
about this medicine. In effect, the government repeatedly threatened to
blind Randall if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

People are still going blind not because marijuana laws cut off the
supply of the drug (tens of millions of people use it, after all), but
because they cut off the supply of INFORMATION. Flaucoma, cancer, and
other patients have had to discover this information independently (and
criminally). Or not discover it, and go blind or starve to death in
retching agony, which all of them would have done if drug laws had been
"successful." These millions of American remain, in effect, victims of a
gigantic Tuskegee experiment (an experiment in which black males were
intentionally denied medical treatment for syphilis for purposes of
studying the disease).

The Procrustean Moral Calculus

Prohibitionists are starting to concede that their policy has
costs. Morton Kondracke, writing in "The New Republic," offers a typical
interventionist analysis: he estimates the cost of the drug war at a
paltry $30 billion -- a third of that for direct enforcement, two-thirds
for the cost of crime generated by heroin addicts. But this sort of cost /
benefit analysis fudges entries on both sides of the ledger, by techniques
including these:
(1) Ignoring the costs of the "Tuskegee experiment" above.
(2) Aggregating costs imposed by people on themselves with costs
imposed by people on others. Every life counts the same in this
Procrustean moral calculus, the consenting and unconsenting alike. We can
see the same shell game when gun control advocates slip suicides into the
figures on "gun-related deaths."
Consider what the interventionist does when he cites "productivity
loss" as a cost of drugs. If Joe Would-Be-Cokehead were not producing
anything in the first place, then his self-destruction would have "zero
cost." Thus Joe's very productivity is perversely used as an argument for
curtailing his liberty. This approach would argue that if Charles
Krauthammer could make more money as a doctor than a political writer, the
law should force him to do so.

This leaves us with the one real social cost: accidents, primarily
driving under the influence by a small, irresponsible minority of drinkers
and other drug users. The idea that we should round up all drug users
because of this sounds suspiciously like "There is no such thing as an
innocent suspect." Surely this is better dealt with by diverting $10
billion a year worth of zealous narcotics officers into traffic patrols
than by attempting preventive detention of all of society.

(3)Ignoring damage to other constitutionl rights. When the
government can blind its critics lawfully, the First Amendment is a
mockery. When the government confiscates putative drug profits (including
money intended for attorney's fees) in a "civil" proceeding, due
process is mocked, as is effective assistance of counsel. Increasingly
obtrusive searches are rubber-stamped in the name of the drug war.
Penalties for marijuana sales have often grossly exceeded commonly given
penalties for murder. And the list goes on. War is the health of the
state, and the drug war is no exception.

(4) Ignoring psychic benefits. The feelings of would-be drug
users are given no weight in this scheme, although they are willing to part
with money to alter their feelings. This is like saying that one who
survived an involuntary game of Russian Roulette had zero loss and one who
survived psychotherapy had zero gain. In fact, the psychic benefits of
some drugs may be far more than the mere physical pleasure of, say,
cocaine.
One of the objections to drugs is that they "cause" some people
to lose control over their lives. But in most such cases, I submit, drugs,
legal or ellegal, are simply the means by which a person carries out his
early-life programming for self-destruction. The "cure" is not the
removal of a few of many available means to that end, but the teaching of
the victim how to change his own programming -- i.e., how to be an
autonomous human being instead of a robot. Ironically, there is, as noted
above, strong evidence that some illegal drugs would be good for precisely
that psychotherapeutic purpose. For vast numbers of responsible would-be
users, then, drug laws are not aiding but obstructing self-control.

(5) Ignoring spinoffs. Only when drugs are legal can they give
rise to spin-offs benefitting non-users. This is the biggest cost of all,
meriting separate discussion.

Spinoffs

The entire advance of civilization is a web of "spinoffs," intri
cately and unpredictably related. Cut off a strand of inquiry, narrow the
range of allowable personal experiments, and the damage to the web grows
exponentially with time -- and in ways we cannot predict. Thus Friedrich
Hayek writes in "The Constitution of Liberty," "We shall never get the
benefits of freedom, never obtain those unforeseeable new developments for
which it provides the pooprtunity, if it is not also granted where the uses
made of it by some do not seem desirable. It is therefore no argument
against individual freedom that it is frequently abused."

Let us look at a business analogous to the recreational drug trade:
the entertainment industry. If any business could be hamstrung without
impairing progress, surely it is this. Let's say, arguendo, that "freedom
of entertainment" has been grossly abused -- that 99% of entertainment
dollars have gone for mindless rubbish. But let's see what those dollars
have financed.
Audiophiles financed the development of magnetic tape, later used
in computers; diskettes and hard discs spun off that. The quarters plunked
into early video games helped finance Silicon Valley. From the money
consumers spent on laser discs there arose CD-Rom storage, which even New
Age bookstores use for instant computer access to Books in Print. Couch
potatoes in the '50s buying TV's to watch "I Love Lucy" helped make it
possible for millions to have high-quality, inexpensive computer monitors
today.
Thus entertainment spinoffs accelerated all advances based on
computers. This includes artificial intelligence, whose applications
include medical expert systems, aiding doctors with faster and more
accurate diagnoses. It also includes the new science of chaor theory,
which has been applied to the study of cardiac arrythmia, Parkinson's
disease, and similar medical abnormalities.

The hardware and software developed to animate sequences in the
"Stars Wars" movies have been adapted for computer-aided design and medical
imaging applications. It's a shame radiology departments don't have signs
rubbing this in, but the first people whose lives were saved by this
technology can thank George Lucas and his fans.
"If science fiction has yielded medical spinoffs, it defies
credibility that recreational drug research would fail to do likewise."

We can already point to the accidental discovery of marijuana's
value fighting nausea and glaucoma. In fact, we can even name one of its
non-medical spinoffs: many utilitarian products can be made from the
marijuana plant, including an inexpensive, high-grade paper that is far
more long-lasting than acid-treated wood pulp. Thus the specific form of
cultural brain damage that occurs as many old books disintegrate is one of
the continuing legacies of the drug war.
A free society's complex web of information and innovation is one
with which we tamper at our peril.

Inventing Danger

The reason our culture has evolved the custom of freedom and the
concept of individual rights is that in the long run, they wor, And the
reason they have developed so slowly is that any zealot, well-meaning but
without understanding, can point to the short run.
Every single freedom we now take as self-evidently crucial in a
struggle against those who attacked it as dangerous. Neophobes of Plato's
day attacked writing -- as an enemy of memory. Luddites, Gordon Tullock
tells us in "The Organization of Inquiry," have been with us always:
"inventions which simply eased the method of production of existing
products were usually frowned upon [by governments]. The fear that
labor-saving inventions will result in widespread unemployment [rather than
more but different employment] is as old as history."

Here, in the realm of invention, is the paradigm of the mechanism
and value of freedom. Very few people personally utilize the right to
invent, and in the short run, some people are "harmed" by invention to
the extent of having to change employment. Despite these two factors, we
not only let people invent things -- we encourage them. We sort out the
results in the most callous manner: if they hit the jackpot, we get to use
the invention without having taken their risks. If their experiments fail,
well, tough for the.
This is the model for the discovery, diffusion, and utilization of
knowledge in a free society.

Of course drug use has risks and costs, but only those to
bystanders should be curtailed by law. Anything more done to the "social
organism" -- any laws and silence and lies -- is not an immune response,
but a jolt of curare, a routing to oblivion of the cultural neurons bearing
information on which drug use is beneficial and which harmful.
This cultural lobotomy is a cost we should insist be included in
the accounting when next the drug warriors trot out their moral
calculators.


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