DRUG FRENZY

(The following essay, by Barbara Ehrenreich, appeared in Ms. Magazine in
1988. It was later published in book form with other essays titled..."The
Worst Years of Our Lives," irreverent notes from a decade of greed.)

If there is anything more mind-altering--more destructive to reason
and common sense than drugs--it must be drug frenzy. Early signs include
memory loss, an inability to process simple facts, an unnatural braying of
the voice, and a belligerent narrowing of the eyes. Almost everyone is
susceptible: liberals and conservatives, presidential candidates and PTA
moms, the up-and-coming and the down-and-out. In fact, even drug users---a
category that, scientifically speaking, embraces wine-sippers and chocolate
addicts--are not immune.

Drug frenzy is not, as many people like to think, just a quick and
harmless high. It is an obsession, overshadowing all other concerns, and
capable of leaving a society drained, impotent, and brain-damaged. The
candidates have made drugs a top issue in the presidential campaign--second
only to the pledge of allegiance. It easily overwhelms poverty,
homelessness, and the federal debt. The worst thing you can say about a
candidate is not that he's a fool or a faker, but that he isn't "tough
enough on drugs." In foreign policy, drugs have replaced communism as the
scourge of the earth, and when we can't depose a Third World strongman, we
indict him for dealing.

Our civil liberties may be the most serious casualty of the frenzy:
boats and cars are being confiscated for containing as little as a tenth
of a gram of marijuana. The Supreme Court has ruled that the police have a
right to search your garbage--and they're not after the five-cent deposits
on your soda-pop cans.

There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a
nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon
leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition
for employment--anywhere. The Reagan administration would like to change a
110-year-old law prohibiting military involvement in domestic matters in
order to unleash the armed forces in the "war" on drugs. There's talk of
issuing "drug-war bonds," and worse talk about incarcerating drug
offenders in "prison tents" to be set up in the Nevada desert. In drug
frenzy, as in drug addiction, the threshold for satisfaction just keeps
rising.

Now I have as much reason to worry about drugs as anyone. I am the
mother of teenagers. I am also, it pains me to admit in print, the
daughter of drug-abusers. But the drugs that worry me the most, the drugs
that menaced my own childhood, are not the drugs that our current drug
warriors are going after. Because the most dangerous drugs in America are
legal drugs.

Consider the facts: Tobacco, which the surgeon general recently
categorized as an addictive drug, kills over 300,000 people a year.
Alcohol, which is advertised on television and sold in supermarkets, is
responsible for as many as 200,000 deaths annually, including those caused
by drunk drivers. But the use of all illegal drugs combined--cocaine,
heroin, marijuana, angel dust, LSD, etc.--accounted for only 3,403 deaths
in 1987. That's 3,403 deaths too many, but it's less than 1 percent of the
death toll from the perfectly legal, socially respectable drugs that
Americans--including drug warriors--indulge in every day.

Alcohol is the drug that undid my parents. When my own children
reached the age of exploration, I said all the usual things--like "No." I
further told them that reality, if carefully attended to, is more exotic
than its chemically induced variations. But I also said that, if they
still felt they had to get involved with a drug, I'd rather it was pot than
Bud.

If that sounds like strange advice, consider the facts: Unlike
alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, marijuana is not addictive. Twenty million
Americans--from hard hats to hippies--use it regularly. In considering
whether to legalize it for medicinal purposes, a federal appeals court
judge found that "marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest
therapeutically active substances known to man." And unlike alcohol use, a
frequent factor in crimes like child abuse, marijuana does not predispose
its users to violence.

Not that marijuana is harmless. Although marijuana is not
chemically addictive, some people do become sufficiently dependent on it to
seek help. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, however,
there are no deaths that can be unequivocally attributed to marijuana use.
Five thousand "marijuana-related" hospital emergencies were reported in
1987, but 80 percent of these were known to involve another drug-- most
commonly alcohol. Nor is there any clear evidence that marijuana "leads
to" harder drugs, unless you count alcohol and the occasional truly dire
drugs, such as PCP, that have been known to contaminate marijuana bought
from street dealers. Taken alone, and in moderation, it is still the
safest "high" on the market.

But one of the first symptoms of drug frenzy is an inability to
make useful distinctions of any kind. The drug that set off the "war,"
the drug that is enslaving ghetto youth and enlisting them into gunslinging
gangs, is cocaine, specifically crack. But who remembers crack? We're
after "drugs"! In an alarming example of drug-frenzied thinking, a recent
Time magazine drug cover story lumped cocaine, heroin, and marijuana
together as the evil drugs in question. Nineteen years ago, before
drug-frenzy-induced brain damage set in, Time was still able to make
distinctions, as this quote from the January 5, 1970, issue shows...
"...the widespread use of marijuana, sometimes by their own children is
leading many Middle Americans toward a bit more sophistication, an ability
to distinguish between the use of pot and harder drugs."

So what turned all these sober Middle Americans into drug-frenzied
hawks? Historians point out that Americans have long been prone to
episodes of "moral panic." One year it's communism; the next it's missing
children--or terrorism, or AIDS, or cyanide-laced cold pills.

Usually, the targeted issue conceals a deeper anxiety. For
example, as historian Barbara Epstein has argued, the late nineteenth-and
early-twentieth-century temperance crusade--which was every bit as maniacal
as today's war on drugs--was only incidentally about alcohol. The real
issue was women's extreme vulnerability within the "traditional marriage."
Husband's leave, husbands get violent, husbands drink. But you couldn't
very well run a mass crusade to abolish husbands or--in the nineteenth
century--to renegotiate the entire institution of marriage. The demon rum
became what the psychohistorians call a "condensed symbol" of male
irresponsibility and female vulnerability--focusing the sense of outrage
that might otherwise have gone into the search for radical, feminist
alternatives.

Drugs also play a powerful symbolic role in our culture.
Generically speaking, we imagine drugs as a kind of pact with the devil:
What you get is ecstasy or something pretty similar. But the price you pay
is eternal thralldom, dependency, loss of self. Only a few drugs--"hard"
ones--actually fit our imaginings. But in mundane, drugless, ordinary
life, we're offered a deal like this every other minute: buy this--sports
car, condo, cologne, or whatever--and you'll be happy, suave,
sexy...forever!

We are talking about the biggest pusher of all-the thoroughly legal
and entirely capitalist consumer culture. No street-corner crack dealer
ever had a better line than the one Madison Avenue delivers at every
commercial break: Buy now! Quick thrills! You deserve it! And, of
course, we love it--all those things , all those promises! If we could
only have a little more ! But, deep down, we also mortally resent it, this
incessant, hard-sell seduction. The sports car does not bring fulfillment;
the cologne does not bring love. And still the payments are due....

Drug frenzy, we might as well acknowledge, is displaced rage at the
consumer culture to which we are all so eagerly, morbidly addicted.
Consider this recent statement in Time magazine by Harvard psychiatrist
Robert Coles, who is otherwise a pretty thoughtful guy. We can't legalize
drugs, he said (including, presumably, marijuana), because to do so would
constitute a "moral surrender," sending what Time called "a message of
unrestricted hedonism." What a quaint concern! We are already getting "a
message of unrestricted hedonism" every time we turn on the TV, glance at
a billboard, or cruise a mall. But we can't very well challenge that
message, or its sender, even as mounting debt--personal and social--gives
that message a mean and mocking undertone.

So we feed our legal addictions and vent our helplessness in a fury
at drugs. We buy our next chance at "ecstasy" on credit and despise
those poor depraved fools who steal for heroin or kill for crack. The word
for this is "projection," and it's the oldest, most comforting form of
self-delusion going.

The only hopeful sign I can see is the emerging debate on drug
legalization. The advocates of legalization, who include such straitlaced
types as the New York County Lawyers' Association's Committee on Law
Reform, argue that drug prohibition has become far more dangerous than
drug abuse. Prohibition causes about 7,000 deaths a year (through
drug-related crime, AIDS, and poisoned drugs) and an $80-billion-a-year
economic loss. And prohibition drives up the price of drugs, making
dealing an attractive career for the unemployed as well as the criminally
inclined.

There are problems with wholesale legalization: crack, for
example, is so highly addictive and debilitating that it probably shouldn't
be available. But I agree with the New York Times that we should consider
legalizing marijuana. We could then tax the estimated $50 billion spent
annually on it and use the revenue to treat people who want to get off the
hard drugs, including alcohol ant tobacco.

But we're not even going to be able to have a sane debate about
legalization until we come down off the drug frenzy. The only cure is a
sturdy dose of truth, honesty, and self-knowledge--and those things do not,
ancient countercultural lore to the contrary, come from drugs. Since
there's no drug for drug frenzy, we're all just going to have to sit down,
cold sober, to face the hard questions: who's hurting, what's hurting
them, and what, in all kindness and decency, we can do about it.


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