Pubdate: May 1999
Source: Harper's Magazine (US)
Copyright: 1999 Harper's Magazine Foundation
Contact:  666 Broadway, New York, New York, 10012
Fax: : (212) 228-5889
Website: http://www.harpers.org/
Contact:  Joshua Wolf Shenk
Note:  Joshua Wolf Shenk is a former editor of The Washington Monthly who
writes frequently on drug policy, pharmacology, and mental illness. He lives
in New York City.

AMERICA'S ALTERED STATES

Part III, Conclusion, and Footnotes

In the late 1980s, in black communities, the Partnership for a Drug Free
America placed billboards showing an outstretched hand filled with vials of
crack cocaine.  It read: "YO, SLAVE! The dealer is selling you something you
don't want.... Addiction is slavery." The ad was obviously designed to
resonate in the black neighborhoods most visibly affected by the wave of
crack use. But its idea has a broader significance in a country for which
independence of mind and spirit is a primary value.

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley created the archetype of
drug-as-enemy-of-freedom: soma.  "A really efficient totalitarian state," he
wrote in the book's foreword, is one in which the "slaves ... do not have to
be coerced, because they love their servitude." Soma-"euphoric, narcotic,
pleasantly hallucinant, with "all the advantages of Christianity and
alcohol; none of their effects," and a way to "take a holiday from reality
whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a
mythology"-is one of the key agents of that voluntary slavery.

In the spring of 1953, two decades after he published this book, Huxley
offered himself as a guinea pig in the experiments of a British psychiatrist
studying mescaline.  What followed was a second masterpiece on drugs and
man, The Doors of Perception.  The title is from William Blake: "If the
doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite-/For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern." Huxley found his mescaline experience to be
"without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this
side of the Beatific vision ... [I]t opens up a host of philosophical
problems, throws intense light and raises all manner of questions in the
field of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge."

Taken together, these two works frame the dual, contradictory nature of
mind-altering substances: they can be agents of servitude or of freedom.
Though we are deathly afraid of the first possibility, we are drawn like
moths to the light of the second.  "The urge to transcend self-conscious
selfhood is, " Huxley writes, "a principal appetite of the soul.  When, for
whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of
worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to
religion's chemical surrogates."

One might think, as mind diseases are broadened and the substances that
alter consciousness take their place beside toothpaste and breakfast cereal,
that users of other "surrogates" might receive more understanding and
sympathy.  You might think the executive taking Xanax before a speech, or
the college student on BuSpar, or any of the recipients of 65 million annual
antidepressant prescriptions, would have second thoughts about punishing the
depressed user of cocaine, or even the person who is not seriously
depressed, just, as the Prozac ad says, "feeling blue." In trying to imagine
why the opposite has happened, I think of the people I know who use
psychopharmaceuticals. Because I've always been up-front about my
experiences, friends often approach me when they're thinking of doing so.
Every year there are more of them.  And yet, in their hushed tones, I hear
shame mixed with fear.  I think we don't know quite what to make of our own
brave new world.  The more fixes that become available, the more we realize
we're vulnerable.  We solve some problems, but add new and perplexing ones.

In the Odyssey, when three of his crew are lured by the lotus-eaters and
"lost all desire to send a message back, much less return," Odysseus
responds decisively.  "I brought them back ... dragged them under the rowing
benches, lashed them fast." "Already," writes David Lenson in On Drugs, "the
high is unspeakable, and already the official response is arrest and
restraint." The pattern is set: since people lose their freedom from drugs,
we take their freedom to keep them from drugs. (11) Odysseus' frantic
response, though, seems more than just a practical measure.  Perhaps he
fears his own desire to retire amidst the lotus-eaters.  Perhaps he fears
what underlies that desire.  If we even feel the lure of drugs, we
acknowledge that we are not satisfied by what is good and productive and
healthy.  And that is a frightening thought.  "The War on Drugs has been
with us," writes Lenson, "for as long as we have despised the part of
ourselves that wants to get high."

As Lenson points out, "It is a peculiar feature of history, that peoples
with strong historical, physical, and cultural affinities tend to detest
each other with the most venom." In the American drug wars, too, animosity
runs in both directions.  Many users of illegal drugs-particularly kids do
so not just because they like the feeling but because it sets them apart
from "straight" society, allows them (without any effort or thought) to join
a culture of dissent.  On the other side, "straight society" sees a hated
version of itself in the drug users.  This is not just the I I percent of
Americans using psychotropic medications, or the 6 million who admit to
"nonmedical" use of legal drugs, but anyone who fears and desires pleasure,
who fears and desires loss of control, who fears and desires chemically
enhanced living.

Straight society has remarkable power: it can arrest the enemy, seize assets
without judicial review, withdraw public housing or assistance. But the real
power of prohibition is that it creates the forbidden world of danger and
hedonism that the straights want to distinguish themselves from.  A black
market spawns violence, thievery, and illnesses-all can be blamed on the
demon drugs.  For a reminder, we need only go to the movies (in which drug
dealers are the stock villains).  Or watch Cops, in which, one by one, the
bedraggled junkies, fearsome crack dealers, and hapless dope smokers are led
away in chains.  For anyone who is secretly ashamed, or confused, about the
explosion in legal drug-taking, here is reassurance: the people in handcuffs
are the bad ones.  Anything the rest of us do is saintly by comparison.

We are like Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, longing that we might be
divided in two, that "the unjust might go his way ... and the just could
walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in
which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence
by the hands of this extraneous evil." In his laboratory, Jekyll creates the
"foul soul" of Edward Hyde, whose presence heightens the reputation of the
esteemed doctor.  But Jekyll's dream cannot last.  Just before his suicide,
he confesses to having become "a creature eaten up and emptied by fever,
languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought:
the horror of my other self." To react to an unpleasant truth by separating
from it is a fundamental human instinct.  Usually, though, what is denied
only grows in injurious power.  We believe that lashing at the illegal drug
user will purify us.  We try to separate the "evil" from the "good" of
drugs, what we love and what we fear about them, to enforce a drug-free
America with handcuffs and jail cells while legal drugs grow in popularity
and variety.  But we cannot separate the inseparable.  We know the truth
about ourselves.  It is time to begin living with that horror, and that
blessing.

Footnotes -

(1) Although I am critical of the exaltation of drugs, it must be noted that
a crisis runs in the opposite direction.  Only a small minority of people
with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression - for which
medications can be very helpful - receive treatment of any kind.

(2) Fifty-five percent of American adults, or 97 million people, are overw
eight or obese.  It is no surprise, then, that at least forty-five companies
have weight-loss drugs in development.  But many of these drugs are
creatures more of marketing than of pharmacology. Meridia is an SSRI, like
Prozac.  Similarly, Zyban, a Glaxo Wellcome product for smoking cessation,
is chemically identical to the antidepressant Wellbutrin.  Admakers exclude
this informiation because they want their products to seem like targeted
cures - not vaguely understood remedies like the "tonics" of yesteryear.

(3) Declared Nancy Reagan, "If you're a casual drug user, you're an
accomplice to murder.  " Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates told the
Senate that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot.  " And so on.

(4) Many people believe that this is still possible, among them House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, who last year co-authored a plan to "help create a
drug-free America by the year 2002.  " In 1995, Hastert sponsored a bill
allowing herbal remedies to bypass FDA regulations, thus helping to satisfy
Americans' incessant desire for improvement and consciousness alteration.

(5) The release describes Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson as "reputed
marijuana smokers." No reference to Golden and pot could be found in the
Nexis database.  The Washington Post reports that Johnson "said he smoked
marijuana.  None of his classmates believed him."

(6) Such propaganda was crucial in convincing the South to allow the
Harrison Act's unprecedented extension of federal power.  It would be
comforting to view this as a sad moment in history, but a prohibition with
racist origins continues to have a racist effect: Blacks account for 12
percent of the U.S. population and 15 percent of regular drug users.  But
they make up 35 percent of arrests for drug possession and 60 percent of the
people in state prison on drug offenses.

(7) Overdoses always increase in a black market, because drugs are of
unknown purity and often include contaminants.  Although drug use declined
between 1978 and 1994, overdose deaths increased by 400 percent.

(8) A popular argument against medical marijuana is that it is a ruse for
the "real" goal of unrestricted use, but this argument is itself a ruse.  We
put aside disagreements over immigration to allow amnesty for victims of
political torture. We - at least most of us put aside disagreements over
abortion in cases	in cases of rape.  Medical Marijuana use for the seriously
ill has the same unambiguous claim to legitimacy.  Yet sick people face
arrest and punishment. In 1997, there were 606,519 arrests for marijuana
possession and 88,682 arrests for sale/manufacture; in the latter category
fell an Oklahoma man with severe rheumatoid arthritis who received
ninety-three years in prison for growing marijuana in his basement. The
prosecutor had told the jury that, in sentencing, they should "pick a number
and add two or three zeros to it."

(9) Defining diseases around medication pleases drug companies as well as
HMOs.  From 1988 to 1997, as general health-care benefits declined 7
percent, mental-health benefits fell 54 percent. Substituting pills for
psychotherapy helps cut costs.

(10) With a street name like Ecstasy, it is hard to take MDMA seriously as a
medicine, especially compared with words like pain KILLERS, or
ANTIdepressants, which signify the elimination of a problem as opposed to
the creation of pleasure.  But the faux-Latin pharmaceutical names are also
designed to suggest the drugs' wonders. David Wood, who used to run the firm
that came up with the name Prozac, explains it this way: "It's short and
aggressive, the 'Pro' is positive, and the Z indicates efficacy." One of
Wood's employees elaborated on good drug names: "Sounds such as 'ah' I or
'ay,' which require that the mouth be open, evoke a feeling of expansiveness
and openness." As in Meridia, Viagra, Propecia.

(11) In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton said, "I don't think my brother
would be alive today if it wasn't for the criminal justice system.  " Roger
served sixteen months in Arkansas State Prison for conspiracy to distribute
cocaine.  Had he been convicted three years later, he would have faced a
five-year mandatory minimum sentence, without the possibility of parole. If
he had had a prior felony or had sold the same amount of cocaine in crack
form, he would have automatically received ten years.

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