Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use By Jacob Sullum. - Tarcher/Putnam. In 1914, Henry Ford published a tract inveighing against a substance that was enjoying a spike in popularity. He gathered testimonials from a host of luminaries, including Booker T. Washington, who said that the drug caused "a blunting of the moral sense," and Thomas Edison, who said it "has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is permanent and uncontrollable." "I will employ no person," Edison concluded, "who smokes cigarettes." [continues 1016 words]
Baltimore Moves Toward 'Medicalization' In early December 1984, an undercover police officer named Marcellus Ward met with a pair of heroin dealers above a candy store in southwest Baltimore. Ward had planned to make a buy, then an arrest. But when Drug Enforcement Administration agents stormed into the building, one of the dealers panicked and shot Ward to death. The next day, Kurt Schmoke listened to the recording from Ward's body wire. A friend of the slain detective, Schmoke was then Baltimore's 35-year-old chief prosecutor. The incident, he would say later, prompted him to rethink the drug laws he had spent six years enforcing: Setups and stings and jail terms hadn't curbed the violence associated with the drug trade, let alone reduced drug use. [continues 2783 words]
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. [continues 1959 words]
In 1912, Merck Pharmaceuticals in Germany synthesized a type of amphetamine, methyllenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. It remained largely unused until 1976, when a biochemist at the University of California named Alexander Shulgin, curious about reports from his students, produced and swallowed 120 milligrams of the compound. The result, he wrote soon afterward, was "an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones." Shulgin's immediate thought was that the drug might be useful in psychotherapy the way LSD had been. In the two decades after its mind-altering properties were discovered in 1943 by a chemist for Sandoz Laboratories, LSD was widely used as an experimental treatment for alcoholism, depression, and various clinical neuroses. More than a thousand clinical papers discussed the use of LSD among an estimated 40,000 people, and research studies of the drug led to some extraordinary advances including the discovery of the serotonin system. When LSD experiments were restricted in 1962 and again in 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy held a congressional hearing. "If they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren't they worthwhile now?" he asked officials of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health. "Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that [LSD] can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly." [continues 4834 words]
When does legal relief of pain become illegal pursuit of pleasure? My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind? -St. Augustine [continues 3879 words]
Thus the advent of Viagra does not simply treat a disease. It changes our conception of disease. This paradigm shift is a common occurrence but is below our radar. Hair loss becomes a disease, not a fact of life. Acid indigestion becomes a disease, not a matter of eating poorly. If these examples seem to make light of the broadening of disease, the ascent of psychopharmaceuticals makes the issue urgent. Outside the realm of the tangibly physical, the power of drugs and drugmakers is far greater. What we now know as "anxiety disorder," for example, existed only in theory from Freud's time through World War II. In the early 1950s, a drug company polled doctors and found that most had no interest in a medication that treated anxiety. But by 1970, one woman in five and one man in thirteen were using a tranquilizer or sedative, and anxiety was a mainstay of psychiatry. The change could be directly attributed to two drugs, Miltown and Valium, which were released in 1955 and 1963, respectively. The successor to these drugs, Xanax, introduced in 1981, virtually created a disease itself. Donald Klein had already proposed the existence of something called "panic disorder," as opposed to generalized anxiety, some twenty years before. But his theory was widely refuted, and in practice panic anxiety was treated only in the context of a larger problem. Xanax changed that. "With a convenient, effective drug available," writes Peter Kramer, "doctors saw panic anxiety everywhere." Xanax has also become the litmus test for generalized anxiety disorder. "If Xanax doesn't work," instructs The Essential Guide to Psychiatric Drugs, "usually the original diagnosis was wrong."[9] [continues 5070 words]
When Does Legal Relief Of Pain Become Illegal Pursuit Of Pleasure? "My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, hut I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love none even in hooks or poetry. Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go yet leave myself behind?" -St. Augustine [continues 5664 words]
In 1986, the Swiss city of Zurich designated its Platzspitz park as a refuge for drug users, a place where they would be tolerated by police and even offered sterile needles and medical care. The goal wasn't to condone drug use, but to control its side effects mainly the diseases contracted by users and spread to the population at large. But, by the early 1990s, "Needle Park" bulged with Europe's outcasts. As crime rose in the area and a oncecharming garden became an eyesore, Zurich ended the experiment. [continues 1414 words]
