A soft case for hard drugs.
I'm telling you this because Jacob Sullum's anti-drug-war polemic Saying Yes reminded me how few people are willing to admit that they take or took drugs. Their silence is why the brutal, inhumane drug war is allowed to go on, bulldozing millions of innocent lives in its path. So I had to say my part: I do drugs. And I'm proud.
There's nothing particularly edgy about drug-taking. Twenty million Americans have tried LSD; 28 million have used cocaine, (including, many say, our president); at least one in three have used marijuana. When the Greatest Generation finally dies off, the ratio of drug-user to non-drug-user will soar even higher. The fact is, as Sullum reminds us, drug users are normal.
To his credit, Sullum condones drug use repeatedly in his book. He takes a number of positions that are commonsensical yet radical, given the way that the drug debate is currently framed. For example, he argues that drugs aren't inherently addictive or destructive: "Just about anything that provides pleasure or relieves stress?including eating, sex, gambling, shopping, jogging and Web surfing?can be the focus of an addiction."
He also reminds us that young people who are moderate drug users tend to be far more socially balanced than young people who have never tried drugs, and even drags into the light the forbidden fact that most drug users, even most heroin and crack users, are normal members of society with normal responsibilities.
Sullum debunks the myths that drive the drug war hysteria one by one, using a clear, rational, calm style. This is Sullum's biggest strategic mistake and why the book is such a grotesque failure. What he doesn't understand in the drug debate is that you can't reason with witchburners. In fact, it's not even a debate. It's an inquisition. The people who shape and support the current drug war are evil lunatics, plain and simple.
Sullum doesn't grasp this because he is incapable of accepting an America in which policy is shaped by lunacy and malice. Sullum is a committed libertarian and therefore a strict Enlightenment rationalist. He believes so deeply in the power of reason that, as his book jacket proudly declares, he was once even the editor of Reason. Sullum, in other words, is reason ad absurdum.
This is clear from his bizarrely extraterrestrial understanding of his subject ("Drinking alcohol for pleasure always involves some measure of intoxication, which is what 'cheers the hearts of men' and helps bring them together in fellowship") and from the assumptions he makes about his intended readership, which, judging by the structure of his argument, is Middle America.
In the first chapter, "Chemical Reactions," he rationally engages mainstream Christians by comparing their beliefs about drugs to Mormon and Islamic attitudes, and then he debunks widely held Christian prejudices by citing counter-examples within the Bible which support wine-drinking and merriment.
At which point I thought, "Is Sullum fucking nuts? He's debating Christians!"
You can almost see Sullum at a witch-burning a few centuries earlier, standing calmly at the edge of the mob, confident that his power of reason would win them over one by one and free the condemned woman: "Gentlemen, fellow Colonials, hear me, for ye may think that the woman ye are befixing to the stake is a witch deserving of fire, but did ye know that among the Africans along the Western Cape, there doth practice witches who perform good and bad?"
Meanwhile the witch is saying, "Aaghhh!"
"Let us also consider Acts, in which Peter tells us?"
"Stop blubbering and get a fucking musket, you rationalist gasbag! Aagghh!"
To which a wigged Sullum would continue, with the calm piety of a committed rationalist, "?can be a responsible, moderate witch, carrying on with one's normal duties as a Christian while also consulting with other spirits, in moderation of course, which Jesus Himself accorded in John?"
He'd still be talking long after the mob had dispersed, debunking witch-hunting to the woman's smoldering ashes, cheered by the quality of his own argument.
Sullum, as a rationalist, is enthralled by the idea of moderate drug use and responsible drug users. He sees moderates everywhere, which is a mistake, because by doing so he takes all the fun out of drug use, alienating what should be a naturally sympathetic reader such as myself. He's the parent at the prom handing out condoms to the students and following them into dark corners, reminding them of the need to practice safe, responsible sex. By the time he reaches his grand conclusion, in a chapter titled "Managing Moderation," you just want to punch him, tell him to get the fuck away because he's bumming your high.
The real issue in the drug debate shouldn't be framed by whether drugs can be taken in moderation or whether drugs are inherently evil. The real issue is more plain: Should a person who takes drugs in the privacy of his own home have his life destroyed by the state? Does choosing smack over that filthy peasant drug alcohol warrant years of rapes and beatings in prison? Clearly, the answer is no. America's drug laws are savage and cruel, period.
Face facts: Those who promote the drug war are neither reasonable nor nice. They are our Taliban, our hardline mullahs. They lie, and they've destroyed lives by the millions. They've got the middle of the country?the silent majority of drug users?scared into siding with them because the lunatics don't play fair. Neither should the legalization movement.
Most major advances of social justice in this country came not thanks to the triumph of rational argument, but rather as a reaction to cultural upheaval and violence. Take slavery. Abolitionism was considered an extreme, fringe movement in the North right up to the early 1850s. "Rational" Northerners worked hard to engage the Southern slaveholders within their framework, since abolitionism was seen as "unrealistic." When the shift started, it was sudden and violent. The shift was made possible partly due to successful abolitionist propaganda, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, which finally made abolitionism respectable and accommodation repulsive in Northern bourgeois circles. Only the violence of the Civil War finally turned abolitionism into policy.
This should provide a good lesson to those of us who view the drug war for the evil that it is. A counter-war should be waged. We need more and better cultural propaganda to promote the joys of drug use, marginalize the drug war lunatics and expose the destruction that the drug war causes to innocent lives. It should no longer be respectable to promote the drug war. In fact, it should be dangerous.
By engaging the drug war supporters on their own terms, Sullum renders his book useless. He's the wrong man for the job: He should be debating the fine points of the Federalist Papers with other rationalist wonks, not writing drug-legalization polemics. It is telling that throughout the book Sullum never admits he uses drugs?a glaring omission. Either that means he has but is afraid that he'll alienate his imaginary audience of Christian loonies, or worse, he's never taken drugs and therefore is a lunatic himself. Either way, we drug users are going to have to look elsewhere for help.