DRUGS DON'T LIVE UP TO THE MYTHS

A memorable scene in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic depicts a
teen-age girl's initiation into the world of cocaine by her prep
school boyfriend. She inhales the fumes from a pipe and almost
instantly a look of rapture engulfs her face. A moment later tears of
ecstasy well up in her eyes, as she surrenders herself to the
seductions of the drug and the boy.

Traffic is both a fine film and a useful polemic in the war against
the war on drugs. Yet this scene implicitly affirms a fiction that
has played a key role in justifying this nation's insane drug policy.
That fiction is that drugs are enormously powerful, life-transforming
agents, which send their users off into a world of cosmic
enlightenment and pleasure, or of soul-destroying degeneracy and
despair.

In fact, drugs rarely do either of these things. The vast majority of
people who have used illegal drugs at some point in their lives
neither become addicts nor write a poem as good as Kubla Khan (which
was the product of an opium dream), nor compose a song as memorable
as A Day in the Life.

And the reason for this is simple: Drugs are not -- or more precisely
should not be -- nearly as big a deal as those who celebrate them and
demonize them treat them as being.

At some point in their lives, most adult Americans have intoxicated
themselves with alcohol. Many people, when they are young, get a kick
out of getting drunk. Most of them soon discover that getting drunk
is an overrated experience, and that it is attended by significant
disadvantages that become particularly clear to the votary of
Dionysus when he finds himself puking in the shrubbery at 3 a.m.

Most of these people either stop drinking altogether, or they
continue to drink, but learn to do so in moderation, which means that
although they may sometimes enjoy a sensation of mild intoxication,
they rarely or never get well and truly drunk.

A society that neither worships nor demonizes alcohol recognizes that
alcohol is one of life's small but significant pleasures, and that
for many people, drinking in moderation enhances their health and
well being. It also recognizes that a minority of those who drink are
incapable of doing so without becoming alcoholics, and that this
addiction can become an extremely destructive force.

Most illegal drugs are no different from alcohol -- or would be, if
not for the additional problems created by their criminalization.
This is the dirtiest little secret of the war on drugs. Ironically,
those who demonize drugs do so in part because they have bought into
the propaganda of the drug pusher. The pusher wants his buyers to
believe that his product will change their lives -- that it is every
bit as potent as the anti-drug hysteria has led his potential
customers to believe.

It isn't. Ultimately, a gram of cocaine is neither more nor less
potent than a fifth of gin. Both will, for better or worse, leave
most of those who indulge in them substantially unchanged. Both will
put a destructive grip on some of those who come within their reach.
Both have the potential to kill the foolish and unlucky (in this
regard, it is worth repeating, the nation's most popular illegal drug
- -- marijuana -- is far less dangerous than a fifth of gin).

Making cocaine addicts into criminals is every bit as absurd a public
policy as making alcoholics into criminals.

People use mind-altering substances for many reasons, good and bad.
Drugs are no more likely to destroy a person's life than they are to
lead to spiritual insight and artistic achievement, which is to say
that occasionally they do have such effects -- but I wouldn't bet a
multibillion-dollar war on it.