EVER SEEKING ESCAPE

The latest prescription drug gone awry, OxyContin, recently grabbed
headlines. The stories told a familiar tale -- a painkiller intended for
cancer patients that became so addictive to so many people that demand
eclipsed legality. Pretty soon, shady doctors were illegally prescribing
it, eager drug dealers were buying and selling it, and unwitting addicts
were fatally overdosing from what, with a proper prescription, is a legal drug.

The story is familiar because it is like that of so many drugs before it.
OxyContin was originally prescribed to help suffering people. Think Valium.
Think Ritalin. Think codeine.

Cocaine was once considered a wonderful cure for many maladies in the 19th
Century. (Freud prescribed it for just about everything.) Even heroin was
hailed as a wonder drug when it was invented, in 1874, as a "safe,
nonaddictive" substitute for morphine. And of course, morphine was the
original wonder drug. Invented in 1810 as a painkiller for medical
operations, it quickly became the main ingredient in many 19th Century
tonics. Even Viagra is now being used recreationally as a thrill pill.

Perhaps you notice a pattern: Drug is invented to help people. Drug is used
recreationally and found to be dangerous. Drug is no longer considered so nice.

One rather obvious conclusion from this pattern of helpful drugs being used
for unintended purposes is that, we, as a species, naturally tend toward
recreational drug use. This is merely part of our never-ending collective
search to escape the banality and/or pain of existence and achieve some
sort of transcendence.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, in 1999, 87.7 million
Americans had tried an illegal drug. (That's about one in three.) And that
doesn't include alcohol or the many legal drugs that are abused.
Civilization is in part a history of recreational drug use. From the Greeks
and Romans with their wine-soaked bacchanalia to Native Americans and their
peyote rituals to the Chinese and their opium, it is practically a
universal experience to find some way to get high.

Horrifically, even some young children, left to their own devices, snort
glue and inhale paint-thinner fumes.

So it should be no surprise that OxyContin is being abused. It offers a
pleasant haze, and temporary removal from suffering. Perhaps the bigger
surprise is the inconsistency in drug policy it reveals. Why is something
such as OxyContin, blamed for numerous deaths, legal, while marijuana,
which has legitimate medicinal uses and is much less dangerous, still
illegal? Perhaps the total of more than $9 million worth of soft-money
contributions made by pharmaceutical companies to both parties in the last
election cycle might suggest one answer.

In any event, the war on drugs seems more and more a ridiculous attempt to
try to save us from ourselves -- and not even in a consistent way.