DRUGS 'R' US, IF WE'RE HONEST

Deep in the hearts of Americans there lurks an almost religious belief that
drug use is not just illegal, but inherently evil and immoral. If
rationality guided our drug policies, most of the illegal substances now
generating billions of dollars in underground profits would have been
decriminalized and drug treatment centers would be wherever they're needed.
But our society's attitude about (certain) psychoactive substances is
oblivious to rational critique; our demonization of drugs has fanatical and
cultlike dimensions.

The cold reality is that we'll never be free of these drugs. Indeed, drugs
are us. Serotonin, endorphins, Adrenalin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc.
are mind-altering chemicals produced by our own bodies. These powerful
substances produce such dramatic changes in mood and behavior, there's
little doubt they would be illicit were they not endogenous. Our
circulatory systems are very efficient drug pushers.

Perhaps if we better understood our biological connection to drugs, we'd
realize the need to avoid punitive social policies that command us to
terminate our intimate relationship with drugs. And it is quite intimate;
humanity evolved from herbivorous ancestors, whose diets regularly included
plants with powerful psychoactive agents. Virtually all pharmaceutical
agents (legal and illegal drugs) originally derive from wild plants and fungi.

Much of this information is available in Daniel M. Perrine's 1996
path-breaking book, "The Chemistry of Mind-altering Drugs: History,
Pharmacology and Cultural Context."

Scientists believe that our neurological system accommodated and, in some
cases, incorporated these substances as our bodies became more complex.
Studies have found evidence of that co-evolution with the discovery of
neurological receptor sites for most of the psychoactive drugs we now
demonize. Those substances produce specific chemical transmitters that fit
receptors within us like keys do a lock. Marijuana, cocaine, opiates
(heroin, morphine and codeine), "psychedelic" drugs like LSD and mescaline
and even amphetamines have their own private receptor sites in the network
of neurons that enable humans to think and feel.

Vitamins provide a good analogy of this evolutionary process. Produced in
nature outside the human body, vitamins now are necessary for optimal human
metabolism and well-being. Since our contemporary diets lack many of those
essential substances, we've created an entire "health-food" industry
devoted to nutritional compensation.

Similarly, modern humanity no longer ingests the drug-rich plants that once
typified our primal diets (and helped design our nervous systems), so we
use external substances to compensate.

That's why the desire for drugs is such a universal need. Human beings
can't "just say no" to physiology. We resist this conclusion because it
humanizes rather than demonizes drug use and undermines the "bogeyman
strategy" that motivates this nation's ridiculous war on drugs.

But it also is clear that certain drugs are demonized while others are
lionized. Commercials for BuSpar, for example, a new drug made by
Bristol-Myers Squibb, tout the substance's miraculous powers to reduce
anxiety. Similar drugs, Prozac being the most prominent, are aggressively
being marketed (pushed?) to anxiety-ridden Americans.

These drugs are not seen as chemical solutions to human problems, they have
redefined human problems as chemical imbalances.

Our natural connection to drugs also increases our tendency to abuse them,
which is undesirable. However, to discourage abuse, we recklessly
exaggerate the dangers of certain drugs and criminalize their use. Rather
than reducing the social harm caused by drug abuse, these misguided
policies serve to exacerbate the problem.

I won't bore you by listing the negative effects and perverse incentives of
our drug policies, though the list is expanding ominously. But even that
lengthening list has failed to prevent drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey from
ratcheting up the idiocy another notch. We've exported our prohibitionist
logic and $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia, where we're
opening another front in the destructive drug war.

I'm arguing for rationality in our drug policies, but that line of argument
apparently has little persuasive power over people who believe drugs are
the work of supernatural demons or other theological bogeymen. Perhaps if
we began to understand our drug policies as a series of fruitless assaults
on human nature, we would assist rather than punish drug-abusing citizens.
Perhaps we would bring our policies more into accord with those of several
European countries that have learned to accept drugs as a part of
humanity's biological heritage and decided to reduce the harm of abuse
instead of denying reality.