HONESTY AND THE WAR ON DRUGS

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of communism was the way it forced those
who lived under it to lie about just about everything, from the trivial to
the most important aspects of every-day life.

Whatever one genuinely felt about communist icons and principles, about the
party bosses who rode in their chauffeur-driven limos down their specially
reserved lanes of the Moscow expressway, one dared not say those things.
Rather, one would have to bury those feelings as deeply as possible within
oneself, letting them out only under carefully guarded circumstances and in
the company of only the closest of friends.

Not only would true feelings about communism have to be suppressed, but
slogans and lies would have to be ritualistically and enthusiastically spit
out as well.

Sullen acquiescence was insufficient; you would have to pretend to
fervently believe in what the state demanded you believe in.

This institutionalized form of lying, what the social scientists now
pretentiously call "preference falsification," was, of course, ultimately
dysfunctional for such societies.

As Vaclav Havel and others pointed out, it tended to produce not the "new
socialist man" of virtue, but a sullen, cynical type of being, an
individual with little capacity for trust in, and cooperation with, others.

A culture is not healthy when it is built upon a foundation of lies and
when it then preserves itself by systematically punishing the expression of
truths that all can see but are afraid to acknowledge. All of this comes to
mind when considering the tortured manner in which our own society attempts
to deal with the question of drugs and past drug usage.

The issue has, belatedly, lodged in our national consciousness with the
allegations regarding George W. Bush and cocaine. But it has actually been
laying there for some time, with everyone pretending, as with a certain
naked emperor, not to see it.

One problem is that as the counterculture generation has successfully
completed its "march through the institutions" and assumed genuine
political and economic power, it has not really come to grips with the
values and behaviors that it once upheld, including drug use.

As a result, a large number of "responsible" politicians and opinion
leaders have enthusiastically enlisted in the war on drugs and
enthusiastically approved the harshest possible penalties for even minor
drug offenses, all the while knowing full well that they themselves have
used the very same drugs, and may have once even proselytized about the
virtues of doing so.

Thus, millions of Americans who have used various drugs are now suppressing
all information about those experiences, as well as any internal doubts
they may have about the anti-drug orthodoxy of our era, while pretending to
be passionate, gung-ho anti-drug crusaders.

In other words, career advancement and broader social approval now require
that we lie and utter slogans on cue that we don't really believe in.

Because drug use of any kind has become unfashionable, telling the truth
about one's own past involvement with drugs, like telling the truth about
communism while living under its sway, has now become dangerous.

The hypocrisies and inconsistencies in all of this become further magnified
when considering the more specific case of marijuana; more precisely, the
difficulty of waging the war on drugs while continuing to also lump that
relatively harmless substance with other, more dangerous variants.

Many times more Americans have "experimented" with marijuana than with
other illegal drugs, and many responsible citizens still use it regularly
and in moderation without committing "Reefer Madness" type crimes under its
influence.

Marijuana has long been considered a "gateway" to experimentation with more
dangerous drugs, but simple logic tells us that any hazard it presents in
that sense stems more from its legal classification than from any
properties intrinsic to the substance itself.

There is also a sizable, and still growing, body of evidence that moderate
use of marijuana in reality poses remarkably few risks to one's
health--that smoking a joint or two a day while sitting on one's back porch
is far less injurious to both oneself and to society as a whole than, for
instance, smoking three packs of Marlboros or driving home from a bar after
downing a half-dozen martinis.

Perhaps most troubling of all for those who continue to insist that
marijuana be lumped with other hard drugs is the growing movement to permit
its legal use for medical purposes.

Because the substance has proved to be effective in combating the effects
of illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS, six states,
beginning with California in 1996, have now passed state referenda allowing
such treatment. Others are set to follow shortly.

There are, of course, many people who don't want to hear such arguments,
crusaders whose fervor requires the suppression of any facts that undermine
anti-drug orthodoxy.

For those folks, anyone who expresses caveats about our anti-drug campaign
is deviating from the program, stepping out of that synchronized lock-step
necessary for victory.

Perhaps. But one suspects that the war on drugs, like other wars in the
past, also can be lost because those fighting it are using the wrong
tactics. And that perhaps it is not too late to substitute an approach
based on logic and honesty for the current one consisting mostly of
hysteria and distortion.