THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

A VERY FINE LINE

The boundary between good and bad drugs is harder than ever to draw.

The same week that a Republican candidate for President spent struggling to
compose ever more tortuous nondenials of his drug use as a young man, a
former Republican Presidential candidate could be seen in full-page
advertisements forthrightly acknowledging his own use of another drug. Oh, I
know: two completely different and incomparable situations; how unfair to
Robert Dole and the Pfizer pharmaceutical company even to mention them in
the same paragraph as George W. Bush and cocaine. One concerns an illegal
drug that people take strictly for pleasure. The other concerns a legal drug
that people take . . . well, also strictly for pleasure, but (almost) always
with a prescription.

The ability to draw and patrol distinctions of this kind becomes critical in
a society like ours, with its two thriving multi-billion-dollar drug
cultures. Everyone understands that licit and illicit drugs are not the
same. How much easier things would be if, instead of having to lump them all
under the rubric of "drugs," we had one word for the beneficent class of
molecules to which Viagra and Prozac belong, and another for the pernicious
class that contains cocaine and cannabis.

The problem is that there is a long history of molecules getting switched
out of one drug culture and into the other. Alcohol, for instance, has spent
time in both cultures in this century. For part of the time that alcohol
resided in the bad drug culture, opium, now evil, occupied a prominent place
in the good drug culture, where it was dispensed by reputable pharmaceutical
firms. More recently LSD and MDMA (a k a ecstasy), both born in the good
drug culture, have found themselves exiled to the bad. Occasionally the drug
traffic flows in the opposite direction. After spending the last few years
firmly ensconced on the demon side of the drug divide, cannabis has lately
got a toehold on the therapeutic side, at least in the half-dozen states
that have legalized medical marijuana. Earlier this year the Institute of
Medicine announced that for a small class of patients, cannabis did indeed
have therapeutic value.

What we have here, then, is a drug war being fought on behalf of a set of
distinctions — a taxonomy of chemicals that, far from being eternal or
absolute, has actually been shaped by historical accident, cultural
prejudice and institutional imperative. You can imagine an alternative
history in which Viagra wound up on the other side of the line -- had it,
say, been cooked up in an uptown drug lab and sold first on the street under
the name Hardy Boy.

You would be hard-pressed to explain the taxonomy of chemicals underpinning
the drug war to an extraterrestrial. Is it, for example, addictiveness that
causes this society to condemn a drug? (No; nicotine is legal, and millions
of Americans have battled addictions to prescription drugs.) So then, our
inquisitive alien might ask, is safety the decisive factor? (Not really;
over-the-counter and prescription drugs kill more than 45,000 Americans
every year while, according to The New England Journal of Medicine, "There
is no risk of death from smoking marijuana.") Is it drugs associated with
violent behavior that your society condemns? (If so, alcohol would still be
illegal.) Perhaps, then, it is the promise of pleasure that puts a drug
beyond the pale? (That would once again rule out alcohol, as well as
Viagra.) Then maybe the molecules you despise are the ones that alter the
texture of consciousness, or even a human's personality? (Tell that to
someone who has been saved from depression by Prozac.)

At this point our extraterrestrial would probably throw up his appendages
and ask, Can we at least say that the drugs you approve of all have a
capital letter at the beginning of their names and a TM at the end?

Historians of the future will wonder how a people possessed of such a deep
faith in the power of drugs also found themselves fighting a war against
certain other drugs with not-dissimilar powers. The media are filled with
gauzy pharmaceutical ads promising not just relief from pain but also
pleasure and even fulfillment; at the same time, Madison Avenue is working
equally hard to demonize other substances on behalf of a "drug-free
America." The more we spend on our worship of the good drugs ($20 billion on
psychoactive prescription drugs last year), the more we spend warring
against the evil ones ($17 billion the same year). We hate drugs. We love
drugs. Or could it be that we hate the fact that we love drugs?

To listen to the storm of comment surrounding George W. Bush's
"irresponsible youth," one might reasonably conclude that no upstanding
American has taken an illicit drug since 1974 or so. Illegal drugs have been
so thoroughly demonized that the only way a person can talk about his drug
use in public (in private is a different matter) is by drawing bright lines
in time: it was a different moment, I was a different person. Thus we have a
tortuous taxonomy of self to go along with our tortuous taxonomy of
chemistry.

Every time a politician finds himself personally ensnared in the drug
issue — finds himself, that is, on the wrong side of the drug war's battle
line between Us and Them — an uncomfortable truth threatens to burst into
public view: in this war there is no Them. The enemy in the drug war is Us —
our faith in the power of drugs to bring us pleasure, to alter the given
textures of consciousness, even to gratify the (unspeakable) wish to get
high. These are qualities hard to accept in oneself, despite the fact that
we humans have indulged these desires since time immemorial. It's much
easier to talk instead about political hypocrisy or youthful indiscretion.
And so these scandals invariably devolve into dramas about the virtue of the
candidate rather than that of the drug war itself. Candidates come and go;
the war must go on.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, last wrote about the
politics of sprawl.