A VERY FINE LINE

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.

[sidebar;]

HEROIN: THE WONDER DRUG OF 1898

Heroin, which was distributed in small boxes with a lion and a globe
printed on the label, was hailed as the new wonder drug. . . . It was
promoted primarily as a nonaddictive treatment for respiratory illnesses
and the suppression of coughs. . . . It could be produced cheaply and
relatively simply with a high degree of purity and quality control.

Only small amounts were required per dose, and it could be given by
hypodermic injection, although it was usually administered orally, as
pastilles -- heroin cough lozenges were popular -- or tablets, or as an
elixir in glycerine solution. Within two years, it was widely used across
Europe and the U.S.A.

From "Opium: A History,"
by Martin Booth