DRUG PROHIBITION: A PERVERTED INSTINCT? (continued from Part 1)

3 Now it has been endlessly demonstrated that the current and past practice
of Drug Prohibition is very racist indeed, and that the history of
prohibitions is predominantly a history of one group or another installing a
prohibition for the purposes of repression and exclusion of a perceived
threatening group.[10] Opium was outlawed because the Chinese railroad
workers used it, marijuana was prohibited because Mexican farm labourers
used it, cocaine because southern black men used it to work up the courage
to copulate with white women and
achieve immunity to bullets of less than .38 calibre (or so some white
racists believed)...Today in the U.S. the great majority of illegal drugs
are consumed by whites, but the great majority of prosecutions and jail
terms are levied against blacks. While even many Prohibitionists accept that
current practice of Prohibition may be
racist, they would insist however that the fault lies in correctable policy
details or in the deeds of police and prosecutors who are also racists. In
other words, Prohibitionists would insist that the goals of Prohibition are
noble, realisable, and transparent to race or other prejudice, but the view
expressed in this essay intends to show that Prohibition is inherently and
unavoidably racist because it springs from instinctive xenophobia: It is one
of the last remaining possible outlets for the instinct which enjoys social
approval on a wide scale.
And it is a very satisfying and effective outlet at that, and functions in a
multitude of ways:

1) Drug Prohibition supplies a large class of persons easily identified as
"foreign" and "inferior." Unlike the sometimes ambiguous judgements deciding
who might or might not be a communist, for example -- since that is a matter
of doctrine and intellectual commitment -- there seems no doubt about who is
a drug-user nor that using drugs sets one apart from human normality. The
fact that all known human societies have used drugs for a wide variety of
beneficial purposes strikes the Prohibitionist not as an argument for
considering drug use normal but as proof of the inferiority, the primitive
and debased nature of all previous human societies, and leads to the fatuous
conviction that our modern goal should surely be a "drug-free society."

2) The drug-using class does not resist. It is a class without much
political or professional clout to contest the prejudice, indeed, many drug
users are even prejudiced against themselves, so strong is the social
demonisation of their class and their habits. And the great majority of drug
users -- who are in reality normal citizens otherwise unrecognisable from
non-drug-using persons -- can afford no public admission of their preferred
consciousness-changers, nor risk any public criticism of the situation or
support for anti-Prohibition groups.

3) Drug users are a class that can be easily if irrationally identified with
practices "alien" to mainstream society and its traditions. A reason often
cited by Prohibitionists against accepting marijuana use is that society has
no associated ongoing tradition of use as is the case with tobacco, for
example. Thus even the most avid of the demonisers can, as did former Drug
Czar Bill Bennett, ignore the contradiction evident in their own severe
addiction to tobacco -- which kills as many as half its life-long
enthusiasts -- all the while pointing to marijuana use as "wrong,
destructive, dangerous, deviant...a stupid habit."

4) Members of the drug-using class are easily considered inferior, diseased,
defective, and unworthy to socialise with "normal" people. The widespread
but largely mythological images in the public mind concerning "addicts" and
their "horrible lives and habits" result in near-unanimous social approval
of demonisation of the class, even by many intellectuals and scientists who
should know better. The recent re-definition of Drug Prohibition as not
properly served by the metaphor of "war" but of a "cancer" -- "Federal
antidrug efforts are
more akin to fighting cancer" in the words of Robert Housman, Chief Policy
Advisor Office of National Drug Control Policy, Washington[11] -- is an
illustration of the trend to depict drug-users as candidates for forcible
and permanent, "surgical" removal from society. Whereas war can be fought
against one's neighbours for merely technical or economic reasons and
implies no essential xenophobia, the image of some subgroup as being like a
cancer calls forth convictions that have in the past allowed and facilitated
outright genocide.

5) Association with drug-use is a convenient mechanism for rejection of
viewpoints at odds with the paradigms of society. A principal justification
very much in force today for the rejection of the "sixties revolution" is
the common perception that it was driven by drug use, that drugs were
"responsible" for turning so many of the young away from our "Great Society":

"[The hippies] rejected the accepted social definitions of reason, progress,
knowledge, and even reality; they proclaimed their abandonment of the
egocentrism and compulsiveness of the technological world view. American
society was seen as a dehumanizing, commercialized air-conditioned
nightmare, meanly conformist in its manners and morals, hypocritical in its
religion, murderous and repressive in its politics."[12]

Psychedelic drugs in particular were seen as leading to "Eastern" religion
and philosophy, adherence to "alien" ideas completely antagonistic to modern
Western society. As a fulfilment of instinctive xenophobia by the
Establishment toward a challenge by the youth movement that actually brought
the former into disgrace over the
Vietnam War, we can more fully understand such statements as Nixon's: "To
erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs."[13]
Drug Prohibition has since the 1960s increasingly functioned as a vehicle to
repress not only positive memories of dissent and resistance, but to promote
the conviction that those hippies and idealists and their remaining remnants
are not only "un-American" and traitors to Western Civilisation, but the
scum of the earth, a "cancer," some sub-human class of mutants whose very
memory must be expunged along with the entire world-view they expressed.

4 Not only the practice of Drug Prohibition but the underlying paradigms
supporting the Prohibitionist attitudes which condemn all illicit drug use
as "abuse" and think of it as a "disease" are in fact racist, or to be more
accurate and in line with the argument developed here, an efficacious and
satisfying, but perverted outlet for the xenophobic instinct.[15] Writing
recently in the International Journal of Drug Policy, Arthur Gould argued that

"...illegal drugs have become a metaphor for our fear of the 'foreign.'
While it may be unfashionable and even illegal to criticise immigrants and
refugees for 'flooding into the country' and for 'destroying...culture with
their strange cultures and alien ways,' it is perfectly legitimate to attack
foreign drugs for the same reasons."[16]

Gould goes on to show how Swedish drug policy, perhaps the most radically
Prohibitionist in Europe, is overtly defended as a means to protect Swedish
national identity from "foreign" drugs and drug habits, and even "'foreign'
debates about legalisation and decriminalisation." Here, drugs and drug use
are no mere metaphor
for the `foreign,' but believed to be the genuine article! But even to think
of xenophobia as needing metaphor for its expression argues strongly for the
claim that we are dealing with instinctive behaviour rather than overt
calculated expression -- the result of well-informed deliberation -- for
such conscious results need only clear and descriptive language to effect
their understanding, not metaphor. If metaphor is required for expressing
fear of the foreign, it strongly suggests that not only is the behaviour
instinctive, but that its
present form is one that is disguised, and a substitute for original more
direct means of expression.

Xenophobic instincts evolved for good reason in our simian ancestors, but
like the appendix have far outlived their usefulness. Unlike the appendix,
however, the behavioural instinct of xenophobia, today expressed through
that vehicle of last resort, Drug Prohibition, kills and maims more than a
few, and may indeed lead to a major crisis for Western Civilisation
comparable to the paroxysms unleashed in the past against designated
out-groups. In light of ideas expressed here, we should have at least a
strong suspicion of why Drug Warriorism is so highly irrational and
resistant to logical objections, and perhaps irresistible for many in search
of a satisfying means of expression for unconscious drives that have no
other socially-sanctioned outlet. It is increasingly obvious to many that
Prohibition is not "rational policy" designed to bring the best results to
the greatest number.

Bertrand Russell once quipped, "The point of philosophy is to start with
something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something
so paradoxical that no one will believe it." If some of my starting premises
here do not fulfil the simplicity requirement for good philosophy, at least
they enjoy solid scientific support. But for many, the second requirement
for good philosophy will certainly be met by my line of argument:
Prohibitionists will unfailingly find it impossible to believe they are
acting out primordial instinctive xenophobia merely in their support of
Prohibition, no matter whether the means of support is itself racist in
practice.

If indeed we can accept that the "Drug War" is the last bastion, the last
possible socially-approved outlet for vestigial and now very destructive
xenophobic tendencies evolved long ago, will such an understanding help to
reverse the long-standing folly of Drug Prohibition? This is hard to say,
for in dealing with such follies it
is notoriously difficult to find quick-acting methods for correcting them,
and mere knowledge of one's instinctive drives can never eliminate them.
Perhaps a few borderline Drug Warriors might be embarrassed by the
demonstration that their support for Prohibition is a hangover from the
behaviour of apes, perhaps not. But it is, I believe, of fundamental
importance that we understand the roots of the phenomenon of racism and
xenophobia and its possible appearance in the guise of Drug Warriorism, for
such an understanding may well be essential for the eventual design of
tactics for the instinct's suppression in ways which will prevent its
further escape into
substitute behaviours even more destructive. Drug Prohibition in its great
irrationality requires a very significant explanation of the reasons for its
great hold on us -- our excessive, even fanatical preoccupation with it
despite its miserable failure and the simultaneous existence of far more
serious and correctable problems in our world. We waste our time and
resources on Prohibition to the exclusion of far more important and pressing
matters, and in so doing risk the future of our civilisation, even the
continued survival of humankind.

References: (cont)

10. Even articles in the popular press have lately stressed this theme, see
Alexander Cockburn, "The Drug War, A War on Poor, Lower Classes," Los
Angeles Times, June 11, 1998. The phenomenon is discussed at length in the
now classic volume by David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of
Narcotic Control, Oxford University Press, 1973. For a recent and severe
indictment of the racism permeating Drug Prohibition in the U.S. see "The
War on Drugs: Race Falls Out of the Closet" by Jerome G. Miller, in chapter
2 of his book, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal
Justice System, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 80-86.

11. Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1998, Letter to the Editor.

12. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, The
Lindesmith Center, 1997 (reprint), p.71-72.

13. From Richard Nixon's book In the Arena, cited in The New Temperance:
The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, David Wagner, Westview Press,
1997, p. 168.

14. See "Demonizing the 1960s" in The New Temperance: The American
Obsession with Sin and Vice, David Wagner, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1997.

15. The question arises, what might be considered a healthy outlet for the
instinct? Perhaps there are none that would fulfill the evidently powerful
needs of the instinct without transgression, but the preservation, practice
and encouragement of distinct cultural forms and rituals might go some way
in the right direction. Indeed, it seems that the social coherence and
long-term stability of many tribal societies were heavily dependent on the
continual enactment of ceremonies and rituals, and perhaps these were
socially-evolved forms
for the channeling of the xenophobic instinct into more or less harmless,
and thus beneficial means of expression.

16. Arthur Gould, "Nationalism, immigrants and attitudes towards drugs,"
International Journal of Drug Policy 9, April 1, 1998, p133.