DRUG PROHIBITION: A PERVERTED INSTINCT?

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.