IN THE FACE OF THE DRUG WAR'S TOTAL FAILURE, CAN CALIFORNIA'S
LEGALIZATION BATTLE KICK-START A MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE?

Prohibition has failed -- again. Drug prohibition has proven
remarkably ineffective, costly and counter-productive. 500,000 people
are behind bars today for violating a drug law - and hundreds of
thousands more are incarcerated for other prohibition-related
violations. There is a smarter approach usually called harm
reduction. Reducing the number of people who use drugs is not nearly
as important as reducing the death, disease, crime, and suffering
associated with both drug misuse and failed policies of prohibition.

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the DRUG
POLICY ALLIANCE, the leading organizations in the United States
promoting alternatives to the war on drugs, grounded in science,
compassion, health and human rights. He received his BA, JD, and PhD
from Harvard, and a Master's degree in international relations from
the London School of Economics. He authored COPS ACROSS BORDERS and
co-authored POLICING THE GLOBE: Criminalization and Crime Control in
International Relations.

McNally: How did drug policy reform become your life's work?

Nadelmann: It had something to do with my growing up in a fairly
traditional Jewish family, going off to college, smoking marijuana,
enjoying it, and wondering why people were getting arrested for it. I
was reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty at the time, and I wondered
why we were criminalizing something so much less dangerous than
alcohol. In graduate school, I ended up writing a dissertation on the
internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Then at the peak
of drug war hysteria In the late 80's, I wrote a piece in Foreign
Policy magazine, saying that most of what we identified as part and
parcel of the drug problem were the results of a failed
prohibitionist policy. Shortly thereafter the Mayor of Baltimore,
Kurt Schmoke, said much the same thing, and we got a lot of media
play. One thing led to another, and finally to my running the Drug
Policy Alliance, and becoming deeply involved in efforts to change
drug laws both in the US and around the world.

McNally: You've said that this is a multi-generational campaign. Why
do you say that?

Nadelmann: I was one of those weird kids who if you asked me what I
wanted to be when I grew up, I'd say a history professor. I became a
professor of politics, but very interested in the history of social
movements. Although sometimes things happen far more rapidly than one
could ever believe -- the repeal of alcohol prohibition or the fall
of the Soviet Union -- a lot of the biggest changes take multiple generations.

My role models are the movements for gay rights, civil rights,
women's rights, even the abolition of slavery in the early 19th
century. Every one of these has been multi-generational. Every one of
them started with people asserting what sounded like quixotic
principles -- about the fundamental equality of people no matter the
color of their skin, the fundamental equality of men and women, the
fundamental equality of people regardless of their sexual
identification. Our core principle is that people should not be
discriminated against or punished solely for what they put into their
bodies, absent harm to others. And I believe this principle will
ultimately prevail just as other once radical principles of freedom
and equality ultimately triumphed.

I've been involved for close to a generation now, and I increasingly
see myself mentoring and handing off the baton to a new generations
of activists. I see this movement morphing and having the same sorts
of internal struggles that other movements have had; it's an
inevitable part of the process. But I feel a sense of momentum right
now. Those other movements ultimately succeeded far more than they
failed. To the extent that I have an optimistic view of historical
evolution, I think the same thing is going to be true with the drug
policy reform movement.

McNally: The Drug Policy Alliance has recently co-hosted a series of
conferences around the country. The one in Los Angeles was entitled
New Directions: A Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy.
What are they about?

Nadelmann: We've done three of these New Directions conferences.
They're about shifting the paradigm of drug control from one in which
criminal justice approaches are dominant to one in which health
approaches are dominant. So much of drug policy takes place on the
ground, and so much involves both governmental and non-governmental
agencies and workers -- cops, prosecutors, housing, public welfare,
health, you name it. We're just trying to come up with pragmatic solutions.

We did a conference in New York in early 2009 together with the New
York Academy of Medicine. In June we did one in Washington DC with
the National Association of Social Workers. Last month we did one in
Los Angeles with the California Society of Addiction Medicine. Those
were our key partners, and we have a whole host of others from
health, civil liberties and sometimes law enforcement co-hosting with us.

These events push in a new direction: To reduce our reliance on a
criminal justice and punitive approach in dealing with drugs, and to
elevate the role of health in dealing with people who are addicted;
To focus criminal justice resources on the harms that people do to
one another, rather than simply arresting people for drugs; To move
toward decriminalization of drug possession, both for those who are
addicted and want help and for those who don't have a drug problem
and should essentially be left alone.

McNally: What are you hoping to achieve?

Nadelmann: First, we want to empower people who deal with drug
addiction to become more independent and to be sensitive to all of
the risks and dangers of doing drug treatment within the criminal
justice system. More and more of the drug treatment industry has
become "co-dependent" on the criminal justice system, relying on the
courts to send them patients and keep them there, even if the
assigned treatment is inappropriate or ineffective. The result is
less emphasis on helping people get their lives together and an
obsession with abstinence-only approaches in which the key criteria
of success or failure in drug treatment is the purity of one's urine.

Second, we want people of color -- African Americans, Latinos -- to
become more deeply engaged. From the traditional Baptist and
Evangelical churches within those communities, you sometimes see a
kind of heavy moralism that is very resistant to a pragmatic approach
to dealing with drugs. Conversations are now beginning to take place
within those communities that are leading things in a new direction.

Third, people who deal with the problems of drug addiction in the
cities oftentimes feel very removed from the whole debate around
marijuana. We want discussions around how you deal with
methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin addiction and how to deal with
marijuana -- which can be addictive, but for a much smaller number of
people and with less serious consequences... to happen in the same rooms.

Finally, when you bring people together like this, law enforcement
still holds back. One of our major challenges is to attract law
enforcement in greater numbers.

McNally: I was especially interested in officials from Vancouver
explaining how things are working since they shifted to more of a
public health approach.

Nadelmann: One of my principle objectives when I started this
organization, as it is now, is to inform Americans about approaches
outside the US that are proving effective with less incarceration and
less taxpayer dollars down the drain -- and with better results in
terms of helping people lead safe and healthy lives. Vancouver is an
outpost of European sensibility on drug policy in North America, and
leapfrogged San Francisco about a decade ago. Vancouverites and other
people in British Columbia moved on things like needle exchange
programs more quickly and effectively than in most places in the US.
Then they went a step further.

In the 1990s, Europeans had initiated projects where heroin addicts
who had tried methadone, tried drug-free, been to jail, tried
everything, and they couldn't quit, could go to a clinic and get
pharmaceutical grade heroin up to three times a day. Programs in
Europe proved remarkably successful -- reducing crime, reducing
addiction, helping people get their lives together and saving
taxpayers money. Montreal and Vancouver did their own very successful
projects, and earlier this year the New England Journal of Medicine
published a highly positive review of these things.

Vancouver also provides "safe injection sites", where people who come
to get a clean needle are allowed to bring their illegal drugs with
them and use them in a place with a nurse present. These too have
proven remarkably successful in enabling people to stabilize their
lives by reducing overdose fatalities, injection-related risks, and
public nuisance. There continues to be reluctance and resistance to
such things in the U.S., especially from the federal government.

McNally: Somehow our oceans isolate us from other folks who are
trying new things and succeeding...

Nadelmann: Can't blame it on the oceans, because places like
Australia are being innovative. We're such a big nation that when we
look for alternative approaches, we tend to look only within. People
might say, "I heard there's a really innovative approach to probation
in Kansas, let's look at that" or "Let's see what Texas did or New
York did..." But the notion of looking at what Switzerland or
Portugal or Australia or even Canada is doing, that's less the
American mindset.

McNally: You've said you're looking for the next generation on this
issue. Do you see one emerging?

Nadelmann: Students for Sensible Drug Policy - SSDP - was created
about ten years ago. It organizes college students to advocate as DPA
does for alternatives to the war on drugs. They mobilized initially
because of the ridiculous Congressional statute that prohibited
student loans from being given to anybody who'd ever had a conviction
of a drug offense, including marijuana possession. If you'd been
convicted of rape or murder or grand larceny, you were still
eligible, but not for possession of a joint. They've also gotten very
involved in trying to change campus policy, for example, to get
marijuana and alcohol treated the same. It's an innovative, dynamic
organization that works very closely with us, and is really growing.

I'm beginning to see and hear about more youth organizations
elsewhere around the country, some focused on young people of color.
In the black community you see more and more mobilization around
prison reform and reducing incarceration, and folks putting their
toes in the water on broader drug policy reform. The drug issue
stands out as one where young people are more mobilized than on most others.

McNally: I'm glad to hear that, because, when you point to other
reforms -- civil rights, gay rights, even ending the Vietnam War --
young people played a big role in those movements, and it seems to me
that's going to be needed here.

Nadelmann: I've met with faculty on a few campuses who say they
haven't seen any activism in a very long time to compare with what
SSDP is doing.

McNally: If people get involved and experience some success, there's
hope that they transfer that energy to other issues. Talk about
Firedog Lake and SSDP uniting on Just Say Now...

Nadelmann: A little take off on Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No".
Huffington Post put it at the top of the front page, and it got tens
of thousands of hits. They're initiating their campaign with support
for Prop 19, the ballot initiative in California to allow counties
and cities to choose to end the penalties for possession of
marijuana, basically a legalization initiative, one of the most
exciting things taking place right now. It was prompted by a leading
medical marijuana entrepreneur, Richard Lee, the unofficial "mayor of
Oaksterdam." He plowed back the money he was making into getting this
initiative on the ballot. Drug Policy Alliance helped a bit on the
drafting, and I'm doing everything I can to help raise funds and other support.

McNally: The polls seem to be all over the map, but one released July
28 by Public Policy Polling, has support for Prop 19 at 52%, 36%
opposed, 12% undecided.

Nadelmann: You can see another with almost the opposite result some
months before, and a Field poll showing 48 for, 44 against. My best
guess is that it's roughly 50/50, and normally it's hard to win a
ballot initiative when the public's split 50/50 a few months before
the election. When you get down to the wire, people get nervous, they
may like an idea in principle but they're worried about the details...

McNally: If they're soft, they'll peel off to "No."

Nadelmann: Exactly. I think it's going to be tough to win, but it has
a shot. If we can raise the funds to take the campaign to the next
level, who knows? And maybe young people will surprise everyone by
voting in much greater numbers than they usually do, especially in a
non-presidential election year.

I'll tell you this, if it doesn't win this year, we're going to win
this sometime in the coming years. Right now the momentum is on our
side, and I'm inspired. Every time I start to despair, something new
happens to give me hope: a new poll; or a new labor union comes out
in favor -- whoever heard of labor unions endorsing marijuana
legalization? Or members of Congress like Barbara Lee in Oakland or
George Miller in northern California or Pete Stark saying "I'll vote for it."

More people know about this initiative in California than about any
other initiative on the ballot. Already by mid-summer something like
70% of all likely voters said they had heard about Prop 19 and knew
it's about legalizing marijuana. It's generating the types of media
conversations and debates which are an essential part of the broader
dynamic that's needed to ultimately end marijuana prohibition in America.

McNally: Can you say a bit about Prop 5 in 2008? It was leading in
the polls but fell apart in the last few weeks.

Nadelmann: Prop 5 was a very different kettle of fish. It proposed a
major reform of the criminal justice system, the prison system and of
drug policy. If it had passed, it would have resulted in a reduction
in incarceration in California's overcrowded prisons of 25 to 30,000
non-violent drug offenders over the next few years. It would have
resulted in the transfer of a billion dollars a year from prison and
parole to treatment and rehabilitation, and would have reorganized
the entire corrections system to hold them accountable to a new set
of standards. It would have been the biggest reform of drug policy
and sentencing in the US since the repeal of alcohol Prohibition, and
the polling initially was in favor by a two to one margin. Even with
the additional monies allocated, it would have saved taxpayers money.

The prison industrial complex mobilized against this like I've never
seen, with Jerry Brown and Dianne Feinstein becoming the face of
their ads. At the last moment, the prison guards union put in two
million bucks of their own money, and raised another two million to
run dishonest ads scaring people. People were freaked out about the
economy, and we were not successful in getting out the fact that this
was going to save money -- in part because Attorney General Jerry
Brown mandated that the ballot language obscure the savings to taxpayers.

McNally: He placed the direct costs up front in the ballot language,
but the net savings, which were much greater, at the bottom.

Nadelmann: Ten years ago, Prop 36, which mandated treatment instead
of incarceration for non-violent drug possession offenders with drug
problems, won with 61% of the vote even though virtually the entire
political, media and criminal justice establishment came out against
it. The last lines of that initiative said that it would allocate
$120 million a year for 5 1/2 years, and would produce a net savings
of roughly a billion and a half dollars over that time. With Prop 5,
Jerry Brown ruled that the direct costs had to placed in the top line
of the initiative, and that any net savings would have to go in the
bottom line. Our initiative was the only one on the ballot that
actually had a net savings, but people don't tend to read to the bottom line.

McNally: Brown, an Attorney General with aspirations for Governor,
put the support of those unions over fully informing the public.

Nadelmann: Meg Whitman spent a quarter million dollars of her own
money against Prop 5, so I want to be clear I'm not taking any
partisan position for or against either candidate in the current
election in California.

McNally: As of mid-August, Prop 19 has out-fundraised the organized
opposition. Do we assume that's going to change as it did in Prop 5?

Nadelmann: If the opposition had not put money in to run those ads
against Prop 5, odds are it would have won. But, with the polling at
50/50 on Prop 19, they're probably figuring it doesn't have much of a shot.

I'm basically saying to major donors -- all of whom get no personal
benefit from this -- if Prop 19 wins, it's going to be an historical
breakthrough; it's an uphill battle but it does have a shot. When I
raised the money back in 1996 for Prop 215, California's medical
marijuana initiative, and then in subsequent years for other medical
marijuana initiatives around the country, and for Prop 36 and other
treatment initiatives, and for the asset forfeiture reform
initiatives in Oregon and Utah, I was always able to say to major
donors: we have 60-plus percent of the public in favor right now; if
we have the money on our side and there's no major money on the other
side, we win; if the other side comes in, it's going to be touch and
go; and, if they come in big, we'll probably lose. With Prop 19, I'm
encouraging major donors to take a chance on this, but they tend to
think if it doesn't have a better than 50/50 chance of winning, they
don't want to get in. I'm doing everything I can to persuade them. We'll see.

McNally: I thought it was quite groundbreaking when the NAACP of
California came out in favor of Prop 19...

Nadelmann: That was fantastic. Although it was a cutting edge civil
rights organization in decades past and they have a dynamic new
leader in Ben Jealous from San Francisco, the NAACP had become a more
socially conservative organization in recent decades and was often
wary of getting involved in criminal justice and especially drug
policy reform. But they do have a new direction, and their California
director, Alice Huffman, has stepped out boldly on this.

The Drug Policy Alliance released a report authored by a professor in
New York, Harry Levine, which says that in every county in California
blacks are disproportionately arrested for marijuana -- even though
they're no more likely to use or sell marijuana than are white
people. People can find that report at the Drug Policy Alliance
website. Alice Huffman properly identifies this as a civil rights issue.

McNally: Depending on the county, Blacks are arrested for marijuana
possession at typically double, triple or even quadruple the rates of Whites.

Nadelmann: Yes, that's right. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michele
Alexander writes that, as an African American, ten years ago when she
would hear people like me or Ira Glasser, the former head of ACLU,
talk about the war on drugs as "the new Jim Crow," she'd roll her
eyes. But the more she's looked at it, the more she's come to believe
that's exactly what it is.

By looking at the enormous extension of our criminal justice system;
at the fact that in many parts of America 50% of young black men have
at least one mark of a criminal record, and that marijuana and other
drugs are oftentimes responsible for that; at the ways in which law
enforcement resources are disproportionately targeted at young black
and brown men in both minority and non-minority communities, and at
the consequences in terms of higher levels of arrest and
incarceration -- this book makes an enormously powerful case that the
war on drugs, including the war on marijuana, is the new Jim Crow.

Marijuana accounts for 40% of all drug arrests in the US, and about
50% in the west. Only 10-15% of Americans support legalizing heroin,
cocaine or methamphetamine, but over 40% of Americans already think
we should take marijuana out of the criminal justice system. If we do
so, we could significantly reduce arrests and incarceration
especially of young men of color.

McNally: I'm going to read a couple of lines from Alice Huffman and
the California NAACP's endorsement of Prop 19: "Instead of wasting
money on marijuana law enforcement Prop 19 will generate tax revenues
we can use to improve the education and employment outcomes of our
youth, our youth want and deserve a future. Let's invest in people
not prisons, it is time to end the failed war on drugs by
decriminalizing and regulating marijuana to save our communities."

Wire service reports estimate that Mexico's drug lords employ over
100,000 "soldiers," and that the cartels' wealth, intimidation and
influence extend to the highest echelons of law enforcement and
government. The US office of National Drug Control Policy says that
more than 60% of the profits reaped by Mexican drug lords are derived
from the exportation and sale of cannabis to the American market,
only about 28% from the distribution of cocaine, less than 1% from
methamphetamine. Your thoughts?

Nadelmann: What's happening in significant parts of Mexico right now
seems like Chicago during the days of alcohol Prohibition and Al
Capone times 50 or 100. They estimate almost 30,000 people have been
murdered for reasons involving drug trafficking and the drug war
since President Felipe Calderon came to power about three years ago.
Most of those killed are in the business, but significant numbers are
also passers-by, innocents, people who wouldn't take a bribe, you name it.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox has been saying we need to put
legalization on the agenda, that in the long term it's the only
pragmatic answer. I was very pleasantly surprised to see President
Calderon recently acknowledge that it's time for a serious debate on
legalization. And that seemed to prompt President Fox to speak out
even more forcefully than before for legalization. But In Mexico
support for ending prohibition, even marijuana prohibition, is lower
than in the US.

There's no simple easy way to jump from where we are today to a world
in which marijuana is legally regulated and taxed in the US and
Mexico and much of the rest of the world. It's going to be a messy
political process, with inconsistencies in laws and enforcement and
different forms of decriminalization and people exploiting that, but
it's ultimately the only solution that can really reduce the violence
and murder and mayhem. We really have no choice but to head down this
road, negotiating the twists and bumps along the way, until both the
US and Mexico, and other countries as well, are ready to embrace a
more rational and orderly system of marijuana regulation.

McNally: On July 27 the House unanimously passed HR5143, which, if
enacted, creates a bipartisan commission to conduct a top to bottom
review of the entire criminal justice system, and offer concrete
recommendations for reform within 18 months. This is the companion
bill to Senator Jim Webb's S714, already approved by the Senate
Judiciary committee. According to Senator Webb, legalization should
be on the table for discussion.

Nadelmann: Senator Webb's bill is now back in the Senate and, apart
from the somewhat irrational opposition of Senator Coburn from
Oklahoma, a clear majority supports it. It's just a matter now of
getting it to a vote.

Also exciting was the recent reform of the federal crack/powder law
that had punished the sale of five grams of crack cocaine with the
same harsh penalty as sale of 500 grams of powder cocaine. The vast
majority of people arrested and prosecuted for crack offenses are
blacks even though they only make up a minority of users and sellers.
Obama came in to office saying he wanted to end this disparity, and a
lot of Democratic leadership said the same thing along with us, the
ACLU, the Sentencing Project, the folks at OSI, the NAACP, Families
Against Mandatory Minimums and a whole range of others. We all fought
tooth and nail to eliminate the disparity, and I've got to give
credit to Obama's Justice Department, who pushed hard with us.

In the end, when Republicans and some conservative Democrats opposed
fully eliminating the disparity, a compromise cut the disparity to 18
to one. People held their noses at the compromise, because there's
something offensive about retaining a legal discrimination that has
such racially disproportionate consequences. But thousands of people
are going to spend less time behind bars and it's going to save
taxpayers lots of money. And it's quite likely that a better bill
would not have gotten through for many years to come.

With the exception of Lamar Smith of Texas, you had more Republicans
vocally supporting this than opposing. Prominent conservatives from
Grover Norquist in DC to Ward Connerly in California supported the
major reform. In an era when almost nothing in Washington happens on
a bipartisan basis, this bill -- where people were potentially
vulnerable to being accused of being soft on crime -- went through
with a voice vote and a very strong majority.

McNally: And there's the Vienna Declaration, the official conference
statement authored by experts in the International AIDS Society, the
National Center for Science and Drug Policy, and the British Columbia
Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. You were at that conference, what
does that declaration mean?

Nadelmann: It's probably the most significant global communications
effort to mobilize opposition to the war on drugs since 1998, when I
and others orchestrated a public letter to UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan on the occasion of the UN General Assembly Special Session on
Drugs in New York. The International AIDS Conference happens every
two years. The recent gathering in Vienna focused to a much greater
extent than ever before on the ways in which the global war on drugs
undermines efforts to reduce HIV/AIDS in much of the world.

Heavy reliance on criminalization and resistance to public health
approaches means that HIV continues to spread among people who use
and inject drugs as well as their lovers, their children and others.
Outside southern Africa, injection drug use is often the number one
or two cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS. It's not injection drug use
per se because that doesn't cause AIDS - it's injection drug use in
an environment where you don't have needle exchange and other
pragmatic harm reduction policies, etc. This started as an effort
among scientists and physicians, and they lined up a lot of other
signatories including former presidents. The list of signatories is
going to continue to grow. Google "Vienna Declaration" and you can
sign your own name to it.

McNally: Let me read a quote from Dr. Evan Wood, the founder of the
International Center for Science and Drug Policy, about the Vienna
Declaration: "There is no positive spin you can put on the war on
drugs. You have a $320 billion illegal market, the enrichment of
organized crime, violence, the spread of infectious disease. This
declaration coming from the scientific community is long overdue; the
community has not been meeting its ethical obligations in terms of
speaking up about the harms of the war on drugs."

The International Center for Science and Drug Policy did a review of
300 international studies and found that in 87% of the cases dating
back 20 years, intensifying drug law enforcement resulted in
increased rates of drug market violence. When it was pointed out to
Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, that Mexican drug lords make 60%
of their profits from marijuana, and he was asked if maybe marijuana
legalization would be a good idea, he said, "I don't know of any
reason that legalizing something that essentially is bad for you
would make it better from a fiscal standpoint or a public health
standpoint or a public safety standpoint." A quick comment on the
Obama administration's efforts.

Nadelmann: Obama made a number of commitments: that they would stop
medical marijuana raids and acknowledge marijuana has a legitimate
medical use; that they would allow federal funding of needle
exchanges; and that they would do what they could to repeal the crack
powder penalties. In all three of those areas the Obama
administration more or less made good on its commitments. They
announced last fall that they would no longer go after medical
marijuana in the states that had made it legal, and they've mostly
kept to that; although they didn't push for federal funding of needle
exchange, they allowed it to happen; and, as we already discussed,
the crack/powder disparities were decreased. They're also pushing for
more of a public health emphasis. Unfortunately, if you look at the
allocation of the money, it's still two to one in favor of law enforcement.

Kerlikowske was the police chief of Seattle, the city that hosts
Hempfest, the largest -marijuana-focused gathering in the world where
almost nobody gets arrested. He's a smart, thoughtful, reasonable
guy, and he's moved things in a good new direction. But for some
reason he seems to feel compelled to keep talking nonsense about
marijuana and marijuana policy; he won't use the phrase "harm
reduction" even as US government representatives increasingly embrace
it in international health forums; there's no willingness to move
forward on heroin maintenance, supervised injection facilities and
other harm reduction innovations that have proven so successful
abroad; and he seems to have not the slightest idea how to respond to
the growing calls from Mexico and South America to "break the taboo"
on considering all drug policy options, including legalization. It
all adds up to incremental reforms in the right direction with no
real vision or intellectual coherence regarding the future of drug
control policy.-

McNally: -- "No fiscal good..." That's clearly wrong.

Nadelmann: Why don't they just stick to saying things that are true
and accurate? Obama made another commitment when he was running for
office - that he would no longer allow science to be trumped by
politics. But in the drug area, they continue to let it happen.

McNally: Finally, why do you think the US with its claims to
individual liberties has been and continues to be against substances
that alter or expand consciousness? What's going on in American
culture that fears altering consciousness in ways that indigenous
cultures, for example, have practiced for millennia?

Nadelmann: It's a funny thing, we look at alcohol prohibition in
America now and think that was some historical fluke from 1919 to
1933 when the country went sort of crazy. But, in fact, that was the
outcome of a multi-generational effort that began with reasonable
calls for temperance in the consumption of alcohol and ultimately
evolved into radical calls for prohibition and total abstinence.
There's a deep seated belief in America -- I think it's wrapped up
with different strands of Protestant Christianity -- that my body is
not just my body, it's God's vessel, and that I have an obligation to
my Lord and Maker to keep this body free of polluting or mind
altering substances. So there's something almost fearful in our
consciousness. We're not totally unique in this regard, but we do
seem to take it further than most others.