USING YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS

Numerous tightly rolled cannabis cigarettes were in evidence at a June 12
luncheon at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian policy think-tank in the
Chicago Loop. These doobies were emblazoned on the cover of the provocative,
plainspoken book, Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use by Jacob Sullum, a
senior editor at Reason ("Free Minds and Free Markets") magazine.

Yet the capacity crowd of 36 hardly appeared ready to kick back and smoke
up: Mainly white men over 50 and conservatively dressed, they appeared more
likely to break a bong over a slacker's head than to consider Sullum's
argument against prohibitionism's moral fearfulness and shoddy science.

Sullum's thesis is that drug war policy has been ruled by "voodoo
pharmacology," the notion that certain chemicals can compel immoral
behavior. Anti-drug messages depend upon the idea that illicit substances
usurp users' judgment and free will, and that any usage equals abuse.
Punitive standards of interdiction and punishment compound the message that
such substances inspire immoral behavior.

Sullum subjects this invocation of automatic turpitude to a withering
critique. By examining the mythologized links between sloth, lust, madness,
gluttony, and wrath and their purported chemical precursors (historically
including tobacco and alcohol), he reveals the intellectual poverty of the
right's central conceit and retrieves the moral high ground ceded by uneasy
legalization proponents.

By discussing illicit substances in terms reserved for socially valued drugs
(notably alcohol) Sullum is able to examine what psychiatrist Norman Zinberg
termed "set and setting"-the combination of environment and expectations
that determines the qualities of a drug experience. When alcohol
prohibition's failure discredited the "demon rum" fervor of its proponents,
our extensive cultural experience with drinking allowed us to encourage
"controlled use," Sullum says.

The demonization of illicit drugs has resulted in a cultural naivete that
promotes irresponsible use and the black market. In Sullum's terms, voodoo
pharmacology recasts illicit substances (and their users) as the dreadful
"other," by averring that alcohol and drugs are fundamentally different, one
controllable and humane, the other corrupting and devilish. This
intellectual dishonesty, spoon-fed to children, contributes to rampant
social misuse of alcohol and other substances, as anyone familiar with drug
use among adolescents knows.

Moderate, responsible drug use is the elephant in the room of anti-drug
zealotry. Thus, even a politician like former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson,
who supported consideration of decriminalization, was unable to deviate from
the Clinton administration's script that drug use is always bad. While
then-U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) saw no contradiction in his support of
a major donor, St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, that sought to kill
legislation limiting beer ads on television, calling alcohol "a product
that's in demand." (Sullum finds Ashcroft's self-justification "notably
lacking in moral reflection.")

If, as Sullum suggests, the fearsome otherness of illicit drugs is
artificial and sags under analysis, then what allows the drug warriors to
get away with such a transparent syllogism? At the Heartland Institute
luncheon, Sullum dismantled the melodramatic, exaggerated morality that
props up our denial of temperance's possibilities.

Sullum detects this in the equating of "sloth" with substance use, which was
key to pre-Prohibition anti-alcohol propaganda and now is used to demonize
cannabis as an aspiration killer suited to losers. Sullum examines
"amotivational syndrome," the concept that marijuana use creates "dropouts"
disinterested in achievement, which provided the psychiatric underpinning
for cannabis prohibition once the '30s-era "reefer madness" typography of
violence had been derided. Discredited by the '90s, yet still key to
anti-cannabis sentiment, amotivational syndrome seems inconsistent with the
strange case of Progressive Insurance's Peter Lewis, innovative businessman,
billionaire and "functioning pothead." While Lewis may be an extreme
example, Sullum contends that rather than candidates for That 70s Show
couch, average cannabis smokers are employed adults with family and
community ties-and therefore have reason to conceal their preferred
intoxicant.

Drugs linked with artificially induced violence-cocaine, crack and
methamphetamine-initially seem a harder sell. Sullum argues that alcohol is
the drug most associated with mayhem, but societies have long accepted the
thesis of psychologist Craig McAndrew and anthropologist Robert Edgerton's
classic study Drunken Comportment: The variety of learned individual and
cultural responses to alcohol confirms that "drinking does not necessarily
beget violence." Even the striking statistic that "about a third of
convicted criminals are thought to have been drinking at the time of their
offense," fails to isolate the drinking activity from "personal and
environmental factors that make both drinking and crime more likely."
Indeed, violent repeat offenders often cite their drinking or stimulant use
as part of a "diminished capacity" defense (a ploy Sullum despises). The
anti-cannabis fervor of the '30s, Sullum notes, developed around lurid,
racially oriented rumors regarding the killer weed's propensity to inspire
violence and fortify offenders with "Dutch courage."

Sullum's notion of voodoo pharmacology is founded on the historic attempt to
lock in a causality that doesn't exist. Such causality is a primary
rationale for punishment. As noted gamesman William Bennett claims, "a
non-addict's drug use Š is highly contagious."

As befits a writer entering this hall of mirrors, Sullum is a bit of a
contradiction: He has impeccable credentials as a libertarian journalist yet
notes that his own "modest but instructive" use of illicit intoxicants
formed the "seed of my conviction that it's reasonable to expect drug users
to exercise self-control." Thus, his observations on the Silent Majority of
responsible users have an authority the anti-drug lobbies lack: "Prohibition
renders [such users] invisible, because they fear the legal, social and
economic consequences of speaking up." His book gains dramatic texture and
validity via interviews with such users, including MBAs, software engineers,
publicists, journalists, academics, a truck driver, and a social worker-all
of whom understandably requested anonymity.

He implies that these users represent the "average" consumer of illicit
substances, whose drug use is unremarkable when incorporated into mainstream
lives. Given that most politicians' survival depends on maintaining the
fiction that, as Sullum puts it, "drug users are different from you and me,"
this silent drug-using majority ironically perpetuates the careers of those
who promote the drug war. Meanwhile, the visible minority of troubled users
become archetypes in the cultural landscape, enforcing the "lazy pothead"
(or the acid casualty or the enraged cokehead) stereotype.

Sullum's audience at the Heartland Society was receptive to his argument
that most individuals have ample incentive (health, employment, community
standing) to keep their drug use in check. With regard to counterarguments
that decriminalization would result in numerous irresponsible new users,
Sullum references this hidden population of socially functional drug users
to call for dispassionate evaluations of prohibition's costs and benefits.
In the meantime, policymakers' continued insistence that dangerous excess
(rather than responsible use) establishes the norm results in a morally and
intellectually stunted debate.

The libertarian perspective provides a valuable intellectual counterpoint to
the drug-war mythology but maintains a colder distance from adverse
outcomes. For instance, Sullum argues that decriminalization of even
stimulants like cocaine or opiates like heroin would not result in graver
social conditions than the already dysfunctional landscape of the drug war
(black-market violence, theft compelled by artificial "street prices," and
so forth).

Yet what of the inevitable spike of addictive personalities who lose
control? Presumably, from a libertarian perspective, they would need to fend
for themselves, an idea confirmed by Sullum, who noted in e-mail
correspondence that he would not support diverting additional funds to
beef-up clinical rehabilitation: "In practical terms, this kind of subsidy
tends to undermine self-control." Such a laissez-faire approach to
dismantling drug prohibition could create new pockets of social pathology,
undermining any decriminalization efforts in their infancy.

Sullum also declines to support a "sin tax" on decriminalized drug products,
a frequent plank of left-leaning cannabis advocates. Yet any
conceptualization of a post-drug war America must take into account the
damage wrought on many communities by the war, as well as the need for a
substantial addiction therapy regimen. Some kind of taxable "war chest"
seems crucial to envisioning such a project.

Sullum avoids these thorny ambiguities of decriminalization for the
simplicity of his ideas in Saying Yes. Indeed, this book's sheer prescience
makes any objection seem churlish. And in some microscopic way, the
Heartland luncheon was like a hazy glimpse of the future, representing
stirrings of consensus regarding how the drug war will end, even if it seems
unimaginable for years to come.

With regard to the segregated personal destruction and diversion of
law-enforcement resources that the drug war has produced, Heartland-style
libertarians and ACLU-style civil libertarians are on the same side, even if
arriving via different journeys. At a time when most "writing on drugs"
consists of youthful preening memoirs, the coolheaded Sullum has produced a
genuinely dangerous book-a white paper from that distant unimaginable
future.