DRUGS PROVIDE POWERFUL SCAPEGOAT FOR POLITICIANS

Canada may soon decriminalize 'simple' cannabis possession. Based on the
history of 'drug scares' in North America, I believe that it is time to
address our Draconian drug laws despite American threats of retaliation
should we do so.

Reading across historical episodes, one can abstract a pattern for drug
scares and repressive drug laws which have a number of elements often
completely unrelated to the use of drugs. Drug scares are not about drugs
per se because drugs (including alcohol and cigarettes) are inanimate
objects which have no power or social consequence until they are ingested.
Instead, drug scares are about the use of something by a group of people
who are already perceived by a ruling elite as some type of threat.

For example, it wasn't alcohol that drove the move toward Prohibition; it
was the behaviour and morality of what the dominant, middle-class
Protestant saw as the 'dangerous class' of urban, immigrant, working-class
Catholics.

It was the Chinese opium dens and the resultant racism, not the widespread
use of opiates among white, middle-class, middle-aged women, that prompted
the first drug laws. It was only when cheap, smokeable cocaine (rock or
crack) made its way from rock-band tour buses and upper-class penthouses to
the African-American and Latino underclass, that calls in the U.S. for a
drug war began. Moral entrepreneurs were able to link a certain substance
to a group of users perceived by the powerful as deviant, dangerous and
otherwise threatening.

Scapegoating of drugs is a way of blaming a drug or its alleged effects on
its users for a variety of social ills which usually have nothing to do
with the user or the drugs per se. Had one been a fly on the wall at a
turn-of-the-century Temperance meeting, one might have believed that if not
for booze, there would be no crime, no broken homes, no mental illness and
no sex outside of marriage.

To listen to politicians and leaders of organized medicine in the 1960s,
one might assume that without the evils of cannabis and LSD there would
have been no student revolt or opposition to the Vietnam war. Most
recently, tuning in to politicians and the media about the blight of crack
cocaine in the inner city, one might think that the underclass would cease
to be marked by crime, poverty and violence if crack disappeared. There is
no historical evidence to support any such claims.

In short, drugs are highly useful, functional and beneficial scapegoats.
They provide a ruling class with "fig leaves to place over the unsightly
social ills that are endemic to the social system over which they preside"
(Patricia and Peter Adler). And they give the general public a focus for
blame in which a chemical 'bogeyman,' or the 'deviants' who ingest it, are
the root cause for a wide array of complex social problems.

In a recent letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail and American had
this to say: "Many of us in the States increasingly look to Canada for
leadership on social issues--not just drug policy reform, but healthcare
funding, urban planning, recognition of gay marriages and more. So, we say
to Canadians: Don't let the Walters (self-proclaimed U.S. drug czar) push
you around." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Dale Peacock

Huntsville