THINK DIFFERENT

Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use By Jacob Sullum. - Tarcher/Putnam.

In 1914, Henry Ford published a tract inveighing against a substance that
was enjoying a spike in popularity. He gathered testimonials from a host of
luminaries, including Booker T. Washington, who said that the drug caused "a
blunting of the moral sense," and Thomas Edison, who said it "has a violent
action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the
brain, which is permanent and uncontrollable." "I will employ no person,"
Edison concluded, "who smokes cigarettes."

Even now -- a time of strong anti-smoking sentiment -- this paroxysm against
cigarettes will strike most people as hysterical. We can assess the rhetoric
against firsthand experience, a large body of reliable science, and (for the
most part) an open and honest discussion about what cigarettes do to the
body and mind.

Yet, had the anti-cigarette movement of the teens and '20s succeeded, the
"Little White Slavers," as Ford called them, could easily have been
subjected to a federal ban, followed by prosecution of makers, sellers --
even users. Then would have come the ad campaigns linking cigarettes to
violence, accompanied by a chill on any research that ran against the grain.
In such an environment, if an "expert" said that cigarettes not only caused
cancer but led inexorably to moral decay and blindness, most people would
dumbly nod their heads.

This move from prohibition to propaganda did happen, of course, with other
drugs that were legal and widely available in 1914 -- products of the coca
leaf, the hemp plant, and the opium poppy. These drugs, among others, came
to be the object of the giant, swaggering, military-moralistic complex that
is our war on drugs.

Saying Yes is not primarily (as its subtitle says) a defense of drug use. It
is, rather, a critique of anti-drug propaganda and a plea for reason.
Sullum, a scholar on drug policy and an editor for Reason magazine, argues
that there is a "silent majority" of drug users who smoke pot, snort
cocaine, even shoot smack without losing their lives, jobs, or families.
They stay quiet, because if they spoke up they would be ridiculed, fired (in
2000, two-thirds of big companies drug-tested), or arrested.

"People who use illegal drugs in a controlled, inconspicuous way are not
inclined to stand up and announce the fact," Sullum writes. "Prohibition
renders them invisible." The visible minority, then, are mostly people in
trouble -- under arrest, on the streets, in the morgue. But to mistake them
for the average drug user, Sullum argues, "is like assuming that the wino
passed out in the gutter is the typical drinker."

Sullum's case is easiest to make with marijuana. According to a federal
survey, 83 million Americans have inhaled and 12 million say they've used
marijuana in the last month. Given these numbers, it's not so surprising to
hear about Peter Lewis. The CEO of a major insurance company for 36 years,
and still its billionaire chairman, Lewis has been praised as a
perfectionist and an "extraordinary businessman." He is also, as Fortune
noted even before his drug arrest at a New Zealand airport, "a functioning
pothead."

You might laugh at that stodgy phrase -- as if it were so unusual for a pot
smoker to "function." But what if you heard there were "functioning
cokeheads" or "functioning dope addicts"? Sigmund Freud used cocaine
regularly for years; the 19th-century British author Thomas De Quincey had a
rather extensive career with opium. Both men wrote effusively about their
drugs of choice. Both also found it possible to moderate their use.

The same is true for many users now. Sullum cites a study of "controlled
opiate users," which included a 41-year-old carpenter who used heroin on
weekends for a decade, while living in a suburb helping to support his wife
and three kids.

The central argument of Saying Yes is that we should replace the current
model of selectively coerced abstinence with one of universal temperance. As
it is, some drug dealers sit in jail while others sit in corporate suites.
Robert Downey Jr. is a disgrace for using cocaine. Robert Dole is "brave"
for pitching Viagra. This system, Sullum writes, makes no sense
intellectually, morally, or practically. Yes, many people do hurt themselves
badly with coke and heroin and pot -- and Ecstasy and LSD, and so on. But
they are the small minority. Even drug czar William Bennett acknowledged
this in 1989 when he wrote, "Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk
of our drug-involved population."

To Bennett, this was even more reason to clamp down on all drug use, because
those who got by all right would encourage those who lack self-control,
whose lives would be screwed up with a few puffs or lines. But if addiction
has a human cost, so too does prohibition. The drug war has left us with a
prison system choked with drug users and small-time dealers, with black
market violence, infections from dirty needles, overdose deaths, and so on.

Many reasonable people justify these costs. However flawed, they say, the
drug war protects us from demon drugs. They impute to certain drugs a power
to enslave, to bewitch, to override all functions of choice, reason, or
moral capacity. "Methamphetamine," said a Colorado prosecutor, "is the
devil's key to your soul." But this theory of "voodoo pharmacology," Sullum
writes, falls apart under scrutiny. In a recent survey, 3 million Americans
said they've used heroin. Only 4 percent of those said they had used it in
the last month. The percentage of people who develop addictions to
methamphetamine and cocaine (powder and crack) is similarly low.

The point -- which physicians and psychologists affirm -- is that however
good or overwhelming a drug, human beings never fully lose their ability to
choose. Drugs are never satanic or angelic in themselves, but rather agents
of human possibility.

Deft, judicious, and thorough, Sullum's book is a healthy dose of sober talk
in a debate dominated by yelping dopes. But maybe what the cause for an
honest discussion of drugs needs, as much as its diligent scholars, is a
propagandist team all its own. Perhaps they could put together an ad
campaign, paralleling Apple's Think Different line, with images of William
James, Stephen Jay Gould, Tom Robbins, and other unapologetic drug users.
Maybe they could organize a national coming-out day -- handing out felt
marijuana or coca or poppy leaves for people to wear. And maybe for a day,
we could all just say what we know.