AFTER THE DRUG WAR, PART 2

So let's say we scrap the drug war. What then?

Yesterday, I discussed an age and culture that dealt with dope with
hardly any government interference; controls on drug abuse were
primarily social, cultural.

The drug war, however, supplanted all of that.

Albert Jay Nock, the great American individualist, was concerned with
one basic thing: That the government kept growing while other
institutions in society kept shrinking. "If we look beneath the
surface of our public affairs," he wrote, "we can discern one
fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between the
society and the State," which he both saw and lamented as "an increase
of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power."

Discussing this power switch, Nock mainly focused on how the state, in
removing money from the people via taxes, limits their wherewithal to
deal with circumstances in society without turning to government. But
it goes beyond money. Certain cultural institutions serve when they
are needed and whither when they are deemed unnecessary.

As a general rule, what the states does, the society quits doing. This
is true for the poor (compare today's welfare to the boisterous
pre-New Deal and Great Society charity industry), the elderly (think
Social Security, which, pre-New Deal, somehow the elderly got along
without thanks to family-care structures), and even drugs users (which
were, before prohibition, mainly dealt with by physicians, church and
family).

But who needs the myriad private institutions, social conventions and
cultural mores that previously dealt with problems when the
governments is ready, willing and (optimists blush) able to take care
of business.

For drugs, it has, to date, taken of business by jailing those who
enjoy or feel a compulsion to use narcotics; jailed those who grow,
distribute and sell those narcotics; along with seizing their property
and steadily whittling away the Bill of Rights.

It hasn't worked.

As pointed out yesterday, the price of drugs continues to fall, even
though the amount seized continues to climb - which can only mean that
use continues despite the best efforts of law enforcement (best
efforts that are damaging possibly irreparably our
Constitution).

If we're honest enough with ourselves to admit it, we'd quickly
confess the futility of the government's drug war, scrap it, and move
on.

But to what?

The purpose yesterday of reciting how drugs were dealt with in the
past was to see how they might be dealt with now and in the future.
Cultural controls, were in the past, vital factors of controls on drug
abuse. In fact, in any scheme, they are almost all that matters. If
you want to control drugs and the culture in which you live doesn't,
then you can forget about it: You're in the minority and don't matter.

While our society, presently steeped in state-prohibitionist solutions
to nearly everything (alcohol, guns, prostitution, drugs, even
ill-feelings if you count hate-crime laws), "plays down the importance
of many social mores, sanctions, and rituals that enhance our capacity
to control the use of intoxicants," Harvard psychiatrist Norman E.
Zinberg points out that they are key to actually keeping the lid on
abuse.

With prohibition serving as a crutch, many of the preexisting social
controls were abandoned or withered away - like rarely-used muscles.
To get them back, the first step should be to ditch prohibition, maybe
not all at once, but eventually. Likely, there will be an upsurge in
drug use - nothing catastrophic, as the Bill Bennetts would argue,
especially if prohibition were dismantled gradually. But we have to be
realistic and admit that no societal controls will root overnight.
They need time to develop, as

1. people model responsible drug use before those who are thinking of
using drugs, thus teaching from the outset responsible use, and

2. people seeing the negative consequences of irresponsible
use.

Drug control is thus, all about learning - proper use v. improper
use.

Historian David Musto, studying the early 20th century "cocaine
epidemic," noticed the decline in use that happened in the mid 1900s.
He saw it as a generational learning pattern. David T. Courtwright
summarizes Musto's findings: "A new drug generates enthusiasm. Use
rises. Then problems - overdose, compulsion, paranoia - begin to
appear among significant minority of users. Would-be recruits think
twice. Use declines." A whole generation learns a lesson.

The trick is passing down that lesson.

With our prohibitionist, just-say-no solution, we've effectively ruled
out any real lesson-learning. It's simply an either-or question. Don't
use drugs; you'll be fine. Use 'em and you're in deep doodoo. Given
that peoples from every moment in history have used some sort of drug,
a one-sized-fits all rule, no exceptions, is irrational, ahistorical,
and just begging to be broken.

A better approach would be to allow the drugs legal status and simply
do as parents are supposed to do - train up a child in the way that he
should go. This is what Europe has done with alcohol, and it works.
Will all parents do it? No, but neither are those parents doing it
now. Beyond that, a large part of that parental abdication is simply
the result of societal controls being ceded to the state almost a
century ago.

Slowly but surely, we need to get them back.

I would prefer, as with use of mild psychoactives, the emphasis be on
avoiding intoxication entirely. Alcohol, kava, coca and even cannabis
can all be used in nonintoxicating ways. But I'm a tolerant guy. If
folks want to be intoxicated, I'm not going to try and stop them.
Society shouldn't in any legal way; the most it should do is mandate,
as it currently does with alcohol, that people not walk or drive
blotto in public.

And ask yourself this: If people aren't stoned in public and are
keeping more extreme forms of drug abuse to themselves and in the
privacy of their homes, what's the problem?

As a Christian who genuinely believes that God judges nations
collectively for wrongdoing, I more fear his reprisals for a
government that abuses power, tyrannically oppresses its citizens and
conducts mass disinformation campaigns about drugs than his collective
judgments for the private abuses of a very small slice of society.

No society has ever existed in which some psychoactive substances were
not used. They've been around as long as the earth. Governments, on
the other hand, are transient, shifting, ineffectual. As such, people
have figured out ways of controlling the excesses of drug use by
simple conventions, rituals, and intergenerational teaching. As these
controls have worked in the past, they can again in the future. But
only if their main impediment, that which daily undermines them - our
useless war on drugs - is scrapped.