Mind Drugs

The widespread human fascination with aphrodisiacs (of which there are so few real ones)  is matched by an almost universal human fascination with mind-altering drugs, of which there are a great many. 

Jared Diamond suggests (with strong distaste) in The Third Chimpanzee that men use mind-altering drugs primarily as a form of courtship display.  Although this idea is less odd than it sounds and might help account for the success of various forms of cigarette and alcohol advertising aimed at men, it fails to explain why women seem equally interested in using such drugs. 

Traditionally, mind-altering drugs seem to have been intimately related to seeking spiritual transcendence.  Substances used for sacred purposes include alcohol, many different kinds of mushroom, various substances derived from toads, "soma," peyote, tobacco, cannabis, opium, nutmeg, cohoba, Virola, ayahuasca, iboga, and numerous others, some quite poisonous.  As biochemistry has become more sophisticated, we've refined the list of mind-altering substances and added some brand new ones.  For those interested in the subject, there are many encyclopedic sources of information, in spite of the fact (or because of the fact) that most of the interesting substances are illegal.  This is in sharp contrast to the situation with aphrodisiacs, where so little reliable information is to be had. 

There is definitely some overlap, however, between mind-altering drugs and sexuality.  I'd guess that if you took a survey in North America today of what people like best as an aphrodisiac, marijuana would win hands down, even though it's principally a "heightened consciousness" drug.  As with other psychedelics, however, its effects differ significantly from person to person and situation to situation. 

I believe that making most mind-altering drugs illegal over the last hundred years has been a huge mistake — and as I explain below, I say that with full recognition of the dangers and tragedies of "abuse" and addiction. 

The Author's Drug History

The discussion of mind drugs is so often colored by people's personal experiences that I think it's important to be clear about your own drug history right up front — so here's mine.  My father grew up in the early 1920s, when everyone was drinking like a fish, but he didn'tt join his friends in drinking.  My mother grew up in China when opium addiction was still fashionable, but she avoided using opium herself. 

As a result, they both did their best to impress on me as a child the real dangers of drug abuse, out of their own experience and from a practical rather than a moral perspective.  Nonetheless, like any kid I wanted to experiment, so one summer when I was 16 and had a chance to try drinking, I consumed a positively amazing amount of cheap wine for a month or so.  I found the results quite interesting but not very satisfying, and in all the years since then, I've gotten drunk maybe two or three times in total. 

I was in college in the late 1960s, when everyone was experimenting with every kind of drug they could get their hands on, but I actually never did any drugs in college at all.  There were a number of factors to explain this — my parents' heartfelt warnings played a part, combined with the fact that I'd already satisfied my curiosity about alcohol's effects, combined with a strong resistance I've always felt to doing anything because of peer pressure (and there was a lot of peer pressure in those days to do drugs, as there still is).  However, even if I myself didn't do drugs, virtually all of my friends did, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with people who were stoned or tripping.  I didn't actively disapprove of drugs — the risks just seemed greater than the rewards to me at that point. 

It was only much later in life that I cautiously experimented with various psychedelic drugs and discovered that both psylocibian mushrooms and LSD can fit in very well with my spiritual interests.  Neither one, however, seemed to affect me as strongly as they do some other people, and I never took them more than three or four times a year.

Marijuana, which I've tried only four or five times, made me high in a way that didn't interest me particularly, (I never noticed any pro-sexual effect in my case, either).  

I don't smoke tobacco or anything else, and I only drink small amounts of wine socially.  The only drug I've ever been addicted to (and I still use it regularly)  is coffee. 

I continue to find it true that many of the people I know seem to use drugs differently than I do.  Also, as I've gotten older I've come to know more and more people in recovery from addictions, and have had many many conversations with people experiencing drug-related problems. 

So that's where I'm coming from when I express the opinions below. 

Drug Abuse and Addiction

Drug addiction and drug abuse can be incredibly damaging. 

By far the most common and deadly addiction worldwide is to tobacco.  The World Health Organization estimates that around a billion men are addicted worldwide, 35% of adult men in developed countries and 50% in the rest of the world.  Of women, 22% are addicted in developed countries, and 9% in the rest of the world — around 250 million people in all.  The resulting death toll is staggering — the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that there were 435,000 smoking-related deaths in the United States alone during the year 2000. 

Tobacco smoking is particularly insidious in several ways.  First of all, nicotine is widely considered to be among the most physically addictive substances known, which is why smokers find it so hard to quit.  Secondly, the damage smoking does to health is gradual and cumulative, not dramatic, making it hard for many people to recognize until it's too late.  Finally, the mood changes caused by smoking are also subtle, and do not impede productivity or social interaction — among mind-altering drugs, tobacco is one of the least dramatic.  Lastly, of course, smoking is almost universally legal, which means that large corporations are doing everything they can to promote addiction. 

Second after smoking comes alcohol, an ancient and much more potent mind-altering drug.  The Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that there were only about a fifth as many alcohol-related deaths in the United States in 2000 as there were smoking-related deaths, or a total of 85,000.  Let me repeat that number: 85,000 people in one year.  Half of all traffic fatalities and a third of all traffic injuries are related to the use of alcohol. 

Like tobacco, alcohol is legal in much of the world, and is heavily promoted by the large corporations who manufacture and distribute it.  Unlike tobacco, there's nothing subtle about its mind-altering effects on users.  Who among us has escaped witnessing at first hand how damaging alcohol addiction is to people's personalities and to their relationships with families and friends?  Around 14 million people in the United States, or one in 13 adults are addicts, and there are a number of cultures worldwide where the rate of addiction is higher.  Almost no one in our culture escapes unscathed.  Not just automobile accidents, but a large proportion of suicides, date rapes, fatal fights and incidents of spousal abuse are associated with drunkenness. 

Throughout my own life, the amount of tragic, "avoidable" alcohol-induced destruction that I've witnessed is staggering.  Starting with my parents' generation, there were so many talented people I can remember whose careers were destroyed or severely curtailed by their drinking.  So many people I've known who have struggled for decades with the consequences of their parents' or grandparents' drinking, that deprived them of safety and trust as they were growing up.  So many intelligent, wonderful people of my own generation and younger whom I've seen lose years of their lives, not to mention careers, relationships and self-respect, to alcohol addiction. 

No wonder people want to make these substances illegal! 

But all the illegal substances are also readily available to people who want to find them.  About a third of all Americans have tried marijuana at least once or twice, and a fair number of people use it regularly.  I myself have known plenty of regular users, and I have to say, even when it's used as a refuge and an escape from life, I've never seen it destroy lives the way I've seen alcohol and cocaine do. 

Cocaine in all its various forms, and barbituates, especially heroin, are usually as dramatically destructive to addicts as alcohol is.  They get wired into the pleasure centers of the brain in a way that makes them both physically and psychologically compelling.  Addicts end up caring for nothing in the world except the drug. 

And yet, when my mother was dying of bone cancer — bone cancer doesn't actually kill you generally, you die of bed sores and painkiller because the agony is so unbearable — I wished that it were possible to give her heroin, as it is in other countries, because it's so much better at reducing the pain without nasty side effects.  But no, our laws are too strict.  You can get it on the street, but not where it's needed, in the hospitals. 

Amphetemines are also nasty.  They give you energy, they restore your confidence when you're down, and then they end up destroying your balance and your mind.  Like alcohol, they're associated with violent behavior.  Methamphetamine has become what bathtub gin was in prohibition days, the cheap home-made drug of choice among the rural poor.  Recent headlines have announced that it's a widespread "scourge" of the midwestern United States, America's heartland, the place where everyone is protected by conservative family values. 

I really haven't witnessed much damage over my lifetime resulting from the use or misuse of psychedelics, even the strong ones.  When I was in college, I knew people who had frightening experiences (bad trips), mostly involving LSD that had other things mixed into it.  It scared them off using drugs.  In one case, the person had a psychotic break and had to be institutionalized for a week or so (other people had psychotic breaks without using drugs, too).  My kids have known people who "got stupid" from using MDMA on a daily basis for months on end.  By and large, though, people seem to use psychedelics less often and more carefully than other recreational drugs. 

Prohibition

Given how destructive mind drugs can be, especially tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and barbituates, doesn't it make sense to make them illegal?  Well, no, I don't believe so.

Alcohol was banned in the United States during the so-called "Prohibition" era in the 1920s, and nothing was gained from the exercise except even more heartbreak.  Not only were people's lives ruined by the drug itself, they were also ruined by run-ins with the law. 

People want drugs.  They want them to forget themselves, to reduce their inhibitions, to be cool, to seem sophisticated, to feel powerful, but above all they want them as emotional anesthetics.  People want to damp down their pain, either by numbing their minds or by jacking up their pleasure.  Among the addicts I've known, this has been a key motivator.  For that kind of anesthesia, just to get some relief from the hardship of their lives, people will break the law.  And they do, all the time. 

Experience has shown, not once, but over and over again that prohibition doesn't work.  It ends up causing more harm than it prevents. 

Even given all the hazards of addiction and abuse, the most common (and most easily preventable) danger of drugs today is still legal and political.  They most often ruin people's lives because they land people in jail — at any given time, between 1 and 2 million Americans are incarcerated because of drug use, and it's estimated that more than 85 million Americans have been arrested on drug-related charges.  The federal government alone spends tens of billions of dollars a year on drug-enforcement, and a large proportion of local law-enforcement budgets are devoted to it.  A small army of federal and local officials make a frustrating, unhappy living doing nothing but pursuing and arresting people on drug charges.  

And still, the street availability of drugs is high, and unscrupulous people make colossal amounts of money selling dangerous drugs to vulnerable populations like kids. 

Something is very clearly not working here!  We've been losing the "War on Drugs" since we began it.  Even without enforcement, drugs can ruin peoples' lives, so why are we spending so much to make the situation worse?  It just doesn't make sense. 

Any businessman can see that the result of all the enforcement effort is to keep profit margins high, which makes the drug business very lucrative.  It also discourages all but the most ruthless and unscrupulous people from entering the business.  These people then make plenty of money to arm themselves with the latest weaponry and to corrupt the very people we're depending on to stop them.  What we're doing is waste an awful lot of taxpayer dollars to persecute our own people, promote corruption in law enforcement, and to create large underground armies of desperate criminals.  This vicious circle is the direct result of misguided (stupid!) public policy.  And the total costs, both to our economy and to the integrity of our society, are incredibly high!

Opponents of Change

As so many people have pointed out, we've been through all this before in "Prohibition" days — why are we making the same mistakes all over again?  The example of the Netherlands is often invoked, where repressive laws have been relaxed very successfully.  People who actually work with addicts increasingly advocate a harm-reduction approach rather than a punishment approach.  So why are we heading in the opposite direction, trying to "crack down" ever harder, wasting more and more money and arresting more and more people? 

One important question to ask is, who benefits from the current system?  Who would lose from reform, and what is it that they'd lose?

Economically, the two groups who stand to lose the most are the drug dealers and the drug enforcers.  In that surprising but not unusual way, these two groups need each other, and feed of each other.  If it weren't for the enforcement people, the trade wouldn't be nearly so lucrative nor so difficult to get into, and if it weren't for the unscrupluous and violent drug lords, enforcement people would have a much harder time justifying their salaries. 

Both of these groups, as you'd expect, do all they can to resist any loosening of drug laws. 

People in drug enforcement have an alarming tendency to become fanatical — they often seem to feel that because they're fighting on the side of good against evil, anything they want to do is justified.  The scientific community (which does not tend to be very drug-friendly) has repeatedly protested the lies and distortions that U.S. federal and local drug enforcers promote under the guise of science to scare kids off drugs.  Scientists point out that these lies only make kids distrust cops, government and even science itself, and encourage them to ignore a lot of the accurate information that is available.  I would certainly agree with that assessment based on what I've observed myself. 

Neither drug lords nor drug enforcers can be blamed for getting us into our current situation, though.  Who are all those other citizens who keep pushing so hard for heavier and heavier penalties and less and less tolerance?  Why do so many people still hate and fear the idea of legal marijuana, when it's so much less dangerous than beer?  (Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that marijuana is harmless, but it demonstrably causes a lot less harm to its abusers than beer does to its abusers).  Who are the people who so feared psychedelic drugs in the late 1960s and 1970s, when many of them seemed to offer significant therapeutic promise and relatively little danger of abuse? 

Here at last we come back to sex and spirituality (I'm sure you thought we were totally off topic) — Mind altering drugs such as heroin, cocaine and alcohol stimulate some of the same pleaure pathways in our brains that sex does — they're not pro-sexual, but they do generate a powerful and comparable sense of pleasure.  Psychedelics similarly generate a sense of heightened awareness that often feels "spiritual." 

Interestingly enough, the same group of people who fear and hate sex obsessively and who battle ceaselessly to suppress any kind of public acceptance of it, also fear and hate mind drugs.  At the core of both antipathies seems to be a fear and hatred of their own longings and desires.  Not only do such people seem driven to try (often unsuccessfully) to repress their own "evil" sexual tendencies, they must also act to restrict the wildly obscene delights that they imagine others to be enjoying.  For such people, pleasure of any kind seems acutely dangerous, and they believe that the only safety lies in strict control and institutional regulation. 

In spite of being a rather small minority of the population, this group exercises a disproportionate influence over everyone else because they appeal to the embarrassment and self-doubt that almost everyone feels around strong emotions — their fear in these areas tends to be contagious to the rest of us. 

Yes, drugs are very dangerous, and yes, nearly all of us feel the most acute pain of our lives as a result of love, but anyone who has lived through the last 50 years or who has studied history seriously can tell you that repression in no way mitigates either of these dangers. 

Effective Social Policy

So, supposingly we could all gather our courage and try to come up with a better solution to the problems of drugs, what would an effective social policy be?

There is much debate in this area.  My personal opinion is that any successful solution must take into account the economic forces of the marketplace.  Ironically, if we really wanted to discourage drug dealing, we could cheaply and reliably do it in an instant — if the government sold all manner of recreational drugs at or below cost, every dealer in existence would go out of business at once. 

Such a policy would obviously have its own drawbacks.  However, looking at our current situation with alcohol and tobacco, it doesn't seem like a good idea just to legalize drugs and then let the free market take over.  Unscrupulous corporate pushers would probably make the violent criminal pushers we're dealing with now look good. 

It seems to me that an effective public policy with respect to mind drugs would have to have the following features:

• It would make use and sale of all but the very most harmful mind drugs legal.
• It would discourage advertising of drugs.
• It would make manufacture and sale of recreational drugs a relatively low-margin business that was not attractive to large corporations.
• It would regulate the quality and purity of drugs available for sale.
• It would make more damaging drugs harder to obtain than less damaging ones.
• It would make accurate, reliable information available to everyone.
• It would make help available to addicts at little or no cost (perhaps paid for by taxing all recreational drugs).

These goals are by no means easy to reach, but with some tinkering we could probably get pretty close.  But if you imagine the howls of the self-righteous on the one side and the tobacco and alcohol companies on the other at the very idea of so much freedom/so much restriction, you have an idea of what we're up against.  And yet, what we're doing now is not just hypocritical, it is profoundly corrupt.  We're creating a large criminal underclass and a widespread disdain for our own legal system that could well end up tearing our society apart.  We shouldn't think of reform as a luxury in this case — we really need it!