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Return to regular viewTrying to Think About Drugs
JON CARROLL
Wednesday, May 20, 1998
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle
LET US SAY only what we know. The citizens of the United States are still troubled by a knot of problems usually collected under the rubric ``drugs.'' Citizens are frustrated by the lack of progress in solving the problem of ``drugs,'' and therefore by the nature of the solutions themselves.
Those who care about traditional values are concerned that the use of illegal drugs continues largely unabated. Seventeen years after the Reagan Revolution changed much of America's perception of itself, citizens are still just saying yes to drugs. Amber waves of marijuana continue to carpet the fruited plains; tons of cocaine move across our borders daily despite billions spent on interdiction.
Those concerned with personal freedoms point to escalating assaults on privacy, due process and private property created by laws passed to support the war on drugs. The property of people still innocent in the eyes of the law has been seized, their homes have been invaded, their personal behavior, no matter how nonviolent or socially harmless, has resulted in serious prison time.
People who see public issues in terms of the inequities of class and race note that the war on drugs has somehow turned into yet another aspect of the war against the poor. More prisons are being built at the expense of other social programs, and these prisons are being filled with the usual suspects
--poor whites, Latinos, African Americans.
Even worse: All of these trends are happening in an atmosphere of misplaced piety and rampant hypocrisy. The usual counterbalances to abusive government power -- the press, the polemicists, the opposition parties -- have been largely silent on these issues.
No one wants to be seen as pro-drug. There are too many other worthy causes. Think of the children.
On the other hand: Think of the children of the people in jail.
THE HYPOCRISY STARTS in the very definitions of the crime. The most dangerous recreational drug in America is alcohol, and yet it is legal -- indeed, it is hardly regulated. There are more warning labels on diet soft drinks than on bourbon.
Rich people can get doctors to write them prescriptions for the narcotics they want. Poor people have to buy their drugs on the street. Getting the money to buy the drugs often involves criminal behavior, of which the easiest and least violent is selling the drugs. Selling drugs is a felony. Selling drugs means hard time.
Hollywood has long taken up the cause of unpopular men. Loathsome murderers (``Dead Man Walking'') turn into Sean Penn; IRA terrorists (``The Devil's Own'') turn into Brad Pitt. But where are the gentle dealers of marijuana, the morally conflicted crack addicts? These people exist in real life, but Hollywood won't touch people who touch drugs, probably because too many people in Hollywood have touched too many drugs.
There are more people in prison all the time, and those incremental humans often don't belong there. If you have 2 million people in prison, and the next year you have 3 million, where has the extra million come from? Not from hard-core murderers and sociopaths -- they're already inside. They're easy to catch.
It's the fringe players, addicts, rebels, nutballs, vets who never made it home and kids who never made it at all -- the people who, in a less obsessed society, are taken care of in discreet, private and inexpensive ways.
Meanwhile, because of the distortion of justice promoted by the war on drugs, villains walk free. A man who beats a woman is sent to a diversion program; a man who sells pot to that same woman is sent to prison.
Because we have zero tolerance. And tiny brains.
I THINK AMERICA is a swell idea for a country, and I think the war on drugs is the moral equivalent of terrorism against the Constitution.
I think we start afresh. We've been looking the other way too long. I have some ideas. Tomorrow.
It's the elephant in the living room, and someone should mention it.
Trying to Think About Drugs, II
JON CARROLL
Thursday, May 21, 1998
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle
WHAT'S BAD ABOUT drug abuse? It might be useful to start there. Ignore the strange distinction between legal and illegal drugs; consider the nature of all recreational chemicals and how they harm society.
That means, for the moment, ignoring those malign effects caused by the criminalization of certain drugs. Gang warfare, crimes by addicts to get money to pay the inflated prices of street drugs, stuff like that. Those are real problems, but they are caused by social decisions rather than chemical reactions.
Recreational chemicals reduce inhibitions. They impair judgment. They promote impulsive and sometimes destructive behavior. Drunken driving is a good example. Bar fights. Spousal abuse.
Chemical dependency also destroys families. An addict always has another lover, another home. An addict cannot do the hard work of raising a child or tending a marriage because an addict is doing the hard work of being an addict. People tend to forget how much time it takes to nurture an addiction.
By far the greatest damage done to society by recreational chemicals is child abuse. When those inhibitions go down, the urge to strike out -- and every parent has felt that urge -- is not mitigated by love or common sense or fear of consequences. It turns into physical violence. The self-loathing that comes with addiction is easily transmuted into rage, and the rage becomes violence against those unable to defend themselves.
And what do we know about abused children? They become abusers themselves. They also become criminals; the statistics on this matter are overwhelming.
THEREFORE, THE MOST rational thing we can do to improve society is to protect our children. We can take all the money going to vast interdiction and law enforcement programs -- programs that have created needless suffering while failing to solve the problem -- and use it instead to help the children.
Rather than targeting drug pushers, we target abusive parents. Rather than looking for stashes of marijuana, we look for bruises on the bodies of children.
Take it as a given that human beings will want to experience pleasure using chemicals. If the pleasure does not result in violent behavior, ignore it. Concentrate on protecting the children.
There is a role for jails and prisons, and here it is -- lock up the people who hit kids. Because the abused child is the greatest danger to society that we know.
ONE OTHER THING: Overwhelmingly, it is young men, 14 to 26, who commit violent acts. The drugs just make it worse because young men are aggressive and judgment-impaired on their brain chemicals alone.
It is time that we understood that young men are an at-risk population. They are being betrayed by their own hormones. They are rutting in the fields and blindly fighting for territory according to genetic imperatives older than any culture.
So if we want to protect society, we want to keep drugs out of the hands of young men. That's where the damage is done. Perhaps we need some kind of huge program, the Young Males Reclamation Act, to intervene with guys and make them understand the nature of their guyness.
Take all the money that goes to warehouse the men in prison, and apply it to a program that would reach every male in this country when he is 12 years old, some combination of group therapy and a bar mitzvah.
Educate parents about what it means to have a son. Start male studies programs at every university. These strange and violent people walk among us, confused and enraged -- why would we not reach out to them?
Think of drug diversion programs in terms of monster truck rallies, video games, boxing, safe sex, hostile takeovers, the modern biathlon, an entire sublimation infrastructure. Keep the young men sane, and we can all get some work done.
Updated 98/05/23
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