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Confessions of a Middle Aged English Hashish Eater
...and they Killed Jesus
Libertarians Smoke Dope: Causal Effect?
The Dark at the Bottom: Guns, Drugs, Education and the Criminal-Corrections Industrial Complex
How not to get eaten by aliens
Addiction is hard to define. So is "drug". Some people take the line that if they are using a substance it cannot be a drug because they are not drug addicts. I tend to think that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck it is not exactly unreasonable to consider the working hypothesis that it might be some kind of waterbird of the family Anatidae.
Almost any substance can be habit forming and give rise to dependency but there is a big difference between substances that cause physical withdrawal symptoms and those whose grip is entirely in the form of habit and desire to repeat a pleasurable experience. Few studies of cannabis have suggested anything other than the pleasurable habit form of addiction. It is true that some users are seen to be damaged by their use of cannabis, they are in a pattern of behaviour that is antisocial and prevents them from taking a full part in society. To what extent cannabis is a cause and to what extent it is a symptom of their underlying mental condition is a moot point.
Withdrawn people often smoke cannabis, don't wash and don't shave. Few people suggest that the lack of hygiene is a cause rather than an effect so why are people so keen to show that cannabis is a cause? I suggest that it is probably both a partial cause and an effect.
Does cannabis lead to experimenting with other drugs? No. Some people want to experiment with other drugs and so if they have to buy cannabis from illegal drug dealers it is hardly surprising that they will come in contact with other illegal drugs. Exactly the same would be happening now if alcohol was prohibited. Only criminals would be supplying it. I can certainly imagine a twenty first century speak-easy with Ecstasy tablet dispensers and hard core porn videos at every table and armed guards on the doors.
The vast majority of evidence on the subject suggests that the first drug on the road to heroin and cocaine is tobacco. Non-smoking heroin addicts are very rare. Many millions of people have smoked cannabis and never been tempted to try addictive illegal drugs. Only 3% of UK non-smokers have ever tried illegal drugs. Drug taking usually starts with cigarettes.
I am no expert on drugs use. I have taken cannabis less than twenty times in my life, so far.
I made a very clear distinction in my mind when I considered illegal drugs. There were several sets of categories, legal and illegal was one division, addictive and non-addictive was another and the third major distinction was based on the effect the drug had on the user. Some drugs make you feel powerful, others make you relaxed, some make you talk faster and keep you awake, others slow you down. To those simple effects can then also be added the effects of hallucination.
The full story of drug effects is long and complex, to class them all as the same is simplistic in the extreme. Even taking a drug as common as alcohol can clearly illustrate the quagmire that drugs present. What is the effect of alcohol? Only a tiny handful of the self-deluded claim that alcohol can improve your driving ability. My own experiments on the subject were done in the safety of a computer. I have found that a modest amount of alcohol does little damage to my score in first person shoot 'em ups and it can help me enjoy myself more. When my alcohol level increases my scores drop off. Professional darts and snooker players have often drank modestly during competitions and the effect on their performance has been modest, the relaxation and confidence building effect has been strong enough to counteract any physical impairment. Reflexes are certainly dulled quite quickly. So activities like driving become impaired before activities that rely on the body's own “muscle-memory”, tasks like having sex, shooting and performing in a play are not adversely affected by the equivalent of one or two glasses of wine. What is affected is inhibition.
The protection of caution is removed by drink, impulses that we can easily set aside in our sober state become irresistible. This starts off helping "break the ice" and later, with larger doses, leads to the problem of waking up next to strangers with a traffic cone on your head.
Larger and larger doses have more profound depressing effects, in a way you roll back the evolutionary clock as you depress the higher centres in the brain. Starting with caution, then reason, later still you lose the ability to walk and talk, then you lose control of your bladder and in extreme cases you can depress your central nervous system to the point of death.
Falling over and vomiting is usually a good cue to stop drinking.
That is a simplistic description of the effects. It is complicated by the fact that people respond in different ways. Some people don't like getting drunk, it just makes them feel ill. Some people can get drunk and merry and never go over the edge into antisocial behaviour. Many people get aggressive, the first thing to leave them is the inhibition to fight. I never get aggressive, how I am affected depends on who I am with. In the company of quiet or modestly loud people I become a little louder and jolly. In the company of loud jolly people I go quiet and want to go to bed.
In Britain there is a distinctly Northern European attitude to drinking. People of Southern Europe drink all the time and rarely get drunk. The Northern Europeans seem to binge drink. Drunkenness is a major social problem in Britain while in many other parts of the world people simply drink and have no problems. How much of drunken behaviour is socially determined is an interesting question. I have heard about experiments in which people were lead to believe that they had been drinking and the effects observed. A glass of tonic water had a smear of vodka around the edge and those drinking it were observed to have altered behaviour.
Many sceptical observers of hypnosis also suggest that the sort of behaviour people show "under" hypnosis are exactly what we are socially conditioned to expect. If you are hypnotized on stage then you act in one way, if hypnotized by a past lives investigator you will recall past lives. If hypnotized by a specialist in sexual abuse you will recall abuse. I would be very interested to learn about how many raving lesbian feminist hypnotists find their subjects recalling past lives of being abducted by aliens and how many UFO believing hypnotists uncover Satanic abuse in the subject's past life as Cleopatra.
If there is a strong element of social conditioning in behaviour while drunk there is the possibility of changing that behaviour. If it is not determined by the chemistry of alcohol then it could be modified. I don't know how this might be achieved but it would surely be worth investigating if there was a possibility to stop people having street fights and instead just have fun like the Japanese do. Karaoke is not quite as antisocial as the traditional British broken glass in the face.
If the effects of drugs are determined to a degree by social pressures and not just by the drug itself this might also be applicable to cannabis. Long hair, beads, patchouli scented incense sticks and a tendency to call people “man” might not be side-effects of cannabis but of the social scene around the drug. It is certainly a possibility. It is also a possibility that cannabis use might not actually change people into anti-capitalist anarchists. It might even be possible to combine using cannabis with playing golf or to use cannabis without having any tattoos or body piercings.
Legalizing Drugs
People have a strange idea about what legalizing means. As if anything that is legal is approved of. It is perfectly legal for a seventy year old millionaire to marry a poor girl one day over the age of consent, but it is not socially acceptable or right. It is not illegal to seduce a married person, wreck their marriage and then walk away laughing. It is not illegal to spend money on things you do not want just to show other people that you can. There is a big distinction between morality and legality. A government does not have to make everything it is uneasy about or opposed to strictly illegal.
The war on drugs is being lost. It is inevitable that is being lost. It is also inevitable that the police anti-drug industry will never admit its own failure. To do so would be to invite its own disbanding.
Drugs supply is as high as ever. Drugs are available in every town in the world. The price of drugs is high but it is being paid. The users are earning money to buy cannabis and ecstasy, and stealing money to buy cocaine and heroin. The financing of drug use is a major stimulation to crime in the western world. A large proportion of muggings and burglaries are motivated by the desire to fund drug use.
The prohibition era in the USA gives a good example of how making a drug illegal fails to secure the original objective. The motives for alcohol prohibition were religiously inspired. People wanted a cleaner, sin-free America. Alcohol promoted sin and destroyed family life and prosperity. Looking back now this seems laughable. The problems caused by prohibition were far greater than those it sought to prevent. Crime and violence increased. Poisoning by alcohol increased. Hard liquor sales rose at the expense of wine and beer. The era of prohibition more than coincided with the heyday of the cocktail, the cocktail was made popular by the International set who drank in speak-easies in New York and the bars of cruise liners on the high seas. Prohibition of alcohol failed the test of reality.
Eliot Ness and the like were clean cut Americans who fought crime and criminals. Would they want alcohol legalized? No. That would spoil their fun. Gangsters were capitalists in the classic sense. Some were violent men with business dealings, others, like Joseph Kennedy, were capitalists whose trade was temporarily disapproved of. Gangsters and pirates have a lot in common, thoroughly amoral people who kill, maim, deceive and steal and somehow manage to appear glamorous.
To me there is no middle way between legal drugs and illegal drugs. Decriminalizing drug taking and possession would be bizarre. It would leave drug users at the mercy of criminals. All the suppliers would still be criminal. They could still adulterate drugs and misrepresent them in terms of quantity and quality. As all the suppliers of drugs would be by definition criminals they would have every reason to supply more dangerous and addictive drugs.
The way to cure the drug problem is to throw it open to the free market. Make all drugs fully legal to manufacture, sell and use. Full legalization, and only subject to regular taxation.
What would happen? Would millions of children rush out and buy heroin? I hardly think so. They know it is dangerous and addictive. If it isn't even illegal what would be the point in taking it? All the glamour would go. All the rebel chic. It would no longer be expensive, it would no longer be sold in little grubby bags by dodgy people. New entrepreneurs would come into the market and sell quality controlled drugs cheaply. Where are these people today? Running dotcom companies, telephone chat lines and mobile 'phone shops, probably...
If drug use did go up it would not be a major problem. Drug use as such is not a major problem in modern societies. We can cope with it reasonably well. The bulk of the problems are caused by the high price the addict pays for the drug. By keeping the price high the addict is forced by prohibition into the underclass. They have to earn very large quantities of money and at the same time they substantially weaken their own ability to hold down a job. The only way they can earn the money is by crime, unless they are one of a tiny handful of people in very high paying jobs that can survive their moodiness. Addicts steal, beg and prostitute themselves. Drug use puts addicts on a downhill spiral. People can get into problems with addiction to legal drugs but such addiction is less likely to turn them into criminals. Alcoholics are well known for the tendency to lose their jobs and to drift into poverty, but are not so likely to steal as heroin addicts.
Cannabis use might well increase. But so what? It would almost certainly expand its share of the drug market, people who are currently spending a lot of time drinking alcohol might find that in the future some of that time they currently invest in being drunk they will now invest in being stoned instead. I find it quite implausible that people will increase the total amount of time that they spend under the influence of drugs. What is far more likely is that leisure time and the drug spend will be shared out differently between alcohol and cannabis. Expenditure in money terms on cannabis will fall as the premium paid for illegal distribution is eliminated. Amoral capitalists will still run the business but probably a different set, capitalists who are more likely to sue you than shoot you.
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Who would sell heroin in a free for all? All I can imagine is self-help organizations, groups run by addicts to secure clean and cheap supplies. I cannot think of how a legal trade could start to encourage new users of such an obviously flawed product. Before it was illegal, when opiates were openly sold and when Heroin was a brand name there was less of a problem with opiate use than there is today. Yes there were addicted wretches to be seen in opium dens but not the extent of problems that exist today. The biggest boon from the proscribing of cocaine and opium was the removal of these powerful drugs from everyday medicines where they had previously ensnared a few people though innocent use, a problem that still happens every so often with waves of people becoming addicted to regular painkillers and other drugs prescribed for genuine medical complaints. |
All in all I have to conclude that addictive drugs are seedy and tacky. That goes for alcohol and nicotine as well as opiates. Weak people will use them and become addicts. Prohibiting their use might make us feel better but it does not stop their use, it only makes it dirtier and more sordid and costs the community dear in extra policing.
A former boss of mine often used to tell me that doing the same thing and expecting something different to happen was madness. We have been fighting illegal drugs for decades. As every year passes the seizures of drugs rise and the street level prices fluctuate little. Drugs are as widely available as ever. The war on drugs is not being won, can never be won.
Vietnam taught the world a lot about unwinnable wars.
We could really do with a Kissinger type figure now to help the west declare the war over, pretend we won and let us all get on with life.
All we are saying
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