Censored Minds

A Short Outline of the Dope Wars

(part 4 of 4) by Gary Stimeling

 

Copyright 2004 Psychotropics Cornucopia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

Help! The Sky’s Not Falling!

      Pot prohibitionists often forecast dire effects on society from legalization, claiming lack of knowledge to the contrary as some sort of argument in their favor. Actually, there is some evidence on this point. Studies of states and countries that have decriminalized drugs in recent years uniformly tend to show that the law has remarkably little effect on the number of users or their level of use.

      If anything, restrictive laws often seem to increase drug use, at least in the short term in some parts of society. The Roaring Twenties were not known as a period of sobriety, and Russia’s attempt to curtail escape from its dreary life via vodka has led only to a huge samogon (“self-run”) moonshine industry. In Holland, where possession of small amounts of cannabis has been legal since 1976 and cannabis cafés flourish in Amsterdam, cocaine and heroin consumption have declined, while only 3 percent of the population use pot occasionally or frequently, compared to 6.5 percent of Americans.

      The British experiment in licensing doctors to prescribe heroin to addicts is often blamed for an increase in addiction there in the 1980s. To the contrary, the system restricted licenses to doctors affiliated with treatment clinics, rather than allowing all doctors to prescribe freely, so it reduced legal availability. The gradual rise in heroin use seems to have been due to the fact that one had to register as an addict to qualify for legal sales, so addicts gradually began buying for a black market of nonaddicted users. Then, as clinics began switching to methadone, which yields addiction but no high, heroin users turned to the street again, where heroin was becoming plentiful due to support of opium growers by Iranian mullahs and Afghani Mujahedeen to get money to buy weapons from the Reagan administration.

      In the waning years of the 19th century, leaders of the British government of India contemplated a ban on cannabis—a plan of amazing hubris considering the extent of use. But instead of plunging blindly ahead, they commissioned the army to study the subject. Researchers traveled throughout the country, interviewing thousands of people from all walks of life, users and nonusers alike. To this day the India Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1893–94,^[23] all nine volumes and 3,700 pages of it, remains one of the best and most extensive sociological studies ever done on any subject. Without reservation, the commissioners recommended against prohibition, having found “no appreciable physical injury of any kind, … no injurious effects on the mind, … [and] no moral injury whatever.” Moreover, they noted:

It has been the most striking feature in this inquiry to find how little the effects of hemp drugs have obtruded themselves on observation. The large number of witnesses of all classes who professed never to have seen these effects, the vague statements made by many who professed to have observed them, the very few witnesses who could so recall a case as to give any definite account of it, and the manner in which a large proportion of these cases broke down on the first attempt to examine them, are facts which combine to show most clearly how little injury society has hitherto sustained from hemp drugs….

Most amazing of all, British leaders heeded the report and abandoned the ban.

 

Possession of the Future (Just say “Whoa!”)

      In 1791, the same year the Bill of Rights was adopted, philosopher Jeremy Bentham published a treatise called Panopticon, meaning the “All-see-um,” or Transparent Building. It was a design for a maximum security prison. His suggestions for eliminating all privacy, dignity, exercise, mental stimulation, and human contact were put into practice first at the infamous Eastern Penitentiary near Philadelphia, later at Port Arthur on Tasmania (where in chapel prisoners sat in booths blindfolded, so they couldn’t hear or see one another), and still later in the KGB’s Lubyanka in Moscow.

      Technology has brought Bentham’s plan to full flower today in places like California’s Pelican Bay, Washington’s Clallam Bay, and Illinois’ Marion. They are far away from populated areas and house many prisoners shipped cross-country, so that family visits are an infrequent hardship. During their entire term, inmates may never see the light of the sun or another person, unless a guard feels like giving them a beating or some pepper-spray scars. Even guards’ voices normally reach their ears only via loudspeakers. Strict limits on pastimes are enforced by constant video surveillance. Now the prison is expanding beyond the walls, as many seem intent on establishing a maximum security society in which we’re all sentenced to artificial life.

      There’s a lot riding on the Dope War. An American-sponsored project aims to eradicate the world’s largest natural stands of cannabis in Kazakhstan. Various herbicides and plant parasites like the Fusarium fungus have been used against Third World drug crops since the Seventies, in the process often poisoning farmers and food. Fusarium, for example, sprayed on Andean coca, remains in the soil to infect future crops and sicken animals or humans who feed on them. Environmental damage from herbicide spraying in Colombia threatens to reach the level of Agent Orange devastation in Vietnam, where large swaths of the countryside remain toxic a generation after the war. An ongoing effort in American, British, and Russian germ-warfare labs aims to genetically engineer new, more virulent pathogens to attack all proscribed plants. Genetic resilience and the dedication of underground breeders make extinction unlikely in the near term, but new knowledge may make it possible.

 

When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.

— Tom Forçade, founder of High Times

 

      Meanwhile, research proceeds toward vaccines to prevent drug effects in the recipient’s brain. As a tool for someone desperately seeking an end to addiction, they could be wonderful, but they could also be administered by force, by law, or as a condition of employment or college admission. Worse, when fully developed, the technology will allow secret dosing of whole populations by vaccines embedded in commercial food or beverages. Such vaccines could prevent highs from selected drugs, trigger the effects of other drugs (which could also be embedded), even control the effects of neurotransmitters and receptors in the brain, and do it for genetically selected classes of people across whole populations without their knowledge. The so-called date-rape drug GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate, a precursor of the neurotransmitter GABA, gamma aminobutyric acid) is the first component of the human brain to have been banned. Assuredly it will not be the last.

      Some writers who have exposed the Dope War’s financial and political corruptions argue that if we could just “clean it up” somehow, all would be well. Though sometimes well intended, such reasoning completely misses the point: The Dope War is corruption. It’s all about the money in a hyperinflated market where the irresistible force of desire meets the immovable object of puritanical control—the algebra of need, as William Burroughs called it. In the war’s politics, drugs are merely the mechanical rabbit that leads the hounds, or what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin, a plot driver whose actual characteristics are irrelevant.

      Money aside, the war is a fundamental corruption of the social contract. Ceding to government the right to decide what we can grow in our gardens or put in our mouths is betrayal of liberty at its most intimate. Jungian therapist James Hollis has written, “A proper course of therapy does not make us better adjusted; it makes us more eccentric, a unique individual who serves a larger project than that of the ego or collective norms.”^[24] The Dope War has become one of the primary means for curtailing individuality, a goal that is the essence of fascism. But don’t take my word for that, take Hitler’s:

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual…. [W]e understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community….^[25]

      As a society, we’re OK with drugs as long as the right dealer gets paid. Bound up with the whole subject of victimless crime and prescription of behavior, the Dope War is deciding whether pleasure and pain are matters of individual choice or will be dictated by outside forces. Shall states of mind be held within narrow channels ordained by church, state, and purveyor corporations? Or will we be free to modify our own consciousnesses at will? (So long as we don’t endanger others—at the wheel, for example.) And who shall profit—small farmers? Even—can we imagine it?—no one? Or only big pharmas, doctors, lawyers, police, agency apparatchiks, smugglers, and jailers?

      Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas said the only way to protect freedom of expression is to protect it absolutely. The same applies to freedom of impression. In a provocative essay called “Mormons in Space,” George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici wondered whether a new kind of human being is evolving in response to the demands of capital—a “desexualized angel,” a drone content to receive reality as hand-me-down images rather than directly feel it through the senses, able to work like a computer with no passion and an infinite capacity for boredom.^[26] If the Dope Warriors take their crusade to its logical conclusion, Homo sapiens risks becoming a new sort of hive species, preoccupied with a fantastic array of allowable trivia but unable to perceive outside the box.

      Shall we continue punishing everyone because some people use drugs unwisely? It makes as much sense to prohibit driving because some do it poorly. Shortly before his death at the age of 32 in the influenza epidemic of 1918, American radical essayist Randolph Bourne warned, “War is the health of the state,” because it gives government a popular excuse to enforce the “herd sense.” The Dope War is a great way to accomplish this goal. It’s endless, it works both at home and abroad, and it can be started with one hand and fought with the other. It’s the perfect prescription for a sick society under a robust tyranny.