MISCmedia for 11/9/00
Anti-Drugs As Drugs

I'M DOWN ON DRUGS.

I know that's a controversial statement in some circles of cyberdom; particularly among the coke-snortin' dot-com bosses, the speed-gulpin' Microserfs, the pot-inhalin' cyber-Libertarians, and the e-gobblin' ravers.

I can't help it.

I'm an incurable rationalist, you see.

I happen not to believe frying one's brain makes one part of some new advance in human evolution. I don't believe pot-induced complacency will revolutionize the world or end all wars. (And I certainly don't orgasm at the mere presence of pot-leaf imagery or at words such as "harsh realm" or "chronic.")

I prefer liveliness to waking-sleep, reality to hallucination, and awareness to stupor.

However, the rationalist in me is also well aware that there are many kinds of addictions and "trips" people go through that don't need to involve chemical assistance. (In my more jaded younger days, I used to say I didn't need drugs, I was strung out on life.)

One of the most dangerous of these un-drugs is mass hysteria. Which is one of the tools being used by proponents of our 30-year-old, and still futile, War On Drugs.

The drug war has incarcerated, killed, or otherwise destroyed the lives of thousands of American and foreign citizens. It's disenfranchised countless minority males and turned some inner-city neighborhoods into quasi-military occupation zones. It's been used as an excuse for the suppression of civil liberties and assorted military misadventures (if you disliked the Panama invasion, you'll loathe the fledgling Colombia incursion).

It's increasingly clear, even to a few politicians (particularly a few Republicans of quasi-Libertarian bent), that the drug war will never permanently reduce the amount of addictive stuff made in or shipped to the U.S. It won't significantly reduce the number of people who become addicts, and can't do anything to get those addicts off the stuff.

It succeeds at providing jobs, cash, and political influence to police departments and their suppliers, to prisons and the contractors that build them, and to the military and its suppliers. These have become powerful lobbies, peddling influence to politicians of all stripes to keep getting "tougher" at policies that serve to increase international instability and domestic crimes (turf wars, thefts for drug money) and to turn small-time users into lifetime members of the criminal-justice system.

As is often the case when U.S. trends enter into obsessive-compulsive-disorder territory, it takes foreigners to point it out, to examine it from a clear distance.

For instance, one of the most thorough and objective online reading sources about the drug-war tragedy is a series of stories by Canadian newspaperman Dan Gardner. "Humans have used psychoactive drugs," Gardner writes, "in just about every society in every time in history. There has never been, and can never be, a 'drug-free world.'"

For another instance, certain European territories are succeeding with different legal strategies that treat drugs as an inevitable social element and addiction as a disease rather than a crime.

It's just the clean and sober way to do it.

TOMORROW: What if America's big team sports all went coed?

IN OTHER NEWS: Dennis Miller's obscure jokes have nothing on the homespun election-night allegories of Dan Rather!

ELSEWHERE:

"Bush Or Gore: 'A New Era Dawns....'"

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