The Days of the Drug Legalization Debate

On the subject of drugs, as on so many others, American culture tends toward Utopian extremes of hedonism and puritanism. Twenty years ago the voluntary alteration of consciousness was celebrated by some otherwise intelligent and noteworthy Americans as a new inner frontier—the spiritual equivalent of outer space lying in wait for human exploration.

In those days, the legalization of various psychotropic chemicals was proposed as a psychic Homestead Act, opening new territory for the great American experiment in liberty and the pursuit of happiness. More traditional liberals of an ACLU bent may not have bought the drug culture's religious fervor, but many of them supported legalization as a freedom of conscience issue.

As the song says, "Those days are gone forever." And good riddance. The people who are usually wrong about the '60s are mostly right about the negative effect of the drug culture. A contemporary rock and roller and student of Americana such as Bono of the Irish rock band U2, who is usually right about the '60s, isn't far from the mark when he blames the collapse of that decade's idealistic promise on drugs in general and LSD in particular.

But now the famous pendulum has swung. These are the days of "Just Say No," when prominent persons, including the president of the United States, go about claiming to believe that the ancient human interest in blurring, sharpening, or colorizing consciousness actually can (and should) be eliminated from the culture of this particular city on a hill.

The sincerity of this crusade is obviously open to question. For one thing, they don't talk much about alcohol, which is still the way most Americans mess up their minds and the way far too many mess up their lives. Then there's the small matter of high-level government complicity in the international drug trade, an iceberg the tip of which has recently appeared in the waters around Panama.

The president and his cohorts mainly like to rant against drugs for the same reason that some Baby Boom counterculturalists still defend them. It's just an intellectual-political bad habit they developed back in the '60s and never bothered to shake. Such sloppy and hypocritical thinking on the part of the Puritans, in fact, helped create its own hedonist counterpart. Somewhere along the line, we've got to get past that particular aging, two-headed monster and figure out what our drug problem really is and isn't.

LET'S START WITH THIS proposition. People like to get loaded. Every society that I've heard of sanctions the use of some intoxicating agent. The altering or extending of consciousness, whether in celebration or to dull the edge of life's miseries, seems to come with consciousness itself. Most religions at least tolerate this human quirk, and in many (i.e. the majority of Christian churches) the local intoxicant is symbolically incorporated into religious ritual.

But here's another equally self-evident proposition. A few people, it seems, will always choose getting messed up on one thing or another over getting on with their lives. People who are denied options to make constructive use of their lives will often find it easier to surrender to this tendency.

But we're also learning that there is something biological and even hereditary that may make some people unable to handle the average human's dabbling in euphorics. For the good of society as a whole and for the sake of persons with this propensity to excess or addiction, it's always necessary to regulate and manage the use and availability of intoxicants to some degree or another.

In pre-modern societies, such management often occurred, inadequately no doubt, through the informal means of peer sanctions, religious teachings, and the whole web of customs and relationships that makes up voluntary social mores. In modern societies, the web of custom and relationship gets fragmented, and the power of informal sanctions is weakened across the board and often breaks down entirely.

Also it does seem to make a difference what the intoxicating agent is. Sometimes a society can handle one brand of buzz-agent by incorporating its reasonable use into communal life and instructing the youth in its proper handling. But when an alien intoxicant is introduced from outside, that cultural framework can collapse. Native American problems with alcohol are one example of that phenomenon. America's cocaine frenzy may be another.

But managing the socio-psycho-spiritual problem of intoxicant abuse and addiction is not what most of today's drug talk is about. It's partly about the hangover from the more loony-tune aspects of the '60s. But it's even more about violent crime. And even beyond that, it's about national values and national behavior.

In recent weeks, legalization of drugs has again entered the national debate. This time around, legalization isn't the platform of those with stars in their dilated pupils. It's being promoted as a bite-the-bullet response to a new round of gang wars. But it has raised the questions of values and behavior all over again, even as it seems to abdicate those questions. In the next issue, this column will look at the new legalization debate.