I recently finished an article for a local publication about chemical dependency among New Hampshire professionals. So I was more than mildly interested in the unseemly overheated reaction by politicians and the press to Douglas Ginsberg's admission to having taken a toke in his time. People spoke as if he belonged on the Group W bench in Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. I found this response at best amnesiac, at worst just plain hypocritical. Whatever damage has been caused by marijuana and cocaine is miniscule compared to the damage inflicted by alcohol and nicotine, two of our premiere addictive drugs. Alcohol is responsible for 100,000 deaths a year, nicotine for 300,000. In contrast, deaths related to cocaine in 1986 about equaled the number of people who died from appendicitis.
It's true that America has a drug problem: Americans consume 60% of the world's production of illegal drugs, and that can't happen without some adverse affects. But our reaction to the drug problem, as Abby Hoffman points out in his new book Steal This Urine Test, is worse than the problem itself because it leads to illusion and misinformation, as well as ineffectual law enforcement. If we're going to effectively deal with the abuse of drugs, then we need to see clearly the source of the demand. Only then will we have an enlightened attitude toward what many people obviously like to do with their bodies.
Drug addiction in our country is not caused primarily by moral failure or psychological breakdown, though these have their place in addiction's etiology. Instead, drug addiction is an outgrowth of the cultural, economic, and political system we've chosen for ourselves. Capitalist culture exists for one purpose: to foster addictions -- to consumption, to debt, to expectation and fulfillment; in short, capitalist culture ceases to exist if it cannot create a slavishness to appetite. Drugs fit neatly into this imperative, appeasing not only the drive to consume and possess but also the alienation that comes when possessing falls short of satisfaction.
Interdicting drugs won't stop the demand for them, and "Just Say No" ignores the economic maxim to say Yes as often as possible. The drug problem can only begin to be solved when the capitalist problem begins to be solved. But every society has its sanctioned addictions. The high season for ours begins soon. Watch how the addiction machine gets up to speed between now and January 1st. It's a sobering spectacle, all those consumers compelled to buy, walking around in a monetary daze, driven and half-mad; yet we celebrate this and call it productive. Some how this is okay.
Somehow this is not okay.
Work Revis(it)ed
Endings