Think Different

Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use<br> By Jacob Sullum.|Tarcher/Putnam.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In 1914, Henry Ford published a tract inveighing against a substance that was enjoying a spike in popularity. He gathered testimonials from a host of luminaries, including Booker T. Washington, who said that the drug caused “a blunting of the moral sense,” and Thomas Edison, who said it “has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which isÉpermanent and uncontrollable.” “I will employ no person,” Edison concluded, “who smokes cigarettes.”

Even now — a time of strong anti-smoking sentiment — this paroxysm against cigarettes will strike most people as hysterical. We can assess the rhetoric against firsthand experience, a large body of reliable science, and (for the most part) an open and honest discussion about what cigarettes do to the body and mind.

Yet, had the anti-cigarette movement of the teens and ’20s succeeded, the “Little White Slavers,” as Ford called them, could easily have been subjected to a federal ban, followed by prosecution of makers, sellers — even users. Then would have come the ad campaigns linking cigarettes to violence, accompanied by a chill on any research that ran against the grain. In such an environment, if an “expert” said that cigarettes not only caused cancer but led inexorably to moral decay and blindness, most people would dumbly nod their heads.

This move from prohibition to propaganda did happen, of course, with other drugs that were legal and widely available in 1914 — products of the coca leaf, the hemp plant, and the opium poppy. These drugs, among others, came to be the object of the giant, swaggering, military-moralistic complex that is our war on drugs.

Saying Yes is not primarily (as its subtitle says) a defense of drug use. It is, rather, a critique of anti-drug propaganda and a plea for reason. Sullum, a scholar on drug policy and an editor for Reason magazine, argues that there is a “silent majority” of drug users who smoke pot, snort cocaine, even shoot smack without losing their lives, jobs, or families. They stay quiet, because if they spoke up they would be ridiculed, fired (in 2000, two-thirds of big companies drug-tested), or arrested.

“People who use illegal drugs in a controlled, inconspicuous way are not inclined to stand up and announce the fact,” Sullum writes. “Prohibition renders them invisible.” The visible minority, then, are mostly people in trouble — under arrest, on the streets, in the morgue. But to mistake them for the average drug user, Sullum argues, “is like assuming that the wino passed out in the gutter is the typical drinker.”

Sullum’s case is easiest to make with marijuana. According to a federal survey, 83 million Americans have inhaled and 12 million say they’ve used marijuana in the last month. Given these numbers, it’s not so surprising to hear about Peter Lewis. The CEO of a major insurance company for 36 years, and still its billionaire chairman, Lewis has been praised as a perfectionist and an “extraordinary businessman.” He is also, as Fortune noted even before his drug arrest at a New Zealand airport, “a functioning pothead.”

You might laugh at that stodgy phrase — as if it were so unusual for a pot smoker to “function.” But what if you heard there were “functioning cokeheads” or “functioning dope addicts”? Sigmund Freud used cocaine regularly for years; the 19th-century British author Thomas De Quincey had a rather extensive career with opium. Both men wrote effusively about their drugs of choice. Both also found it possible to moderate their use.

The same is true for many users now. Sullum cites a study of “controlled opiate users,” which included a 41-year-old carpenter who used heroin on weekends for a decade, while living in a suburb helping to support his wife and three kids.

The central argument of Saying Yes is that we should replace the current model of selectively coerced abstinence with one of universal temperance. As it is, some drug dealers sit in jail while others sit in corporate suites. Robert Downey Jr. is a disgrace for using cocaine. Robert Dole is “brave” for pitching Viagra. This system, Sullum writes, makes no sense intellectually, morally, or practically. Yes, many people do hurt themselves badly with coke and heroin and pot — and Ecstasy and LSD, and so on. But they are the small minority. Even drug czar William Bennett acknowledged this in 1989 when he wrote, “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”

To Bennett, this was even more reason to clamp down on all drug use, because those who got by all right would encourage those who lack self-control, whose lives would be screwed up with a few puffs or lines. But if addiction has a human cost, so too does prohibition. The drug war has left us with a prison system choked with drug users and small-time dealers, with black market violence, infections from dirty needles, overdose deaths, and so on.

Many reasonable people justify these costs. However flawed, they say, the drug war protects us from demon drugs. They impute to certain drugs a power to enslave, to bewitch, to override all functions of choice, reason, or moral capacity. “Methamphetamine,” said a Colorado prosecutor, “is the devil’s key to your soul.” But this theory of “voodoo pharmacology,” Sullum writes, falls apart under scrutiny. In a recent survey, 3 million Americans said they’ve used heroin. Only 4 percent of those said they had used it in the last month. The percentage of people who develop addictions to methamphetamine and cocaine (powder and crack) is similarly low.

The point — which physicians and psychologists affirm — is that however good or overwhelming a drug, human beings never fully lose their ability to choose. Drugs are never satanic or angelic in themselves, but rather agents of human possibility.

Deft, judicious, and thorough, Sullum’s book is a healthy dose of sober talk in a debate dominated by yelping dopes. But maybe what the cause for an honest discussion of drugs needs, as much as its diligent scholars, is a propagandist team all its own. Perhaps they could put together an ad campaign, paralleling Apple’s Think Different line, with images of William James, Stephen Jay Gould, Tom Robbins, and other unapologetic drug users. Maybe they could organize a national coming-out day — handing out felt marijuana or coca or poppy leaves for people to wear. And maybe for a day, we could all just say what we know.

Joshua Wolf Shenk has written for Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate