What Historians Wish People Knew About Drugs, Part II: Isaac Campos
pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com
pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com
I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.
People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.
>> Why is nearly every culture against it
Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.
>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless
This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s').
And most illegal drugs are demonstratively not harmless, to the point its almost axiomatic.
Nutt found that alcohol _the most harmful drug_ -- even more harmful than meth, crack and heroin-- far more harmful than ecstasy, marijuana, magic musrooms, LSD, etc.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
in general, using drugs isn't illegal. using drugs and not being wealthy enough to insulate yourself from the consequences of that choice is what is illegal
Your last sentence is exactly right. Neither of them will ever face legal action. But this is no different than most other things in the US (and elsewhere, usually to a lesser extent): law-enforcement-related outcomes react strongly to the presence of wealth.
I think that a key part of this discussion is making the distinction between saying which drugs are illegal and whether drugs should be illegal at all.
Alcohol is particuarly interesting. It was a crucial part of pre-modern society in creating clean drinking water and even for nutrition in the case of beer. Not only that but alcohol, as opposed to LSD for example, can be taken in doses that range from completely benign to powerfully intoxicating.
Defining what drugs should be illegal, how to punish the crime, and all the other details around it are more difficult to navigate.
I think perhaps you have no idea what you're talking about. The available range of doses for most psychedelics are "microdosing" (about the same taking any nootropic, including strong coffee) to far in excess of safe levels of alcohol. (I met someone once who claimed to have (accidentally) snorted a line of LSD crystals. She was fine, but said it took a couple of days)
> Defining what drugs should be illegal....
I think the better question to start with is why drugs should be illegal. Then you can see whether (and when) a drug matches that description, and proceed accordingly.
Ironically, the "Schedule" system lays out pretty good categories, they just apply the rubrics unreasonably and with Catch-22's.
I am wondering if you have ever taken LSD or heard of the term micro-dosing? At any rate, I disagree that LSD cannot be taken in benign doses.
This is false. For example, people microdose LSD for a more clear headed, caffeine-like stimulant effect. People microdose psilocybin to treat migraines. DXM, one of the most powerful dissociative psychedelics that exists, is sold over-the-counter in convenience stores to treat coughs. Research before your talk.
I think the reason you find alcohol so interesting because of the Iron Law of Prohibition(2): 'The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Cowan put it this way: "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."'
I'm reading the Kalevala (The National Epic of the Finns), and there is a lot of talk about brewing "table beer". I didn't know the term, so I had to look it up: beer of 1-2% alcohol, suitable for drinking during meals.
I think the reason you find such a range of "responses" to alcohol is not the drug itself, but because of the fact that it's legal, and therefore not subject to the Iron Law of Prohibition, you can buy it in a variety of strengths-- from beer to wine to liquor. It's not the drug per se, but its manufacture.
But, if you're going to go through the trouble of breaking the law to sell or buy and use illegal drugs, you might as well make it "worthwhile". That's why you could not find beer or wine during Prohibition, but you could get hold of high-content whiskey and vodka, even white lighting, moonshine, etc.
Likewise, contraband drugs have from from morphine to heroin to even more powerful manufactured opioids. If you're going to risk buying a sheet of LSD, get a dose of 70 micrograms, instead of 20.
Meanwhile, in silicon valley and other places, there is a new trend of microdosing(3): taking sub-threshold doses of "hallucinogens" to the point that _you're not even hallucinating-- but you do experience the "side effects" of increased alertness, awareness, creativity, memory, and problem solving. So there are doses of LSD, mushrooms, etc you can take that are not very powerful at all. It all depends on how they are manufactured and sold, just like alcohol.
Even now in South American countries, the most popular form of "cocaine" is coca leaves-- which, by contrast, are actually very healthy, and the first response to potentially deadly altitude sickness when pills aren't available.
I would suspect that if drugs were legalized, you would find a lot more forms with a lot less power.
1. http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wate...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition
3. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2015/11/27/lsd-mic...
As an anecdote, I once had the opportunity to sample coca tea - not the kind with the cocaine removed that's legal to sell in the US, but the real stuff. The magnitude of the effect was similar to a strong cup of coffee or energy drink, but the feeling was a little different. It was pleasant, and I would do it again if it was readily available.
I don't know how I'd obtain it in the US or Europe, but I'm quite certain I could obtain refined cocaine if I wanted that.
A classic example is the observation that the average orange sold in New York City is of significantly higher quality that the average orange sold in Florida.
On the face of it, this sounds silly - NYC doesn't grow oranges and Florida has lots of excellent orange trees, yet what happens is that given the high costs to ship fresh fruit, it makes sense (from a marginal cost perspective) to send mostly above-average fruit to NYC because the people in NYC who are already paying a much higher amount than the people in Florida for the same orange likely won't care very much about an extra five or ten cents to get the better orange while the people in Florida could see the extra five or ten cents as a 100% increase in the price of a good.
I would say that's accurate.
And if you agree to that, would you agree that the current policies based on racism and political goals would benefit from reform or do you think we should continue supporting them and the intentions behind them?
Deciding the criteria ultimately cannot be anything but an ideological policy decision. Deciding which specific drugs meet that criteria may be a scientific questions (if the criteria is such that that is the appropriate method of determining it.)
Do you see the possibility for a scientific process which would help define criteria?
At root, criteria are a value proposition, not a fact proposition. Science answers (or, predicts answers to) fact propositions, not value propositions.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
Without data, any opinion of this subject is bound to be based entirely on society's collective opinion or individual anecdotes. Within those limits, I'd argue that "people that enjoy that shit" are actually more reliable.
I believe the partition made by the the post you're replying to gets pretty close to my anecdotal reality. I'm somewhat convinced that heroin/crack/meth are addictive and that alone will always scare me off. Whereas LSD/mushrooms/ecstasy have almost no potential for addiction.
And, yes, having experienced them tends to make you run around telling people that it's part of the human experience – much like I'd tell people that they'd miss something essential if they never got slightly drunk on white wine watching the sunset on a beach.
edit: I may be looking at a different study (I can't read that economist link). I'm referring to "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs," though I do see another study "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis" that corroborates his post.
>> Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.
Yes, but we tolerate alcohol. We tolerate getting high - but we are selective about which drugs you can get high on. If we tolerate alcohol, so why don't we tolerate cannabis, psychedelics and other "soft drugs"? It's because of misinformation, fear, taboo and stigma.
>>>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless
>> This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s').
But if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime. Victimless crimes do nothing to help society - in fact, it degrades society, marginalizes and criminalizes otherwise respectable citizens, and in case of drug prohibition, guarantees that drug money goes to black market, which in turn potentially increase violent, real crime.
>> but if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime
This is where I would push back a bit and say that line of reasoning is too individualistic. Again, I'm not drawing lines between substances (that is another discussion) but I suggest that substances which significantly diminish your reasoning capacities and self-control do harm society. The entire project of democracy requires self-governing citizens. It only makes sense that if we want to have the freedom to live as we see fit we must be able to control ourselves. If a drug causes a person loose their reasoning capacities and self-control, as many do, they do damage society. Individuals who take such drugs are not respectable citizens because they are forfeiting a primary civic duty of self-control.
Again, because I'm staking out a narrow piece of ground here, I am not saying at this point which drugs ought to fall into the criminal category. Nor am I denying there are inconsistencies and perverse incentives in our existing system. I'm simply arguing that its reasonable for some drugs to be outlawed.
Also no one reasonable is recommending to drop acid right before going to the voting booth.
The effects of most drugs are fairly short-lived. I can drink whiskey until I'm incoherent tonight and be perfectly lucid and productive tomorrow. Maybe there's something more pro-social I could do than get drunk and there's an opportunity cost argument to be made, but there are a great many other socially neutral things I could do, like play video games.
It's not good for a society if too many people are too disengaged, incoherent or intoxicated to participate constructively, but I'm not convinced that prohibiting access to drugs is an effective means of causing people to participate constructively. I think it's more likely people who would withdraw from reality by taking drugs will withdraw by some other means if the only change made is to deny access to the drugs.
In short, I think the focus must be on the carrot, not the stick.
Who defines control and how do you do so without inevitably reducing the freedom said control exists to preserve?
If you want people to engage is their societies and being good citizens you don't do so by banning the alternatives. By and large we're programmed so that if given the opportunities to successfully engage and contribute we do.
We permit, encourage or even glorify countless destructive, risky, or dangerous forms of behavior, including various legal mind altering substances. Alcoholism is known to be a serious issue, but alcohol and the vast ways that it is treated in our culture is widely accepted and encouraged. We allow extreme sports, or even "traditional" sports like gymnastics, most of us drive every day in conditions that should be objectively terrifying, we allow recreational firearm activities in most countries, smoking is legal, etc.
But when it comes to drug use we put this huge social stigma on somewhat arbitrary substances, we impose significant punishments, we potentially ruin people's lives in the legal system, and all of this is so ingrained in our culture that even considering alternative systems is so radical that it seems like a fantasy. It's bizarre that such normal behavior is so incredibly reviled, when almost all of the negative consequences of it are due to the culture and legal system surrounding it rather than any physiological facts.
Are you saying you think sobriety and self-control at all times by everyone is essential to a functioning society?
If so, that's clearly false for virtually every functioning society. The widespread use of alcohol in many functioning societies is the most obvious counterexample.
On the other hand, if you are saying that you think sobriety and self-control sometimes and by some people is essential to a functioning society, then I don't think you'd find many people disagree.
Most societies where drug use is rampant (and that's pretty much every society) consists of some people who are sober some of the time, some who use drugs some of the time, and some (usually sick or dying) who use drugs all of the time, though the proportion varies widely depending on your definition of "drug" (ie. is chocolate, tea, and coffee to be drugs? do you consider legal, prescription or over the counter medications as drugs?)
On the issue of self-control: though widely considered to be essential in many western societies, in some other societies the loss of control is highly valued. I'm thinking primarily of some religious contexts. For example, glossalalia in some Christian sects, possession in Voodoo, etc. In all of these cases, self-control is deliberately relinquished to another -- usually to a god. This loss of self-control is not seen to be negative, but rather to be highly positive and desirable.
Drug use also has very deep roots in religion, from the role of alcohol in Judeo-Christian religions and the various "pagan cults" that preceded them, to an enormous variety of other drugs in various indigenous cultures around the world. Once again, the societies in which these drugs are used in religious contexts consider such drug use to be very positive, and the societies of which they're part tend to do quite well -- well, if you discount the destruction brought on to them by military, economic, and cultural invasion from other, more technologically advanced societies.
Connecting sobriety to prohibition stands on the premise that people need a nanny state to decide what they are allowed to put in their bodies. And on the premise that prohibition has a positive effect.
I don't believe in the first one and am very open to seeing any proof of drug prohibition resulting in sobriety.
What I can see clearly as it is very well documented, is the prohibition-related incarceration (of mostly people whom the police or government wants incarcerated anyways).
http://november.org/graphs/Federal1914.gif
Any proof of positive change caused by prohibition?
Except their not. There's vast bodies of research suggesting the war on drugs has been largely ineffective and encouraged a massive amount of related crime. If your focus is on reduction criminalization is proven to be ineffective. The major point of the article is that to reduce drug use your most effective at reduce the societal problems that lead to drug use.
Anecdotally, where I live the city has passed ordnances against selling or displaying wire-wrap jewelry on the streets, and I can't think of a reason to single that out except that, because the materials are cheap it is a common source of income for transient populations. You can't make them illegal directly, but you can make all their activities illegal and arrest them when they inevitably break the law.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
It's a mess and entirely determined by cultural history. I'm not aware of any culture that comprehensively bans all drugs, they just dodge the issue by weaseling the definition of what constitutes a drug.
And whilst I don't know of any earthly bans on chocolate, the Aztec god Quetzacoatl was condemned by his fellow deities for sharing chocolate - reserved for the gods - with humans. They punished him by getting him drunk.
[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/12662/5-historical-attempts-b...
I assume it's mostly to ensure your culture has a suitable fighting force. If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up.
It's only in the last hundred years or so that most nations have made most drugs illegal (there have been many exceptions of course but I'm talking about that mass banning across almost all nations that we see today).
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the British went to war with China for the right to keep selling their citizens opium.
If all the world leaders were required to take psychedelics on a quarterly basis there would likely be no need for warriors.
Every war is a civil war. We are all humans.
Alcohol is a drug which has been deemed acceptable by western culture, perhaps because suppressing it is impossible and it's (relatively) innocuous. But it still ruins many lives.
Changing attitudes to pornography are an interesting test case for the slow rehabilitation of a taboo activity.(Whether, in future, it does become completely normalized, or alternatively is definitively identified as an activity that, in its industrial form, is harmful to producers or consumers)
Are you sure about this? My layman's observation has been that all societies have some list of approved drugs and drugs approved for specific purposes, then demonizes the unapproved drugs and unapproved use of drugs. Your general point still stands, but we need to be careful about romanticizing groups just because we think they're "closer to the earth" or whatever.
The correlation would be obvious to anyone. You don't need a grand conspiracy to imagine why a leader might try to stop drug use.
That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But it can be easily explained without ulterior motives.
In fact, I think your allusion to some caricature of a (probably black) inner city and its problems is part of the problem more than the solution.
Unless you're talking about a mayor from the projects who outlaws coke after hearing of its rampant use among investment bankers, and their propensity to fight each other over territory. In that case, I'd love to see the movie.
edit grammar
Firstly, the effect of drug use in indigenous cultures may be limited (strongly) by culture: smaller communities having much stronger social controls on individuals' behaviour, which may in practice result in rules for drug use (and consequences for misuse) much like our's, just not in writing.
Secondly, there seems to be a mechanism by which a culture develops shared methods to handle drugs by various means. See for example the difficulty indigenous cultures have had again and again in adapting to alcohol – compared to western cultures' relative benign[0] relationship with alcohol. Even within western cultures, there are differences in adaptation, with good adaptation usually being anti correlated to level of regulation. From the jewish and southern European cultures where 8-year old get a glass of red wine with lunch to the inebriated inanity that is the UK at last call.
[0]: "relative" being the operative word here – alcohol obviously is a huge burden on western societies, in direct health effects, domestic violence, traffic deaths etc.
You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.
> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless.
What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural?
What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What?
While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.
Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today.
Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.
That's hardly an explanation. Then why would nearly every culture like to have an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them?
These kind of cultural traditions represent the lessons learned over many generations: it's because drugs tend to cause trouble. Not for everyone, but for enough people to cancel out the benefits.
I think this control is more about fear, for better or worse a society [more] active in drugs is unpredictable.
There's a lot to criticise in the war on drugs. But I don't think it involves a conspiracy to stun some imagined society of free-thinkers. If I had to name the worst mechanism at play here, it's the tendency of people to buy into law-and-order rhetoric and the lack of empathy for anybody who is seen as (even potentially) transgress.
Countries often pressure one another to make their laws as strict as their own, to prevent people from traveling abroad to break their laws (drug tourism, sex tourism). For instance about 5 years ago in The Netherlands, under pressure from neighboring countries they officially banned foreigners from buying pot from coffee shops (although this law is often ignored or overridden by local municipalities).
Moreover, most cultures accept the use of (generally poorly understood) mind-altering psychiatric medications.
The question is why cultures accept some drugs but not others.
One thing about cars is a higher proportion of people are ramming phone charging cables into them and scrolling around gps maps and mashing and spinning knobs and buttons of radios or texting or eating mcdonalds or falling asleep or whatever non driving activity you can think of that clearly jeopardizes everyone else's well-being than are driving under the influence of some drug. So really I think the penalty isn't proportional necessary to the harm but instead to likelihood it's some risk you are taking. If you are taking that risk then you don't want the penalty to involve being smashed in the face with a book large enough to massive impair your ability to lead a reasonable life on the first or second offense.
It also makes claims like
> drugs are not either “good” or “bad.” All drugs can be both “good” and “bad” in their interaction with humans"
This can said about "guns" too, but these sorts of cliches won't be very illuminating for thoughtful people.
Drugs are both a symptom of other problems and a cause of new problems.
Presciption opiates are an example where the drugs were clearly a huge cause, not just some symptom of a social problem.
In fact, the previous article in the blog is looking at the correlation between drug abuse problems and areas of the country that voted for Trump---a hypothesis being that poor social outcomes are linked with both political upheaval and addiction.
No, you are just saying that they are also a symptom. Which is exactly what I said.
Hari digs in to the history of the demonization of addicts in the United States. This started about a century ago as a federal police initiative, in the predecessor to the DEA.
One of the things the US did in the middle of the 20th century was to coerce other countries into agreeing to treaties criminalizing drugs -- the Paris Convention of 1931 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_Limiting_the_Ma... and the 1961 Single Convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...
If Hari's to be believed, the anti-addict stuff in the US was, at its core, racist. Cannabis was, he says, believed to cause violent insanity in black and brown people. The same was true of opium and similar drugs.
He doesn't make the argument that addiction is good, only that addicts are not evil or morally deficient. He does make the argument that prohibition causes addiction for several reasons:
(1) the iron law of prohibition: when a substance is prohibited, it drives out all but the most potent formulations of the substance from the market. Nobody smuggled lite beer during alcohol prohibition; they smuggled white lightning and 151-proof rum. The most potent formulations are most addictive.
(2) the various dealer effects.
a) Addicts to prohibited substances sell some to their friends to support their habits. This introduces more people to the substance. (This happened to me many years ago with cocaine. Fortunately for me I was broke at the time and my experience with the stuff seemed like dentist novocaine: boring).
b) Retail dealers cut the wholesale product with nasty adulterants to get more stuff to sell.
c) Dealer bigshots (guys with names like El Chapo) have an underworld kind of glamour to them.
d) Dealers outside the law have zero incentive to keep their products away from children.
(4) the lack of supervision of addicts getting their doses. Experiments in parts of England, Portugal, and Switzerland show that addicts who can safely get their doses in clinics lead productive lives and can, when ready, take on the task of curing their addictions.
It's counter-intuitive but true: decriminalizing drugs reduces addiction.
But, it will happen slowly. The narco-industrial complex is too powerful. Decriminalizing drugs means police layoffs. It means an end to most civil forfeiture property seizures, which will cut into government revenue. It eliminates a rich source of scare tactics for politicians. It takes a fat chunk out of gun and ammunition sales.
Just look at Massachusetts, where I live. Cannabis was decriminalized in November, and the law has been in effect for about a month. Police and politicians are wringing their hands about what to do.
Also, coca was reserved to higher classes in the past so laborers probably didn't have access to it. [1]
- Prices are 70% lower (although I believe the consumer-to-dealer mechanism is limited to very few drugs – you could be the world's #1 consumer of LSD for less than the price of cable)
- Reviews and shared tests create incentives for dealers to improve their products. I think Vice had an article about MDMA nowadays being 90%+ pure
- (not mentioned) Using the net and the post office as the only points of contact, drug consumers no longer get into contact with the "underworld". I have no idea how prominent this effect was in the past, but I could imagine that some criminal activity and relationships started from dealer<->consumer relationships.