When the government’s top doctor resurrected the idea of decriminalizing certain drugs, the hoo-hah that followed shouldn’t have surprised anybody.
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders had made the mistake of suggesting a logical approach to the topic. And mood-altering substances have never lent themselves to logical discourse-not since long before the Puritans arrived on these shores, long before the Church Lady, long before the Deadheads’ mangy VW buses meandered across the landscape.
In the last century, for example, denial was the proper approach. That’s because the majority of U.S. drug addicts were women: white, middle-class and upper-class women whose doctors prescribed opium for them under names like “Dover’s Powder.” In fact, according to Richard Sandor, M.D., the opium staved off only one set of symptoms: the pains of opium withdrawal.
Logic was not in the picture, and rarely is when we deal with the mind-bending ingredients.
Politics, yes. Harsh judgment and sleazy permissiveness, yes. Punishment rather than prevention, yes. But not logic.
Sandor’s wry look at the history of U.S. drug policy was one of the papers at a recent meeting of the California Society of Addiction Medicine. Most of the papers-prepared before Elders shook up the government’s public relations corps-dealt with the controversial idea of decriminalizing the addictive drugs.
Here are some of his reminders, not as arguments for one side or the other, but to demonstrate the power of emotion over logic:
– Before the turn of the century, in the days when doctors’ methods were confined to blood-letting and amputation, opium was the only effective sedative and painkiller they had.
– The second largest group of addicts at that time were the doctors themselves.
– Early in this century, medicine began to be more scientific and earned more respect. At the same time, public disapproval of narcotics was growing; the alcohol prohibition movement joined with the anti-narcotics groups to become a powerful force in politics.
– U.S. foreign policy also played a hand in the change. Markets were opening in China; to establish itself as a friend, the U.S. sponsored several international conferences on how to help China fight the importation of opium from England and its colony, India. The conferences fizzled because the United States didn’t have a domestic drug policy of its own. The powers looking eastward lobbied Congress in 1909 for a federal narcotics control law. And failed. It took four more years to push through the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.
– Some doctors continued to keep addicts on maintenance doses, as they do today in places like Britain and the Netherlands. Within a few years, gung-ho was the word; even though the law exempted prescriptions, the Treasury Department began tracking down and prosecuting these doctors. It put the department in the spotlight, increased its budget and served as a warmup for the days of alcohol prohibition just ahead. In 25 years, according to Dr. Sandor, “the use of opiates had been transformed from a medically sanctioned response to illness to a despised criminal enterprise.”
– Publicity-wise Harry Anslinger, who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 32 years, singlehandedly “added the prohibition of marijuana to his domain in 1937.”
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– After World War II, narcotics control progressively got more punitive and went after more people. In 1956, Congress established mandatory minimum sentences, with stiffer penalties for repeaters, including execution for some. The result of this was not to cut the use of illegal drugs, but to give law-enforcement officials more power. Meanwhile, the load on the judicial system grew because defendants no longer could hope for a lenient judge and decided to take their chances with a jury.
– In 1970, a new federal law replaced all previous laws, superseded state and local laws and transferred narcotics enforcement to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. This kept narcotics enforcement separate from alcohol and tobacco, strengthening the long-standing fiction that these are not “drugs” and don’t really threaten anybody.
– Meanwhile, Dr. Sandor wrote, we’re caught in a tug of war between values: “puritanical morality” vs. individualism, deterrence vs. punishment, admiration for medical science vs. a distrust of professional advice-all rubbed raw by “every society’s undying need for a scapegoat.”
The result of all this, he said, is that “addicts have been at the mercy of a ruthless black market for over 70 years.”
As many of his colleagues also told the gathering, there must be a better way. This one isn’t working.