Marijuana (Yet Again): Drug Policy for American Drug Culture

            In a letter to the editor posted on line on Feb. 3 and later printed in the Ventura County Star, Al Knuth of Camarillo, CA, argues that marijuana is "Not a harmless drug" and notes that he has "personally witnessed the recreational use of marijuana destroy the lives of some relatives, friends and others [… through] divorce, loss of jobs, loss of friends, loss of ambition, criminal acts, etc." and adds, "the use of alcohol causes about 88,000 deaths and more than $224 billion in damages per year in the United States," finally asking rhetorically, "Do we really need to encourage and legalize yet another 'harmless' drug for our society?"

            A very close friend of mine had addiction problems leading to criminal acts, loss of job, divorce, and ultimately his death. His addictions started with beer and cigarettes and ended with beer and cigarettes, but I don't conclude from that personal experience, nor from the clear facts of the harm done by alcohol and tobacco, that we should make nicotine an illegal drug and return to alcohol prohibition.

            What I do conclude is that we need to recognize that mainstream America has drug problems, and we need a rational approach to dealing with them.

            A rational approach would classify drugs dispassionately and scientifically, do the math and public-health analysis, and attempt to limit harm; and a rational approach would get over our puritanical heritage enough to acknowledge that most people use psychoactive drugs because it gives them pleasure and to acknowledge pleasure as a good thing and to be placed in the equations along with harm.

            The US federal and local governments gave up on alcohol prohibition for complex reasons, but most justifiably because capital "P" Prohibition did far more harm than good. If you count jail time as often justified harm, but still harm; if you count sucking people into the US criminal justice system as punishment in itself, even when they're acquitted; if you count punishment disproportionate to crimes (and historically racist) as an outright evil — then marijuana prohibition currently does great harm.

            Better to treat psychoactive drugs as a group and regulate stringently drug pushing. For net harm reduction while allowing drug users to seek pleasure and drug addicts to avoid pain, it would be useful to legalize for those over 18 possession of any recreational drugs while limiting advertising and aggressive marketing. Like, it makes no sense to put people in jail for selling a few grams of marijuana while allowing brilliantly-executed alcohol ads on television and "happy-hour" at your local bar to ramp up the use and abuse of booze.

            We need tough-minded policies on drugs: on all and any drugs, of both underclass and mainstream American drug culture.

            If there are First Amendment issues with limiting advertising and marketing of alcohol as a recreational drug — and there are — well, we dealt with similar issues with tobacco.

            If people aren't doing their jobs because they're stoned fire them: not for using drugs but for not doing their jobs. If people are endangering others because they're driving while zonked, punish them for endangering others. If limiting the pushing of currently legal drugs will result in increased unemployment, then former bartenders and others of the deserving unemployed should be given generous support and aid finding other jobs, and ad agency flacks and marketing folk can be offered retraining for more honest work.

Marijuana Debate (yet again): August 2015

            In his column in the Ventura County Star for August 13 (and other papers), Tom Elias usefully reminds us of the risks involved in marijuana use and, (therefore, marijuana legalization. Still, we need to put such arguments into larger contexts.

            Anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and human beings have found getting zonked one way or another worth doing for as long as we've been civilized, and possibly going back to the First Agricultural Revolution some 12,000 years ago: we may've grown grain as much for beer as for bread. The issue with psychoactive drugs from beer and wine to heroin and amphetamines is how to regulate them to minimize harm.

            Our current system includes aggressive pushing of privileged drugs such as pharmaceuticals and ethyl alcohol — there are TV ads for medicines and beer — and criminal punishment for selling and possessing DRUGS!!! not favored by people in power. This system does more harm than good, and there will be a net increase in the public good in changing it to one that deals with all drugs in our culture sensibly and handles addiction and other drug abuse as public health issues.

            Yes, there will be problems in legalizing marijuana and, I hope, other drugs. For Americans generally and currently targeted minorities particularly, the lost and ruined lives will be far fewer with legalization.

Drug Abuse, Child Abuse, Exploiting the Young (2 Sept. 2014)

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             Some Australians joke that the British government sent Australia their felons and North America the Puritans — and Australia got the better deal. Those Ausies have a point certainly this far: the American Puritan heritage can skew our evaluations of what's interesting and important, and skewing ideas of what's interesting and important — and good and evil — can skew policy.

            Two quick sports stories from my years at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, a "MAC" school, athletics-wise: The Mid-America Conference.

            One of my students was a football player who had transferred to Miami from what was definitely not a MAC school but a football power. I did not raise the question directly — tact isn't exactly my long suit, but I do have a vague sense of the concept — I didn't raise the question out of nowhere, but the conversation did take a turn where I could ask the obvious, "Why?!" Why did he give up a chance to play what is pretty much pro football and come to a relatively no-name school like Miami?

            His answer was that he didn't want to take steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, and that in the Miami program he wasn't pressured to do so. Specifically, there weren't "training tables" at Miami for jock nutrition (at least not back then) where assistant coaches would put pill bottles out at the end of the table, then turn their backs and walk away.

            Another student had played high school football, including a final quarter after the trainer, on the coach's instructions, had shot up his knees with a Xylocaine-and-cortisone cocktail. I asked the student how he was doing, and he said, "I can walk, but I won't be playing much football." It is interesting, if largely off the point, that the game my student finished wasn't all that important for the coach: their high school team won a lot of football games, and, in addition, the coach had tenure as a PE teacher. "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing" can be taken very literally, and this coach really, really wanted to win that game, which his team did, in part because my student kept playing when, on medical grounds, he should not have: really, seriously should not have.

            Olympic champion Michael Phelps's taking some hits off of a bong at a party isn't particularly drug abuse and in a sane, non-puritanical culture would not have been big news. What was done to my students was abusing drugs and, in the case of the high school football player, abusing someone large and strong but still, legally, a child — and someone who had trusted the coach and trainer. In a sane, non-puritanical culture, it would be news and a scandal indeed when coaches have sex with their players and bad indeed if they sexually exploit children; but it should be bigger scandals when you have routine pressuring of athletes to use powerful drugs, and a scandal leading to loss of licenses and serious prison time when you have a coach and trainer risk crippling a kid.

            Similarly with campus rape.

            Rape is a problem, period, and I am unconvinced that it is a bigger problem on US campuses than elsewhere and pretty well convinced that it would be most directly addressed by locating, charging, prosecuting, convicting, and imprisoning a relatively small number of serial rapists, with much of the remaining problem best handled through major changes in how American young people are brought up to use recreational drugs, most especially ethyl alcohol. Beyond that is the issue of the status of women in American society (and worldwide), and a robust feminist movement must work now and for a time to come on a wide range of criminal, political, and cultural issues that include rape but — a politically-charged "but" — but are not so centered on rape as to impede forming coalitions between and among women and men united for shared causes.

            In a society less tainted by puritanical prurient interest in bodily matters, the bigger stories about exploitation and abuse of the young would be the far less sexy (sic) issues of jobs for young people and the continuing defunding of programs for them with the notable and crucial exception of more prisons and police.

            Campus rape is an issue; bigger issues, for more young Americans over the long haul of their happiness is the set that includes degree inflation (the constantly rising bar of degree required for a decent job), requirement inflation (more credit hours required to get a bachelor's degree), and inflation inflation for the cost of a degree: primarily the reduction in State and other public subsidies for schooling that sends people into years of debt to go to college.

            Even limiting the subject to drugs in sports, and ignoring huge threats like misuse of antibiotics — even limiting the subject to sports and drugs, there are more important drug issues than Michael Phelps on the bong-o's or Lance Armstrong's doping schemes. Even limiting the subject to coachly abuse, there are other and equally serious problems that do not include sex.

            And when looking at American crimes against the young, campus rape is among them, but one are of offense among many. And dealing with campus rape can be an excuse for State Legislatures like that of California to look like they're doing something without paying the political costs that would come from reassigning priorities and increasing taxes to put more investment into programs for the young of both sexual "modal phenotypes" and the whole range of genders.