The Enduring Hypocrisy of The War on Drugs
By any objective measure, the so-called War on Drugs has been a failure.
The term was first used by President Nixon in 1971, but the war itself didn’t get underway in earnest until the Reagan administration with agreements with drug-supplying countries to curb the import of marijuana, cocaine and heroin into the U.S.
A quarter of a century later, the War on Drugs has failed to stem the flow of illegal drugs, the street prices of which are at record lows, while filling American prisons with hundreds of thousands of men and women whose only crime was to get caught with a joint or bag of marijuana.
This is not to say that dealers whose wares have addicted the dumb and defenseless shouldn’t have been apprehended and incarcerated, but the number of people whose lives have been ruined because of so-called victimless crimes and are innocent by almost any measure is staggering.
The underlying hypocrisy of the War on Drugs is hard to miss — unless you think like most politicians, cops and social conservatives.
Americans abuse enormous quantities of cigarettes, alcohol and prescription drugs in an orgy of socially-acceptable mood-altering that makes marijuana seem all the more benign, especially when imbibed by terminally-ill people in the 12 states where voters have approved referenda allowing its use for that purpose.
Yet the Justice Department, with the support of a Food and Drug Administration that in true Bush Era fashion has allowed politics to trump science, threatens to bust the 65-year-old man who smokes a joint to relieve the nausea and pain of chemotherapy. I know. My father was one of those people.
ILLUSION vs. REALITY
This bring me to the main purpose of this post — the growing evidence that psychedelics do a whole lot more than make people high and can be beneficial in the treatment of some of the most intractable medical conditions.
Dr. John Halpern is a leader in this promising field of research. As associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital, he is running tests with LSD as a treatment for super migraines known as cluster headaches and is treating late-stage cancer patients with MDMA. That psychedelic is better known as ecstasy, a drug as misunderstood today as LSD was in the 1960s.
Halpern’s biggest challenge is not funding, and to give credit where it’s due, the FDA is helping underwrite his MDMA research.
The problem is overcoming the social stigma of using drugs unfairly branded as dangerous that do far more good than harm.
To hear a radio interview with Halpern, click here.
12 Responses to “The Enduring Hypocrisy of The War on Drugs”
Man did I enjoy Psychedlics in the early 70′s.
My first experience of Acid was listening to Dark Side of the Moon and the first album of “Boston”.
I did this under the supervision of a Therapist.
I do not regret those experiences.
I also remember a friend who kept jumping into a campfire declaring that he was the Cook.
I do wish there were a way to alow these drugs to be available in semi controlled environments.
Similarly I would support the decriminalization of pot for personal use. Let’s use the jails to contain predators.
It’d be nice if the US could adopt at least a rule of indifference. In Spain marijuana is legal “for personal use” more than a certain weight found on you is illegal because it is supposed that it’s for sale. A person can have up to three plants of their own. Additionaly, though technically illegal, as long as it’s JUST marijuana, the law is sluggish at best. You have to get on the bad side of a policeman for him to bust you. Even more leeway is given to the sick, who are virtually NEVER charged with a crime. I still think it would be useful to allow for legal prescription of the drug for sick people, though as I understand it oncologists do supervise their patients unofficially, giving tips on the matter.
The war on drugs is just as fruitless as the war on terrorism…both are $500 billion sinkholes each. *smh*
I agree that MDMA and marijuana should be investigated for symptom relief in terminal patients, and should be used in certain cases even now before extensive data is available.
However, MDMA is not as benign as many believe. Serotoninergic neuron projections die back after just one use according to primate autopsy data, and both cognitive and emotional side effects are common in humans. Unlike the aftereffects of drugs like cocaine and opiates though, my experience is that patients with significant MDMA use associated with these symptoms tend to not improve over time after their last use of MDMA, although some medications can help.
Link
fmodo:
I obviously will have to bow to your clinical experience or knowledge thereof, but you may be making an unsupportable assumption — that MDMA makes people do socially unacceptable and dangerous things.
My decidedly non-clinical view based on being around many people in the late 1960s through the 1980s who were using LSD, STP, psilocibyn mushrooms and MDA (which as you probably know is a close cousin of MDMA), is that when people do socially unacceptable and dangerous things when they’re high it is because they’re inclined to do so to begin with, not because of the drug per se.
However, MDMA is not as benign as many believe. Serotoninergic neuron projections die back after just one use according to primate autopsy data, and both cognitive and emotional side effects are common in humans.
Remove MDMA and insert alcohol, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome isn’t caused by MDMA. The Bible Thumpers on the Right will never allow decriminalization. Their leadership never abuses Crank – LOL.
“I obviously will have to bow to your clinical experience or knowledge thereof, but you may be making an unsupportable assumption — that MDMA makes people do socially unacceptable and dangerous things.”
There is also an assumption that what people are taking is actually MDMA. Given that these drugs are illegal in the U.S. it is incredibly difficult to determine product quality. A decent percentage of what get passed off as “ectasy” contains miniscule ammounts of MDMA, if any at all.
Same with LSD. You may have been getting pure stuff from your doc back in the day but a lot of acid these days is laced with speed, strychnine and other additives.
If these drugs were regulated consumers could at least be more confident that they were getting the real deal.
By any objective measure, the so-called War on Drugs has been a failure.
Ain’t that the truth.
Overall, I agree with virtually everything said by Shaun in his post, noting that he makes many of the same arguments that I’ve been making for years.
I would point out, though, that both the Democrats and Republicans have a pretty bad track record in terms of the War on Drugs. Yes, many of the most prominent apologists for the War on Drugs happen to be conservatives [Rush Limbaugh (who has his own drug addiction problems), Bill Bennett (who has his own gambling addiction problems), Duke Cunningham (who's now in prison for accepting bribes as a congressman and previously begged a judge for leniency after his son was caught at Logan International Airport with a crap-load of pot), and Bill O'Reilly (who's only addicted to the sound of his own voice, as far as I can tell) quickly come to mind].
But Democrats, and even socially liberal Democrats have been pretty spineless about criticizing the futility and legality of the War on Drugs. John Kerry even went so far as to write a book in which he advocated expanding (or is that outsourcing?) our War on Drugs overseas (which sadly, we’ve done–see Project Columbia).
As far as I can tell, the only poltical parties that have been forcefully and consistently speaking out against the War on Drugs have been the Libertarian and Green parties.
Other than Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, there aren’t any politicians at the federal level (that I’m aware of) that are currently advocating an end to the War on Drugs.
For anyone here who’s as pasionate about this issue as Shaun and I, I invite you to read my seminal War on Drugs post over at my blog or at the litterally dozens of writings that I have posted over at the Centrist Coalition.
Also, Radley Balko’s The Agitator is about as good a blog as it gets in regards to how the War on Drugs has led to literally hundreds of botched paramilitary police raids over the last twenty years.
Thanks nicrivera for the link to CATO. The woman in Baltimore and a 90 old woman both shot dead in no knock raids. The price of the Drug War is higher than the GWOT. Paul is a RINO, I wish he would run as the Libertarian he reaaly is.
It’s too bad that there doesn’t seem to be any way to move to a realistic approach on this issue. Almost no one in the political mainstream has the courage to look at this issue honestly. If they did they’d have to admit that it’s been a massive disaster both in how much of our government resources it eats up and its effect on certain portions of society.
Thanks for the post, Shaun. I have only recently been realizing what a disaster the war on drugs has been and continues to be. I was only 8 years old in 1980 when “Just say no” became the catchphrase. Being a child, it never occurred to me to question any of it. It never occurred to me until rather recently that drugs were not horribly immoral. And it’s not as if I grew up in a teetotalling family or anything. My father drank beer regularly. (Thankfully, he saw the light many years ago and stopped drinking beer out of those vile-tasting aluminum cans. These days it’s bottles only. Vast improvement; the stuff’s actually worth drinking.) My father stopped smoking in college, but that was because he discovered that he got so engrossed in studing that he would forget to draw on the pipe and it kept going out. It just wasn’t worth the trouble to continue smoking.
During the past year, or thereabouts, I’ve been learning what incredible devastation the war on drugs has caused to our society on all levels. It’s really stunning how totally we’ve screwed ourselves and how much better we could make things
I think you’re right that it will be dificult to do medical research because of the stigma. I wish it weren’t that way. An awful lot of people stand to benefit if we would just relax a bit and be willing to use what works. I submit that drugs have been made into not a public health isue but into a moral one. As my husband observes, the attitude is, “We can’t let the stoners win.”
If I had cluster headaches, I am sure that I would be more than willing to try LSD if the opportunity were presented, side effects be damned (and thereputic LSD has got to have one heck of a side effect profile. IMO, the side effects I get from Percoset are bad enough, but the relief if well worth the difficulty.) I suffer from chronic classic migraine with aura (prodrome, actually), and I honestly thank God that I don’t have cluster headaches. By all accounts, those are so much worse. Speaking of Percoset side effects, I’m experiencing them at the moment. My body’s been trying very hard to have a full-blown migraine for the last week straight, and I think that it’s finally managed to acheive that goal. At this point, I’m all for getting it over with. With the Percoset, the next 24-48 hours will probably not be terribly uncomfortable – as long as I remain lying down do reduce the dizziness from the Percoset and take Phenergan when necessary to keep myself from throwing up my meds (the excessive nausea is a side effect of the narcotic, not of the migraine in my case.) Without the Percoset the next couple days would be quite agonizing. I suffered through these things for years without pain relief. Why should people with migraines (or anyone else with serious pain) have to suffer unnecessarily because everyone (doctors included) is so phobic about narcotics due to the war on drugs?
Getting the cannabis for your father was the right thing to do – and a very brave thing. It’s good you did it. The world would be a better place if people didn’t insist that it was illegal and/immoral.
Whenever I think of the so called “War on Drugs” I always scoff and think “Ya, because prohibition worked out so well…”
It’s such a waste of time, money and resources and it’s another way for someone’s to push their own morals onto someone else. It’s my body. I should be allowed to do with it as I see fit.