Jacob Sullum: Saying Yes - In Defense of Drug Use

National Review, June 20, 2003

Jacob Sullum is a brave man. In his first book, the entertaining and provocative For Your Own Good, he attacked the excesses of anti-smoking activism and was duly—and unfairly—vilified as a Marlboro mercenary, a hard-hearted shill for Big Tobacco with little care for nicotine's wheezing victims. Fortunately, he was undeterred. In Saying Yes, Sullum, formerly of NATIONAL RF.VIEW and now a senior editor at Reason magazine, turns his attention to the most contentious of all the substance wars, the debate over illegal drugs. Sullum being Sullum, he manages to find a bad word for the mothers of MADD and a good one for 19th-century China's opium habit.

Sullum's effort in Saying Yes is more ambitious (or, depending on your viewpoint, outrageous) than that of most critiques of the war on drugs. Supporters of legalization typically base their case on moral or practical grounds, or both. The moral case is broadly libertarian—the individual has the right to decide for himself what drugs to take—while the practical objection to prohibition rests on the notion that it has not only failed, but is also counterproductive: It creates a lucrative (black) market where none would otherwise exist. Sullum repeats these arguments, but then goes further. Taken in moderation, he claims, drugs can be just fine—and he's not talking just about pot.

Whoa. In an era so conflicted about pleasure that wicked old New York City has just banned smoking (tobacco) in bars, this is not the sort of thing Americans are used to reading. Health is the new holiness and in this puritanical, decaf decade, most advocates of a change in the drug laws feel obliged to seem more than a little, well, unenthusiastic about the substances they want to make legal. Their own past drug use was, they intone, nothing more than youthful "experimentation." Most confine themselves to calling for the legalization of "softer" drugs and, even then, they are usually at pains to stress that, no, no, no, they themselves would never recommend drugs for anyone.

Sullum is made of sterner stuff. He admits to "modest but instructive" use of marijuana, psychedelics, cocaine, opioids, and tranquilizers with, apparently, no regrets. (Judging by the quality of his reasoning, I would guess the drugs had no adverse effect on him.) He seems prepared to legalize just about anything that can be smoked, snorted, swallowed, injected, or chewed—and, more heretically still, has no truck with the notion that drug use is automatically "abuse." "Reformers," he warns, "will not make much progress as long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always wrong."

In this book Sullum demonstrates that if anything is "wrong"—or at least laughably inconsistent—it is the status quo. The beer-swilling, Starbucks-sipping Prozac Nation is not one that ought to have an objection in principle to the notion of mood-altering substances. Yet the U.S. persists with a war on drugs that is as pointless as it is destructive. This contradiction is supposedly justified by the assumption that certain drugs are simply too risky to be permitted. Unlike alcohol (full disclosure: Over the years I have enjoyed a drink or two with Mr. Sullum) the banned substances are said to be products that cannot be enjoyed in moderation. They will consume their consumers. Either they are so addictive that the user no longer has a free choice, or their side effects are too destructive to be compatible with "normal" life.

To Sullum, most such claims are nonsense, propaganda, and "voodoo pharmacology." Much of his book is dedicated to a highly effective debunking of the myths that surround this "science." There's little that will be new to specialists in this topic, but the more general reader will be startled to discover that, for example, heroin is far less addictive than is often thought. The horrors of cold turkey? Not much worse than a bad case of flu. (John Lennon—not for the only time in his career—was exaggerating.) Even crack gets a break: Of 1988's "crack-related" homicides in New York City, only one was committed by a perpetrator high on the drug. That's one too many, of course, but 85 percent of these murders were the result of black-market disputes, a black market that had been created by prohibition.

So if drug users are neither necessarily dangerous nor, in most cases, addicts, can they be successful CPAs or pillars of the PTA? Sullum argues that many currently illegal drugs can safely be taken in moderation—and over a long period of time. He interviews a number of drug users who have managed to combine their reputedly perilous pastime with 9-to-5 respectability. Sullum concedes that they may not necessarily be representative, but his larger point is correct: The insistence that drugs lead inevitably to a squalid destiny is difficult to reconcile with the millions of former or current drug users who have passed through neither prison nor the Betty Ford. As Sullum points out, "excess is the exception," a claim buttressed by the fact that there are millions of former drug users.

Typically, drug consumption peaks just when would be expected—high school, college, or shortly thereafter. Then most people grow out of it. The experience begins to pall and the demands of work and family mean that there's no time, or desire, to linger with the lotus-eaters. Others no longer want to run the risks of punishment or stigma associated with an illegal habit. Deterrence does-— sometimes—deter, and it may deter some of those who would not be able to combine a routine existence with recreational drug use. But this is not an argument that Sullum is prepared to accept: He counters that the potentially vulnerable population is small and may well become alcoholics anyway, "thereby exposing themselves to more serious health risks than if they had taken up, say, heroin." Sullum is not, we are again reminded, an author who is afraid of controversy.

But is he too blithe about the degree of potential medical problems associated with drug use? As he shows (occasionally amusingly and often devastatingly), much of the "evidence" against drug use has been bunk, little more than crude scare- mongering frequently infected with racial, sexual, or moralistic panic; but it doesn't follow that all the dangers arc imaginary. To be sure, he does acknowledge some other health hazards associated with drugs; but he can sometimes be disconcertingly relaxed about some of the real risks.

His discussion of LSD is a case in point. The causal relationship between LSD and schizophrenia is complex (and muddled by the fact that both schizophrenics and schizotypal individuals are more likely to be attracted lo drugs in the first place), but it's not too unfair to describe an acid trip as a chemically induced psychotic episode. The "heightened sense of reality" often recorded by LSD users is, in fact, exactly the opposite—a blurring of the real with the unreal that is also a hallmark of schizophrenia. Throw in acid's ability to generate the occasional-—and utterly unpredictable—"flashback" and, even if many of the horror stories arc no more than folklore, it's difficult to feel much enthusiasm for legalizing LSD except, just perhaps, under carefully controlled therapeutic conditions.

What's more, as a substance that, even in small doses, will create a prolonged delusional state, LSD is not exactly the poster pill for responsible drug use. But this exception should not distract us from the overall strength of Sullum's case. It is possible, he writes, to "control" drug consumption "without prohibition. Drug users themselves show that it is." It's unnecessary for him to add that the abolition of prohibition would imply a relearning of the virtue of self-control, a quality long imperiled by the soft tyranny of the nanny state.

For Sullum is not advocating a descent into Dionysian frenzy. The poverty of "Just Say No" may be obvious, he writes, "but moving beyond abstinence does not mean plunging into excess. Without abstaining from food, it is possible to condemn gluttony as sinful, self-destructive, or both . . . Viewing intoxication as a basic human impulse is the beginning of moral judgment, not the end. It brings us into the territory of temperance"—a word Sullum uses, accurately, to mean moderation. The 19th-century anti-alcohol campaigners who hijacked it were as cavalier with vocabulary as they were with science.

Proponents of legalization will, naturally, say yes to this book, but their opponents should read it too. Sullum's arguments deserve a response from those who disagree with him. As he points out, the costs of the war on drugs far exceed the billions of dollars of direct expenditure. They also include "violence, official corruption, disrespect for the law, diversion of law-enforcement resources, years wasted in prison by drug offenders who are not predatory criminals, thefts that would not occur if drugs were more affordable, erosion of privacy rights and other civil liberties, and deaths from tainted drugs, unexpectedly high doses, and unsanitary injection practices." Under these circumstances, it's up to the drug warriors to come up with a convincing explanation as to why we are fighting their drug war. Judging by this well-written, persuasive, and important book, they are unlikely to succeed.