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March 05, 2008
A Diversion Occasioned by a Death. (Historical, Personal)
The unexpected, but hardly surprising, sudden death of William F. Buckley Jr. at 82 was a reminder of my own involvement with the drug Policy Reform Movement. It began in April 1995 with an Op-ed by Joe McNamara in the San Francisco Chronicle. I was so impressed by its rare, but accurate criticism of what I already knew to be a pernicious policy that I wrote to ask a naive question: was he part of a formal organization? He responded by sending me the cover of a brochure for the Drug Policy Foundation’s Ninth annual convention to be held in Santa Monica in October. The good news was that there was a group opposing the drug war; the bad news was that it was nearly invisible and, as I would soon discover, struggling for both recognition and credibility against the enormous power of the federal government I’d once served for thirteen years as a physician in its regular Army.
I later attended the convention in Santa Monica and soon became an enthusiatic member of “reform.” The timing was just right; I’d been phasing into retirement, had just bought my first computer, and was already a member of the fledgling online community. Reform membership soon had me immersed in internet activism. As a physician willing to write letters critical of drug policy, I was a welcome recruit and soon found myself on the Board of a new organization. That we elected to support Proposition 215 as one of our first projects would put me at the epicenter of “medical marijuana” for the next twelve years.
My awareness of Buckley had come at about the same time because he unsettled the drug war heirarchy by declaring publicly in National Review that even though he continued to believe that drug use was "wrong," the policy should be modifiied because of its obvious failure. I recognized at the time that such a position was incomplete, but like many others, was so grateful for articulate criticism of drug policy by a Right Wing icon that I saw it as a turning point; a belief based on the wishful thinking I would learn soon enough was one of the more deeply ingrained tendencies of reform culture. Unfortunately, another that took longer to discover, and turned out to be the even more deeply ingrained, is the essentially (human) tendency toward intellectually dishonest competition that can be found in most (all?) of our species’ organizations.
It is precisely that tendency that is accounted for by the cognitive flaw I suggested in yesterday’s entry and will describe more fully in the next.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 5, 2008 04:50 PM