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December 30, 2008
An Untold American Success Story; Part 6
Although iconic Beat writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac, in concert with “psychonauts” like Timothy Leary, undoubtedly played a role in motivating youthful baby boomers to sample the rich variety of exotic psychotropic agents that were appearing on the popular scene just as they were coming of age in the mid-Sixties, it would be a misleading oversimplification to blame either them or the youthful counterculture itself for creating the “drug problem” that had been coming into sharper focus a few years prior to Richard Nixon's unexpected election in 1968.In fact, the most cogent interpretation of the best evidence now available is that the imponderable entity known as human nature, as well demonstrated by the behavior of the Nixon administration itself, was far more responsible than any other factor. In other words, our species has a penchant for creating its own biggest problems, one seriously compounded a common flaw we have as individuals: that of recognizing and correcting our collective shortcomings.
My personal route to that painful conclusion began with a decision to gather data systematically from those seeking pot recommendations. What that data discloses most conclusively is the absurdity of the assumptions underpinning our original drug policy from its legislative inception in 1914 and the dishonesty betrayed by another easily made observation: Nixon's punitive expansion of that original policy was crafted by lawyers intent on repairing the policy's claim to Constitutional legitimacy, without any serious attempt to analyze either contemporary scientific opinion or whatever federal experience had been accumulated between 1914 and the departure of Harry Anslinger in 1962.
Indeed, the record of any data gathered under Anslinger is almost non-existent and what does survive doesn't bear serious scrutiny, a fact further attested to by the near silence of Academia on either the FBN or its first director. Anslinger's tirelessly dishonest efforts on behalf of the scientifically uninformed and incoherent policy he protected throughout a long and influential career have been almost completely swept under the rug of history. Ironically, what does call the most attention to his career (and our human inability to deal with inconvenient truth) is the very absence of an academic Anslinger biography.
All of which brings up another example of how, once one is alerted to the frightening irrationality of human behavior referred to above, one can nearly always find examples. As this is written, Israelis, who have been attacking Arab "terrorists" in the densely populated Gaza Strip for five days, are seemingly oblivious to the fact that in the eyes of their fellow Arab semites and hundreds of millions of other Muslims around the world, their actions are seen as a form of terrorism.
Meanwhile, Republicans and Israelis, by gleefully repeating, ad nauseam, an (obviously) political statement by President-Elect Obama made during the recent campaign are already co-opting his presidency before he can even take office.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 30, 2008 03:46 PM