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December 25, 2010
Long Overdue Change
Harry Anslinger’s sponsorship of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act set in motion an unplanned (and unwitting) natural experiment the results of which are still neither complete nor final. However, thanks to the remarkable series of events set in motion by California’s Proposition 215 in 1996, the weaknesses of our national drug policy are now so evident to so many people that its radical alteration over the next ten to twenty years is far more likely than its preservation. That said; both the direction and rapidity of those alterations are difficult to predict, precisely because the policy’s ardent defenders (including many who are also its dupes) have done such a good job of selling fear of addiction to their distracted, anxious fellow citizens. In essence, America’s experiment with drug prohibition has been a bipartisan disaster; however because of its support from both major political parties, it has also acquired a degree of veresimilitude sufficient to immunize it against its many failures and thus convince a majority of citizens they had no alternative to continuing the same destructive policy year after year. What has gradually eroded that belief since 1996 has been the revelation of how many ordinary people have continued using “marijuana” despite its considerable social and legal risks and how much benefit it seems to confer on them. Ironically, disagreement within the pro-legalization community over the nature of those benefits is perhaps more of a threat to their political success than the (understandable, but disgraceful) tendency of professionals in the medical and behavioral sciences to adapt their own beliefs and studies to supporting the increasingly disorganized requirements of federal dogma.Although the Controlled Substances Act (1970) gave the drug war its modern arsenal, its remote federal origins were in the deceptive 1914 Harrison Act, which was then critically modified by passage of the MTA in 1937. It's important to remember that both older pieces of legislation were passed before modern Biochemistry, Pharmacology, or medical imaging had elucidated what are now considered the basics of "neuroscience," thus allowing the timely injection of just enough bias to keep drug war dogma current. It's even more important to note that even as the CSA was being drafted during the first two years of the Nixon Administration, there was no review of the implicit assumptions about "addiction" made in either Harrison or the MTA.
The evidence for that assertion is well documented, but not well known, because our mainstream press, which has always had a soft spot for lurid popular notions of addiction, buried Nixon's rejection of the Shafer Commission report: itself a timid statement of available evidence that should have persuaded more people to question the judgment of one of the biggest liars ever to occupy the Oval Office.
It's my contention that the hardening of those false assumptions about addiction into dogma over a long interval, together with the implicit support of the whole body politic, has had the effect of normalizing them in the minds of otherwise bright people who then looked past the glaring lack of clinical studies on people being labeled "addicts," "junkies," and-finally- "criminals" by whole new professions engaged in treating "patients" (clients) for a living.
Thus a lot of bright people will have to consume an enormous amount of crow before any real change in drug policy can happen. Fortunately the state initiative process has been left alone and if there's any solace to be found in our economic "downturn," it's that Prohibition was trashed early in the "Great Depression."
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 25, 2010 05:38 PM