From: Christopher B Reeve <[cr 39] at [andrew.cmu.edu]>
Organization: Sophomore, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon,
Pittsburgh, PA

"Almost every social problem (especially crime) is portrayed as
and perceived of as a drug problem.  Almost every homicide,
every assault, and every robbery is now presented in the media
as drug-related.  Newspaper stories contain estimates by various
government officials of the amount of crime that is
drug-related.  Almost never, however, is the concept of
drug-related crime defined.  There is no uniform definition of
drug-related crime among criminal justice agencies or
researchers, much less among those in the media.  Its increasing
application is a reflection of the moral panic that has been
manufactured over illegal drugs and the desire to write off
profound social problems as problems of drug use and
trafficking.  In one study, for example, researchers seeking to
probe the lack of definitional clarity noted that a crime might
be considered drug related if arresting officers suspected the
perpetrator or victim of being involved with drugs [Ryan,
Patrick J., Paul J. Goldstein, Henry H. Brownstein, and Patricia
A. Bellucci.  (1989).  Drug-Related Homicides, New York City,
1988.  Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Society of Criminology, Reno, Nevada.].  Through the label of
drug-related crime, the survival strategies  of the marginalized
and their violence, desperation, and alienation have been
redefined into a contemporary version of 'reefer madness.'"
(Christina Jacqueline Johns, Power, Idealogy, and the War on
Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure, 62)

Drugs and The Public

  "First, by being greatly concerned about the potential danger
of drugs, Mr. Fry [the typical anti-drug advocate] is protected
personally against drug-taking, alerted to the use of drugs by
those close to him, and predisposed to support antidrug
measures.  These are the manifest functions of his concern.  Teh
latent functions are to reinforce his desire to resist the
temptation to take drugs and to be a 'good' person.  But the
depth of his desire to maintain the status quo reaches into
unconscious levels, and has driven Mr. Fry, normally a
reasonable man, into regarding the marijuana smoker whose only
crime is his use of the drug as a dangerous criminal.  By
censoring material that conflicts with his views, Mr. Fry
minimizes the internal conflict that would arise were he to take
note of all the information available to him.  We know enough
about nonmedical drug use to make Mr. Fry and the others we
interviewed uncomfortable if they were to acknowledge all the
facts.
  Second, our vision of ourselves as upright and capable of
judging is reaffirmed vis-a-vis drug use, and this strengthens
our resolve to maintain the status quo.  Mr. Fry, for example,
on the subject of drug use felt on firm ground in an insecure
world.  He was keenly aware that he had done little to make the
world a better place for his children, and his guilt about this
immobilized his wish to control the younger generation.
However, when it came to drugs, he knew what was right.  His
desire to protect the kids from themselves made him certain of
is position, exorcised his guilt, and permitted him to feel
perfectly justified in his wish to control.  These are the
manifest functions.  Mr. Fry is unaware of the latent function,
by which his veyr rwillingness and power to judge the drug user
affirms the uprightness of him who judges.  The myths about drug
use that Mr. Fry clings to - such as htat of an inevitable drug
progression - permit him to retain his sense of righteousness."
(Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 50
- 51)

"In order to feel useful and beneficient when they enforced the
laws, they felt that drug use had to be seen as bad for society.
 To deal with drug use directly and unequivocallyl, while
mantaining their own self-respect, the olice had to eschew all
doubts on this subject." (Norman E. Zinberg and John A.
Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 51)

"Third, we must remember that the very idea of following
unfamiliar throught patterns can be threatening; by deterring
most people from reexamining controversial and complex issues
this, too, serves to maintain the status quo." (Norman E.
Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 51)

"Public attitudes toward drug use have a second function: that
of defining evil.  We need evil in order to define good, and we
love evil with a truly ambivalent love.
  Our interviews illustrated real and practical ways in which
drug users have served this semimystical need.  Deviants have
always been used to define the boundaries of the socially
acceptable, and until recently few people, including users
themselves, protested against drug users as the epitome of all
that good people didn't want to be." (Norman E. Zinberg and John
A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 53)

"The doctors see nonmedical drug use as a direct threat to their
professional role, and therefore do not distinguish among drugs.
 This enables them to draw a line against people who use drugs
other than under medical auspices, which then includes anyone
who believes in self-medication.  The drug user epitomizes the
diregard of medical sanctity so thoroughly that he makes it easy
to state the virtue of medical supervision." (Norman E. Zinberg
and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 54)

"It's threat, as well as its capacity to stir up unconscious
conflict, is dulled because we have so often watched other
people take the trip and emerge unscathed.  We do not have the
same comforting familiarity with drugs.  Howard Becker suggests
that when responses to marijuana and LSD are more thoroughly
known, the secondary anxiety associated with them will vanish.
There is evidence to bear him out; in the last six months of
1967 admission to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center or
Bellevue for bad psychedelic trips ran approximately 10 percent
a month; in the last six months of 1969, there were only three
such admissions.  There were probably many more bad trips during
that period, but the sufferers knew what was happening and could
wait it out.  Familiarity can help one to deal with the common
human fear of being overwhelmed by one's passive desires.  But
it will take some time for this familiarity to develop, and (if
this psychoanalytic exlanation holds) until the defensiveness
relaxes, we can expect all the mechanisms just described to
continue; the fear of passivity, of mental disorganization, and
of solitary and unfamiliar activities." (Norman E. Zinberg and
John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 56 - 57)

"In the present social setting, where drug use is labeled
criminal and drug users deviants, subcultural responses - such
as anger, exhibitionism, alienation, anxiety, the desire to be
different - are stimulated.  Often it is hard to tell which is
part of the new consciousness and which is in response to social
persecution.  All we can do is to remember that such a
difference exists.  Then we will not dismiss new insights
because they are clothed in revolutionary rhetoric or polemic;
nor will we uncritically accept loose allegations and utopian
visions merely because they come from alleged spokesmen for the
wave of the future." (Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson,
Drugs & The Public, 76 - 77)

"These reports are, of course, subject to all the frailties of a
person's evaluaation of his own motives.  Nonetheless, if
believed, they show that some of the non-users had abstained
because they were morally opposed to the use of any intoxicants;
some because they feared the effects of marijuana; some because
they had 'better things to do' with their time; some because
they were afraid of something that might reduce their resolve to
give up cigarette smoking; some because they hadn't gotten
around to using hte drug; and finally some, a very few, because
they did not know where they could obtain the drug without too
great a risk of apprehension.  In a sample of students at Cal
Tech, fewer than twenty percent of the non-users of marijuana
regarded the law as a major reason not to use the drug.  Of
these, eleven percent stated that they wished to avoid the risk
of legal or security-clearance problems, while eight percent as
a matter of principle wished to avoid doing what was illegal."
(Kaplan, John.  Marijuana: The New Prohibition.  New York and
Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970, p. 324)

"One way of putting oneself into the position of the potential
offender is to translate the abstraction of such terms as
'opiate addiction,' 'marijuana use,' 'homosexuality,' into the
reality of an already experienced everyday behavior.  For
example, the lawmaker might ask himself how he would respond to
penal sanctions forbidding the smoking of cigarettes, the
drinking of coffee, sexual orgasm, or any other commonly
practiced activity which, if 'excessively' indulged in, might
lead to social and personal harm." (Skolnick, Jerome.  "Coercion
to virtue," 41 University of Southern California Law Review, 624
(1968))

"One function of laws against the use and possession of drugs is
that they publicly sanciton the feeling of most people that drug
use is morally wrong, even when no one is hurt.  John Kaplan, an
advocate of marijuana reform, has articulated this feeling:
'Like many Americans of my generation, I cannot escape the
feeling that drug use, aside from any harm it does, is somehow
wrong.'  Professor Kaplan, however, was able to separate his
moral views from his legal judgment.  Since the marijuana laws
created heavy burens for the legal system, he urged that
penalties be dropped.  Most people, however, are unable or
unwilling to keep law and morality distinct.  If drug use is
wrong, they reason, it is perfectly natural to have the law
express that judgment and punish the immorality when it occurs.
Indeed, the need to enshrine moral sentiments in the law often
obstructs the desire to lessen the damage from drug use."
(Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public,
190)

Drug Laws and Legalization

  "The we-don't-know-enough-now argument is deficient in several
respects.  Perhaps the most important is its confusion between
harmfulness and legality.  Even if all the evidence were in, the
question of whether personal use and possession of a drug should
be criminal would still be open.  While this subtlety has not
been missed in the case of cigarette smoking, most people hav e
great difficulty in separating the two questions where other
drugs are concerned.
  The more-research-before-change posture also assumes that given
a little more time, modern science can come up with the desired
answers.  In a world where the obstacles to definitive research
described later in this chapter did not exist, this argument
would still be unconvincing.  Usually it is lack of knowledge of
long-term social, psychological, and physical effects that is
used as a basis for caution.  Yet it is precisely knowledge of
those effects that is out of reach at the moment.  Indeed, if
ever we can with assurance pinpoint the long-term effects of
drugs, it will be a generation too late to resolve the dilemma
now confronting us.
  Finally, the proponents of caution tend to overlook the vast
body of knowledge concerning the effects both of drugs and of
the laws regulating them that now exists.  Thousand of years of
opiate, cannabis, and hallucinogen use have left us with
considerable, albeit rough, knowledge about their effects.  A
surge of research and increased knowledge in the past thirty
years enables us to say some important, if not definitive,
things aobut drugs.  Even more important, over fifty years of
experience with police control of drug use has demonstrated the
ill effects of an unbalanced, overly moralistic approach.
Although we cannot scientifically asser that marijuana smokers
some thirty years from now might contract some unknown ill, we
do know that the drug laws are ineffective, costly, unjust, and
unnecessary in dealing with problems of drug misuse." (Norman E.
Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 88 - 89)

"One more development - and one of the saddest - that indicates
that differences in national character amount to less than might
have been thought is the changing attitude toward the police.
Alan Brian, in an essay in the New Statesman called 'From Bobby
to Fuzz,' outlined the changing attitude of the British public,
particularly the young, toward the police.  It indicates that
once search and seizure laws are adopted and differential
law-enforcement procedures become frequent, even a mutual trust
as strong as that between the average Britisher and the bobby
can break down.  Cannabis bedevils British society and its most
trusted social institutions in much the same way marijuana has
the United States." (Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson,
Drugs & The Public, 163)

"The most basic flaw in a system that penalizes without regard
to harm every act of use or possession is its clash with the
fundamental safeguard of Anglo-American juriprudence that only
the occurrence and not the potentiality of harm be penalized.
The vast majority of criminal statutes act post facto - they
penalize conduct after it has caused injury.  A system whereby
an intention to steal, say, was made a crime might, assuming
detection of intentions were possible, be an efficient way of
preventing theft.  Yet the price of such efficiency would be the
nightmare of thought conrol, and the injustice of arresting
people who, despite their intention, never actually do steal."
(Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public,
169)

"The legal policy of penalizing all drug use and possession has
not resulted from clear and convincing evidence that drug use is
damaging, and that the damage can be best prevented by criminal
law.  Accident, distortion, or disregard of information, and an
almost naive acceptance of any charge about the evil of drugs,
dominate the lawmaking process." (Norman E. Zinberg and John A.
Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 177 - 178)

"It is fair to say that one of themmost serious deficiencies of
the American Legislative process is the failure to provide
machinery for the routine collection of data adequate for
evaluation of existing regulatory measures and consideration of
new proposals.  Nowhere are the consequences of these
deficiencies more serious than in the area of narcotics control.
 For two generations we have engaged in a program of penal
regulation profoundly affecting the lives and liberties of
persons and involving public interests of greatest importance
without reliable data on a host of matters indispensable to any
sound audit of what we have been doing and to what we should be
doing." (Francis Allen, Michigan Law School dean, excerpted from
Wilner, Daniel, and Gene Kassebaum, eds.  Narcotics.  New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 33)

"A British law passed in 1967 to restrict the prescribing of
heroin to addicts by hospital clinics also required statistics
on the addict population, to give a clear picture of the
epidemiology and incidence of heroin use and provide a benchmark
to assess policy.  In the United States, despite chronic alarm
over the existence of addicts, the total number of addicts
remains a mystery.  We cannot even say accurately that there are
more heroin adicts now than there were ten years ago." (Norman
E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The Public, 188)

  "The strength of these feelings was evident in the reasoning of
the lower court in the Leis case, which found marijuana to be
harmful because, among other things, it causes 'a euphoric and
unreal feeling of exhilaration ... an abnormally subjective
concentration on trivia' and leads 'the user to lose perspective
and focus his attention on one object to the exclusion of all
others.'  such reasoning does not spring from a rational
assessment of tangible injury to user or others.  It rests on a
subjective feeling that pleasure, contemplation, and inactivity
for their own sake cannot be worthwhile, and are thus wrong.
  It is not immediately apparent why the psychic states attained
through drugs are undesirable.  Even the bluest Calvinist knows
some pleasures.  If the court just quoted were consistent, it
would permit laws banning telvision, van Gogh paintings,
flowers, prayer, and mountain views.  Indeed, such mental states
are in some sense enjoyed and sought by us all.  When they
occur, they enrich our lies and are satisfying.  Postindustrial
society surelly can survive without the same instinctual
renunciation necessary in a frontier or developing culture.
Indeed, as many historians have noted, we have left behind the
era of production adn moved into an era of consumption, with
increased leisure for all, and a shifting attitude toward
hedonism." (Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, Drugs & The
Public, 192)

--
"Freud was convinced that 'the voice of the intellect will be heard.'
But no one understood better than he that if reason is to triumph,
it has to sound above the clamor of conflicting emotion and the roar
of primitive desires." (Zinberg and Robertson, _Drugs & The Public_, 242)