From: Jim Rosenfield <[j n r] at [igc.apc.org]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 29 Sep 94 14:41 PDT
Subject: Re: "Moral Culture" in THE HUMANIST 9/9
The Moral Culture of Drug Prohibition
by Ed D'Angelo
in THE HUMANIST, September/October 1994
The most common explanation for why drugs are illegal is "to
protect public health and safety". And yet we acknowledge
that there are many dangerous and unhealthy activities that are
not and should not be prohibited by the government. What in
addition to public health and safety are drug laws supposed to
protect? I want to suggest that drug laws have been imposed to
protect the moral culture of capitalism as it developed in Great
Britain and the United States between the seventeenth century and
World War II.
Why are drugs illegal? To begin with, drugs are "addictive":
unlike other dangerous and unhealthy activities, people sometimes
use drugs "against their will" and "lose control of their own
desires." This is why they need someone else to control their
desires for them; and because such control will be met with
resistance from the "addict", the controlling agent must use
coercive power.
In a developing capitalist country such as Singapore, which
lacks a strong liberal tradition, coercive authority is not
questioned. Vandals are flogged, drug users are hung, and even
bubblegum is illegal. But in a self-avowedly liberal society such
as ours, coercion is more problematic. We believe -- or so we
say -- in the dignity of the individual person. No one is born
with a collar around his or her neck. We are all born equal and
must freely negotiate our relationships from this position of
equality without the use of coercion or deception. Only the
government has the right to coerce us, by violent means if
necessary. Anarchists take the argument one step further and
argue that even the government has no right to use coercive
force. Liberals, however, believe that the coercive power of
government is necessary in order to ensure that private citizens
do not coerce or deceive one another. In other words, allowing
the government to use coercive power over us is the price we must
pay for our relationships with one another to be as free (as
"liberal") as possible. We must sacrifice some freedom to gain
much more. Similarly, the argument in favor of the government's
prohibition of drug use is that, by using coercive power against
its citizens, the government actually increases their freedom by
saving them from their own addictive and enslaving desires.
The use of coercive power by the government to control its
citizens' desires is what I will call the moral purpose of a
liberal government, to be distinguished from its social purpose.
Whereas the primary and immediate social purpose of a liberal
government is to regulate relationships between citizens, the
primary and immediate moral purpose of a liberal government is to
regulate and shape the internal character structure of
individuals, such as (and most fundamentally) the relationship
between the so-called rational will and desire. Neoconservatives
argue that a liberal society depends upon a particular character
structure -- one in which the rational will exerts authority over
desire -- just as much as it depends upon the police to ensure
that citizens do not coerce or deceive one another by subverting
the authority of the rational will over desire, drugs (like
romantic infatuation, "lust," and other desires that threaten
good "family values") represent not merely or even primarily a
social threat, let alone a health threat, but a moral threat to
liberal society. It is therefore the right and duty of a liberal
government to protect the society from such threats "by any means
necessary".
The fact is that even the most dangerous drugs do not
represent a sufficiently great health threat to society to
justify the cost (in terms of dollars, lives, and loss of
liberty) of the current war on drugs. Even in the case of crack
cocaine -- which in spite of prohibition is readily available in
American cities, and which would probably not be used on as wide
a scale today if the war on drugs had not driven the price of
marijuana so high -- the number of deaths nationwide is
comparable to the number of deaths from aspirin (a few thousand).
In the case of marijuana, there are no known deaths resulting
from its use and, contrary to popular myths spread by
disreputable and dishonest persons such as Dr. Gabriel Nahas
(former member of the ClA's "World War II prototype", the 0SS,
and a friend and ally of Lyndon La Rouche, founder of a far right
organization that seeks to restore medieval Christendom), as well
as groups like the Partnership for a Drug Free America (producers
of the famous frying-egg commercial), marijuana does not cause
lung cancer or brain damage. Nor do drugs represent a
sufficiently great social threat to society to justify the cost
of the war on drugs. Indeed, it may be argued that the war on
drugs represents a greater social threat to society than do drugs
themselves, by creating a huge underground economy and a
fantastic escalation in the rate of crime and violence. No, the
social and health threats posed by drugs are bogeyman thrown up
by the authorities to scare the populace into acquiescence with
their moral crusade. The real purpose of the war on drugs is not
to preserve our health or our peace, but rather to impose a set
of old-fashioned Victorian moral principles which the drug
warriors sometimes honestly believe are necessary for a
liberal-capitalist society. Read what James Q. Wilson, professor
of management and public policy at the University of California
at Los Angeles, had to say in "Against the Legalization of Drugs"
(Commentary, February 1990), during the winter that George Bush
ordered American troops to invade Panama, killing thousands
of people for the sake of capturing a drug "kingpin":
If we believe -- as I do -- that dependency on
certain mind- altering drugs is a moral issue and that
their illegality rests in part on their immorality,
then legalizing them undercuts, if it does not
eliminate altogether, the moral message.
That message is at the root of the distinction we
now make between nicotine and cocaine. Both are highly
addictive; both have harmful physical effects. But we
treat the two drugs differently, not simply because
nicotine is so widely used as to be beyond the reach of
effective prohibition, but because its use does not
destroy the user's essential humanity. Tobacco shortens
one's life, cocaine debases it. Nicotine alters one's
habits, cocaine alters one's soul. The heavy use of
crack, unlike the heavy use of tobacco, corrodes those
natural sentiments of sympathy and duty that constitute
our human nature and make possible our social life. To
say, as does Nadelman, that distinguishing morally
between tobacco and cocaine is "little more than a
transient prejudice" is close to saying that morality
itself is but a prejudice.
How are drug users morally deficient? They lack such classic
Puritan character traits as self-control, self-restraint,
frugality, sobriety, equanimity, muted affect, and the ability to
delay gratification. In short, they lack everything that is
necessary to function in a developing capitalist exchange
economy, where one must save and invest rather than consume,
where one must remember to pay debts and fulfill contractual
obligations. "Drug-dependent people have very short time horizons
and a weak capacity for commitment," Wilson asserts. This is why
it is necessary to use "compulsion" to get drug users to stay in
treatment programs (although Wilson neglects to mention that
forced drug treatment rarely works).
Note carefully that Wilson condemns the use of cocaine not
because, like nicotine, it damages the body but because it
"corrodes" the soul and consequently makes our social life
impossible. The historical source of his argument lies in a
religious concern for the soul in its relation to God. Indeed,
when our "drug-dependent" person reaches the drug treatment
center, he or she is likely to meet a thinly veiled religious
program of salvation, such as the 12-step programs which bear
such a striking resemblance to the conventional pattern of
Protestant religious conversion and a therapeutic ideology which
reduces all human problems to "addiction" and "dependency".
In order to understand this moral attack on drugs, it's
necessary to review the ideology of the New Left and of the
counter-cultural youth of the 1960s, for much of the politics
which has followed since then can be understood as a reaction
against that movement. The New Left, and especially the
counterculture, was not interested merely in changing the
structure of our institutions. Theirs was not primarily a
political or even a social revolution but also (and I believe
more importantly) a moral and psychological revolution.
Sociologists have long since documented the fact that most
members of the 1960s counterculture and New Left were children of
upper-middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and that many
of those who weren't were still educated in colleges and
universities controlled by upper-middle-class WASPS: these were
the "spiritual" children of Anglo-Saxon culture. What these
youthful WASPs of the 1960s were protesting was what Max Weber
and R. H. Tawney have both described as the Protestant work ethic
-- an ethic, however, which entailed far more than a simple
obligation to work, for it demanded a severe control over one's
body and desires in all domains of life. The ethic dates back to
the bourgeoisie of seventeenth century England but has been a
recurring feature of Anglo-Saxon culture ever since.
In the culture of nineteenth-century Victorian Protestantism,
the work ethic took two forms -- one for the working class and
another for the bourgeoisie -- just as today the Victorian
revival takes two forms: the evangelical New Right for the
working class, and Puritan neo-conservatism for the educated
middle class. For the working class, as E. P. Thompson has shown,
the ethic entailed mindless obedience to the authorities, the
logic being that such people were incapable of controlling
themselves and so must be controlled by others. Schools, prisons,
military barracks, hospitals, and factories imposed the necessary
discipline. For the bourgeoisie, however, an ethic of self-
control was the order of the day. Taken to an extreme this ethic
produced proud individuals such as the early American
individualist anarchists, who recognized no authority besides
their own independent conscience. More commonly it bred
hysterical neurotics -- just the sort of personality that
responds well to Freudian analysis.
Freud, a bourgeois Austrian Jew, was not, of course, a
Puritan. His psychoanalytical theories were sufficiently
ambiguous, however, to lend themselves to easy appropriation by
Anglo-American Protestant culture in the form of what came to be
known as "ego psychology?' Freud's theories underwent more than
one significant change over the course of his life. At one point,
he divided the psyche into ego, superego, and id. Under this
cartography of the soul, the motto of psychoanalysis became
"where id was, there shall ego be." The id may be conceived as a
potentially self-destructive reservoir of biological drives which
seek satisfaction regardless of the constraints imposed by the
physical and social environment. The superego consists of
internalized moral authorities (initially, parents). The ego is
the psychic apparatus that serves to adapt the individual to the
external social and physical environment. Speech which emanates
from the mouth is a function of the ego, serving to adapt the
individual to the social environment; it develops at the same
time during infancy as the ego itself. The ego operates according
to the "reality principle" in the pursuit of self-preservation,
whereas the id operates according to the "pleasure principle?'
Left to its own devices, the id would seek pleasure regardless of
the constraints imposed by "reality" or by "society": ultimately
being destroyed by either or both, In this sense the id has a
"short time horizon" as Wilson put it.
American ego psychologists interpret Freud's motto "where id
was, there shall ego be" to mean "where id was, there shall ego
replace it." Oral aggression has been a part of western culture
at least since the time of the lawyers of the ancient Greek
merchant ports. But ego psychology escalates oral aggression to a
new level by proposing that the purpose of psychoanalysis is for
the ego to gobble up the entire psyche. The American ego is the
happy burgher whose actions are based entirely upon a rational
(verbally reasoned) calculation of self-interest. The ego, in
other words, is the "rational will" and say ego psychologists, it
ought to control if not entirely replace the desires brooding
within the id.
Although it may sometimes seem that Freud was advocating
control of the id by the ego, he did not reach the same
conclusions as the ego psychologists: the Freudian ego is not a
happy, well-adjusted burgher but, rather, a fatalist who merely
accepts the ordinary misery of everyday life in order to preserve
civilization. Freud believed that modern civilization is based
upon science and that science is a product of the ego, not of the
id. Indeed, a plausible argument can be made (as Robert Merton
has) that the ascetic discipline of the mind required by the
scientific method as it is now practiced is consistent with the
Protestant work ethic. But whether the Protestant work ethic is
necessary for scientific (let alone other types of) inquiry, and
whether empirical-mathematical science really does provide an
adequate foundation for modern civilization (as the west has
supposed since the seventeenth century) are questions which
remain unanswered.
During periods like the Great Depression and World War II, it
may have been easier to accept the necessity of frugality and
self-denial, and even of repression. But the 1960s came at the
crest of a period of unprecedented prosperity for the American
middle class. Children coming of age in the 1960s had not known
the hardships their parents had witnessed (if not experienced
firsthand). Furthermore, they were the beneficiaries of a
burgeoning consumer economy which encouraged freedom from
restraint, immediate gratification, spending rather than saving,
and an uninhibited pursuit of pleasure. In this context, the need
for repression -- and indeed, the entire Protestant work ethic --
made little sense. And so one of the leading spokesperson for
the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, combined the Freudian concept of
repression with the Marxist concept of surplus labor to level the
charge of surplus repression against the existing capitalist
culture. Capitalism has progressed beyond the stage of "primitive
accumulation" and so civilization no longer requires so much
repression. We should be happier than we are, Marcuse claimed --
and, indeed, we easily could be, if only we would abandon our
outdated puritanical habits. Members of the counterculture
discovered that if you needed a little help liberating your id,
there was no more powerful key than psychedelics to unlock the
"door" to the unconscious so one could "break on through to the
other side" And when it became increasingly difficult for legal
reasons to use psychedelics, they resorted to an entire
smorgasbord of nonverbal therapeutic techniques ranging from
primal-scream therapy and deep-muscle massage to meditation
constituting an "Aquarian Culture" which was to evolve into the
"New Age" of the 1980s.
But the powerful institutions of our society-the corporations,
the universities and think tanks, the government, and the mass
media - are still controlled by the old-generation
Anglo-Saxon/North Sea culture. Indeed, because these institutions
felt threatened by the uprisings and cultural turmoil of the
1960s and early 1970s and continue to feel threatened today,
there has been a vicious backlash by the powers that be, creating
in effect a "Victorian renaissance." The backlash has been a
many-pronged attack, one prong of which is the rise of
neo-conservatism.
"Welfare reform fascist Charles Murray advocates
institutionalizing the children of the poor and
inflicting a `just measure of pain' on unwed mothers".
Let's take a look at an article written in 1970 by a "true,
self-confessed - perhaps the only - neoconservative": Irving
Kristol. In his essay "Urban Civilization and Its Discontents"
Kristol explicitly argues that drugs are a moral threat to
bourgeois society, not merely a health threat:
The problem of drugs would be just as serious even if
it were determined that marijuana, or amphetamines, or
LSD were medically harmless. what makes a drug a truly
serious problem is less its medical aspect than its
social purpose. Today drug taking has become a mass
habit -- among our young masses especially -- whose
purpose is to secede from our society and our
civilization; and such a declaration requires a moral
answer, not a medical one. [The real reasons to
prohibit drugs] have to do with the importance of
Republican morality [and] why it is desirable to
function as an autonomous and sell-reliant citizen in
our urban, democratic society, rather than to drift
through life in a pleasant but enervating haze ... .
Kristol is partly right: a few enlightened hippies did do
drugs (more specifically, psychedelics) to secede from bourgeois
society and its repressive morality. A few hippies did give moral
authority to "desire" (the voice of the unconscious) over the
ego's rational will, as one can detect in their slogan, "If it
feels good, do it." But for most people, drugs were not consumed
with any self-conscious moral or social purpose.
Kristol is also wrong to believe -- as was Freud -- that
civilization would collapse if society were to undergo the moral
and psychological revolution advocated by some hippies. On the
contrary; all that would have happened is that the old-generation
Anglo-Saxon/North Sea culture would have taken a much-needed step
forward into the future. Instead, we stand motionless in the
1990s, listening to the same Puritan shit (warmed over and molded
into different forms) we've been hearing for over 300 years, such
as the latest from former "drug czar" William Bennett,
self-righteously pontificating author of the bestselling Book of
Virtues; former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who blamed the Los
Angeles riots on a lack of "family values" and condemned a TV
character for having a baby out of wedlock; and influential
welfare-reform fascist Charles Murray, who advocates
institutionalizing the children of the poor and inflicting a
"just measure of pain" on unwed mothers.
NOTE: My use of the word "shit" is intentional. Working
class people (at least the "bad" ones who don't go to
church) routinely use "four-letter-words" to express
emotion. The prohibition against use of four-letter-
words in academic discourse is to some extent, a
product of Puritanism and class bias. Even more
fundamental than the Puritan and class bias against
four-letter-words, however,r is the separation of
emotion from intellect in Platonic-Christian
metaphysics.
Bennett, Quayle, and Murray are not just laughable quacks or
dangerous fools; they speak to a venerable conservative tradition
which fears that the children of the upper middle class -- such
as Murphy Brown, a successful young professional -- might adopt
the life-styles and values of the working classes, and especially
of the black ghettos, ranging from the blues and rock `n' roll to
jazz and marijuana to single-parent households. From a
conservative perspective, both the working class (including the
poor and unemployed) and the progressive children of the middle
class are afflicted with the same problem: they have failed to
adopt such traditional Puritan values as sell-control,
self-reliance, and the ability to delay gratification, and so are
ill-equipped to serve as full-fledged citizens in a
liberal-capitalist society. An old conservative tradition (one
which dates back to Plato and Aristotle) holds that the working
class will always be enslaved by its desires, and for that reason
its members can justifiably be controlled by those better than
they. But when the Murphy Browns of society start letting their
desires run wild, a veritable panic sets into the bowels of
bourgeois society and-splichhh!!! -- out comes the shit.
(Puritans have always enjoyed the feeling of a pure, clean
bowel).
Probably the classic statement of this fear is The Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism by Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell.
Published in 1976, Bell's thesis is that the affluence brought
about by the success of our capitalist society undermines the
Protestant ethic which made that success and affluence possible
in the first place. His thesis is consistent with the finding
that the countercultural hippies who challenged the Protestant
ethic were children of the affluent middle class. In effect, Bell
is claiming that the hippies were spoiled children; their parents
-- collectively, the upper middle class -- were too generous and
lenient toward them. Never having experienced an unfulfilled
desire, they no longer knew how to restrain themselves. The
obvious remedy for this "contradiction" is austerity, both
political and economic. And so one must wonder if the
constriction of the economy, the loss of civil liberties, and the
narrow range of intellectual expression we've experienced since
the early 1970s is mere coincidence or if it has been largely
orchestrated by the ruling class to put a stop to the feared
revolution of desire. Certainly the Trilateral Commission's 1975
report The Crisis of Democracy suggests as much. Written by a
Japanese, a European, and an American scholar -- including
another neoconservative Harvard sociology professor, one Samuel
P. Huntington -- the report argued that in order to save liberal
democracy from itself, there must be less liberty, less
democracy, and (most of all) more respect for authority.
This is the true story behind the war on drugs. Its real
purpose is not to preserve the public health but to preserve
the moral culture of capitalism as it developed over 300 years
ago in the North Sea region of Western Europe. Will the strategy
work? Judging from the current state of the union, the answer is
a resounding "no!" All that two decades' worth of austerity
programs have accomplished is to produce more poverty, more
despair, and more violence -- and if the powers that be don't
watch out, they may find themselves with more than a revolution
of desire on their hands. Indeed, they already have more than a
revolution of desire on their hands. The army unit that George
Bush sent to Los Angeles to control the "riots" was a special
counterinsurgency unit trained for guerrilla warfare. Was Los
Angeles a riot, an insurrection, or an unsuccessful revolution?
The government seems to have feared a revolution.
------------------------------------------
Ed D'Angelo is a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. He
was an adjunct professor at Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute and
has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of New York
at Stony Brook. His special area of interest has been the social,
metaphysical, and political implications of the use of
psychedelic drugs .
...........................................
This article was translated from the original print media into
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public dialog. The original print version contains many
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Typographic errors are not unlikely. The poster would appreciate
being informed of such errors ([j n r] at [igc.org]).