There Is No Opioid Epidemic (Part 2)

Three years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “There Is No Opioid Epidemic.” It got several positive responses and, when shared by a popular Colorado yoga practitioner, became my first essay to go viral. So I assume it must’ve struck a chord with readers. Almost like, in a one-note media chorus of professional chin-waggers complaining about the opioid epidemic, readers were happy to hear somebody say their suffering wasn’t invalid.

When I re-shared it yesterday, on its three-year anniversary, a friend contacted me with her story. She suffers a chronic disability with symptoms which include immobilizing chronic pain. (This friend, and the stories she’s shared recently, have made me aware how pervasive disability-based prejudices are in American society.) She told me she’d been prescribed opioids, but had the prescription yanked, fearing she might, in the future, become addicted.

Not, please note, that she’s currently addicted; rather, that she might become addicted in some hypothetical future. Her doctor admitted that, under pressure from the DEA and other authorities, she’d been forced to restrict the number of opioid prescriptions she wrote. So my friend got handed a prescription for another drug that doesn’t work as well, leaving her in a constant state of pervasive, low-level pain—not debilitating, but restrictive.

Thinking about this, I’ve struggled to comprehend the reasoning. Clearly, the authorities responsible for regulating American drug behaviors believe chronic addiction is a worse affliction than chronic pain. We’ve certainly been conditioned to believe this through generations of “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” messages, coupled with police interventions and DARE programs. We’ve heard for years that becoming addicted is always, innately, a fate worse than pain.

British journalist Johann Hari writes, in Chasing the Scream, that Harry J. Anslinger, America’s former top narcotics officer, had a personal aversion to addicts. Owing to a complex and nuanced experience in childhood, he believed addicts weren’t just suffering, they were actively bad people. Because Anslinger had a hand in negotiating the end of World War I, President Wilson gave Anslinger a blank check for his post-war public service career.

Anslinger chose to dedicate his life to punishing addicts. He chaired the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner to the ONDCP) for thirty-two years, one of the longest public appointments in American history. Using this leverage, he pushed legislators to enact laws intended to punish addicts, enforce private morality, and force people to be, in Anslinger’s view, good. All because Anslinger had an inflexible moral attitude.

Harry J. Anslinger, near retirement in 1962

Even this explanation doesn’t really satisfy. Though the unprecedented power Anslinger enjoyed (if that’s the word) allowed him to enforce his moral prejudices, President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, nearly a decade after Anslinger retired, and years after abundant science demonstrated that many illegal drugs, particularly cannabis, aren’t that dangerous. Clearly the prejudice persists beyond one person’s preconceptions.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former deputy, admitted to a journalist that the administration turned hostile to drugs, in brief, because they needed camouflage. Busting drugs became a convenient legal condom that allowed Feds to harass Civil Rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators without contracting the taint of racism or war-hawk-ism. In other words, for Nixonites (and Reaganites after them), addicts were bad people because they were different.

This has been extensively documented. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander records that, though it’s illegal to stop somebody simply because they’re Black, race is nevertheless an acceptable qualifying condition. In other words, police can randomly stop somebody because they’re Black and something else. The law is so inclusive that “something else” can include basically anything that a reasonably healthy imagination could conjure. And it’s almost always something drug-related.

So basically, when drug enforcement officers force my friend’s doctor to take her off pain control medications that work, and put her on something marginally better than a placebo, they say they’re preventing her from becoming an addict. But really, they’re preventing her from becoming a nonconformist. Our drug regulations, which doctors must comply with to remain licensed, are based on moral fears of hippies and African Americans. We can’t let a White woman become… that.

It boggles my mind that, in 2020, these prejudices remain so persistent. Worse, the moral panic surrounding opioid “abuse” has been perpetrated by media forces marching in lock-step. The same newsrooms that want congratulations for holding Donald Trump to account, continue reinforcing Harry J. Anslinger’s class-based prejudices, and Nixon’s racism. Eighty years later, it’s time to show some moral independence, and let these old, outdated ideas finally, mercifully, die.

The Economics of Addiction

My father has emphysema. Who wouldn’t, after fifty-six years of smoking? Though he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, his pained breathing and persistent fatigue have finally forced him to use the word “emphysema” for the first time, at age 72. He once told me he began smoking at age fourteen, though he never mentioned why; after several false starts, he finally kicked the habit about eighteen months ago.

When my family relocated from California to Nebraska in 1992, so my parents could retire near where they grew up, I immediately noticed how many people smoked. My first job, behind the convenience store counter, involved accessing the tobacco rack for customers, a position for which I now suspect I was technically underage. While it wouldn’t be accurate to say most purchases included packs of smokes, enough did to worry me.

At that time, still under the sway of neoliberal political thinking, I would’ve never attributed economic reasoning to personal habits. I just wondered why smoking seemed so pervasive in Nebraska culture compared to California. Though I knew smokers Out West, they remained primarily obscure, pursuing their habits less blatantly. My workplace never completely stopped at smoke-break time, as it did in Nebraska, where smokers herded, lemming-like, toward the doors.

But thinking about my father’s struggling health, I realized I did see something similar in California. Though people smoking weed and consuming other drugs needed to maintain more cover than smokers do, the same basic behavior obtained. People embraced work, school, and other mandatory responsibilities as clear-headed as circumstances allowed, then when duty ended, they raced headlong to whatever substance made them feel human again. Legal or otherwise.

Addiction specialist Gabor Maté writes that understanding substance addicts in terms of recreational users is mistaken. Some people smoke weed, inject heroin, snort cocaine, and consume other drugs because their substances make them feel good. Addicts don’t want to feel good, however; they want to feel normal. They want whatever suffering infects their sober lives to vanish under the comforting glow of their favored substance, even for an hour.

Cocaine and heroin are painkillers. Before they became illegal, snake-oil salesmen included these drugs in their patent medicines because, no matter whatever else their concoctions included, Peruvian marching powder made the pain go away. So when considering what turns people into coke or smack addicts, or what hooks people on other painkillers like alcohol or Vicodin, we must look not at the drugs, but at whatever pain needs killed.

Nicotine and cannabis, however, aren’t painkillers. Like Valium, another widely abused substance, they’re anti-anxiety drugs. When jitters paralyze you, having a smoke, a toke, or a tab of V really drains the tension. So if painkillers require us to find the user’s unexamined pain, logic dictates, anti-anxiety drugs require us to find the unexamined anxiety. Why would a 14-year-old from bucolic western Nebraska have anxieties that need smoked out?

Rural life is frequently precarious. The principal economic driver, farming, is constantly subject to weather, market fluctuations, and other forces individuals cannot control. Dips in commodity prices take money from farmers, but also from businesses dependent on farmers, like equipment dealers, small-town banks, and entire rural downtowns. Despite tough-talking individualist myths, rural and small-town people, the western Nebraska population, live constantly at the verge of a sheer cliff.

Compare big-city life. Even after the collapse of 2008, the financial services sector remains America’s largest industry, in dollar terms. People wager massive fortunes on a 24-hour cycle. As we learned during the last economic contraction, financial services operates like a casino, plying big winners with rewards to keep them at the table. In Vegas, the rewards include comped drinks. One icon of bankers’ lifestyles is the three-martini lunch.

So while small-town people live constantly with the anxiety of hoping they’ll make next month’s payments, big-city moguls swallow the risks of gambling away Grandmother’s retirement savings. People raised in rural life, like my dad, or in California’s suburban uncertainty, smoke the anxiety away. While Bernie Madoff-type gamblers kill the pain of knowing they’re rewarded while they’re winning, but could lose everything at any moment.

Cocaine and heroin have little presence in western Nebraska, where I live, but at my construction job, I’m among the few men who don’t use tobacco. This isn’t coincidental. People’s favored drugs reflect their circumstances, and their circumstances have dollar measurements. Though hard drugs remain the province of urbanism, where difficulty and pain define daily life, rural workers will always prefer to smoke their fears away.

Black Tar on the Prairie

C.J. Box, Badlands

After small-town paperboy Kyle Westergaard witnesses a one-car rollover accident, he discovers a mysterious packet ejected from the car. Too naive to understand what he’s uncovered, he finds himself unwittingly possessing a massive brick of meth, heroin, and marked bills. He also places himself, his struggling ex-junkie mother, and several bystanders in a Salvadoran cartel’s crosshairs.

Rancher turned novelist C.J. Box ventures outside his well-established Wyoming comfort zone to introduce an entirely new story. This novel travels to fictional Grimstad, North Dakota, modeled on Williston, a controversial oil boomtown. Box embraces hot-button issues, describing a town whose rapid expansion brings attendant crime and dislocation. Grimstad’s blossoming future has made paper millionaires, but cauterized the town’s historic past.

Veteran detective Cassandra “Cassie” Dewell, newly installed as Grimstad PD’s lead investigator, anticipates the opportunity to reinvent herself in a new town. But a gruesome, highly public murder on her first day shoves her immediately into hot water. Rich, ruthless drug merchants have muscled into a town changing so rapidly that every newcomer becomes suspect. A former Norman Rockwell town has become a war zone.

This very ambitious story addresses multiple themes simultaneously. Sheriff Kirkbride immediately details Cassie to investigate… something, he’s less than forthcoming. She immediately discovers an atmosphere of top-down distrust permeates Grimstad. Not just the PD, either; ongoing feuds between newcomers and oldtimers, management and labor, white and brown, make every encounter a political two-step worthy of Congressional elections.

Meanwhile, Kyle’s mother’s current boyfriend, a sterling specimen of meth burnout, devises plans around the recovered drugs. The Westergaards’ landlord has served notice, hoping to garner higher rents from better-paid newcomers, and T-Lock thinks Kyle’s windfall will answer their prayers. But T-Lock is so stoopid, the cartels so ruthless, and his plan so transparent, that he puts himself, Kyle, and all of Grimstad in evil people’s sights.

Cassie’s twin investigations pierce through layers of accumulated detritus in Grimstad’s evolving economy. Mentored by grizzled Sheriff Kirkbride, Cassie discovers a town with a future so vast and all-encompassing that its past has vanished. Money shatters generations-old social webs, leaving little besides resentment and boredom. It has become ideal breeding ground for addiction and abuse.

Box paints a bleak but compassionate tale of nouveau riche corruption in a region formerly very staid and settled. New workers rushing Grimstad wind up living in “man camps,” makeshift lodges and trailer parks about as cultured as Old West gold camps. Newcomers have little interest in Grimstad’s traditions; oldtimers who previously struggled for every dime would rather sell out and leave. There’s lots of money, but little to do.

Rural drug abuse, Box makes clear, doesn't hit communities like Grimstad from nowhere. Illegal narcotics are a nigh-inevitable consequence of money intruding on communities unprepared for its catastrophic side effects. The town has gotten rich from convenient access to petroleum from the Bakken Shale, some of the most valuable crude oil on Earth. Also some of the most inflammable. This matters later.

Box uses fiction to enact concepts I've recently seen described by journalists like Nick Reding and Johann Hari: geographic isolation. A widening gulf between work and pay. Little to do, in weatherbeaten prairie towns, but work and get high. A male-to-female population ratio comparable to prison. Box makes clear something elected leaders miss, that drugs aren’t a moral crime, they’re an economic crime.

For all his social conscience, Box almost misses one point. Throughout the book, Cassie feels awkward being the only woman on an otherwise all-male police force. She instructs another officer to “Call me Cassie”—and from there forward, Box’s narrator only calls her Cassie, while addressing men by their surname. I couldn’t tell if Box made a deliberate choice, or Cassie can’t think of herself by surname, or the men simply don’t respect her enough.

This matters. How much Box respects his female protagonist matters.

I’m willing to forgive plenty, because Box raises several issues—poverty, community, race, history—which he doesn’t yet settle. This book bears several hallmarks of the first in a new series, Box’s second. The troubled heroine, the unresolved quest, the ominous foe whose presence underscores the “monster of the week”... I suspect we’ll see more from Cassie, and questions like these will get fuller treatments.

C.J. Box has previously demonstrated his mystery-writing panache. Here he couples rich storytelling with razor-sharp commentary. Mystery readers will enjoy a good, tautly paced thriller, but prairie dwellers will also get the cold shock of recognition. This isn’t a story; this is our lives.

Squatters on the Walk of Shame

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 48
Gabor Maté, MD, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Doctor Gabor Maté left a thriving private practice to counsel addicts in one of North America’s most brutal neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He has immersed himself in addict subculture, the battles won and the tears shed, and has come to recognize his own addictions, though not to substances. He’s made one important discovery: it’s hard to hate people you know. So he introduces readers to his hard-bitten, suffering clientele.

This book, a thick tome that rewards careful perusal, starts as a form of group autobiography. Not that he claims his patients’ stories as his own. Having worked among Vancouver’s poorest, most despised citizens for a decade, he remains an outsider, returning to his suburban home nightly. Yet he knows these survivors’ stories well enough to write of them: "The misery is extraordinary in the drug gulag, but so is the humanity."

The gulag metaphor isn’t incidental. Not only have Maté’s clients disproportionately suffered incarceration (some, he says, have spent more than half their adult lives in jail), but many face extended imprisonment within their own minds. Most come from backgrounds of abuse and neglect. Many of Maté’s First Nations patients have generational trauma and Reservation Sickness back to the first white encroachments. Drugs cannot explain their behaviors.

Where these people come from, what tragedies and Sisyphean challenges formed their outlooks, proves inextricable from their addictions. Nearly all were broken before they touched drugs: "'I'm not afraid of dying,' a client told me. 'Sometimes I'm more afraid of living.'" This gives Maté his direct line into science. Transitioning from storytelling, Maté becomes an incisive researcher, distilling massively complex science into plain English without losing power.

At some pivotal moment in childhood development, Maté writes, addicts lack the unconditional love children require. It’s actually more difficult than that, but stripped to its rudiments, all people suffering long-term intractable addiction didn’t have loving guidance, as children, to control their emotions. Children, by definition, cannot handle stress independently. Our developing brains outsource self-control to responsible adults; if such adults aren’t around, our brains adapt accordingly.

Dr. Gabor Maté

Not for nothing, Maté observes, to many addicts compare the heroin rush to receiving a warm, lingering hug. The un-nurtured infant brain never develops the ability to guide itself through stress; fundamentally, that squalling child survives, desperate and scared, within every addict’s brain. The deprived infant becomes the terrified adult. "The dominant emotions suffusing all addictive behavior,” Maté writes, “are fear and resentment—an inseparable vaudeville team of unhappiness."

Don’t start feeling self-righteous, though, because you don’t wolf narcotics. Maté describes equitable structures in behavioral addictions, like abusive overeating, philandering, and thrill-seeking. Some of Maté’s most engaging chapters describe his own struggles with workaholism and binge-buying music CDs. "What seems non-adaptive and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we had to go through then."

It’s difficult to read certain chapters without powerful twinges. Many women addicts he counsels, Maté writes, obsessively collect teddy bears among their drug-fueled squalor. Others have lost their children, but cannot bear to be parted from their small furry animals. Remember, he’s describing the poorest, most despised people in Canada, and all they want, amid the burglaries and self-mutilation and prostitution that subsidizes their drug dependency, is something to love.

This makes current approaches to drug prohibition doubly costly. We pay social costs to capture, prosecute, and imprison junkies, yes, and civil libertarians have long protested this lopsidedness. But the trauma of imprisonment compounds the conditions that created addicts’ problems to begin with. Nobody taught these people how to endure being alone with themselves, so what, let’s throw them in solitary? Who does that help?

As Maté describes it, criminal justice approaches become just plain mean. But more: we deny addicts social services, meaningful jobs, and basic medical care. This makes no sense, as Maté writes: "If our guiding principle is that a person who makes his own bed ought to lie in it, we should immediately dismantle much of our health care system." Yet somehow, we accept that further dehumanizing people already stripped of common humanity will help.

Addiction isn’t a story of “those people.” It’s the story of how we construct ourselves, and help construct other people, every day. Maté essentially paraphrases Thomas Aquinas when he writes: "In the final analysis, it's not the activity or object itself that defines an addiction but our relationship to whatever is the external focus of our attention or behavior." This means us.

America Is Going To (Legalized) Pot

Bruce Barcott, Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America

Like it or not, the era of legalized weed is upon us. Four states and DC have passed recreational marijuana laws by popular referendum, while medical marijuana is legal in so many states, I can’t find an accurate up-to-date count. Some people like this, some hate it, and I still struggle. Regardless of your position, though, the changing climate is real. Seattle-area journalist Bruce Barcott decided the time was right to investigate what that means.

Barcott admits initially having dim opinions about legalized marijuana. Despite college experimentation, his opinion of pot, and pot smokers, was largely based on ONDCP leaflets, DARE seminars, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No.” Then Washington Initiative 502 crossed his electoral view. Unlike Colorado’s “pot is safer than liquor” bill, Washington’s referendum turned on issues of justice. Ham-handed enforcement of federal and state drug laws unfairly targeted Hispanics, African Americans, and white trash, with Orwellian consequences.

Like many fair-minded citizens before him, Barcott realized he didn’t know enough. Not just enough facts, but enough people. He confesses thinking medical marijuana was for “just late-stage cancer patients or pain-faking stoners.” When he actually met the well-scrubbed lawyers pushing Initiative 502, the nerdy entrepreneurs spearheading commercial pot, or the remarkably ordinary people using—professional dancers with aching joints, AIDS sufferers, decorated soldiers with PTSD nightmares—he found a very different, more nuanced story.

It wouldn’t be unfair to compare Barcott’s narrative to Homer’s Odyssey. We could compare his discovery of cannabis creams (that don’t induce highs) for his aching joints to Circe’s island, or Colorado’s Cannabis Cup 2014 to the Lotus Eaters. But more than metaphors, what matters is that Barcott traveled a world that, amid changing laws and ethics, is hardly recognizable, even to anyone who visited Denver just five years ago. The people drive Barcott’s journey.

People like Tripp Keber, a Colorado entrepreneur who hopes to become America’s first marijuana billionaire. Unable, by Federal law, to store pot proceeds in chartered banks, he instead invests his profits in increasingly sophisticated marketable products. His intricate plans, forward thought, and technological savvy make pot-peddling almost respectable. Tripp’s transition from buying sketchy weed beneath sketchy kitchen tables, to spearheading massive marijuana trade shows, forms a thread weaving throughout the Colorado leg of Barcott’s journey.

Bruce Barcott

People like Dennis Peron, Barcott’s most memorable interview, despite only featuring in one chapter. Back in 1990, Peron’s partner, like many Castro District homosexuals, required intensive AIDS drugs that caused vomiting, making keeping the drugs down impossible. Smoking weed bypassed the spewing, but procuring weed landed Peron in jail, so his allies managed to pass America’s first medical marijuana referendum. Thus today’s two great upheavals, same-sex marriage and legalized pot, emerged from the same chrysalis.

People like Kevin Sabet, a leading voice defending status quo drug enforcement and advocating tough marijuana interventions. His lucrative nationwide speaking tours have made him legendary in anti-drug circles. Yet Barcott describes him lecturing a roomful of Seattle drug cops, who roll their eyes as Sabet rehashes anti-drug propaganda decades out of date. As Barcott writes: “When confronted with new evidence that challenged the beliefs of those in power, those in power dismissed the evidence.”

This book overlaps with Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream. They draw similar conclusions that most current anti-drug rhetoric is driven more by moral umbrage than scientific facts. They both pin responsibility for this hysteria first on founding drug enforcer Harry J. Anslinger, then on successor politicians scared of being called “soft.” They agree that current knowledge, coupled with changing social attitudes, means the time has come to change America’s approach to drugs, and drug patients.

But these books aren’t essentially interchangeable. Hari addresses the entire global Drug War, from Anslinger to today; Barcott focuses on America, pot, and mainly the present. Hari is synoptic; Barcott is specific. Hari strives, sometimes unsuccessfully, to maintain journalistic dispassion; Barcott jumps into the story, samples the product, and, Boswell-like, helps create the story by asking dangerous questions. Hari and Barcott aren’t doing the same thing. Read both together to better understand the entire controversy.

Society’s changing drug standards are real, happening right now. History stands still for nobody. And whether you advocate more and broader legalization, or prefer strengthening today’s drug laws and enforcing them rigorously, you need serious facts. Anybody who’s smoked a doobie, seen they didn’t turn maniacal, and thereafter stopped trusting propaganda, knows why the debate is turning. Rather than political camouflage, we need factual transparency. This debate will happen, and we mustn’t get left behind.

Doobie Newbie Blues

Click to enlarge

The image at right appeared on a friend’s Facebook feed this weekend. Having recently become interested in the sociology of drug use, and the forces that make illegal drugs a desirable choice for so many people, I’ve developed a reflexive distrust of blanket statements about how drugs work. So I decided to don my Snopes cap and investigate this claim’s truth value.

Though floated by various law enforcement, civil service, and public interest groups, this image originates with the American Lung Association. The ALA’s original source material verifies the picture’s essential claim, that marijuana (hemp, cannabis sativa) certainly does deposit more tar on human lung tissue than commercially manufactured, legally sold tobacco cigarettes. As it stands, this claim appears substantially true.

However, reading the source requires understanding basics of argument analysis. If I had my way, Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics would be required reading in every American middle-grades classroom. Anybody familiar with Huff’s principles will immediately recognize, reading the ALA’s statistics, that they’re guilty of several mistakes. For our purposes, the most important is “Comparing the Incomparable.”

By their own admission, the ALA compares machine-manufactured cigarettes, tipped with cellulose fiber filters, with hand-rolled marijuana doobies. Nearly everyone agrees that cellulose filters reduce the quantity of tar, fine particulate matter, and other matter from cigarette smoke. However, there’s no agreement whether that actually has significant health benefits. Provided they remain moist, meaning alive, tarry lungs continue to function.

Promo art for Reefer Madness, possibly the most
moralistic, wrong-headed anti-drug propaganda ever

There’s also wide agreement that filters don’t obstruct the inhalation of nicotine. The neurologically active component in marijuana smoke, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), literally cannot kill you at any quantity. We cannot say this about nicotine, which is so lethal that only by diffusing it into microscopic particles, and inhaling it amid hot smoke into the lungs, can it have any narcotic effect without instantly killing the consumer.

Also, the ALA compares cigarettes, manufactured under highly regulated standards, to marijuana, which is grown, distributed, and consumed with no purity standards whatsoever. Cigarette manufacture and sale is strictly regulated by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). This gives ATF remarkable authority to control tobacco purity, and gives consumers confidence regarding what their smokes are made of.

Marijuana, by contrast, remains exclusively in control of criminal enterprises, which can enforce standards only via assassinations. Once marijuana supplies reach street customers, we have no confidence that our wacky tobaccy hasn’t been thoroughly adulterated with pine needles and lawn clippings. Drug dealers are known to stretch supplies by cutting cocaine with baking soda, or heroin with chlorine bleach.

Therefore, if the marijuana consumed by regular users has damaging health consequences beyond ordinary THC effects, well, why is that? It’s hard to differentiate actual marijuana effects from those created by drug prohibition. Say whatever you will regarding the moral implications of corporate regulation. But anyone concerned about public health will agree that having government oversight of food and tobacco production beats not having it.

The Camberwell Carrot, the iconic oversized doobie in
the 1987 British classic Withnail and I

America has attempted limited-scale regulations in this manner. Besides the four states and the District of Columbia, which have all legalized personal marijuana possession for personal consumption, several states (the number changes so quickly that I cannot find reliable sources) have legalized medically prescribed marijuana. But the patchwork of state regulations, and ease of interstate transit, makes even this regulation slapdash and unreliable.

This being the case, any reasonable person must consider the ALA’s conclusions unreliable at best. On multiple levels, they compare diverse products that have little overlap. Imagine if the FDA published a white paper comparing patent-pending pharmaceuticals with homeopathic peach-pit cures. If the FDA proclaimed the natural superiority of lawful, government-approved products, tested in their own labs, we’d have legitimate reason to pause.

The ALA, therefore, demonstrates less about marijuana itself, and more about the destabilizing consequences of drug prohibition. By concentrating control of drug commerce into criminal hands, we provide economic incentives to organizations like the Sinaloa and Zeta cartels. Anti-drug advocates might insist that drugs are bad, and I agree. But simply banning them doesn’t make demand go away, simply reorganizes his routes of transit.

Users embracing marijuana for many and diverse reasons, just as people embrace legal drugs, like nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine. The distinction between which drugs are prohibited, and which remain lawful, has mainly moral rather than medical foundations. If merely being dangerous were sufficient, we’d have banned liquor and tobacco generations ago. How about, rather than cloudying the debate with tar, we get to know users as humans?

The War On the War On Drugs

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 45
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

President Nixon first used the phrase “War On Drugs” in 1971, but Harry J. Anslinger, founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, used war metaphors in the 1930s. The Harrison Act, which banned formerly legal tinctures of coca and opium, passed in 1914, and under American pressure, other governments passed similar blanket drug bans. Yet somehow, drugs and their attendant problems persist. Drugs underwrite Mexico’s ongoing civil violence, and undergird American poverty. What gives?

Anglo-Swiss journalist Johann Hari, who has witnessed drug addiction in his family and admits struggling with amphetamine abuse himself, unpacks the global drug war, a quest that carries him from the Vancouver to Juárez to Liverpool, and from Great Depression to the Great Recession. The facts he uncovers challenge top-level sacred cows. Many common assumptions, from drugs themselves to addicts’ motivations, come under fire, daring readers, regardless of their politics, to evaluate their prior prejudices.

From its foundations, the drug war has reflected its generals’ values above science. Anslinger believed addicts so subhuman that any legal overreach was acceptable to squelch them. He made exceptions, though: Anslinger made destroying Billie Holiday his personal mission, but gave Judy Garland a free pass. Anslinger’s prohibitionist tendencies, and sense of moral mission, created entire new classes of criminals. He also empowered the Mafia by channeling control of world drug trafficking into organized crime.

But Hari doesn’t linger in the past. Scarcely has he laid out the drug war’s historical foundations, than he rockets into its present-day ramifications. Comparing Brooklyn turf competitions with Mexican cartel violence, Hari shows how American prohibition basically subsidizes both sides of the ongoing conflict. But some people have chosen to stand fast. From a cadre of Juárez schoolchildren, to a former street pusher turned scholar, Hari profiles activists who prove today’s circumstances aren’t inevitable.

Johann Hari

Why do drugs remain immune to police pressure? Interviewing law enforcement professionals, Hari shows that drugs don’t behave like other crimes. Where rounding up burglars reduces burglary stats, rounding up drug traffickers has little visible impact. Drugs have economic drivers most other major crimes lack, meaning when cops bust one pusher, somebody somewhere is hungry enough to fill the gap. Many police have become disillusioned, and begun pressuring for new approaches. (See also Howard Rahtz.)

This economic momentum also changes how we address addicts. Our current approach treats all drug users equally, squeezing them into marginal status. Anyone with a drug record is unilaterally excluded from government jobs, student loans, public assistance, and other hands up. This means convicted users, turned loose again, has few opportunities to earn a living, except to resume their former drug war roles. The drug war thus becomes a self-sealing argument, destined never to change.

And who, exactly, are these addicts? Anti-drug programs like DARE, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, have been driven by Harry Anslinger’s moral impetus, but recent science calls common rhetoric into question. Researchers Hari interviews, like Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander, have studied addicts as they actually are. They’ve made some remarkable discoveries, not least of which is: addicts have plenty in common before they ever discover drugs. Maybe if we treated underlying needs…?

Change is certainly possible. The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, saw an organized movement by local addicts that changed how the city treated its poorest citizens. Since then, Vancouver addicts’ life expectancies have expanded by ten years. The states of Colorado and Washington both famously legalized recreational marijuana, though for very different reasons outsiders probably missed. Entire countries, like Portugal and Switzerland, changed their addict treatment programs, and violence, disease, and overdose death all plunged.

For Hari, this isn’t merely academic. He bookends his journalism with personal narratives of loved ones who’ve descended into addiction, and how his researches have forced him to change how he treats them. Hari also briefly alludes to his own struggle with amphetamines as a binge-writing tool. He neglects to mention that his amphetamine abuse submarined his British journalism career. This book represents Hari’s efforts to confront the damage he’s done, and reclaim his integrity.

This book represents cause-oriented journalism, in the best way. Hari begins with a simple premise, that what we’re doing now doesn’t work, and another way must exist. He doesn’t start with simplistic alternatives in mind, and admits struggling with the conclusions his sources imply, because they contradict everything we think we know about drugs. But even if we cannot accept everything he discovers, Hari nevertheless gives us reason to hope today’s failed approaches can change.

Small Towns In Hell

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 44
Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

Magazine writer Nick Reding discovered crystal methamphetamine’s pervasive effects in 1999 while pursuing another story. A powerful drug that city-dwellers never saw was busily transforming rural America’s cultural landscape, almost completely unseen by city dwellers. But Reding’s Manhattan-based editors disdained this story. The mostly white, overwhelmingly poor meth problem was largely invisible to America’s urban journalism community. Then, in 2005, a country doctor attracted media attention. Suddenly, editors acknowledged the story Reding needed to tell.

Oelwein, Iowa, is a deeply divided community. The bucolic, but tragically underpopulated, Main Street evokes Norman Rockwell comparisons and pastoral nostalgia. A significant cadre of attorneys, doctors, law enforcement officers, and other skilled professionals attempt to maintain that culture. But behind curtained windows in Oelwein’s Third Ward, a silent population of tweakers, cookers, and their families maintains a shadow economy. Where work has abandoned the White rural working class, meth provides alternate, but bleak, meaning.

Meth, Reding discovers (as rural dwellers have known), doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Though the Reagan-era Farm Crisis has receded from national attention, attracting desultory attention whenever FarmAid concerts circulate, the consequences still linger. Old MacDonald Sold His Farm, manufacturing in America scarcely exists anymore, and money stopped rolling into rural regions. Those who lacked money when catastrophe struck, remained trapped in America’s new rural poverty. For more on the topic, also see George Pyle.

Reding’s diagnosis of Oelwein’s—and by implication rural America’s—enervation defies one-sentence synopsis. A former railroad hub and capital of regional culture, Oelwein dwindled when passenger rail vanished and the Interstate bypassed their area. More recently, the “vertical integration” of agriculture under corporate control, with the attendant diminishment of wages in the one industry that formerly bolstered regional economies. Honest, salt-of-the-earth workers saw life pass beyond their control. Meth provided illusions of meaning and autonomy.

Nick Reding

But meth’s uniquely white, working-class differs from other drugs. Where heroin or cocaine encourage slovenly behavior and mushy thinking, meth users feel energized, work hard, and think lucidly… temporarily. Under the trade name Benzedrine, doctors once prescribed meth to cure insomnia, depression, and schizophrenia. It still treats these conditions, until toxic levels accumulate, when it causes them. Poor rural workers embrace meth because its effects bolster their Protestant work ethic. It’s a virtual miracle drug.

That’s meth’s magic appeal. Reding writes: “It was as though… a sense of nihilism had become endemic to Oelwein.” Invisible to national media, maltreated by out-of-town corporations, and unable to even work meaningfully, rural poor turned to meth because it returned what they believed life had stolen. Meth, Reding discovers, isn’t the story. Though I’m oversimplifying for concision, the story is the conspiracy of incomprehensible forces that trivialized white rural people and demeaned their work.

Reding traces meth’s history, from its advent as patent medication and cure-all, through developing black markets and ignorant vilification, into America’s most profitable illegal narcotic. Without ever mentioning Breaking Bad, Reding debunks sweeping generalizations and War On Drugs mythology, preferring real users and their unique experiences. His incisive views and telling details make discussions with everyone, from Oelwein’s mayor to a meth cook whose business literally melted his skin off, both cringe-inducing and remarkably humane.

Ultimately, this isn’t a book about meth. It’s about the pressures that impact rural America, and human reactions to it. It’s about corporate rapacity, country perseverance, and changing culture. It’s about city-dwellers’, including the media’s, pervasive neglect of rural issues. It’s about what lets some people surrender to despair and addiction, and what makes others stand fast. Like other insightful nonfiction, from In Cold Blood to Silent Spring, it matters because it’s finally about us.

In his afterword to the paperback edition, Reding laments that many reviewers focus on this book’s bleak, negative implications. This ignores the book’s entire final third, where Mayor Larry Murphy, joined by a passionately engaged citizenry and welcoming business community, managed to revitalize Oelwein’s downtown, attract work, and give an old town new purpose. Oelwein’s miracle isn’t portable; certainly. This isn’t a blueprint for small-town renaissance. However, Reding reminds audiences that no malaise is terminal.

We rural dwellers often feel invisible, not only to city-based national media, but to our employers, our community organizations, even ourselves. It’s tempting to believe we suffer alone, because outsiders cannot see our problems. But Reding calls this “The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” because it demonstrates the forces that conspire against us, and our capacity to resist those forces. Reding tells some painful truths, but this is a defiantly optimistic book.