Drug Policy: Engaging with Reality

In Japan, there is a widespread benign ignorance about the effects of recreational drug use on the human body.  I know only one person here who has tried a hardcore drug (by which I mean it doesn't pass the lunchbreak test), and he happens to be an extremely unique, strongwilled, powerful, and privileged individual.  Drugs (besides of course alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, nitrous, and until recently, both marijuana and mushrooms) are not a part of Japanese culture, and so if Japanese people do not dispassionately understand the physiological effects of crystal meth, who cares?  

However in America, a country saturated with recreational drug use, we suffer from a malignant almost willful ignorance on the part of parents and authority figures.  Our drug laws and programs designed to combat youth drug use, personal experimentation, and addiction are universally poor and self-defeating.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the easily-debunkable urban legends and boogieman stories disseminated through networks of parents and school officials engaging in discussions of mutual ignorance.  Like priests and nuns lecturing Catholic school students about sex, bureaucrats, PTA officials, and politicians not named Hunter S. Thompson should not be formulating drug policy or setting curricula.  This job should be the proper province of neuroscientists who understand the physiology of addiction, and illegal drugs should be scientifically reviewed and assessed by the chemists and clinical researchers at the FDA.

One particularly odious boogieman is that of the "gateway drug"; "I-dosing" as a gateway drug was discussed last week on Jason Kottke's website to point out some of the obvious ridiculousness of the discussion.  It is worth noting that the very concept of a gateway drug seldom includes legal drugs such as caffeine, alcohol, or tobacco, although there is a persistent cultural turn against tobacco that may lead to it's being referenced as a "gateway drug" in the near future.  This incoherent inconsistency should place the very idea of a "gateway drug" in the same category as masturbation leading to blindness and belly-piercing harming babies; i.e, as an offensive social control, which, when discovered, leads inevitably to resentment-fueled hatred of authority figures manifest in that very activity which the lie intended initially to discourage.  And by that I mean a bunch of pissed-off kids jerking off ferociously, piercing everything and anything, getting wasted, and setting shit on fire.

From the perspective of human neurophysiology, the whole concept of a gateway drug is severely flawed: people are generally hardwired to be obsessively addicted to one thing at the expense of all others.  From clinical and experimental research: religion, caffeine, food, pornography, videogames, cocaine, heroin, etc. all stimulate the same part of the limbic system, although marijuana and hallucinigens are noticeably different and it's worth noting have no addictive properties.  It may be worth noting here also that amphibians cannot get high, but dogs get wasted when you give them beer.  The point is that drinking too much coffee, or obsessively working on a novel, or talking to Jesus all day, or constantly craving Twinkies (the apparent addiction of choice for 68% of Americans) may actually be preventing all but a few stock brokers with small penises and action movie directors from developing crippling cocaine addictions.  Everyone has an addiction, so we must focus on choosing wisely.

From an individual and collective consequentialist standpoint, there seems to be a hierarchy of sorts. Choosing cocaine to satisfy your physiological need for an addiction is foolish because your heart will explode if you don't stop at some point in time, but you will be the coolest guy in the room for the duration of that period of use, plus the consequences of the illegal cocaine trade are pretty devastating for the lower class.  Choosing to indulge in overeating (-3 years of life-expectancy) or tobacco (-6 years of life-expectancy is often reported as a blanket figure, but there is a huge, underreported range based on how much one smokes, when one started, and when one quit.) is definitely an improvement over harder, illegal drugs, in nearly all respects; but these choices are still probably not as good as religion, pornography, caffeine, or videogames. 

It is telling that even though this neuroscientific evidence for the universality of addiction is relatively new, the corroborating empirical evidence has been under our very noses for years: private addiction-recovery centers unaffiliated with the criminal justice system and the War on Drugs rose organically to the top by using some combination of religion and cigarettes to wean people off harder, more destructive drugs.  Recent major breakthroughs on combating obesity have actually come from the neurophysiological discovery that overeating and drug addictions share the same neurological pathway to the exclusion of the other, which was finally experimentally investigated after years of clinicians's anecdotal reports that drug addicts were seldom obese, even in a nation of obese people.

There's also a boatload of silent evidence in gateway drug discussions: where are all the people who have taken "gateway drugs" like marijuana who never became gutter-sleeping junkies? They're wearing suits and sitting at desks unobstrusively not advertising their former recreational drug use and bonaroo attendance history to their coworkers.

Personally, I'm relatively pleased to have "chosen" benign iced coffee and the many faceted internet to neuter and suppress my limbic system in favor of mammalian levels of neocortical cognition.  I'm quite satisfied to have not wound up with religion, heroin, or overeating, however, the best use of the limbic system overall is probably to make it a slave to the planning capacities of the neocortex, i.e. do what Alfred Hitchcock did and direct a burning hatred for law enforcement into making cops badguys in narrative form and present it to the public for collective absorption.

Comments

[Kelsey]

True there is also still much debate about whether the gateway hypothesis was a better predictor of substance abuse than any other theories. Such theory hypothesizes that every type of drug is linked with certain specific risk factors that cause the use of subsequent drugs, like alcohol or cigarettes leading to marijuana for example. This is also not discounting the fact that environmental and social aspects have also a stronger influence.