3 reviews of Jacob Sullum's _Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use_
RMJon23
Everybody Must Get Stoned? ('Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use')(Book
Review)_(book review) Andrew Stuttaford.
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum (J. P. Tarcher, 352 pp.,
$25.95)
Jacob Sullum is a brave man. In his first book, the entertaining and
provocative For Your Own Good, he attacked the excesses of anti-smoking
activism and was duly -- and unfairly -- vilified as a Marlboro mercenary, a
hard-hearted shill for Big Tobacco with little care for nicotine's wheezing
victims. Fortunately, he was undeterred. In Saying Yes, Sullum, formerly of
National Review and now a senior editor at Reason magazine, turns his attention
to the most contentious of all the substance wars, the debate over illegal
drugs. Sullum being Sullum, he manages to find a bad word for the mothers of
MADD and a good one for 19th-century China's opium habit.
Sullum's effort in Saying Yes is more ambitious (or, depending on your
viewpoint, outrageous) than that of most critiques of the war on drugs.
Supporters of legalization typically base their case on moral or practical
grounds, or both. The moral case is broadly libertarian -- the individual has
the right to decide for himself what drugs to take - - while the practical
objection to prohibition rests on the notion that it has not only failed, but
is also counterproductive: It creates a lucrative (black) market where none
would otherwise exist. Sullum repeats these arguments, but then goes further.
Taken in moderation, he claims, drugs can be just fine -- and he's not talking
just about pot.
Whoa. In an era so conflicted about pleasure that wicked old New York City has
just banned smoking (tobacco) in bars, this is not the sort of thing Americans
are used to reading. Health is the new holiness and in this puritanical, decaf
decade, most advocates of a change in the drug laws feel obliged to seem more
than a little, well, unenthusiastic about the substances they want to make
legal. Their own past drug use was, they intone, nothing more than youthful
"experimentation." Most confine themselves to calling for the legalization of
"softer" drugs and, even then, they are usually at pains to stress that, no,
no, no, they themselves would never recommend drugs for anyone.
Sullum is made of sterner stuff. He admits to "modest but instructive" use of
marijuana, psychedelics, cocaine, opioids, and tranquilizers with, apparently,
no regrets. (Judging by the quality of his reasoning, I would guess the drugs
had no adverse effect on him.) He seems prepared to legalize just about
anything that can be smoked, snorted, swallowed, injected, or chewed -- and,
more heretically still, has no truck with the notion that drug use is
automatically "abuse." "Reformers," he warns, "will not make much progress as
long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always
wrong."
In this book Sullum demonstrates that if anything is "wrong" -- or at least
laughably inconsistent -- it is the status quo. The beer- swilling,
Starbucks-sipping Prozac Nation is not one that ought to have an objection in
principle to the notion of mood-altering substances. Yet the U.S. persists with
a war on drugs that is as pointless as it is destructive. This contradiction is
supposedly justified by the assumption that certain drugs are simply too risky
to be permitted. Unlike alcohol (full disclosure: Over the years I have enjoyed
a drink or two with Mr. Sullum), the banned substances are said to be products
that cannot be enjoyed in moderation. They will consume their consumers. Either
they are so addictive that the user no longer has a free choice, or their side
effects are too destructive to be compatible with "normal" life.
To Sullum, most such claims are nonsense, propaganda, and "voodoo
pharmacology." Much of his book is dedicated to a highly effective debunking of
the myths that surround this "science." There's little that will be new to
specialists in this topic, but the more general reader will be startled to
discover that, for example, heroin is far less addictive than is often thought.
The horrors of cold turkey? Not much worse than a bad case of flu. (John Lennon
-- not for the only time in his career -- was exaggerating.) Even crack gets a
break: Of 1988's "crack-related" homicides in New York City, only one was
committed by a perpetrator high on the drug. That's one too many, of course,
but 85 percent of these murders were the result of black-market disputes, a
black market that had been created by prohibition.
So if drug users are neither necessarily dangerous nor, in most cases, addicts,
can they be successful CPAs or pillars of the PTA? Sullum argues that many
currently illegal drugs can safely be taken in moderation -- and over a long
period of time. He interviews a number of drug users who have managed to
combine their reputedly perilous pastime with 9-to-5 respectability. Sullum
concedes that they may not necessarily be representative, but his larger point
is correct: The insistence that drugs lead inevitably to a squalid destiny is
difficult to reconcile with the millions of former or current drug users who
have passed through neither prison nor the Betty Ford. As Sullum points out,
"excess is the exception," a claim buttressed by the fact that there are
millions of former drug users.
Typically, drug consumption peaks just when would be expected -- high school,
college, or shortly thereafter. Then most people grow out of it. The experience
begins to pall and the demands of work and family mean that there's no time, or
desire, to linger with the lotus-eaters. Others no longer want to run the risks
of punishment or stigma associated with an illegal habit. Deterrence does --
sometimes -- deter, and it may deter some of those who would not be able to
combine a routine existence with recreational drug use. But this is not an
argument that Sullum is prepared to accept: He counters that the potentially
vulnerable population is small and may well become alcoholics anyway, "thereby
exposing themselves to more serious health risks than if they had taken up,
say, heroin." Sullum is not, we are again reminded, an author who is afraid of
controversy.
But is he too blithe about the degree of potential medical problems associated
with drug use? As he shows (occasionally amusingly and often devastatingly),
much of the "evidence" against drug use has been bunk, little more than crude
scaremongering frequently infected with racial, sexual, or moralistic panic;
but it doesn't follow that all the dangers are imaginary. To be sure, he does
acknowledge some of the health hazards associated with drugs; but he can
sometimes be disconcertingly relaxed about some of the real risks.
His discussion of LSD is a case in point. The causal relationship between LSD
and schizophrenia is complex (and muddled by the fact that both schizophrenics
and schizotypal individuals are more likely to be attracted to drugs in the
first place), but it's not too unfair to describe an acid trip as a chemically
induced psychotic episode. The "heightened sense of reality" often recorded by
LSD users is, in fact, exactly the opposite -- a blurring of the real with the
unreal that is also a hallmark of schizophrenia. Throw in acid's ability to
generate the occasional -- and utterly unpredictable -- "flashback" and, even
if many of the horror stories are no more than folklore, it's difficult to feel
much enthusiasm for legalizing LSD except, just perhaps, under carefully
controlled therapeutic conditions.
What's more, as a substance that, even in small doses, will create a prolonged
delusional state, LSD is not exactly the poster pill for responsible drug use.
But this exception should not distract us from the overall strength of Sullum's
case. It is possible, he writes, to "control" drug consumption "without
prohibition. Drug users themselves show that it is." It's unnecessary for him
to add that the abolition of prohibition would imply a relearning of the virtue
of self-control, a quality long imperiled by the soft tyranny of the nanny
state.
For Sullum is not advocating a descent into Dionysian frenzy. The poverty of
"Just Say No" may be obvious, he writes, "but moving beyond abstinence does not
mean plunging into excess. Without abstaining from food, it is possible to
condemn gluttony as sinful, self-destructive, or both . . . Viewing
intoxication as a basic human impulse is the beginning of moral judgment, not
the end. It brings us into the territory of temperance" -- a word Sullum uses,
accurately, to mean moderation. The 19th-century anti-alcohol campaigners who
hijacked it were as cavalier with vocabulary as they were with science.
Proponents of legalization will, naturally, say yes to this book, but their
opponents should read it too. Sullum's arguments deserve a response from those
who disagree with him. As he points out, the costs of the war on drugs far
exceed the billions of dollars of direct expenditure. They also include
"violence, official corruption, disrespect for the law, diversion of
law-enforcement resources, years wasted in prison by drug offenders who are not
predatory criminals, thefts that would not occur if drugs were more affordable,
erosion of privacy rights and other civil liberties, and deaths from tainted
drugs, unexpectedly high doses, and unsanitary injection practices." Under
these circumstances, it's up to the drug warriors to come up with a convincing
explanation as to why we are fighting their drug war. Judging by this
well-written, persuasive, and important book, they are unlikely to succeed.
Mother Jones, May-June 2003 v28 i3 p81(2)
Think different. (Book Review)_(book review) Joshua Wolf Shenk.
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use By Jacob Sullum. Tarcher/Putnam. 352 pages.
$24.95. In 1914, Henry Ford published a tract inveighing against a substance
that was enjoying a spike in popularity. He gathered testimonials from a host
of luminaries, including Booker T. Washington, who said that the drug caused "a
blunting of the moral sense," and Thomas Edison, who said it "has a violent
action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain,
which is ... permanent and uncontrollable." "I will employ no person," Edison
concluded, "who smokes cigarettes."
Even now--a time of strong anti-smoking sentiment--this paroxysm against
cigarettes will strike most people as hysterical. We can assess the rhetoric
against firsthand experience, a large body of reliable science, and (for the
most part) an open and honest discussion about what cigarettes do to the body
and mind.
Yet, had the anti-cigarette movement of the teens and '20s succeeded, the
"Little White Slavers," as Ford called them, could easily have been subjected
to a federal ban, followed by prosecution of makers, sellers-even users. Then
would have come the ad campaigns linking cigarettes to violence, accompanied by
a chill on any research that ran against the grain. In such an environment, if
an "expert" said that cigarettes not only caused cancer but led inexorably to
moral decay and blindness, most people would dumbly nod their heads.
This move from prohibition to propaganda did happen, of course, with other
drugs that were legal and widely available in 1914--products of the coca leaf,
the hemp plant, and the opium poppy. These drugs, among others, came to be the
object of the giant, swaggering, military-moralistic complex that is our war on
drugs.
Saying Yes is not primarily (as its subtitle says) a defense of drug use. It
is, rather, a critique of anti-drug propaganda and a plea for reason. Sullum, a
scholar on drug policy and an editor for Reason magazine, argues that there is
a "silent majority" of drug users who smoke pot, snort cocaine, even shoot
smack without losing their lives, jobs, or families. They stay quiet, because
if they spoke up they would be ridiculed, fired (in 2000, two-thirds of big
companies drug-tested), or arrested.
"People who use illegal drugs in a controlled, inconspicuous way are not
inclined to stand up and announce the fact," Sullum writes. "Prohibition
renders them invisible." The visible minority, then, are mostly people in
trouble-under arrest, on the streets, in the morgue. But to mistake them for
the average drug user, Sullum argues, "is like assuming that the wino passed
out in the gutter is the typical drinker."
Sullum's case is easiest to make with marijuana. According to a federal survey,
83 million Americans have inhaled and 12 million say they've used marijuana in
the last month. Given these numbers, it's not so surprising to hear about Peter
Lewis. The CEO of a major insurance company for 36 years, and still its
billionaire chairman, Lewis has been praised as a perfectionist and an
"extraordinary businessman." He is also, as Fortune noted even before his drug
arrest at a New Zealand airport, "a functioning pothead."
You might laugh at that stodgy phrase--as if it were so unusual for a pot
smoker to "function." But what if you heard there were "functioning cokeheads"
or "functioning dope addicts"? Sigmund Freud used cocaine regularly for years;
the 19th-century British author Thomas De Quincey had a rather extensive career
with opium. Both men wrote effusively about their drugs of choice. Both also
found it possible to moderate their use.
The same is true for many users now. Sullum cites a study of "controlled opiate
users," which included a 41-year-old carpenter who used heroin on weekends for
a decade, while living in a suburb helping to support his wife and three kids.
The central argument of Saying Yes is that we should replace the current model
of selectively coerced abstinence with one of universal temperance. As it is,
some drug dealers sit in jail while others sit in corporate suites. Robert
Downey Jr. is a disgrace for using cocaine. Robert Dole is "brave" for pitching
Viagra. This system, Sullum writes, makes no sense intellectually, morally, or
practically. Yes, many people do hurt themselves badly with coke and heroin and
pot-and Ecstasy and LSD, and so on. But they are the small minority. Even drug
czar William Bennett acknowledged this in 1989 when he wrote, "Non-addicted
users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population."
To Bennett, this was even more reason to clamp down on all drug use, because
those who got by all fight would encourage those who lack self-control, whose
lives would be screwed up with a few puffs or lines. But if addiction has a
human cost, so too does prohibition. The drug war has left us with a prison
system choked with drug users and small-time dealers, with black market
violence, infections from dirty needles, overdose deaths, and so on.
Many reasonable people justify these costs. However flawed, they say, the drug
war protects us from demon drugs. They impute to certain drugs a power to
enslave, to bewitch, to override all functions of choice, reason, or moral
capacity. "Methamphetamine," said a Colorado prosecutor, "is the devil's key to
your soul." But this theory of "voodoo pharmacology," Sullum writes, falls
apart under scrutiny. In a recent survey, 3 million Americans said they've used
heroin. Only 4 percent of those said they had used it in the last month. The
percentage of people who develop addictions to methamphetamine and cocaine
(powder and crack) is similarly low.
The point--which physicians and psychologists affirm--is that however good or
overwhelming a drug, human beings never fully lose their ability to choose.
Drugs are never satanic or angelic in themselves, but rather agents of human
possibility.
Deft, judicious, and thorough, Sullum's book is a healthy dose of sober talk in
a debate dominated by yelping dopes. But maybe what the cause for an honest
discussion of drugs needs, as much as its diligent scholars, is a propagandist
team all its own. Perhaps they could put together an ad campaign, paralleling
Apple's Think Different line, with images of William James, Stephen Jay Gould,
Tom Robbins, and other unapologetic drug users. Maybe they could organize a
national coming-out day--handing out felt marijuana or coca or poppy leaves for
people to wear. And maybe for a day, we could all just say what we know.
Joshua Wolf Shenk has written for Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and the New York
Times.
Library Journal, April 15, 2003 v128 i7 p110(1)
Sullum, Jacob. Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use. (Book Review)_(book review)
Audrey Snowden.
Tarcher: Putnam. May 2003. c.332p. permanent paper. bibliog. index. ISBN
1-58542-227-4. $24.95. SOC SCI In his second book, journalist Sullum (For Your
Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health) takes two
tacks in his defense of drug use. First, he methodically dismantles
conventional antidrug rhetoric; then he takes a more philosophical strand as he
delves into the relevant moral issues. As the title hints, Sullum is strongly
in favor of individual choice over governmental regulation. He advances
politically incorrect views about drug use, but he substantiates them with
research and evidence--something he repeatedly claims that antidrug propaganda
lacks. The jacket copy notes that Sullum's style is "provocative" and to some
extent it is: but while his provocative, substantiated content is to be
commended, the provocative writing style may cause some readers to turn off and
tune out. But what Sullum has to say should be heard, and this book represents
an effort to get readers to think about facts rather than rhetoric, to examine
the historical evolution of American public response to drugs, and to consider
viewpoints that receive little mainstream ink or airtime. This thoughtful,
engaging analysis is sure to spark discussion. Recommended for public,
academic, and high school libraries.--Audrey Snowden, GSLIS (student), Simmons
Coll., Boston