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March 16, 2008
Why is Drug Policy Important? (Historical, Political)
As noted earlier, the current selection process for picking presidential nominees has avoided any direct questions of the candidates about the drug war. Given the campaign’s current intensity, the only possible conclusion about that avoidance is that it meets with the approval of the candidates, the media, and the public at large.
An important corollary is that those who stubbornly attempt to raise drug policy as an issue are being ignored and will probably continue to be ignored unless some untoward event changes the status quo. So unclear is the present situation (and so profound is the denial), that just what such an event might be can’t even be anticipated, however several possibilities do exist and those that focus attention on the same behavioral tendency (denial) most often employed to avoid “inconvenient truth,” (like climate change) could become a surrogate; if for no other reason than the hour for effective action is so late.
To repeat the familiar theme of this blog, favorable modulation of common adolescent emotional symptoms was clearly the main reason for the explosive success of marijuana as a product when it first became available to youthful initiates around 1965. The subsequent rapid growth in that youthful market, as documented by MTF studies in 1975, is further clarified by initiation data supplied by candidates of all ages now seeking to use it legally almost forty years after the drug war was declared and nearly seventy years after the MTA was passed.
The most reasonable interpretation of their data is that the ridiculous rationale for cannabis prohibition as implemented by the MTA was a huge mistake, one that was further compounded by its expansion into a “war” on drugs by the CSA which can also be seen as stimulating the illegal markets for all designated “drugs of abuse” from 1970 onward.
The unifying concept underpinning such admittedly “radical” assertions is provided by data supplied by pot applicants and confirmed by recurrent MTF studies from 1975 on: we humans tend to sample (“initiate”) most of the drugs we will ever use between the ages of 12 and 18, a pattern that also suggests that the need to self-medicate symptoms of adolescent angst is much more important than simple youthful hedonism.
The most important corollary is, as with other drug policy issues, the one most assiduously avoided in all discussions: when we study our own behavior, we humans tend to deny the importance of our emotions, despite (overwhelming) evidence that our evolutionarily more primitive feelings often trump our more recently evolved logical processes.
In other words, the process of cultural evolution, dependent on the same adaptive changes in the brain that gave rise to our language and cognitive ability, has also involved participation of emotional centers that have been evolving in parallel, since (at least) the age of reptiles. Once that possibility is admitted, we can start to see that the thrust of recorded human history reflects the influence of our remarkably common existential anxiety on our behavior.
To use Economic jargon similar to that borrowed by drug war apologists to justify their policy, an aggregation of perceived individual needs (symptoms) probably represent the microeconomics that drive illegal drug market macroeconomics. The real absurdity of the policy can best be understood by realizing the degree to which both components have been effectively placed off limits by the policy itself, which can thus be seen as flagrant use of taxpayer dollars to lobby for its own continued expansion despite an abysmal record of failure.
Like most prolonged wars, the drug war has simply become another opportunity for the unscrupulous to steal from the unwary.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 16, 2008 02:03 AM