POT, PITY, AND POLITICS
In 1997, the State of Oklahoma imposed two strangely different sentences for two very different crimes: A father convicted of murdering his son was sentenced to 4 years of incar-ceration and a 57-year-old arthritic man named Will Foster was sentenced to 93 years in prison for growing marijuana in his basement. Foster had used his marijuana to self-medicate against the pain and muscle spasms of acute arthritis.
A spokesman for Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating proudly justified Foster's sentence on the premise that drug use is destroying American society. Making the connection between Will Foster's medicinal pot-smoking and the destruction of American society strains ordinary logic, requiring a wild leap that sees medical marijuana use as 20 times more socially destructive than murder. Clearly the motive of such laws transcends ´any consideration of the observable effects of using an illegal drug and enters a realm of potent symbolism.
Yet if Will Foster's house had been built on a basement two or three states away, he would be a free man. By legalizing the medical use of marijuana in their 1996 initiatives, voters in California and Arizona have contradicted the symbolism that underlies America's severe anti-drug laws-those lurid images that depict marijuana and all illegal drugs as inherently evil. The medical marijuana initiatives have forced anti-drug officials to wrestle with the prickly paradox of a naughty medicine. The conflicting perception of marijuana as a humanitarian aid to the sick creates both a cognitive dissonance (evil medicine?) and a sympathy toward those deprived of this medicine--two factors that undermine the moral authority of the Drug War and give us a glimpse into the psychological dynamics that have kept it thriving despite its obvious failures.
No Ordinary Laws
America's War on Drugs is an unusual set of laws and policies. For, unlike laws against theft, assault, or manslaughter, they draw enthusiastic endorsement. Popular anti-drug civic organizations have been formed around them. Anti-drug fervor is so intense and widespread that it's become an American social theme or what should be a sufficient basis for an emotionally charged cultural theme. This core truth of addictive harms has been wound over with strands of exaggeration and false association, enhancements that make our anti-drug narrative both mesmerizing and deceitful.
The first enhancement is pure melodrama: we've separated "our" drugs from "their" drugs, "good-guy" drugs from "bad-guy" drugs. Drugs associated in the public mind with racial minorities and deviants have been criminalized. Opium became illegal because of its association with Chinese immigrants, marijuana, and cocaine because of their association with Latinos and African Americans, and hallucinogens because of their association with Hippies. The drugs preferred by the cultural majority remain legal despite qualifying technically for criminalization (tobacco under Schedule I, alcohol under Schedule II). This enhancement is founded on racism and hypocrisy.
The narrative's second enhancement simplifies the complex relationship between the drug, the user, and the context of use by depicting the drug as an autonomous evil agent--a monster that enslaves and deranges the user. This simplification lets us pin all manner of demonic characteristics onto drugs as long as they enhance the narrative. The "Reefer Madness" film enhanced anti-drugism in the 1930s just as the crack baby hysteria has done in the '80s and '90s. Both are outlandishly dishonest. Yet if a proposition supports the narrative, its falsity is forgiven and plausible exaggeration is encouraged. And any observation that contradicts the melodramatic theme is rejected, regardless of its objective truth or falsity. These dynamics make it impossible for anti-drug officials to acknowledge a phenomenon like controlled drug use (which is the case for 85% of users) or the idea that marijuana might be useful as a medicine.
Under the spell of anti-drugism, hardball draconian punishment makes sense. Yet based on the core truth of addiction's harmfulness, punishment is absurd. Which is crazier, the belligerence of punishing harmless people (controlled users) or the sadism of punishing troubled people (addicts)? And if we removed drug dealers' opportunity for profit, we'd have no need to punish them either. Why does America maintain a drug-control system that's based on illogical cruelty and that creates a dangerous black market? The Drug War continues despite its moral and pragmatic failures because it is intensely meaningful.
Cave Men at Worship
The anti-drugism narrative starts by affirming certain legitimate values, like sobriety and clean living, but ends in disproportionate punishment--a peculiar sequence. Indeed, deeply held values touching the drug issue seem to be affirmed precisely in the act of punishment, following an ancient pattern that theologian Gil Baillie describes as "sacred violence." In his book Violence Unveiled (Crossroads, 1996), Baillie shows how this Stone Age phenomenon operates--from Aztec altars of human sacrifice to the streets of Sarajevo to the villages of Rwanda. Although sacred violence varies in form and intensity, it tends to follow a ritualized recipe.
Sacred violence starts with a cultural narrative that proclaims the tribe's values and why they must be preserved. It explains why the tribe is superior to others: wiser, stronger, nobler. Mixing legend and history, the mythic narrative describes the triumph over evil enemies and the blessing of the gods that marked the tribe's origins. Now comes the archaic mind's grim genius: to demonstrate the grandeur of its founding values, it introduced the death-specter of sacrificial scapegoats. Symbolic blood-letting shows the solemnity of the tribe's origins and values convincingly, as if to say that the life-force itself trembles at the nobility of our tribe and our values. The cultural narrative or myth justifies the bloodshed. Innocent victims die, but it's for the greater good of ritually affirming tribal values.
The Drug War fits the pattern of sacred violence precisely. Its ritual bloodletting has many expressions: 20 years in prison for possessing a pound of a once-common weed, 10 years for a smidgen of LSD that's lighter than a toothpick, 5 years for a weekend supply of crack cocaine, and, yes, the jailing of patients who use marijuana as a medicine.
Anti-drugism is the justifying myth, a meaningful mixture of truth and legend proudly proclaimed through slogans and bumper stickers. All around are trustees and keepers of the myth: the drug czar, the DARE officer, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. They appeal by turn to science, coercion, and morality to bolster anti-drugism. These ritual myth-keepers are always ready with a spell-binding litany: a crack baby here, a flashback there, Hitler drug, gateway drug, everywhere a bad drug.
To fend off pangs of pity, the ritual executioner must cover the victim's face and gag his mouth--disidentifying him as a fellow human being and silencing his cry to be spared. America's courts silence our Drug War victims decisively, hiding their faces behind prison walls, revising our cultural theme of personal freedom to accommodate anti-drugism.
The press, our mythic orators and scribes, faithfully tell the story of the Drug War's sacred violence from the viewpoint of the "righteous community of persecutors," filtering out all that's unseemly. The drug bust is covered as a heroic act, the "street value" of the drug loot reported as a measure of the evil thwarted. The civil rights of druggies are rarely part of the news story. The shattered lives of drug prisoners and their families do not qualify them as pitiable victims of excessive harshness, but rather as walking commemorations, solemnly validating our stern anti-drug beliefs.
Sacred violence creates social solidarity and generates political meaning. Police, parents, community groups, and the media unite to send kids a dissuading message about drugs. Their support of the Drug War shows an instinctive understanding that acts of punitive ritual violence send the most powerful message imaginable, an endorsement of positive values with primal intensity. Anti-drug politicians cook up new and imaginative ways to be "tough on drugs," assuring a steady stream of scapegoats to celebrate the national ideal of a "drug-free America." Sheltered by the justifying myth, our sacred violence is gratifying and free of guilt, executed in good faith by those who live inside that myth.
Are all Americans equally accepting of anti-drugism? Certainly not. But nearly every American believes at least one potent anti-drug exaggeration, and most are willing to overlook the excesses of crusading drug warriors and accept their explanation for our punitive system.
The strongest rationale for sacred (respectable) violence is that it's needed to squelch unsanctioned and chaotic violence within society. So we must examine anti-drugism's widely believed claim that drugs cause violence. The claim is false. The pharmacological effects of illegal drugs do not cause violence. In Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (Putnam, 1996), Harvard psychiatrist James Gilligan points out that the only drug truly linked to violence is alcohol, which is legal. Oddly, it is the drugs that decrease aggression (marijuana and heroin) and those that have no aggregate effect on violence either way (psychep;delics, cocaine, and other stimulants) that have been made illegal. But the primal satisfactions of sacred violence prevent our nation from recognizing this blatant anomaly.
"Cops" versus Calvary
Americans have had many previous occasions for such primal satisfaction, but they've been disavowed, one after the other. The days when Western civilization could smile or even wink at the persecution of Jews, Blacks, and religious heretics are long gone. Theologian Baillie explains why: "Something that was unique and distinctive to Western culture was ... preventing its scapegoating mechanisms from operating with their full mesmerizing and galvanizing power." That something, says Baillie, is exactly the empathy for victims advanced by our foundational biblical tradition, whose prophets were martyred, whose savior was himself the victim of ritual violence. In every century since the crucifixion, scapegoating has been harder and harder to justify. If drug-warring is a last frontier of respectable persecution, it is both hampered and haunted by this empathy.
William Bennett's approval of beheading drug dealers and Daryl Gates' counsel that drug users be shot to death show a strong intuitive grasp of sacred violence: literal blood-letting squashes the victim class and produces social meaning far more effectively than tamer forms of scapegoating. Cultures less influenced by Christianity, like China and Singapore, employ this very strategy: druggies die. Powerful scapegoating sentiments push the U.S. to do the same, but Christianity thwarts its full expression, annoying those anti-drug enthusiasts who make TV's drug-busting docu-dramas like "Cops" so popular. This deprivation of scapegoating's full righteous satisfaction accounts for the pervasive belief that we are "soft on crime," even though drug-warring has made us the world's second largest jailer.
The medical marijuana issue amplifies this religious haunting of the Drug War. How do you oppose a heart-rending plea for compassion toward victims of AIDS, glaucoma, and cancer without appearing disreputably cruel and heartless? In its objections to medical marijuana, the Clinton administration shaped its justifying myths skillfully. By envisioning children getting the wrong message, massive carnage from medically stoned pilots, and consumers duped by snake-oil drugs, the government depicted a huge fellowship of victims harmed by medical marijuana precisely to justify society's ritual persecution of marijuana users, patients included. Rationale: withholding medical marijuana prevents more harm than its availability relieves. Although absurdly dishonest, this is exactly the reasoning required to uphold a system of sacred violence against the threat of encroaching empathy.
Sacred Violence: Unraveling or Unrecognized?
Will medical marijuana be the Drug War's undoing? Although it undermines the anti-drugism myth and inspires disarming sympathy, we must not underestimate our society's resistance to being robbed of an intensely meaningful system of sacred violence. Since the primal satisfactions of scapegoating are nearly instinctual, they are stubbornly defended and cleverly justified. Americans accustomed to a sensational anti-drug crusade will be sorely disappointed with a mundane public-health policy that merely addresses the core truth of addictive harms-no more fascinating melodrama. Those employed in Drug War industries (police, jailers, drug testers, etc.) have even more to lose-both money and meaning. Politicians understand the power of the anti-drugism myth. If they fail to feed it, they rightly fear that they may be fed to it. Few take the risk.
But if Baillie is right, the days of enthusiastic drug-warring are numbered. Cultures immersed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, have seen a "gradually developing aversion for sacred violence and ... a corresponding tendency to see historical phenomena from the perspective of its victims .... Most of the West's political innovations are linked to [this insight] and our most deeply held social and moral sensibilities are suffused with it."
From the biblical mob surrounding the adulteress to the drug-fighters of today, scapegoaters have always claimed that empathy for the victims of righteous crusading weakens society's moral authority. But this is not true. Indeed, after persuading the righteous mob to drop their stones, Jesus could say, "go and sin no more" with unparalleled moral authority. Compassion, not coercion. The idea is still scandalous today--at odds with the conventional wisdom of gut-level, get-toughness that social critic Neil Postman calls a "cultural narrative."
In The End of Education (Knopf, 1995), Postman talks about the stories or narratives that have shaped American life. A culture-shaping narrative "envisions a future ... constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct ... and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose." We live by and educate our children through cultural narratives, including themes praising the scientific method, the democratic process, and the Protestant work ethic. You need only look at our automobiles, plastered with millions of DARE bumper stickers, to convince yourself that "anti-drugism" has become a full-blown cultural narrative.
Deception Wound on a Truthful Core
The Drug War theme has one very truthful proposition at its core: compulsive consumption of mind-altering substances, regardless of their legal status, can do great harm to addicted individuals and those around them. This would reasonably give rise to various public-health measures, but a majority of Americans don't see the Drug War as violence at all. True believers, we swim about within the justifying myth as unconsciously as fish in water. Almost.
The best chance for wider drug reform is that the press may begin gradually to tell the story from the viewpoint of the oppressed--showing the human face, not just of marijuana patients but of all the Drug War's victims. As with Negro slavery, Indian massacres, and other cases of ritualized violence de-legitimized by Judeo-Christian empathy, such exposure would reveal the Drug War's present moral authority as a sham. At that point, the stone in the hand of the ritual persecutors, must be dropped. It's over. After some time passes and the myth is completely unraveled, we'll all shake our heads at the folly, as our once-heroic violence becomes unveiled.
Paul M. Bischke is an instructional designer who co-directs the Drug Policy Reform Group in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Reprinted with permission from "Fellowship," the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, $15/yr. For a free sample copy write to Fellowship, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960.