America Deepens a Long Trend Toward Intolerance of Drug Abuse

Reaction to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg’s use of marijuana while a professor of law reflects the profound antagonism to drug use, including marijuana, that has been growing for almost 10 years.

His experience has confirmed in the political sphere what the tragic deaths of prominent athletes two years ago confirmed for sports: Toleration of drug use is rapidly declining.

Interestingly, the last time Ginsburg is said to have used the drug, 1979, was near the peak of marijuana favor in the United States. At the time, President Jimmy Carter was proposing decriminalization of marijuana, and the number of high school students who felt that regular marijuana use was dangerous had fallen to the all-time low of 35%. Now that figure has doubled and it is a minority who think that regular marijuana use is not dangerous. To take another example of the trend, in 1980 only 43% of Americans favored criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana; by 1986 the percentage had increased to 67%.

This trend continues a pattern Americans followed after a previous peak of drug toleration earlier this century. In our encounter with mood-altering substances, the initial reaction is a rapid escalation of claims and enthusiasm for the effects of drugs on our minds and bodies. Drugs appear to aid us in achieving our maximum, whether in physical labor, alert thinking, philosophical insight, cheer with others or contentment with ourselves. Without drugs, the assumption runs, we cannot quite attain our potential. During these periods of positive attitude toward drugs, laws against their use seem ignorant and short-sighted in the face of the advantages that drugs promise.

Fear of drugs begins to rise as the effects of drug use begin to accumulate. Tragic instances of the bad effects of drugs grow more frequent. At first, “bad trips” are seen as exceptions to routine satisfaction with the effects of drugs. In the downturn of drug favor, social pressure shifts from having to justify abstinence to requiring an apology for drug consumption. Intolerance replaces toleration, and just as we frequently heard campaigns to “turn on” in the 1960s, we now witness campaigns to abstain totally from drugs--from tobacco and alcohol, as well as cocaine, marijuana and so on. No recreational drug use can be justified because all damage the mind and body, reducing the user’s potential.

So the rise and fall of drug toleration appears to have a symmetry. Just as opponents to drug use were offended in the 1970s by the uncritical praise given to drugs, so those who continue to see recreational drug use as harmless are shocked at the blanket denunciation of any drug use, which is more commonly heard now. If the past is a guide, the intolerance of drug use will deepen and may leave the nation at a relatively low level of drug consumption for several decades, as happened from the 1930s until the early 1960s.

Therefore, when the Reagan Administration and Mrs. Reagan in particular encourage intolerance toward drug use, they are advocating one of the most powerful influences to reduce drug consumption in the United States. The impact of intolerance, however, like that of a strong medication, is hard to confine to a discrete target area. Judge Ginsburg is an early political casualty, although he is not the first. Recall the challenge to take a drug test made to Julian Bond by his eventually successful congressional opponent, or the problems that college drug use caused the ultimately lost reelection campaign of Gov. William Scranton III in Pennsylvania.

Those intolerant of drug use see no acceptable reason for using drugs, therefore no need to debate or make difficult decisions on which drugs to use and how much. For these citizens, the conflict between excusing Judge Ginsburg’s occasional use some years ago and supporting him as the President’s Supreme Court nominee created just too much psychic pain.

The fate of this man who came so close to the pinnacle of achievement in his profession is a cautionary tale that no politician will ignore. The message is clear: Drug use in the past will not be judged by the attitudes that prevailed at that time. Politicians may find their casual use of drugs in the 1970s to be as popular as having joined a Soviet friendship society in World War II was in the 1950s.