DRUGS THE ABSTINENCE ERROR : Drop the Iron Fist and Try Rules of Moderation : Cultures that teach children about drinking but frown on adult drunks have lower rates of alcoholism. The lesson should translate to drugs.
Faced with the complexities of drug use, many people are tempted by simple formulas: Don’t try to distinguish moderation from abuse; settle only for “zero tolerance.” Don’t separate illegal drugs that are beneficial from deadly ones; forbid them all. Don’t let the kids have an ounce of wine; it will make them alcoholics. Just say no.
The most ironic consequence of these efforts to rein in drug consumption is that they actually increase the chances of abuse. There are two reasons for this: Policies of abstinence do not teach how to use drugs in moderation; and by focusing on the drugs themselves, they ignore why people use them.
For individuals and for society, such policies are mistakenly thought to be the best defense against abuse. In fact, the opposite is true. Lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse have been associated with approaches that emphasize moderation and education--in which young people learn responsible use of alcohol and “social drugs” in controlled settings, with less potent forms of a drug and with information about the hazards of excess.
Cultures in which people drink moderately with their meals--and where children, in the presence of their parents, learn the social rules of drinking--have much lower rates of alcoholism than those in which drinking occurs in bars, in binges, or mostly alone. Study after study has found that alcoholism is much more prevalent in societies that forbid children to drink but view adult drunkenness with amused tolerance or as a sign of masculinity (such as Ireland and the United States) than in cultures that teach children how to drink responsibly but frown on adult drunkenness (such as Italy and Greece). With other drugs, too, moderate use--the Peruvian Indian custom of chewing coca leaves, the occasional use of marijuana for social and medical purposes--does not lead to addiction or social problems.
When a person tries any drug without knowing the rules for its use, he or she typically uses it stupidly--the way teen-agers and college students binge on liquor, for instance. Prohibition was supposed to keep adolescents free from liquor’s contaminating influence (a rationale of today’s drug policies). Sociologist Joan McCord of Temple University has documented how this rationale backfired: Males who were teen-agers during Prohibition were later more likely to be problem drinkers and to commit many more crimes than men who were adults during that time. The former, never having learned how to drink, overdid it when given the opportunity later on.
An individual’s responses to a drug depend on his or her mental set--expectations of what it will do and on what he or she wants it to do. Studies have shown, for example, that there is nothing intrinsic in alcohol or crack that makes consumers violent--but violent, angry, frustrated individuals tend to be drawn to these drugs.
Similarly, the physical and social settings shape an individual’s responses. A century ago in this country, marijuana was used as a mild sedative. Cocaine was widely touted as a cure for everything from toothaches to timidity. When cultural outsiders began using marijuana and cocaine for “mind-altering” purposes, society responded by making the drugs illegal. That was the first step toward making them major social problems.
When an approach to a problem is repeatedly tried and repeatedly fails, it is time to experiment with alternatives. The alternative to prohibition and enforcement is not legalizing drugs and crossing our fingers. It is drug education, training in the moderate use of some drugs and continued social sanctions against abuse.
What would a legalization and education program look like? Elements of it are apparent in the case of cigarettes. Cigarette smoking has significantly declined because of a combination of factors--limits on advertising, rapidly changing social attitudes toward smoking and regulations restricting when and where people may smoke. As is the case with tobacco, legalizing marijuana, cocaine and heroin would not signify an endorsement of their use. Society could continue to prohibit drug abuse on the job, drug advertising and the use of narcotics while driving a motor vehicle or in certain public settings.
But most important, as physician Andrew Weil observed years ago, legalizing drugs must be accompanied by real drug education on a widespread basis. “What passes for education today,” he said, is “a thinly disguised attempt to scare people away from drugs we don’t like by exaggerating their dangers.” A more truthful program must avoid this hypocrisy. Children would learn that not all drugs are equally hazardous and that some illegal drugs are safer than legal ones. For example, marijuana has some important medical properties--it lessens pain and reduces the swelling in glaucoma--whereas tobacco poses unacceptably high health risks. The dangers of both alcohol and crack would be taught, and children would learn the positive reasons--relaxation, meditation, socializing--for moderate use.
Education would also spotlight the risks of what Weil calls “problem sets”--consuming drugs to alter bad moods--and “problem settings”--in which drug or alcohol abuse is compulsory. Lessons about moderation and “self-control” will depend on the reason a person drinks or abuses drugs in the first place. In order to pass for 21 in a bar? To join a fraternity or gang? To escape illiteracy or hopelessness? To quiet the despair of a dead-end life?
Many people worry that legalizing drugs would mean that everyone would choose to be “high” all the time. Perhaps some would for a while, just as dieters sometimes binge on chocolate and involuntary teetotalers binged after Prohibition. And perhaps some people, like the sad, lost youths who inhabit the legal-drug parks of Europe, would give over their lives to pursuit of the constant high. There are costs to any policy decisions we make. But the evidence suggests that there will be fewer human, economic and social costs to a policy of legalization-and-education than to continued escalation of an unwinnable war.
