 Thank you, Michael. And it is a distinct honor to welcome you all here this morning and have the privilege of introducing our keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Zaz. Dr. Zaz is, in my opinion, certainly one of the most influential psychiatrists in the world today. He's influenced and I think indeed shaped our thoughts about mental disorders and addictive behaviors. His lifelong work has been motivated by a very keen intellect and a passion for his work. Among his most important works are his well-known myth of mental illness, my personal favorite, Insanity, the idea and its consequences, and his newest book, which I have a copy of here, Our Right to Drugs, The Case for a Free Market. At a conference several years ago where Dr. Zaz was one of our featured speakers, I said that Dr. Zaz was the superego of psychiatry. I'm not sure that he liked the idea, at least at first. I haven't really changed my mind. He continually reminds us of the limitations and the roots of mental health treatment. His classic book about drug use and drug pushers and oppression, Ceremonial Chemistry, reminds us just how easy it is to oppress and persecute drug users in the name of health and treatment. Dr. Zaz's work stands as a testament to the humane dignified treatment for consenting patients who are struggling with addiction. Dr. Zaz is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center and he's a defender of liberty and a champion of personal freedom. His work warns us of the significant risks to freedom when society, either for benevolent or malevolent reasons, wants to impose or improve health. Dr. Zaz's work also teaches us that it's very easy to substitute retribution for treatment to take a phrase from George Valiant. It's a distinct pleasure for me to introduce my colleague and friend Dr. Thomas Zaz. Dr. Schaefer, Mr. Wädel, ladies and gentlemen, let me first thank Mr. Wädel and Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and all the other hosts, sponsors, for inviting me and the honor of asking me to present a keynote address. I appreciate it. Now, I did plan to make some comments. I have written extensively on this subject and so I thought I would speak informally just from some notes. And let me begin by saying that although some of you may not believe this, I'm not really interested in the conventional sense in either the criminalization or the legalization of drugs, as these terms are now used. I'm interested in why we are now treating this particular subject in this particular way, given the fact that this country, and especially this city and this building, is devoted to studying the relations between the state and the individual. It's devoted to the proposition that in this country, everyone who reaches the age of maturity, is presumed to be in a criminal law, innocent until proven guilty, and in conventional civil law, competent until proven otherwise. So when you reach 18, you can do all kinds of things which have tremendously harmful consequences of society. And I hope that no one, if I point out that the most harmful thing someone can do is to produce a child that he or she is not prepared to take care of. It's far more harmful than smoking marijuana on other people. So what I want to discuss is the way drugs fit into this scheme. Now, second point, language is all important in this, because in the war on drugs, like in many other moral crusades, the crusaders have seized the vocabulary and are sort of winning before the first shot is fired, because how can anyone be for drug abuse? How can anyone be for addiction? How can anyone be for cocaine babies? This whole rhetoric, obviously this is impossible. So the issue is not being for the abuse of drugs. The issue is being for self-responsible behavior. And if we know anything, we know that the more controls are imposed on people from without, the less they will control themselves and vice versa. Many of Mark Twain's wonderful stories are devoted to this subject. If you treat children, adolescents, as if they were responsible, they will act responsibly. If you treat them as if they were irresponsible, they will act irresponsibly. Now let's take an example here of a subject which may seem completely unrelated. One of the most dangerous implements in our society is the automobile. I believe the figure that's usually given is that 50,000 people get killed every year by cars. Now I don't know how many of those killed themselves and how many of those I don't know if these figures exist. I don't remember them if they do. And how many are killed? It's so to speak, innocent people run down by drunken drivers or simply by people who may be on some other medicine or don't know how to drive like this, or are too old to drive perhaps, like this elderly woman who ran down 20 people in New York a week or so ago. Cars are dangerous things, yet we allow them. They are not regulated. They are regulated in the sense that you have to have a driver's license. If you drink and drive, you get punished. Now of course you don't get punished nearly enough in this country as compared to other countries. So that's how we regulate automobiles. Now it seems to me rather strange that I don't regulate other things in the same way. Now Svaz, now let's get to drugs. My main objection to the present discourse on drugs is that it is medically oriented. And my objection here is too prominent. One is that one of the problems in the war on drugs and in the whole attitude towards drugs is that since approximately 1914, the Harrison Narcotic Act is a kind of a watershed mark, but since approximately that time, there has been a steadily increasing medical monopolization of drugs so that the medical profession and the government are in alliance in a paternalistic way telling people what they can take and what they can't take. And this is epitomized, symbolized by the distinction between prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs. Now the hypocrisy and idiocy that this has given rise to is all around us in advertising. And I don't want to waste my precious time here to give you too many examples, but you know it's now quite popular to advertise drugs like dimetaps. I think I advertise constantly on television which says if it was any more powerful you would need a prescription. Which means you little kiddies, you know you can have it because you know it's not that bad, but if it was any stronger you would need your governess, doctor, government to tell you that you can have it. Then there are all these drugs which like motrin or benadryl which can get in a certain strength over-the-counter but in a greater strength only by prescription. Well all you have to do is take two benadryls and then you're up to the prescription side. Now this to me is crucial because I don't see and I am not really trying to pick a disagreement with my friends and colleagues who are trying to combat this moral, this holy war on drugs by trying to medicalize various drugs, by trying to point out their medical value. But I think that's quite hopeless because I don't see how the illegal drugs can be made available essentially in like over-the-counter drugs or in local food market while completely harmless drugs like pennies harmless in the sense that they don't do any harm except they might possibly give you some problems with yeast infection or some other medical problem yourself that you might want to be quite capable of using intelligently remain illegal. Now to me it isn't just heroin and marijuana that are illegal, every drug in America that's any god is illegal because if you have to go to a doctor to get a prescription to get a drug ladies and gentlemen. That's illegal and the American people have forgotten this because we all get drugs now like the people in Russia had to get permission to immigrate. Now if you had to get a government permission to immigrate we didn't consider it to be free immigration. For 20 years various American governments agitated against the Soviet system to let people out which means that the government can't ask you at the border why are you leaving. I live in Syracuse which is only an hour away from Canada and perhaps because I was born in Hungary I'm always very stressed that when you go drive up to North on the American side there is nobody you drive across the bridge it's on the Canadian side that they ask you good morning what are you doing. Nobody in America ask you why do you want to go to Toronto. Now why should anybody ask you why you want a drug. I'm coming to one of the most interesting distinction which is also basically linguistic and it's terribly simple namely we as mature Americans are now getting drugs only if we need them we can't get them because we want them. This to me is a quintessence of infantilism. In a capitalist free society you get something because you want it and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how many cars you have the dealer doesn't ask you do you need another one or do you need a bigger one. They don't ask you why do you need a six-cylinder engine why is the four is enough are you planning to speed are you planning to abuse the horsepower of it. It doesn't ask about the dosage of the power and now we come to another aspect which is completely neglected especially by the press, by the media in relation to the war on drugs and there is that drugs have only peripherally to do with what is now considered to be their only legitimate parameter to with health. We have now gotten ourselves we present company I hope excluded we have gotten ourselves into a frame of mind where we think that the only function of drugs is to give it to somebody who is sick to make him healthier like insulin. Well do I have to spell it out for you? How wrong this is? Well I don't know whether I do but I will. I put on my reading glasses so I don't miss any of them. Well since time immemorial people have used drugs for the simple reason to make themselves feel better. Whatever better means. Now better basically means one of two things generally since human beings come in two conditions awake and asleep. When they are awake they very often want to fall asleep and when they are asleep they very often want to wake up. So the presence and stimulants are as old as mankind and they have been taken for which is nothing to do with health. Upers and downers we now call them in a kind of a pejorative way. Then of course and I don't want to go into that too much because I sort of identified with this subject and I just will mention it there is a religious reason the strictly religious ceremonial reason like ceremonial wine in both the Jewish and Christian ceremonies and the ceremonial forbidding of alcohol in Islam. So there you see this is a religious dimension which we deny or slide at our own peril. Then there is the issue of conviviality. Smoking jackets, the whole culture of drinking, smoking, opium dance and so on. Now let's keep going. Then there is a whole category of using chemicals, drugs which by the way in our current war on drugs mentality are generally associated with making people less capable of being productive citizens as if drugs were the problem of not being a productive citizen and not education and family structure. Drugs have nothing to do with it. The fact is that drugs can be really much more effectively used to enhance your capacities than to disable yourself. After all most people who smoke tell me unfortunately I have never acquired that habit tell me that they smoke because it makes them feel better. And of course Freud never tired of emphasizing that if you don't smoke there is no point in living and he didn't consider it an addiction. It was something to which he was entitled to do not to mention cocaine to which he was also liked when he was depressed and didn't have a good practice and so on and enabled him to work. Now the fact that coca leaves have been used by poor Indians long before this country was discovered and long before there was Christianity and white men and so on. Again it's all forgotten in this. I mean there were these poor people starving and with coca leaves they could work harder. Sports. Now I don't see what's wrong with people taking anabolic steroids if they want to run faster. And again I hope I'm not offending anyone but there are lots of ways in which you can improve or disimprove your performance. It seems to me again that religion is one of them. If someone is a very religious person and believes in God and prays and so on and gets a great deal of sustenance from this I would think this would enhance his athletic or other performance before a contest as compared to someone who is an atheist and doesn't have this particular source of strength. Now if you don't, if you, let's assume you are married or have an important relationship and in the morning of a contest your wife is particularly nice to you. I'm sure that would help and if she's particularly not nice to you I'm sure that would hurt your performance. So also as long as drugs are, as long as the rules are the same for everyone it seems to me that whether or not people use drugs is irrelevant. It's simply one way. After all the very process of training for a sport may not be very healthy for your body if you're concerned about health. After all playing professional football or boxing are not very healthy. After all boxing is a way, a professional way of inducing brain damage. Much more effective than taking drugs probably for causing brain damage. Now let's come to an entirely different area. A very hot area, used to be a very hot area in this city. Actually I interned in this city at the Harvard Medical School at Boston City Hospital almost 50 years ago at which time it was of course illegal even to mention birth control to patients. Now that has changed now but it hasn't changed that much because are you 464 or whatever it's called it's still illegal in America, it's legal everywhere, elsewhere. Now the whole area of controlling reproduction in various ways, fertility drugs, contraceptive drugs have nothing to do with health, they have to do with how you regulate your life, right? So where is the medicalization here? It's no more medical than abortion. Now the interesting thing is that a very large number of people in this country now believe that a woman has a right to an abortion. Now I'm not going to get into that thicket. But let me only point out that no matter what you think about an abortion an abortion is the right of a woman to get rid of a living fetus from her body. That's what it is. Now whether this is justified or not morally personally is another issue. So you have a right to do that but you don't have the right to put a silicone breast implant in your breast. Only if you have cancer. If you want to look better you don't have a right to do that. Poor Marlene Dietrich, it's a good thing she's dead. Why? What about the whole monopoly of surgery and drugs for improvement of looks, plastic surgery? Well that about exhaust the list of things for which we take drugs and as you see health is way down the list on here. Now let me talk a little bit about the relation between the ceremonial and the technical aspects of drugs to which I referred in terms of religion. There was great consternation in this country. It sort of died down. When Salman Rushdie was declared to be a person of non-grat and he was going to be killed because he wrote a book which libles, defames Islam. When Salman Rushdie is just one person that the Islamic government, not that I'm here to defend them wanted to kill and he has been killed yet. But how is this different from American planes going to South America and killing people there because they are growing something on their own soil? In the last analysis you see I don't see how honest decent people can deny the effect except by paternalizing the population. How they can deny the effect that there is no drug problem at all. If there is a problem it's a problem of infantilism and lack of self-control. There is no dangerous drug because a drug on the shelf is not dangerous. The danger of drugs is one danger in the United States or one of the few dangers obviously is not the only one. It's a danger par excellence, protection from which we do not need the government or the medical profession or anyone else. All we need is abstinence. Just like we don't, a woman doesn't need the government to protect her from being pregnant and man doesn't need the government to protect him from getting AIDS. If you are sexually abstinent, well you know it's a high price then you certainly won't get certain things. Okay? Isn't that obvious for drugs too? So now we are coming down really to the nitty gritty of what the Warren Drugs is about. Now the Warren Drugs as I see it started in America in 1906 with a pure food and drug loan. It didn't start 20 or 30 years ago with marijuana. It started with a pure food and drug loan and I want to see a few words about that and then I will stop. I don't know if you will stop me or shall I stop myself? Is this a matter of self-control? Let me put it to you this way. It's not exactly a democratic decision. Well I will stop myself at some reasonable in the near future. You're doing good. Keep going. Thank you. Drugs are a matter of self-control. Really, let me collect my thoughts to get this right. What we need the government for, we are really coming down now to the nitty gritty of what political philosophy is about. Political philosophy not 101 but zero. I mean why do we have a state? Why do we have a government? Forgive me for spelling this out. You will only take a second. We have a state, we have a government in order to protect us from dangers. What dangers? External dangers? Enemies for which we have an army and internal dangers? Criminals. People who want to kill us, steal our property, injure us. Right? Now what was the 1906 food and drug glow about? Until 1906, as I hope you realize, people could sell and buy virtually anything both in the way of food and drugs. And those were the days of so-called patent medicines and again language is wonderfully revealing. Patent medicine meant that you could buy cartes little liver pills or a lady a pink or whatever it meant. And that's all it said on the label. So you know what you are buying. And then partly through media agitation, there was a demand, not really from the population, this was not a consumer demand, that people ought to know what's in the bottle. So there was a requirement to put on the label that it contained, which it usually contained, 20-25% alcohol and 2% or 3% cocaine or morphine and naturally it made people feel better. Now that was 1906. The same thing with food, that there were certain regulations that the government imposed. For example, if you had a tuberculosis cow, you could not sell the milk, you could not sell the meat and so on for health problems. Now to me this is so obvious that this was a law to protect people from unscrupulous vendors. It fell in line with the traditional duty of the government to protect us from, and I'm using classic libertarian language here, it's nicely alliterating, from force and fraud. The only people are supposed to use force on us as a government. And of course the only people who use fraud on us is the government. Otherwise it's not a sprinting money or making promises, political promises. They can use force. You and I can't use in our dealings, we can't say if you go to a drugstore and you want aspirin, they can't sell you red poison. ought to be able to correct it. This is to protect me from you. And there were several interesting Supreme Court decisions. One decided by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who I gather his father was born a couple of years from here. In 1911, which I discussed at length in my book, in which actually the government tried to sue a gentleman, I think named Sullivan, because he advertised one of these things which was correctly labeled as curing everything from anemia to cancer. And the government said, but this is mislabeled. The Supreme Court held. Of course it's mislabeled. Every advertising is mislabeling. Everybody promises something absolute, doesn't don't lipsticks and deodorants. Everything promise that you'll get the most wonderful girl and boy if you use it. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Supreme Court held that the labeling only pertains to what is in the bottle, not what ingesting it will do to you. Now somewhere after the end of the first world war, this gradually metamorphosed until by the end of the second world war, drug laws and now this is full blown are clearly, consciously, unashamedly directed to protecting you from yourself. And if you don't obey the protection, then you're put in jail for 20, 30 or 40 years. Some protection. So my ending message is that we can talk about criminalization. We can talk about medicalization or legalization. And we can talk about a genuinely free market in which drugs, all drugs, including all prescription drugs, I do not see how there can be any change in the war on drugs without a real confrontation of the issue of prescription drugs. If someone, I'm always told well, but people don't know what to take. Well a prescription, the abolition of prescription laws doesn't mean that you can go to a doctor and get a quotes prescription. And the more that you can go to a garage and ask them what oil to put in your car. But it would not have any legal standing. You would not need it. You could just get it if you don't know what to take. For most people who are not physicians or even if they are physicians, they would be well advised to do that. So we can have criminalization, we can have medicalization, we can have various forms of legalization and we can have a regulated free market in which drugs are sold essentially like tomatoes and green peppers. But that requires something which is gone from America. And that's why I'm not very up. This is obviously what I'm presenting to you I don't think is particularly relevant today except as a beacon to think about. Because it requires something which is gone now. And that is caveat emptor. You can't complain. You don't have to take anything. If you take Halcyon and then go and shoot your mother, you shouldn't get acquitted by reason of insanity and you shouldn't be able to get money from a joint company. Because that's why you shot your mother. And that's the kind of country we now live on. You take Halcyon, you shoot your mother, you get acquitted and you get money from a joint. It's a real case a couple of months ago. I hope you read about this. And it's now every time someone takes some drug and it doesn't agree with him or her soon. Well, we can't have it both ways. That's one of the reasons why I understand why many new drugs are not being tested or not released. Drugs for AIDS and so on. Now, to illustrate where we have come, it so happens that just before I left Syracuse last issue, I get the US News and World Report and one of their major features is called Underground Medicine. Four or five pages. A quest for state of art treatments is turning thousands of ordinary immigrants into activists and sometimes outlaws. And it tells a story, which I'm sure you all know, that all people with all kinds of diseases from AIDS to cancer of the prostate are going to foreign countries, especially Mexico, to be able to have their diseases treated. Well, I just don't think this is the idea that the founding fathers had in mind for this country. But if you are sick, you should not be able to get whatever you want and then bear the consequences. The government and the medical professionals just protect you from yourself. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Saz. I told you there would not be enough time. I'm sure we could all sit for another hour and be spellbound by his common sense. I wish those of us in government who make policy had the common sense of Dr. Saz. We'd have a much better country, a country that perhaps would live up to its ideal of liberty. I remind it ironic that America, a land that prides itself on liberty, should imprison so many people. In fact, more people per capita than any nation on earth. Which leads us into the direction of the panels and workshops we have. I remind each of you to look carefully over your schedule, know which workshops you wish to go to.