 One of the most surprising things I've ever seen in the New York Times was a front-page story about a successful business man Who happened to be a regular heroin user? The article which appeared in July 1992 began He is an executive in a company in New York lives in a condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan drives an expensive car Plays tennis in the Hamptons and vacations with his wife in Europe and the Caribbean But unknown to office colleagues friends and most of his family the man is also a longtime heroin user He says he finds heroin relaxing and pleasurable and has seen no reason to stop using it until the woman He recently married insisted that he do so The drug is an enhancement of my life. He said I see it as similar to a guy coming home and having a drink of alcohol Only alcohol has never done it for me What surprised me about this article was not that people can use opiates for many years and still be healthy and productive That fact is well documented one of the best-known examples being the pioneering surgeon William Halstead Who led a brilliant career while secretly addicted to morphine? Now what surprised me about the New York Times? Article was that that the Times would run such a story Let alone run it on the front page In general the times like other major news organizations dutifully echoes the government's position on illegal drugs all use is abuse inevitably leading to physical and psychological ruin the story of the heroin using executive ran counter to that premise Nearly everything about the 44 year old executive seems to fly in the face of widely held perceptions about heroin users the Times noted But drug experts say perhaps as many as a third of the estimated 750,000 heroin addicts in America are juggling habitual use of what has long been thought of as the most debilitating and enslaving of drugs Managing jobs and even families with few if any outward signs of addiction Now no one really knows what percentage of regular heroin users lead respectable lives How after all does one identify an addict who displays no outward sign of his addiction? But it's clear that contrary to popular belief heroin is not necessarily inconsistent Excuse me heroin use is not necessarily inconsistent with meeting one's obligations at home and at work The reporter who wrote the story and his editors seemed uncomfortable about contradicting official anti-drug propaganda The headline read executive secret struggle with heroin's powerful grip Which sounds more like a cautionary tale than a success story? And the Times hastened to add that heroin users are flirting with disaster It conceded that heroin does not damage the organs as for instance heavy alcohol use does But it cited the risk of arrest overdose aids and hepatitis Without noting that all of these risks are products of prohibition Which makes users subject to arrest drives them to a black market where doses and purity are uncertain And encourages them to share needles by limiting access to injection equipment The general thrust of the piece was here is a privileged man who is tempting fate by messing around with a very dangerous drug He may have escaped disaster so far, but unless he quits he will probably end up dead or in prison But that is not the way the businessman saw his situation He said he had decided to give up heroin only because his wife did not approve of the habit in my heart He said I really don't feel there's anything wrong with using heroin But there doesn't seem to be any way in the world I can persuade my wife to grant me this space in our relationship I don't want to lose her so I'm making this effort the anti-drug messages that saturate our culture have primed us to believe That the heroin using executive is fooling himself He is in denial and therefore does not recognize or will not acknowledge All of the problems that heroin is causing him in addition to the friction with his wife Alternatively if he's basically okay right now, this is only a temporary situation a brief rest stop on the inexorable descent into addiction hell But for a moment allow yourself to consider the possibility that this man knows more about his own life than you do If we're if we're going to credit every story of woe in which someone attributes all of his problems to drug use It seems only fair that we should not dismiss out of hand the account of someone who says that on balance drug use has improved his life To many people the very notion is so incredible that it's not even worth considering But if we were talking about alcohol rather than heroin they would probably feel differently Certainly a lot of people have problems with alcohol. They lose their jobs alienate their families assault their spouses Hip pedestrians with their cars drink themselves to death By and large however people who drink do so moderately and responsibly without harming themselves or anyone else They drink because they like it another way of saying that for them the benefits of drinking outweigh its costs Could the same be true of people who use illegal drugs? And if it were should that affect our moral judgment of such people? I believe it should a Central premise of the war on drugs is the idea that there is something morally suspect about using psychoactive substances Such that people should either abstain completely or limit themselves to those drugs that have been officially approved Most critics of current policy concede implicitly or explicitly that drug use is bad While insisting that the drug war is worse Sometimes they will add that people have a right a basic right to ruin their lives with drugs Just as they have a right to make bad decisions in other areas It is certainly legitimate to argue that behavior should be legal even though it is immoral But the perception that it's inherently wrong to use drugs or at least to use certain certain drugs Is a major stumbling block in trying to get people to think about what the world would be like without prohibition? I found found that much of the resistance to drug policy reform stems from the conviction that there is something Qualitatively different about illegal drugs that makes it impossible to use them in a moderate and responsible way Unless we believe that using chemicals to alter our consciousness is always immoral in which case We would have to assume all psychoactive drugs legal as well as illegal. It seems to me that the morality of drug use Should be judged by its consequences not by the substances involved in other words We should think about all drugs the way we think about alcohol When it comes to alcohol a widely accepted drug with a long history of use in Western culture It is not hard to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible use between moderate drinkers and alcoholics Between alcoholics who harm only themselves and alcoholics who beat their wives or run over old ladies The same source of distinctions can and should be applied to other drugs Whatever their current legal status the failure to do so the insistence that all use of illegal drugs is by definition Abuse is a way of avoiding serious moral discourse Now last fall I participated in a panel discussion with Bob Barr the Republican congressman from Georgia and It wasn't actually about drug use but the topic of legalization came up And he said this Mind-altering drugs are called mind-altering drugs for a reason They alter your mind He said he said that a couple of times He seemed to think that disposed of the matter After the discussion I pointed out that all psychoactive substances including legal ones such as alcohol nicotine and caffeine are mind-altering He asked me if I'd like a surgeon to operate on me after smoking a joint. I Said no But I wouldn't want a surgeon to operate on me after drinking a few beers either If the surgeon wanted to drink beer or smoke pot when he wasn't on duty. I said I would have no objection So what you're saying bar responded sarcastically is that it depends on the situation Exactly I said moral judgments often do as That encounter suggests it is difficult to distinguish between different kinds of drug use in a society dominated by a simple-minded Just say no ethos Just asked Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block in 1990 the two UC Berkeley researchers published an article in American Psychologist About their study of adolescent drug use and psychological health Tracking a group of children from preschool until age 18 They found that adolescents who engage had engaged in some drug experimentation Primarily marijuana were the best adjusted in the sample Let me just put it in context Adolescents who use drugs frequently were maladjusted showing a distinct personality syndrome marked by Interpersonal alienation poor impulse control and manifest emotional distress. Those are the heavy users Adolescents who by the age of 18 had never experimented with any drug were relatively anxious emotionally constricted and lacking in social skills now Shedler and Block Did not conclude that a little pot is just the thing to help children grow upright rather They they found that psychological differences between frequent users Experimenters and abstainers could be traced to the earliest years of childhood and related to the quality of parenting received They observed that problem drug use is a symptom not a cause of personal and social maladjustment and That the meaning of drug use can be understood only in the context of an individual's personality structure and developmental history These might seem like non controversial points, but the study caused an uproar among so-called drug treatment and drug education specialists One said it was irresponsible to portray dabbling with drugs as part of normal adolescent experimentation Another worried the kids who had decided not to use drugs would now be seen as a bunch of geeks and dorks Yet Shedler and Block's major finding that Maladjustment leads to drug abuse rather than the other way around Was confirmed a few years later in a study funded by the National Institute on drug abuse the federal government's own research center Conduct disorder is in large part the common forerunner of both drug abuse and criminality the researchers wrote Challenging the assumption that drug use causes crime Although such heretical notions do appear from time to time even in government sponsored studies the focus of research and drug Use is almost always negative Scientists who are interested in looking at drug use as something other than a problem are not likely to get funding from the government Which is no interest in raising questions about its war on drugs or from academic institutions that rely on government money In a recent letter to Harper's magazine a researcher at Northern Illinois University reported that he and his colleague had been unable to obtain funding for a study of why people use drugs You'd think that people campaigning against drug use might want to know something about that He suggested that no one in the anti drug complex wants to learn that the choice to do drugs is for most people a rational one That users see themselves rightly or wrongly as benefiting from doing so At the same time people who use illegal drugs in a controlled inconspicuous way are not inclined to stand up and announce the fact Prohibition renders them invisible Because they fear the social and legal consequences of speaking up The illegal drug users who register with the general public are the ones who get into trouble or make a nuisance of themselves We see the drug users who get hauled away by the police Who not often doorways or on park benches who beg on the streets or break into cars We do not see the drug users who hold down a job pay the rent or the mortgage and support a family In the absence of evidence of the contrary people naturally assume that most illegal drug users are like the ones that they see Who tend to be the least discreet and the most anti-social? This is like assuming that the whine-o passed out in the gutter is a typical drinker Keenly aware of how prohibition distorts public perceptions of drug users the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws Who's very acronym betokens its quest for respectability? Recently began testing a billboard campaign emphasizing that pot smokers are part of the mainstream Honk if you inhale says one followed by the tagline stop arresting responsible pot smokers another says a Pot smoker is busted every 45 seconds And you wonder why we're paranoid Keith struck normal's founder and executive director wants to break the stereotype of pot smokers as burned-out hippies and tie-died t-shirts The reality is that the average marijuana smoker is a middle-aged person who puts on a coat and a tie and goes to work and raises a family He told the San Jose mercury news our constituency is largely in the closet And when you're in the closet, you're invisible to elected officials and have very little power Now stereotypes about drug users are relatively easy to maintain for a drug like heroin Which has been used according to the government's survey data by less than 1% of the population By contrast excuse me one in ten Americans have tried cocaine About one in three report having tried marijuana You will have a hard time convincing these people and those who know them well That marijuana and cocaine users are criminals and parasites in their experience people generally emerge unscathed from their encounters with illegal drugs Some of them even won't go on to successful careers in politics I'm not I'm not sure that that's a good consequence, but They certainly seem to be functional in some sense Indeed confessing youthful experimentation with illicit substances has become a rite of passage for middle-aged politicians President Clinton did it clumsily at first saying he had never broken the laws of this country Then owning up to having tried pot at Oxford, but insisting that he didn't inhale Later on in an appearance on MTV. He laughed about his widely ridiculed attempt at minimizing his transgression Vice president Al Gore performed the ritual a little more gracefully Admitting that he had smoked pot on more than one occasion as a young man and adding that he regretted it Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich was breezier about his own marijuana use Telling the economist in 1995 That was a sign. We were alive and in graduate school in that era no big deal apparently Or is it? About nine months before his own confession Gingrich appeared on NBC's meet the press where he was asked to elaborate on the connection He had drawn between the Clinton administration and the 1960s counterculture He's got scattered throughout the administration this administration counterculture people he said I had a senior law enforcement officer Official tell me that in his judgment Up to a quarter of the White House staff when they first came in had used drugs in the last four or five years And just just want to interject here that I love figures like up to a quarter because of course that includes zero one percent and so on Now leading Democrats were outraged by this remark He's lost it said Massachusetts representative Marnie Frank It's smacks of McCarthyism said New York representative Charles Schumer White House chief of staff Leon Panetta called the charge absolutely false He said Gingrich had no evidence no facts no foundation just basically smear and innuendo Yeah, Gingrich's claim was actually quite plausible According to his law enforcement source up to a quarter of Clinton staffers had used an illegal drug within the previous five years When they started working in early 1993 to assess this claim we can take a look at the government survey data for 1988 about five years before four years before because we're talking about use during the past year 32% of 18 to 25 year olds reported illicit drug use in the previous year 23% of 26 to 34 year olds reported illegal drug use during the previous year Given the relative youth of Clinton staffers and the likelihood that self-reports under state drug use Up to a quarter is a pretty good stab at the share of White House staffers who used illegal drugs mostly marijuana In the five years before they were hired So why did Gingrich think it was worth noting that members of the Clinton administration Had this sort of drug use histories you'd expect for people of their age and why did the Democrats react so hysterically to such a bland observation Because politicians have to pretend regardless of their own experience to the contrary that drug users are different from you and me This is a fundamental tenet of the reprobationist faith a pamphlet put out by the Drug Enforcement Administration warns that one of the basic intentions of legalization is that drug users are essentially normal people Not so says the DEA Drugs undo the bounds that keep many seemingly normal people on an even keel Like the pod people an invasion of the body snatchers Drug users may seem normal, but they are not to be trusted Indeed Bush administration drugs are William Bennett has argued that drug users who seem normal are especially dangerous Because they encourage others to imitate their behavior thereby spreading the epidemic of substance abuse Former Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates went even further Saying casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot For committing treason the word he used in the war on drugs See people forget this stuff. That was big news when he said he said that Lest they be identified as traitors former pot smokers and Coke sniffers who become politicians are especially anxious to seem tough on drugs a Position that creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance After all the government continues to arrest people At a rate of about seven hundred thousand a year For doing what president Clinton joked about on MTV or for enabling other people to do it If it wasn't such a big deal in the 60s and 70s, why is it such a big deal now? It's a question that could fairly be put to both of the major parties likely presidential nominees Al Gore has cold called his own pot use rare and infrequent But according to John Warnickie An old buddy of Gores with whom he worked at the Nashville, Tennessee and We smoked more than once more than a few times we smoked a lot We smoked in his car in his house we smoked at his parents house in my house we smoked on weekends We smoked a lot Now Warnickie says He and Gore continued smoking pot together until just before Gore announced that he was running for Congress in 1976 As Hendrik Hertzberg recently observed in the New Yorker for some years Gore was an occasional by his account or regular by Warnickies marijuana user during those years. He served in the army in Vietnam Studied divinity and law worked as a newspaper reporter and prepared to run for Congress Whatever the effect marijuana had on him his ability to function as productive citizen does not appear to have been impaired depends how you define productive, I know Yet Gore has presided with Clinton over a huge escalation escalation in the war on drugs That has set records for spending money as you can see in this chart and For arresting people most of them on marijuana charges went up steadily until justice this 98 it was a slight decline basically the same as money, so Meanwhile George W. Bush Who signed legislation in Texas allowing jail time for first-time possession of a gram or less of drugs? Likes to tell audiences that drugs will destroy you It would be inconvenient for him to admit that he is a living refutation of that claim He is repeatedly declined to confirm or deny rumors that he used cocaine in the 70s And in a 1998 interview with Newsweek. He suggested why if I were you he said I wouldn't tell your kids that you smoke pot Unless you wanted to smoke pot. I think it's important for leaders and parents not to send mixed signals I don't want some kids saying well governor Bush tried it In other words parents should hide the truth about drug use to avoid setting a bad example for the kids More recently Bush reiterated this stance asked what baby boomer parents Sentite should say to kids who want to know if they have used drugs. He replied. I think the baby boomer parent ought to say Let's stay with it because this is beautiful I've learned from mistakes. I may or may not have made and I'd like to share some wisdom with you Now it's a mystery how anyone can learn from mistakes. He hasn't made But the beginning of wisdom in dealing with drug use as in dealing with other kinds of potentially risky behavior Is understanding the importance of context? What is appropriate for an adult may not be appropriate for a child and what is okay at home or on the weekend? May not be okay at work during a lunch break a Parent who refuses to talk about his mistakes in any detail or even to admit that he made any is not imparting wisdom He is resetting a mantra aimed at warding off charges of hypocrisy Unlike bush some people are willing to discuss their use of illegal drugs Usually because they are protected by celebrity or anonymity and I'm collecting Stories from this sort of these sort of people as part of my research for this book These people include journalists novelists artists entrepreneurs computer programmers scientists academics and clerical workers Typically, they have dabbled in various drugs including LSD and cocaine and now smoke marijuana from time to time Some occasionally use amphetamines or other stimulants to stay awake or boost their concentration Some have sampled a bewildering variety of psychoactive substances was one guy He named a lot of things I'd never heard of And they continue to experiment Some like the executive whose story made the front page of the New York Times are regular opiate users What they all have in common is the is that they managed to lead decent productive lives Putting it that way may imply more of a struggle than they typically report in General these people are puzzled by the rare individuals. They have seen who lose control over their drug use This is a quote from Brett Easton Ellison interview in High Times magazine I'm always surprised when someone ends up in rehab when people don't know their limits or can't set boundaries with drugs Ellis remarked It's like eating or drinking. He sort of know when you've had enough And you have some kind of self-control to say, okay, I'm not going to do enough drugs So I never get to do them again in my life There was a point where you can say no and wait a week or whatever It doesn't seem that difficult to incorporate it into the fabric of your life Indeed the evidence indicates that controlled use is the norm that the vast majority of illegal drug users do not become addicts And the vast majority do not harm themselves or others According to the government survey data something like 78 million Americans have used illicit drugs 23 million of those in the last year 14 million in the past month Since these estimates are based on self-reports. They have probably on the low side Even so we are talking about a third of the adult population for lifetime use a tenth that we look only at the last year last year of use Now given the huge numbers involved It's clear right off the bat that drug users do not generally end up in treatment or in jail Contrary to the impression left by anti drug propaganda disguised as TV programming. What percentage of users have drug problems? It's hard to say precisely because the surveys do not usually ask detailed enough questions But they do give us some idea of the upper limits and it's 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse About 22 This is the federal survey about 22 percent of the respondents reported using marijuana in the previous year of The and three percent of the respondents had used it on 51 or more days during that period So in other words about 14 percent of the past year marijuana users were using marijuana as often as once a week Now that rate of use weekly use by no means suggests abuse But that's as far as as detailed as got the figure for cocaine comparable figure 15 percent Which perhaps runs counter to the notion that the cocaine is so much more addictive than marijuana By comparison weekly drinkers Represented about a third of all alcohol users that year Again weekly use is not tantamount to addiction a guy who has a beer Every Saturday night is not an alcoholic a guy who smoked a joint Every Saturday night isn't isn't necessarily an addict But no one using drugs less often than once a week could reasonably be called an addict So this gives us some idea of the upper limits Now there's another government sponsored survey called the monitoring the future study which interviews students high school students college students and also young adults who are not in school and I figures for 1993 This is for young adults about ten percent of past year marijuana users were daily users for cocaine interesting two percent Again that not not what you would expect from from the notion that cocaine is so much more addictive Alcohol was in between about five percent about five percent Of the people who'd used in the previous year used it on a daily basis Now even daily use of course does not necessarily signify a problem Especially if we're talking about a joint or cocktail at the end of the day Heroin use by the way barely shows up in these surveys So it's very hard because the people who've even tried it is so small. It's very hard to break it down to weekly use or daily use You know just don't have the numbers But there is a study that's widely cited It was conducted in 1976 it estimated that ten percent of heroin users could be considered addicted And that's about the same percentage as it is the same percentage of drinkers who are said to be alcoholics Here's another interesting statistic This is also from the government surveys About 70 percent of past month drug users are full-time employees interesting Now that fact surprisingly was emphasized in a government report released last fall Officials said they hoped the data would dispel the notion that most drug users are burned out and disconnected from the mainstream the Associated Press reported And it quoted Barry McCaffrey. Oh, there's another number here, which I'll come back to it Quoted Barry McCaffrey. This is the drug czar saying the typical drug user is not poor and unemployed He or she can be a co-worker a husband or wife a parent Now I think I mean it's interesting because he's blind to the implications of this his idea. I think Was to alarm people by telling them that drug users are everywhere Right, it'll be the guy next to you. It doesn't you can't tell a drug user by looking at them again There's seemingly normal Now I'm sure that was his intent But the numbers also indicate that the vast majority of drug users function well enough to hold down full-time jobs That's interesting. Let's go back I believe in full disclosure Oops, that's one. Okay. No, that's not the right one There we go Now it is true that full-time employment is more common among people who don't report illicit drug use in the past month About 84 percent of whom have full-time jobs now that difference may be due in part to the impact of drug abuse But what yet one of the things you have to keep in mind is that responsible users are being lumped together with abusers Which brings down the employment rate for the overall group That would be like comparing the employment rate for all drinkers including alcoholics So the employment rate for tea totalers That's a good one. I'm going to add that to this paragraph Next next time next time let's say the question to the end I'm going to add definitely add that point to this paragraph, but let me just talk about a couple other possibilities It is likely that people with characteristics that make them less employable And as you pointed out simply having a positive drug test could make you unemployed or harder to employ For example, poor the educated people impulsive people rebellious people Do not get along well with others It's it's quite likely that these kind of people are more apt on average to use illicit drugs Finally drug use could be a response to unemployment rather than a cause of unemployment So in any case, I mean it's right. You cannot you cannot tell what the real reason is from from the data They have but there are various possibilities in any case It's quite clear that drug users typically are productive members of society Now these are the kinds of facts that opponents of prohibition need to emphasize more New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has been quite courageous both in candidly discussing his own youthful drug use And in calling for an end to the war on drugs But by constantly repeating the warning that quote drugs are a handicap And asserting that drug use is a bad choice He concedes too much ground to the drug warriors He seems to be saying that it's always wrong or at least unwise to use drugs That puritanical message Was reinforced at the cato institute conference where johnson spoke in october During which the sponsors repeatedly declared That they were not of course endorsing drug use Johnson was on firmer ground when he told a group of college students that the majority of people who use drugs use them responsibly Morally and practically the important distinction is between use and abuse not between use and abstinence Thanks in part to brave people like johnson the drug policy reform movement is stronger now than it has been in decades A variety of organizations ranging from grassroots activists to think tanks Are calling attention to the appalling consequences of the war on drugs Many respectable people including judges former cops and prosecutors academics entrepreneurs And two sitting governors including johnson Have joined the dissenters Vokes critical of prohibition receive respectable excuse me respectful reviews in prominent places And the mainstream press increasingly understands that there is more than one side to this issue The reform movement has gained enough visibility that the drug enforcement administration felt in need not only to publish But to recently update a pamphlet called how to hold your own in a drug legalization debate at the same time The criticism of current policy that resonates with the general public mainly concerns the excesses of the war on drugs Things like harsh mandatory minimum sentences the seizure of property from innocent people the denial of medicine to the gravely ill The challenge to the war on drugs itself has not gained much support Despite the fact that a strong case can be and has been made that its costs far outweigh its benefits Thus Polls find that most americans think patients who can benefit from marijuana should be able to obtain it But polls also find that a large majority opposes the idea of letting people use marijuana for non-medical purposes Which is the main reason people use marijuana by the way We tend to lose sight of that I think one reason people have not been swayed by cost-benefit analysis Is the widespread belief that drugs are wrong as bill Bennett put it Bennett went so far as to say that even if it could be conclusively demonstrated that prohibition causes more damage than it prevents He would not be persuaded There are certain things that are wrong Oops That's my cap. Here we go. There are certain things that are wrong. He said and you cannot countenance them no matter what the cost And again, he's talking about drug use not talking about murder I think many people feel the same way and critics of the drug war have done little to address this position The familiar utilitarian and libertarian arguments are important And they carry weight with certain audiences This one for example But if we really want to get the government out of the business of monitoring our blood streams We need to start defending the morality of drug use. Thank you