Foreword

It's quite simple: never in the history of organised society has there been so much talk, never has so much breath been expended on the subject of `drugs' as in the last few decades, and particularly right now. And never have people been so alarmingly confused about a problem which is, admittedly, an acute and complex one.

The confusion covers even the most elementary aspects of the issue: the semantic content, for instance, of words and terms. The term drugs is used quite arbitrarily of the whole gamut of mind-affecting substances, including, worst of all, those that have selectively been made illegal in the service of various ulterior motives. The words habituation and dependence have also undergone considerable semantic distortion, by being used at random, irrespective of whether they relate to the use or the abuse of all or of some substances.

The confusion is exacerbated by the disinformation and sheer lies churned out by the mass media and fostered by the timidity or ulterior motives and self-interest of those who have the knowledge, but lack the will, to make a stand against it.

The confusion provides fertile ground for scaremongering and prejudice, because the most vociferous (and most suspect) champions of every 'anti-drug' campaign defiantly ignore the scientific facts about the nature, the dangers, and the usefulness of substances both legal and illegal.

The confusion is deliberate, calculated to create a negative, contemptuous social stereotype of the users of illicit mind-affecting substances. This then justifies a callous, virulent official policy against them, once they have been condemned in perpetuity to the margins of society, to the one-way streets of the criminal underworld, to the horror of prison.

The confusion is obscurantist, for it paralyses many people's basic intellectual faculties to the point where they uncritically swallow the prevalent notions, without questioning them, without thinking, without asking searching questions about the penalisation of use, and turning a deaf ear to cogent and authoritative answers - when, for instance, such authorities as Arnold Trebach and Lester Grinspoon dispute the very legality of suppression, because the use of mind-affecting substances, as an act of self-aggression, is not and cannot be punishable by law; or when Kleanthis Grivas, taking it for granted that a person is a self-defining being in a free society, countersigns Professor Thomas Szasz's declaration that "No one but me has the right to decide what substance I shall or shall not consume."

The confusion is dangerous because it steeps the policy of suppression in public acquiescence, justifies state violence and high-handedness, and legitimises an expanding authoritarianism which erodes rights and emasculates liberties.

The confusion, finally, is cultivated in a highly questionable manner, because it makes an illiberal, inhuman, irrational policy acceptable, a policy that perpetuates and inflates the problem by strengthening the economically and politically powerful drug networks all over the world.

There has been no lack in Greece of conscious efforts to combat this confusion and to consider the enormous (as it has become) problem of `drugs' in rational terms.

Kleanthis Grivas is one of the few specialists (they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, alas!) who battle vigorously against the ideological manipulation of the majority, against authoritarian coercion and highhandedness. He has made it his life's work, has dedicated himself for nearly twenty years to uncovering and castigating the addiction of the authorities who are bringing back a sinister mediaeval obscurantism in the age of the communication revolution.

Kleanthis Grivas has the erudition to shed light, through his books and articles, on all aspects of the problem: medical and pharmacological; social, historical, and legal; political, cultural, economic, and ideological; philosophical and ethical. He is courageous enough, honest enough, socially sensitive enough to do it. If he weren't, his erudition would be a purely personal matter. Above all, he is gifted with the supreme virtue: a passion for freedom.

Forthright and tough to the point of his polemics being misunderstood when he is defending the unpalatable truth, Kleanthis Grivas isn't interested in being liked; he loathes flattery, refuses to mince his words. He is relentlessly at war with spurious `authorities', solidly substantiates his thinking, and thus invites dialogue with sound arguments. He is not talking to those whose minds are made up, he is striving to awaken the majority, to galvanise them into active speculation, to share his knowledge with everybody.

The fruit of hard work and a sense of responsibility, of courage and free thought, of scrupulous research and anguished vigilance, every book by Kleanthis Grivas is a gift to Greek society.

Yorgos Votsis

Yorgos Votsis is a prominent columnist for Eleftherotypia, one of the biggest newspapers in Greece.

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