THE MOVEMENT, PART II

What will hard drug users do with pot legalization?

FOR A RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT WHO also favors radical reformation of scorched-earth drug control policies, exposure to a certain partisan faction in the reform movement has proved to be a dismaying and alienating experience. The laissez-faire legalizers I encountered at last November's DPF conference in Washington left me with the sour sense that, in their insistence upon ignoring messy human complexities, they can be just as rigid and unrealistic as any lock-'em-up drug warrior.

Inevitably, folks are going to approach so wildly contentious a controversy as drug policy somewhat solipsistically, their perspectives shaped by their personal experiences. My own experience — a repeated return during 28 years of using a wide range of licit and illicit chemicals to compulsive consumption of heroin and cocaine — has led me to the reluctant conclusion that I, for one, can no longer use any mind-altering drugs. The ugliness, danger, and expense of dealing with the black market fostered by prohibition aside, living locked in a room by myself shooting speedballs became a messy sort of slow-motion suicide. Since mid-1994, I have thus abstained completely from all substances (including, necessarily, alcohol, the most widely abused, physically destructive, and criminogenic drug in use in America today).

Many, perhaps most, of my fellow recovering addicts view the legalization of currently illicit drugs with alarm, fearing that easier availability of crack, junk, and such would only undermine the already tricky task of staying clean. I strongly disagree. While draconian laws and the street thuggery these laws engender unarguably deter some potential drug users, they have demonstrably failed to dissuade me. As a matter of democratic principle, moreover, I refuse to grant the government responsibility for protecting me from my own unhealthy urges. I'll do that on my own with the support of other fed-up addicts. Don't go jailing hundreds of thousands of users and suppliers on my behalf, thank you very much.

Besides personal preservation, an additional incentive for cleaning up my act a few years back was the prospect of plunging head first into a reinvigorated public debate over drug policy. The ability to do so without fearing persecution and prosecution for drug usage has indeed been a fruit of recovery. My expectation that I would be able unreservedly to link arms with the reformers already long engaged in the drug dispute, however, has borne rather less fruit.

INSTEAD, WHAT I HAVE ENCOUNTERED IN MUCH of the reformer/legalizer literature, as well as among certain reformers, is a tendency to focus solely on the more absurdly demonized "soft" drugs (marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and so on). When the more problematic "hard" drugs (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine) come up for discussion, the impulse is to minimize the individual, familial, and communal consequences of abuse of these potent alkaloids —independent of the undisputable health, wealth, and liberty-destroying distortions imposed by punitive prohibition.

In other words, legalizer arguments all too often present a distorted mirror image of the warriors' reasoning. Prohibitionists like to view any nonmedical use of drugs other than alcohol as ipso facto "abuse." Legalizers too often refuse to acknowledge that any use of drugs can degenerate into abuse. (I have definitional disagreements with the addiction-as-disease concept, but still view it as a personally meaningful metaphor.) In pursuit of their vision of a "drug-free" society, prohibitionists want to blame all of the problems posed by drug use in the current culture on the drugs themselves. In pursuit of their vision of a "free drug" society, legalizers want to blame all of today's drug dilemmas solely on the laws forbidding their use.

Readers of this publication require no rehearsal here of the manifold ways in which the absolutist prohibitionist perspective is methodologically wrong-headed and socially destructive. I have been startled to learn how myopic and inflexible the reformist perspective, in turn, can be.

In 1995, I sat on the "New Ways of Thinking About Drugs" panel at the DPF's ninth annual event in Santa Monica. In the course of my comments, I remarked that, even if heroin were as legal as alcohol, I would strive the rest of my life never to use the stuff again. In this, I added, I would differ little from the mass of recovering alcoholics who walk past bottle shops and booze billboards every day of their sober lives. So entrenched is the consequence-minimizing mentality, a woman was moved to challenge me sharply: Why wouldn't you use heroin? she demanded. After all, opiates are far more physiologically benign than alcohol. I couldn't help feeling I was somehow letting the side down by declining to be strung out on smack.

Once you commit to the use of opiates, I pointed out, you lose the ability to choose not to use them. There are no days off for the junkie. Unless heroin is administered every six-eight hours, the addict endures a profoundly unpleasant withdrawal lasting weeks. Cheaper heroin, more safely obtained, would resolve some aspects of this quandary. For one who still enjoys being opiated every day, supply is indeed the chief complication. But, for myself, spending my days with my chin on my chest is a form of somnambulism I would rather no longer endure.

This answer seemed to make a number of people in the room uncomfortable, as did the fact that an outspoken critic of current drug policy also acknowledged being a member of — indeed, likely being alive today thanks to — a 12-step recovery program.

Just how uncomfortable was reiterated last fall when my experiences in Santa Monica led me to organize a panel — "A Hard Look at Hard Drugs: The Legalizers' Achilles Heel" — for the Tenth International Conference on Drug Policy Reform. Joining me were Maia Szalavitz, a fellow writer, recovering addict, and anti-prohibition campaigner, and Eric Sterling, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who fortunately, as it turned out, convinced me to let him moderate what turned into a frenzied free-for-all. Once everyone in the standing-room-only crowd had had their say, poor overworked Jim Turney had to cram his taping of the session onto two audiocassettes.

More heat was generated, I'm afraid, than light. Most of those who responded evinced the view that any discussion of the harm certain drugs can induce certain individuals to inflict upon themselves was an unwelcome and unnecessary diversion from decrying the harm that the current drug laws inflict upon all users. Szalavitz's offhanded assertion that some wake-and-bakers properly seek help for their compulsive pot smoking evoked an outraged outcry. Rufus King — of whose seminal 1972 work, The Drug Hang-up, I am a huge fan — stormed from the room protesting that we weren't focusing on unconstitutional drug laws.

King's dramatic exit prompted a man standing at the back to remark that the tenor of the discussion suggested to him that the reform movement had a long way to go. Absent realistic discourse about drugs, he said, "you don't have a product to sell." "Yes we do," Jim Hogshire, the author of Opium for the Masses and a victim of prohibition persecution, retorted, "it's called freedom." That may be, I responded in turn, but when I use certain drugs I lose my freedom, whatever the laws may say.

The lesson learned from the panel discussion, if you could call it that, was one I already knew: Heated policy debates drive the disputants into profoundly polarized positions. As a result, real-life complexities are buried in a hail of polemical brickbats. Working for an antinuclear think tank in the early 1980s, I saw this black-and-white syndrome hobble activists who devoted their efforts to minimizing Soviet missile building and blaming the arms race solely on American efforts. I've seen it, too, as a reporter covering a fierce abortion debate in which pro-choice advocates feel compelled to minimize the human pain involved in any decision to terminate a pregnancy.

As for the drug debate, I remain convinced that the prohibitionists are as wrong as wrong can be. Just because the other side is simpleminded, though, doesn't mean we have to act as if similarly lobotomized. What I heard at Loews L'Enfant Plaza last fall did not encourage confidence in the prospects for real change. As long as the reform movement is dominated by pot-head libertarians ideologically incapable of freely acknowledging that some drugs will cause problems regardless of the statutes surrounding their use, well, our movement can never amount to much more than a pack of anarchists baying at the moon.

What's the point of reformers meeting at a different hotel every year when the majority of us seem unwilling to accept the existence of certain hard facts about certain "hard" drugs as they will be used and abused in a certain hard, but very real, world? I'm not proposing a Dick Morrisesque mainstream "triangulation" of our views. Believe me, the warriors are not going to be bought off so cheaply. Rather, I'm advocating an honest acknowledgment of reality: The drug war is bad, but so are some drugs.

We hear outrageous statements from the prohibitionists every day. My vote for the most outrageous utterance from a legalizer last November was the ass who stood at an aisle microphone during Saturday's plenary session to denounce harm reduction as "collaboration with an evil system." Grinding my teeth, I could only ponder that this ideologue was in little danger of contracting HIV or hepatitis C from his reefers or Ecstasy. While he is preening his political purity, my friends are dying out there.

I left the hotel that evening convinced that if cannabis were legalized tomorrow (fat chance), many of those who consider themselves drug policy reformers would be sinking roots into a sofa at home, listening to their Grateful Dead tapes, and rolling up a nice fatty, while not giving a single, solitary damn that the war against the nation's crackheads and junkies continues unabated.

I hope I'm wrong about that. But I can't help wondering: With friends like these, do I really need any more enemies?

The national security correspondent for National Journal from 1985 to 1995, David C. Morrison is way behind in finishing writing Me and My Monkey: Confessions of a White-Collar Dope Fiend for Doubleday.