Stuck in the Wrong Metaphor: Why a "War" on Drugs
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
January 28,2001

Stuck in the Wrong Metaphor: Why a "War" on Drugs

Reading: From Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line by Terry Williams

     The building is a faded brownstone, five stories tall, faced with green-copper arches. Set between Leona's Discount House and Perfumerie and Victor's Travel Agency, there is not much to distinguish it from hundreds of other buildings in the neighbourhood. But there are subtle signs: the door is jammed open; visitors glance around furtively and step quickly, plunging their hands into their pockets to make sure the glass pipe is out of sight. Multicolored plastic vials crunch underfoot; just inside the door are unshaven lookouts with sunken eyes. The girls and boys, men and women whose stories are recorded here are the lost souls of the city, visible to outsiders only as menacing apparitions: boys steering customers to a drug location, too-thin girls standing in the stench of the stairwells, pressing passersby for loose change--always trying to get a dollar closer to a "hit"...

    Addictions of one kind or another are everywhere in our society, so much so that (the) word itself has become a broad-based metaphor for unsatisfactory relationships, attitudes, and characteristics of everyday life. "Addiction" is used to describe the destructive greed fro money as well as cravings for substances like food and drugs; people are said to be addicted to dependency, work, sex, therapy, status, power. The idea of addiction seems to capture something essential in the United States: some 500,000 groups are actively engaged in aiding twelve to fifteen million people who describe themselves as suffering from an addiction of some kind...

    Many of those in the drug culture want to escape reality, but just as many--perhaps more--want to be absorbed into a meaningful way of life. Not all of those who have made their way into the crackhouse know or quite understand how they got there. was it bad luck or stupidity? A desire for adventure? Some see crack cocaine as the exciting new happening on the drug scene, the latest in a series of the "best highs in the world" that American like to experiment with in the belief that chemicals will change them for the better and never the worse. For others the crackhouse is the place to escape the pain of disappointment in love, the destruction of a family, the death of parents.

    Coming to know the individuals in the crackhouse makes it clear that addiction does not take over people's lives because they are irresponsible or have some inherent character flaw. Instead the crack users' behaviour reflects class, race, and economic factors. Those who can command the resources, who have the power to effect change in their lives, are very hard to find in the crackhouse. They are not counted among the "unpopulation" (unstable, uneducated, undomiciled), and whatever their habits, they are rarely stigmatized as drug addicts.

Sermon

    In the spring of 2000 I offered a sermon based on Dr. Lauren Slater's book Prozac Diary in which she described how her use of the drug Prozac allowed her to overcome a life-long struggle with depression and obsessive compulsive disorders, and live in a very productive and creative fashion. It was/is a very moving book, especially the parts where Ms. Slater wrestles with the issue of who she really is--i.e. her so-called "natural" self or her "Prozac" self. A few years prior to the publication of Slater's book, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story titled "Beyond Prozac" with several articles about this new age of "psychopharmacology" we're now in, and that has seen its ascendancy over the past decade and more. Psychopharmacology, which is quite a mouthful of a word, is the use of primarily prescription drugs to alter, enhance, or significantly change a person's moods, emotions, or psychological make-up. Here's a few lines from one of the articles in that Newsweek issue: "The same scientific insights into the brain that led to the development of Prozac are raising the prospect of nothing less than made-to-order, off-the shelf personalities...Writes neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, 'Most of the new drugs will be aimed not so much at "patients" as (at) people who are already functioning on a high level ...enriching memory, enhancing intelligence, and altering for the good people's moods... for the first time in history (Dr. Restak notes) we will be in a position to design our own brain..."

    Dr. Restak, and Newsweek magazine, may have been reaching a little. We would need an informed neuro-psychiatrist to tell us just how far along we actually are today in the field of "brain design" via prescription drugs since that article was written. But the fact that such possibilities have been cited in a positive way in a mainstream publication like Newsweek, and by a respectable psychiatrist like Dr. Restak, is instructive all by itself. It leaves me trying to make some sense--some moral sense, that is--of a society that is annually putting billions of its public dollars into an enterprise called the "war on drugs," while at the same time our popular media hails a brave new world in which certain drugs will allow us, as the Doctor says, to "design our own brains." I'm not making a moral judgment about brain design as such here, but I do have to ask: Given such a set of circumstances, what could the term "drug free society" possibly even mean? Is your "brain on drugs" that egg frying in the hot skillet, as portrayed in an anti-drug public service announcement that ran several years ago; or is your "brain on drugs" a new and improved "designer brain" made possible courtesy of prescription drugs?

    On the surface it seems clear enough. There are "good" drugs and there are "bad" drugs. The good drugs are legal and the bad ones aren't; and a drug-free society is one in which none of these illegal drugs are used. OK? Well, as the Hertz commercial says, not exactly. We've got something like 400,000 Americans dying each year from diseases caused by smoking perfectly legal cigarettes, so we can't really call nicotine a "good" drug now can we? And remember back a little over 5 years ago now when Mickey Mantle died at age 63 following a failed liver transplant after his own liver gave out due to his many years of alcohol abuse beginning when he was a young adult? I don't recall anyone calling Mr. Mantle a drug addict. No, we said he was a very good man who had an unfortunate encounter with a socially acceptable and legal drug, and his death was a tragedy and a loss to the nation. That, in fact, was exactly the way I felt about his death. If you're a life-long baseball fan like I am, you had to love Mickey Mantle ... even if you hate the Yankees.

    But then, what do we say about the people described in Terry Williams' Crackhouse? Mr. Williams is a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and did some of his research for Crackhouse as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant. Are the persons he describes in his book also good people who have had an unfortunate encounter with a drug that is not socially acceptable and is illegal, or are they bad people who should be sent to jail? Is there something immoral about their addiction, and their drug use, in a way that was not the case with Mickey Mantle? These are not just rhetorical questions; how we as a society are now answering them is determining and driving our current drug policies. Even though I don't have precise answers to the questions I'm raising here, it does not prevent me from concluding that when it come to drug use and abuse in our society we are not just morally confused, we are morally incoherent.

    How much coherence I can bring to this issue may also be questionable, but I nonetheless want to offer my thoughts on a study issue that our UU Association's General Assembly has recommended to its member congregations on "An Alternative to the War on Drugs." Our UUA's Commission on Social Witness has framed the issue with a question of their own: "How can Unitarian Universalists contribute to a reformulation of drug policies which would reduce drug use without infringing on civil liberties, scapegoating minority communities, interfering with the internal affairs of other countries, or dehumanizing drug users?" It would actually take a series of sermons to adequately deal with all the stated aspects of this question, but we'll cover what we can.

    If it is an "alternative" to the war on drugs that we are to be considering, we should look first at the nature of this war itself. Here is one person's evaluation: "We are speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50% percent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50% of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen--yet (it is) a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect." These words were spoken by William F. Buckley, who is generally regarded as the Dean of American conservatism, in a speech he gave 5 years ago to the New York Bar Association. It was later reprinted in his journal The National Review. (February 12, 1996). The figures he cites have remained pretty consistent in the time since Mr. Buckley used them. The plague he refers to is not illegal drugs themselves, but the war on drugs.

    At a later point in his address, Mr. Buckley takes up the issue of incarceration versus treatment for the use of certain addictive drugs: "It transpires (he says, in a way that only Mr. Buckley can say such things) that treatment is seven times more cost effective [than incarceration]. By this is meant that one dollar spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on incarceration. Looked at another way: Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and treatment." [It's amazing what a truly brilliant man William Buckley is when he and I are on the same side of an issue!]

    There is a racial angle to drug incarcerations that Mr. Buckley did not mention, but also needs to be brought out. According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, while drug use is at similar levels for black and white young people, the incarceration rate for black males between ages 15-29 was four times that of white males of the same age between 1986-96. Apparently its more of a crime to be a young African American drug offender in this country than it is to be a youthful white drug offender.

    A little over a year ago sentiments similar to those of Mr. Buckley appeared in an issue of The Nation (September 20, 1999) magazine that was devoted almost entirely to the drug war. One of the contributors was Michael Massing, author of The Fix, and a professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism. He weighed in with this opinion: "As for the nation's drug laws, the goal should not be abolishing them ... but making them more rational ... non-violent addicts and sellers should be offered treatment as an alternative to incarceration ... arresting low-level offenders should be society's last, not first, line of defence." Taking into account that Buckley's National Review more or less represents the thinking of America's political right, and the The Nation more or less represents the thinking of America's political left; when you start finding essentially the same sentiments in both publications on a given issue, you could reasonably assume that the discussion on the matter is pretty well over.

    But it's not. Politically we continue to deal with drug use (or let's say the use of certain drugs) as primarily a criminal matter rather than a medical or psychological or social problem. To question the rationality of our drug policy is still a political kiss of death. That may be slowly changing. In the fall of 1999, the Republican Governor of New Mexico, Mr. Gary Johnson--a teetotaling non-smoker, no less--became one of the nation's leading proponents of the legalization of such drugs as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. Former Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore has become an advocate of decriminalization. Congressional Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and John Conyers of Michigan have also lent their voices in questioning whether a "war" is the way to go in dealing with the use of addictive drugs and drug abuse. Maybe, just maybe, a dialogue is beginning to open up on this subject in one of the places where it most needs to take place.

    If anything I've said to this point is taken as any kind of an endorsement on my part of the use of what are now illegal substances, that is hardly my point at all. As a parent, as a minister, and as the responsible citizen I at least try to be, one of the last things I want to see is people, especially young people, abusing their bodies and endangering their lives via the use of drugs. I think is a proper and necessary role of families, schools, churches, and civic organizations to alert young people to the dangers and consequences of such abuse on the basis of reliable and factual information. What I am trying to do is draw a distinction between criminalization on the one hand, and regulation and treatment on the other, especially in a society that gives such highly mixed and morally confusing messages about drug use in general; a society hails the advent of "designer brains" via drugs on the one hand, while enforcing "zero tolerance" policies drug offenders on the other. In order to do this, I'm going to back up a couple of steps now and say little about legislation and moral behaviour.

    While I generally agree with the phrase "you can't legislate morality" when applied to private behaviour among adults, in a broader sense many of our laws are indeed attempts, valid attempts I would say, to legislate morality. We have laws against, and punishments mandated for, such acts as murder, rape, assault, theft, extortion, child abuse, etc. for precisely moral reasons. With such laws we are saying, as a society, that these kinds of behaviours are morally impermissible in that they destroy, demean, or diminish the sanctity and value of human life, and we will deal with them as such. We may have disagreements about the kinds of laws, and the punishments we want to see enacted, when it comes to dealing with these kinds of acts, but we do have a moral consensus that such acts are wrong, that is to say, immoral, and need to be treated as such.

    But then we have another range of behaviours where the moral consensus is not so clear; where the behaviour has some level of acceptability, or where--due to the level and nature of the behaviour itself--regulation is a more rational means of dealing with it that outright prohibition. We regulate, rather than ban, abortion for example. I'm not going to open up this issue today other that to point out that we permit abortions, with the state having the power and authority to decree who can perform them, under what conditions, whether or not state funds shall pay for them, and the like. How just and fair some of these regulations are is another matter entirely. But regulation makes more rational sense than trying to enforce an outright ban on abortion on the one hand, or allowing completely unregulated abortions on the other. Even the most ardent pro-choice advocates do not advocate completely unregulated abortions for a number of rather obvious safety reasons.

    The same goes for the sale and consumption of alcohol and tobacco products. The state regulates their use rather than seeking to ban or prevent it. The state can make, and to the best of its ability enforce, all kinds of stipulations as to who can sell these products, who can buy and consume them, where they may be used (e.g. no smoking areas), the consequences for their misuse (DWI laws, etc.), but there is no attempt at an outright ban. One such 13 year attempt at banning alcoholic beverages between 1920 to 1933, known as Prohibition, resulted in the creation of a crime wave and of a criminal class that otherwise would not have existed; and in the manufacture and sale of beverages whose actual contents and degree of toxicity were essentially unknown to the consumer, making them quite dangerous. For these and many other reasons Prohibition was abandoned. We now deal with the addictive effects that alcohol and tobacco have on some of their users without placing those users in legal jeopardy, unless they endanger the lives of others via drunk driving, second hand smoke, and the like.

    I think it is time for an honest dialogue, like the one our UU Association is calling for, among citizens and political leaders as to ways we can reduce to the greatest extent possible the use of addictive and potentially dangerous drugs without having to deal with the same set of circumstances that are now being thrust upon us that we had when we tried to criminalize the use of alcohol.. I believe it is time for our political leaders to step back from the "war" metaphor we are trapped in and seriously look at the question of whether continued illegality, or regulation and control, of certain narcotic drugs represents the most effective way of dealing with their sale and use. Right now a 15 year old cannot purchase cigarettes or liquor because he/she has to show proof of age. But if that same 15 year old wants to purchase marijuana, cocaine, or even heroin all he or she has to do is show a dealer the money, no ID required. That's not to say a 15 year old cannot get hold of cigarettes or beer. I'm not naive. But it is to say that there are scarcely any restrictions s/he has to deal with in order to purchase marijuana or cocaine, in a way that there are when it comes to purchasing alcohol or tobacco products.

    I cannot precisely say what form, or forms, the regulation and control of the sale and use of what are now illegal drugs would be. I don't feel I have to have a blueprint solution in order to point out a problem. That's what the conversation needs to be about. Even among advocates of legalization or decriminalization there are numerous disagreements as to what the alternatives to the war on drugs should be, and what models for decriminalization would be best for our society.. There is agreement among legalization and decriminalization advocates, however, that the criminal activity that now surrounds the disbursement and sale of such drugs is claiming more lives, destroying more neighbourhoods, and consuming more of our public dollars than the actual use of the drugs themselves--dangerous as they are--could ever do.

    For all of the deadly dangers that clearly go with the use of crack-cocaine, for example, it is the criminalization of cocaine that creates the crackhouse that Terry Williams so vividly and disturbingly portrays. As Mr. Williams also astutely points out our present drug policies exacerbate, and magnify, the class stratification already present in our culture: "The crack users' behaviour reflects class, race, and economic factors. Those who can command resources, (and) who have the power to effect change in their lives, are hard to find in the crackhouse; they are not counted among the 'un-population' (unstable, uneducated undomiciled) and whatever their habits they are rarely stigmatized as drug addicts." Our war on drugs has actually created a criminal class this is becoming increasingly unreachable. But as long as those who make, and who are charged with carrying out, our laws with respect to drug use remain trapped in the war metaphor we cannot even get to the point of discussing possible alternatives to this so-called war. My personal opinion is that as long as we keep treating as a war, it's a war we will continue to lose.

    In moving these thoughts--these admittedly unfinished thoughts--to a close, I'd like to read some very powerful words by a liberal Christian theologian and biblical scholar named Walter Wink which he wrote in The Christian Century magazine (February 24, 1999). Hear him out: "Our attempts to stamp out drugs by force violate a fundamental spiritual principle. Jesus articulated it in the Sermon on the Mount: 'Do not react violently against the one who is evil.' Adapted to the drug issue it means, 'Do not resist drugs by violent methods.' We have merely repeated the mistakes of Prohibition. The harder we try to stamp out our illicit drugs, the more lucrative me make them and the more they spread...When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we invariably find ourselves committing the same atrocities, violating the same civil liberties, bending and breaking the same laws as those whom we oppose ... Armed resistance to the drug trade is doomed to fail precisely because the drug trade mirrors our own values...Drug dealers mirror the morality of the capitalist system itself: get what's yours, greed is good, money speaks, hedonism is fun."

    Wink goes on: "American are variously addicted to many things, among them wealth, sex, food, work, alcohol, and tobacco. By attacking addiction in others, we can feel good about ourselves without coming to any insight about our own addictions .. For their part, drug dealers are aggressively living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately trying to become upwardly mobile. This is why we cannot win the war on drugs. The enemy is us. Unable to face that fact, we launch a half-hearted, ill conceived war against a menace that only mirrors what we have become as a nation."

    These are harsh words, but ones well worth heeding. As Dr. Wink and Mr. Williams both point out, addictions of one kind or another have unfortunately become a basic staple of American life. "The idea of addiction seems to capture something essential about the United States," as Terry Williams correctly observes. Yet we continue to criminalize some forms of addiction in a way, as Dr. Wink suggests, that allows some of us to say that "we" at least are not addicted in the same way that "they" are.

    One of our tasks and callings as a congregation is to be a community of meaning and hope for those who participate in our shared life. In some instances it is a lack of meaning and hope that engenders the use of drugs in the first place. As Terry Williams points out, "Many of those in the drug culture want to escape reality, but just as many--perhaps more--want to be absorbed into a meaningful way of life." We must continue, as a religious community, to be a place where persons find meaning and hope in their lives both from the strength derived from shared values and from shared human lives; and from the strength in the resources they find both within and beyond themselves. Let us continue, then, to be bearers of Life to its fullest, and be advocates for lives that can be lived in a sane, compassionate, safe, and just world.

Copyright © 2001 by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua NH.