Voodoo Pharmacology

It is a sort of obligatory obeisance before the malign power of controlled substances, those pills, powders, potions and puffables that, as one-time Republican presidential contender Steve Forbes, neatly summed up, "destroy the body, enslave the soul, and take away people's freedom to think and choose for themselves." No matter how ardent the reformer, all too often, when he stands up to call for an end to the drug war, his oration begins with some variation of "I don't condone drug use, but..."

Well, Jacob Sullum has had enough of that, thank you. With "Saying Yes," Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine, syndicated columnist, and author of "For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health," has penned a reasonable, easily readable, and well-researched response to decades of knee-jerk anti-drug sentiment -- which, in a memorable phrase, he refers to as "voodoo pharmacology." Instead, Sullum suggests, the public and the legalization movement would both be better served with a nuanced, realistic, and -- d.a.r.e. we say it? -- temperate response to drug use.

Voodoo pharmacology is that strange blend of hysteria, myth, and agenda-driven public pronouncements by self-interested parties that, unfortunately, passes for a reasoned discussion of the effects of different controlled substances these days. Voodoo pharmacology knows that alcohol is not a drug, that taking Prozac to feel better is a medical decision but taking Ecstasy to feel better is a crime, and that the first toke or the first pill is the first step on an inevitable path to chemically-induced hell. You know voodoo pharmacology. Your tax dollars support great gobs of it spewing forth from your television in those ridiculous, demented ads emanating from the Bush White House, where the drug czar plots his campaign against rape-inducing, ambition-draining, gun accident-causing marijuana.

But, as Sullum shows in several entertaining chapters, voodoo pharmacology -- the basis of our current prohibitionist drug policies -- has little to do with the reality of drug use patterns and more to do with enduring cultural fears encapsulated above by the paranoid Mr. Forbes. In passage after passage that will be uplifting to those drug users who never lost their jobs, their families, their health or their minds because they smoke pot today or snorted coke in the '80s or tripped on acid in the '60s or rolled on Ecstasy in the '90s, Sullum explores not only the unharmful but sometimes downright positive effects of drug use for many drug users.

And he finds that just as the wino drunk in the gutter does not represent most alcohol drinkers, neither does the thieving junky represent all heroin users, the twitching tweaker all amphetamine users, nor Cheech and Chong all pot smokers. Quite the opposite. "The silent majority of users," he writes, are "decent, respectable people who, despite their politically incorrect choice of intoxicants, earn a living and meet their responsibilities."

Sullum shouldn't have to tell us that. But in the face of decades of relentless demonization of drugs and drug users, it bears repeating. And repeating. And repeating. This is why campaigns to improve the image of drug users, like Mikki Norris's Pot Pride (http://www.cannabisconsumers.org) are necessary. It is pathetic that such a thing is necessary, but it is, and Sullum helps explain why.

Demonstrating an adroit touch with historical sources, Sullum shows how the evils ascribed to a particular drug at a particular time float without concrete reference to attach themselves to another drug at another time. "The cells of the brain may become poisoned. The will power may be weakened, and it may be an effort to do the routine duties of life... The memory may also be impaired... The mind of the habitual user is apt to lose its capacity for study or successful effort." John Walters describing the effects of marijuana in 2003? No, Albert Blaisdell, an earlier incarnation of the prohibitionist beast, describing the effects of tobacco cigarettes in 1904.