The End of Faith (20 page)

A variety of religious notions of wrongdoing can be seen con-

verging hereconcerns over nonprocreative sexuality and idolatry especiallyand these seem
to have given many of us the sense that it is ethical to punish people, often severely,
for engaging in private behavior that harms no one. Like most costly examples of irra-
tionality, in which human happiness has been blindly subverted for generations, the role
of religion here is both explicit and founda- tional. To see that our laws against “vice”
have actually nothing to do with keeping people from coming to physical or psychological
harm, and everything to do with not angering God, we need only consider that oral or anal
sex between consenting adults remains a criminal offense in thirteen states. Four of the
states (Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri) prohibit these acts between same-sex cou-
ples and, therefore, effectively prohibit homosexuality. The other nine ban consensual
sodomy for everyone (these places of equity are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia).23 One does not have to be a demographer to grasp that the impulse to prosecute consenting
adults for nonprocreative sexual behavior will correlate rather strongly with religious
faith.

The influence of faith on our criminal laws comes at a remarkable price. Consider the case
of drugs. As it happens, there are many sub- stancesmany of them naturally occurringthe
consumption of which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Occasionally, it is
true, they lead to transient states of misery as well, but there is no doubt that pleasure
is the norm, otherwise human beings would not have felt the continual desire to take such
substances for mil- lennia. Of course, pleasure is precisely the problem with these
substances, since pleasure and piety have always had an uneasy relationship.

When one looks at our drug lawsindeed, at our vice laws alto- getherthe only organizing
principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically
eclipse prayer or pro- creative sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed. In
par- ticular, any drug (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA,

WEST OF EDEN l6l

marijuana, etc.) to which spiritual or religious significance has been ascribed by its
users has been prohibited. Concerns about the health of our citizens, or about their
productivity, are red herrings in this debate, as the legality of alcohol and cigarettes
attests.

The fact that people are being prosecuted and imprisoned for using marijuana, while
alcohol remains a staple commodity, is surely the reductio ad absurdum of any notion that
our drug laws are designed to keep people from harming themselves or others.24 Alcohol is by any measure the more dangerous substance. It has no approved medical use,
and its lethal dose is rather easily achieved. Its role in causing automobile accidents is
beyond dispute. The manner in which alcohol relieves people of their inhibitions
contributes to human violence, personal injury, unplanned pregnancy, and the spread of
sexual disease. Alcohol is also well known to be addictive. When consumed in large
quantities over many years, it can lead to devastating neurological impairments, to
cirrhosis of the liver, and to death. In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people
annu- ally die from its use. It is also more toxic to a developing fetus than any other
drug of abuse. (Indeed, “crack babies” appear to have been really suffering from
fetal-alcohol syndrome.)25 None of these charges can be leveled at marijuana. As a drug, marijuana is nearly unique
in having several medical applications and no known lethal dosage. While adverse reactions
to drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen account for an estimated 7,600 deaths (and 76,000
hospitalizations) each year in the United States alone, marijuana kills no one.26 Its role as a “gateway drug” now seems less plausible than ever (and it was never
plausible).27 In fact, nearly everything human beings dodriving cars, flying planes, hitting golf
ballsis more danger- ous than smoking marijuana in the privacy of one's own home. Any- one
who would seriously attempt to argue that marijuana is worthy of prohibition because of
the risk it poses to human beings will find that the powers of the human brain are simply
insufficient for the job.

And yet, we are so far from the shady groves of reason now that

people are still receiving life sentences without the possibility of parole for growing,
selling, possessing, or buying what is, in fact, a naturally occurring plant.28 Cancer patients and paraplegics have been sentenced to decades in prison for marijuana
possession. Own- ers of garden-supply stores have received similar sentences because some
of their customers were caught growing marijuana. What explains this astonishing wastage of human life and
material resources ? The only explanation is that our discourse on this subject has never
been obliged to function within the bounds of rationality. Under our current laws, it is safe to say, if a
drug were invented that posed no risk of physical harm or addiction to its users but
produced a brief feeling of spiritual bliss and epiphany in 100 percent of those who tried
it, this drug would be illegal, and people would be pun- ished mercilessly for its use.
Only anxiety about the biblical crime of idolatry would appear to make sense of this
retributive impulse. Because we are a people of faith, taught to concern ourselves with
the sinfulness of our neighbors, we have grown tolerant of irrational uses of state power.

Our prohibition of certain substances has led thousands of other- wise productive and
law-abiding men and women to be locked away for decades at a stretch, sometimes for life.
Their children have become wards of the state. As if such cascading horror were not
disturbing enough, violent criminalsmurders, rapists, and child molestersare regularly paroled to make room for them.29 Here we appear to have overstepped the banality of evil and plunged to the absurdity at
its depths.30

The consequences of our irrationality on this front are so egre- gious that they bear
closer examination. Each year, over 1.5 million men and women are arrested in the United
States because of our drug laws. At this moment, somewhere on the order of 400,000 men and
women languish in U.S. prisons for nonviolent drug offenses. One million others are currently on probation.31 More people are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses in the United States than are
incarcerated, for any reason, in all of Western Europe (which has

a larger population). The cost of these efforts, at the federal level alone, is nearly $20
billion dollars annually.32 The total cost of our drug lawswhen one factors in the expense to state and local gov-
ernments and the tax revenue lost by our failure to regulate the sale of drugscould easily
be in excess of $100 billion dollars each year.33 Our war on drugs consumes an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our courts and the
full-time energies of over 400,000 police officers.34 These are resources that might otherwise be used to fight violent crime and terrorism.

In historical terms, there was every reason to expect that such a policy of prohibition
would fail. It is well known, for instance, that the experiment with the prohibition of
alcohol in the United States did little more than precipitate a terrible comedy of
increased drink- ing, organized crime, and police corruption. What is not generally
remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint
product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain
Protestant missionary societies.

The problem with the prohibition of any desirable commodity is money. The United Nations
values the drug trade at $400 billion a year. This exceeds the annual budget for the U.S.
Department of Defense. If this figure is correct, the trade in illegal drugs constitutes 8
percent of all international commerce (while the sale of textiles makes up 7.5 percent and
motor vehicles just 5.3 percent).35 And yet, prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so
extraordinarily profitable. Those who earn their living in this way enjoy a 5,000 to
20,000 percent return on their investment, tax-free. Every relevant indicator of the drug
traderates of drug use and interdiction, estimates of production, the purity of drugs on
the street, etc.shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as long as such
profits exist (indeed, these profits are highly corrupting of law enforcement in any
case). The crimes of the addict, to finance the stratospheric cost of his lifestyle, and
the crimes of the dealer, to protect both his territory and his goods, are likewise the
results of prohibition.36 A final irony, which seems good enough to be the work

of Satan himself, is that the market we have created by our drug laws has become a steady
source of revenue for terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah,
Shining Path, and others.37

Even if we acknowledge that stopping drug use is a justifiable social goal, how does the
financial cost of our war on drugs appear in light of the other challenges we face?
Consider that it would require only a onetime expenditure of $2 billion to secure our
commercial seaports against smuggled nuclear weapons. At present we have allo- cated a
mere $93 million for this purpose.38 How will our prohibi- tion of marijuana use look (this comes at a cost of $4 billion annually) if a new sun ever dawns over the port of Los Angeles ? Or consider that the U.S.
government can afford to spend only $2.3 billion each year on the reconstruction of
Afghanistan. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are now regrouping. Warlords rule the countryside
beyond the city limits of Kabul. Which is more important to us, reclaiming this part of
the world for the forces of civilization or keeping cancer patients in Berkeley from
relieving their nausea with marijuana? Our present use of government funds suggests an
uncanny skewingwe might even say derangementof our national priorities. Such a bizarre
allocation of resources is sure to keep Afghanistan in ruins for many years to come. It
will also leave Afghan farmers with no alternative but to grow opium. Happily for them,
our drug laws still render this a highly profitable enterprise.39

Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing
peaceful men and women for their pri- vate pleasure is perfectly reasonable. We are now in
the twenty-first century. Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our
neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint. Given the magnitude of the real problems that
confront us-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the spread of infectious disease, failing
infrastructure, lack of ade- quate funds for education and health care, etc.our war on sin
is so outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment. How have we grown so blind
to our deeper interests ? And how have we man- aged to enact such policies with so little
substantive debate?

WEST OF EDEN l65

The God of Medicine

While there is surely an opposition between reason and faith, we will see that there is
none between reason and love or reason and spirituality. The basis for this claim is
simple. Every experience that a human being can have admits of rational discussion about
its causes and consequences (or about our ignorance thereof). Although this leaves
considerable room for the exotic, it leaves none at all for faith. There may yet be good
reasons to believe in psychic phenom- ena, alien life, the doctrine of rebirth, the
healing power of prayer, or anything elsebut our credulity must scale with the evidence. The doctrine of faith denies this. From the perspective of faith, it is bet- ter to ape
the behavior of one's ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the
present.

There are sources of irrationality other than religious faith, of course, but none of them
are celebrated for their role in shaping public policy. Supreme Court justices are not in
the habit of praising our nation for its reliance upon astrology, or for its wealth of UFO
sightings, or for exemplifying the various reasoning biases that psy- chologists have
found to be more or less endemic to our species.40 Only mainstream religious dogmatism receives the unqualified sup- port of government. And
yet, religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty manifestly exists, allowing
the unknown, the implausible, and the patently false to achieve primacy over the facts.

Consider the present debate over research on human embryonic stem cells. The problem with
this research, from the religious point of view, is simple: it entails the destruction of
human embryos. The embryos in question will have been cultured in vitro (not removed from
a woman's body) and permitted to grow for three to five days. At this stage of
development, an embryo is called a blastocyst and consists of about 150 cells arranged in
a microscopic sphere. Interior to the blastocyst is a small group of about 30 embryonic
stem cells. These cells have two properties that make them of such abiding interest to
scientists: as stem cells, they can remain in an unspecial-

ized state, reproducing themselves through cell division for long periods of time (a
population of such cells living in culture is known as a cell line); stem cells are also
pluripotent, which means they have the potential to become any specialized cell in the
human body neurons of the brain and spinal cord, insulin-producing cells of the pancreas,
muscle cells of the heart, and so forth.

Here is what we know. We know that much can be learned from research on embryonic stem
cells. In particular, such research may give us further insight into the processes of cell
division and cell dif- ferentiation. This would almost certainly shed new light on those
medical conditions, like cancer and birth defects, that seem to be merely a matter of
these processes gone awry. We also know that research on embryonic stem cells requires the
destruction of human embryos at the 150-cell stage. There is not the slightest reason to
believe, however, that such embryos have the capacity to sense pain, to suffer, or to
experience the loss of life in any way at all. What is indisputable is that there are
millions of human beings who do have these capacities, and who currently suffer from
traumatic injuries to the brain and spinal cord. Millions more suffer from Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's diseases. Millions more suffer from stroke and heart disease, from burns, from
diabetes, from rheumatoid arthritis, from Purkinje cell degeneration, from Duchenne
muscular dystrophy, and from vision and hearing loss. We know that embryonic stem cells
promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might alleviate such suffering
in the not too distant future.