You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (43 page)

Alcohol would also serve as a scapegoat when people had sexual relations with someone who was not up to their friends’ aesthetic standards. Males would also use it to justify brutish behavior. “I’m not a racist sexist asshole. I just had too much to drink.” Women would also use it to protect from being labeled easy. “I’m not a slut. I just had too much to drink.”

Women also know men are more likely to hit on a drunk woman than a sober one. The joke that a woman’s pick-up line is often “I’m really drunk” is funny because it is true. Again I learned this firsthand. At one of my first college house parties there was a pretty woman loudly proclaiming her inebriation and stumbling about rubbing up on random guys. I grabbed her ass. She sobered up immediately, berating me as an asshole pervert and telling everyone in earshot what I had done. Apparently, when the unattractive dude moved in the game was over. I quickly left the party before she could round up a posse of frat boys to beat me for sexual harassment.

Since then, I have suspected that alcohol does not make people lose control of their actions. The dozens of times I’ve observed women sleep with someone “because they were drunk,” the man was always someone in whom they were interested anyway. I’ve never witnessed a woman sleep with the broke, smelly, fat, ugly fellow or the homeless guy “because she was drunk.”

Alcohol played other roles my freshman year. I did not lose my virginity because I had been taught that a woman could not give consent for carnal relations when she was intoxicated with the devil’s brew. Looking back, I was a damn fool. No means no, but yes means yes even if alcohol is involved.

My most dramatic experience with alcohol is a void. One night I was ecstatic to have the ID of a friend who shared my big nose, brown hair, and elongated stature. Never having an ID before, this was an opportunity for greatness. I went to a club with my friend, Pookie, met some pretty Georgetown nursing students, tried to buy them as many drinks as I could before the drink special ended at 11 p.m. and then woke up the next morning in the hospital. Apparently I passed out at the club, and since I was underage, the club workers quickly dumped me outside on the sidewalk (after taking my wallet). Some kind freshmen who had seen me
around campus got me an ambulance, or so I’m told. When I told my parents my dad laughed, my mom cried.

In college, alcohol wasn’t the only drug I used. To stay awake during finals I sucked on tea bags. I also learned to smoke. I liked to smoke cigarettes when I got intoxicated. Everybody told me I would become addicted but I never have. I also learned to smoke marijuana and did so occasionally. I remember potheads telling me about its unjust treatment, their conspiracy theories regarding DuPont, and that George Washington used to smoke it. I laughed them off. Silly potheads. Why would the government lie about marijuana? It had more important things on its agenda.

I did not have much exposure to “hard” drugs in college but I did visit a high school friend attending Gettysburg College. He had always experimented with drugs—all drugs. He told me about his pleasurable experience with heroin, however, cocaine was his drug of choice. I always considered him my proxy. He was an intelligent and responsible individual, and I figured if drugs did not wreck his life, they probably would not have wrecked mine. He is currently getting his doctorate in psychology, still does hard drugs on occasion, and has never had any dependency problems— outside of cigarettes. Still, it was not until law school that the drug charade collapsed.

I was very lucky to get into New York University Law School in Manhattan. It was ranked as one of the top five law schools in the country. My classmates were extremely smart, extremely hardworking, and extremely driven. Unlike me, these people had received straight A’s in college, and these were A’s at places like Harvard and Yale. Most of them would go on to make $100,000+ starting salaries at big Manhattan law firms where they would work 60+ hour weeks.

To my surprise many of them did drugs. Even more surprising is that it was not the kids at the bottom of the class, it was some of the best of the best. One friend of mine who went to Harvard undergrad and who did well in law school smoked marijuana almost daily. His smoke buddy had gone to Yale undergrad and would eventually graduate in the top ten percent of our class and write for the prestigious
Law Review—two
amazing accomplishments at any law school, much less NYU. Not only did they smoke marijuana regularly, but they had a fondness for whippets. Whippets are nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, and they kept canisters of the stuff in their stash.

Another law school friend of mine was an older man who engaged in futures
trading during law school. It was through him that I met some unbelievably wealthy and successful elites. For example, one gentleman was a high-ranking banker who had his own private zoo in Africa. I was shocked to discover that these high achievers casually used cocaine on weekends. They had been using it for years. They weren’t addicts. They didn’t know of anybody who overdosed. And they had a blast on it. Some of my friends who had never tried it snorted some one night, and besides having fun bragging to people that they were high on coke it wasn’t a big deal.

The dictionary definition of a drug is “a substance that acts on the nervous system . . . especially one causing addiction.”
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The ignorance surrounding the previous taboos was slowly enculturated over millennia. The ignorance surrounding the drug taboo is relatively recent and has been caused by media sensationalism and government propaganda in the twentieth century.

One result of this brainwash has been to change the popular definition of the word
drug
to fit the government’s laws. Legal drugs are good; illegal drugs are evil. As President George W. Bush said: “We must reduce drug use for one great moral reason: over time, drugs rob men, women, and children of their dignity and of their character… When we fight against drugs, we fight for the souls of our fellow Americans.”
²

There are two characteristics of a drug: (1) its effect on the nervous system and (2) its addictive qualities. Both of these concepts have been corrupted by the government to justify its criminal laws. The latter has been so corrupted that it is arguably meaningless. Other concepts have been warped as well. Drug abuse has been defined by the scientific community as the continued use of a drug despite negative consequences.
³
The government’s definition of drug abuse is any use that it does not approve. The government has unofficially decided using a drug for pleasure equals abuse.
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This is sanctimonious drivel considering that a great many politicians, prosecutors, and law enforcers enjoy alcohol after a day of work.

To pull every recreational drug from the government’s vast lie hole is impossible due to space limitations. However, it should be understood that the law of utility applies to an illegal drug’s popularity. Most drug users are
not
stupid. A drug becomes popular because it provides more benefit than harm to its responsible users.
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Although some users have a “desire to erase” themselves,
⁶
most do not.

This chapter will expose only some of the drug perversions. However, the rule of utility should make one question the assertions of the media and government whenever a drug takes its turn as the most evil drug of the moment. The Internet has given scientists a way to respond to false and misleading propaganda, however, these scientists are not well-funded and their responses are not publicized. One must look for them.
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Some major distortions surrounding drugs are:

The popular perception is that illegal drugs are outlawed because they are powerfully addictive. This is a myth. The three legal drugs—nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine—are no less addictive than supposedly “hard” drugs and significantly more addictive than others.

It may appear ludicrous that caffeine and cocaine are comparable, but this demonstrates how effective the anti-drug campaign has been since cocaine was outlawed in 1914. Before the drug war, the inherent “evilness” separating these substances did not exist. Here is a German pharmacologist in 1927 decrying America’s prohibition of alcohol: “[Alcohol] causes as little harm to others as the voluntary taking of morphine or cocaine, or the intoxication by caffeine by taking too much coffee.”
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Currently the popular view is that caffeine and cocaine are worlds apart, but they are chemically similar stimulants.
¹⁰
The vast difference in their effects stems from how they are consumed. Caffeine is readily available in beverages. Ingestion is the slowest and least efficient method to take a drug because of the lengthy rigors of the digestive process. (The quick “high” from most caffeinated beverages is psychological or from the large sugar content.)

Before criminalization, cocaine was used much like caffeine is used today. South Americans have chewed coca leaves and drunk coca tea for thousands of years. Thomas Edison, Ulysses S. Grant, H.G. Wells, Henrik Ibsen, Jules Verne, and Pope Leo XIII all enjoyed drinking cocaine wine, Vin Mariani.
¹¹
Grant used it to give him the energy to write his memoirs.

Cocaine also came in chewing gum, lozenges, teas, and elixirs. The most famous of the latter is Coca-Cola, which had roughly two lines of cocaine per twelve ounces.
¹²
(This explains its name; cocaine comes from the coca plant.) Coca-Cola’s popularity did not falter when it was legally targeted for containing cocaine because the cocaine was replaced with a comparable stimulant, caffeine.
¹³

The criminalization of a substance immediately creates incentives for it to take a more potent form.
¹⁴
With the danger of arrest, it is important to make something concealable for possession, use, and transportation. In addition, punishments are based on quantities, with larger weights receiving more severe penalties. Potent forms of a drug carry less risk because they weigh less than milder forms. With the arbitrariness of mandatory minimum sentences, mere tenths of an ounce can have severe consequences. For example, in Pennsylvania if a person delivers less than the weight of a dollar bill in heroin she may receive probation. If she delivers more, she is facing a two-year mandatory minimum.
¹⁵

When a drug only comes in powder form the culture of moderate use that surrounds it disappears. Now that cocaine’s criminalization is approaching the century mark, its mild forms have long been forgotten, and instead cocaine now comes in the form of crack.

It is questionable whether crack would even exist if cocaine had remained legal.
¹⁶
Crack is cocaine chemically modified to allow it to be easily smoked. It is the same substance enjoyed by Edison and Grant, however, the cocaine is hitting the brain faster than if it was snorted or drunk. The effect is significantly more intense, and significantly shorter in duration.

The influence of administration on addictiveness can be seen on the addictiveness chart below with the example of amphetamine. Just as cocaine is the same substance whether snorted or smoked, amphetamine and its related compound, methamphetamine, are the same substance whether snorted, injected, or smoked. Smoked cocaine and methamphetamine are more addictive,
not
because they affect the brain differently but because the effect is more intense.

Caffeine’s crack version has not been created because there is no need for it. Because it has not been criminalized, super-high caffeine doses are readily available in the safer beverage form such as the appropriately-named energy drink, Cocaine. For the more adventurous there are caffeine pills like No-Doz. Although much rarer incidences—because legalization allows caffeine to be drunk—young people are still hospitalized for enormous caffeine intakes, which can lead to hallucinations and death,
¹⁷
and just like with other stimulants (cocaine, amphetamines), chronic abuse leads to addiction and correlates with psychosis and a host of other problems.
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