You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (47 page)

People are forced into desperate and unhealthy lifestyles to finance their addictions.
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When heroin was criminalized in 1915, the cost per ounce shot from $6.50 an ounce to about $100 an ounce.
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Heroin addicts are forced to deal with criminals regularly and need money to support the artificially sky-high prices of heroin. It is estimated that the prices of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are a hundred times higher than they would be in a free market.
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Heroin addicts are more likely to commit crimes than alcoholics because their substances cost exorbitantly more. A parallel can be seen in post-World War II Europe, where there was a cigarette shortage that drove up their value. Nicotine addicts were reported stealing, trading away prized personal possessions, and engaging in prostitution in order to obtain tobacco.
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Ever since the nineteenth-century yellow journalism of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, reporters have used anecdotal scare stories to claim drugs cause insanity.
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Few drugs have endured this slander as much as LSD.

One of the most famous LSD tales is that of the man who took too much and believed that he was orange juice. He was committed to a psychiatric ward and for the rest of his life he was terrified that someone might drink him. Variations of this urban legend were circulated by the media and health professionals in the 1960s.
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There is no evidence that LSD causes schizophrenia or any other mental illness. LSD’s effects are temporary and a user “never completely loses sight of the fact that sensual distortions are drug-induced.”
^90
,
91
There is evidence that LSD can trigger schizophrenia in people who are predisposed to it, but this effect is not limited to LSD.
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Any highly stressful event can trigger a schizophrenic’s first psychotic episode.

LSD is not the only drug that causes temporary psychosis. Extreme usage of alcohol, marijuana, and stimulants like caffeine can also cause hallucinations. (Severe fatigue also induces artificial visions.) Even though the government has spent millions of tax dollars to prove these drugs cause permanent brain damage, the evidence is still sparse.

A recent junk science scare involved methamphetamine and led to typical understated drug headlines like this 2006 one in the
New York Times
: “This Is Your Brain on Meth: A ‘Forest Fire’ of Damage.” Five years later reviewers analyzed the original data and found it to be bogus.
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Drug users are seen as unhealthy and desperate because unhealthy and desperate users are the only ones the public ever sees. The public perception of the heroin user is the “junkie.” It is easy to overlook the fact that occasional heroin users (“chippers”) and functioning addicts make up the vast majority of heroin users.
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Chippers, like the weekend user on the BBC who enjoys it when gardening, and the anonymous successful Manhattan business executive featured in the
New York Times
,
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remain invisible to avoid criminal prosecution, job loss, and losing their narcophobic friends.
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Words like the following from the executive almost never get media coverage: “[Heroin] is an enhancement of my life. I see it as similar to a guy coming home and having a drink of alcohol. Only alcohol has never done it for me.”
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One of the most remarkable examples of a heroin addict leading an exemplary life is Dr. William Halsted.
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Halsted is known as the father of modern surgery and was one of the four founders of Johns Hopkins University. This man saved his sister by doing the first emergency blood transfusion, and he did it with
his own
blood.

For the last thirty-five years of his life Halsted continued to make medical breakthroughs as a heroin addict. His skill with the surgical blade earned him a global reputation. Halsted never could quit but kept himself healthy and functioning with maintenance doses. It was only because of a book that was unsealed nearly fifty years after his death that his secret was revealed.

Halsted is not an aberration. It is openly acknowledged that modern doctors addicted to heroin (usually morphine) can perform at high levels.
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Researchers have found well-functioning heroin addicts in all lines of work. A District of Columbia police official stated that around 1971 “more than one hundred officers were taking heroin. How did we learn about them? Not because their performance was poor . . . We took urine specimens.”
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Even users of the relatively accepted illegal drug marijuana are covert.
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Outside of the entertainment industry, cannabis use is reluctantly revealed. One successful user who has been outed is the billionaire Peter Lewis. As the CEO of Progressive Insurance for thirty-six years he transformed a small company with millions in revenues into a Fortune 200 company with billions in revenues. Lewis’ peers regard him as a creative perfectionist, “an extraordinary businessman,” and a “pothead.”
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The popular perception is that illegal drugs cause people to do harmful and evil things. This is false. Drugs do not
make
one do anything. They can temporarily lower inhibitions, impede decision-making, and ruin coordination, however, the drug
is never in control. The same occurs when you are extremely tired. Your decision-making is hampered; however, it would be inane to blame sleep deprivation for heinous acts such as murder. Yet the government and the media have been doing this to drugs for the past one hundred years.

No drug has been found to directly cause violence through its pharmacological action.
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Drugs that have been popularly touted as violence-causing but have come up woefully short when scientists looked past colorful anecdotes and urban myths include crack, PCP,
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and anabolic steroids.
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The drug most correlated with violence is the legal substance alcohol.
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Two-thirds of people who have been attacked by current/former spouses/lovers say their assailant was drinking, and “I didn’t know what I was doing when I was drunk” is the most frequently heard excuse by those who counsel violent families.
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Yet a cross-cultural study has shown that drunken behavior is a largely learned behavior that varies widely from person to person, setting to setting, and culture to culture.
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At some point in Western history alcohol became a “temporary license to act like an asshole,”
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and most people who have been intoxicated realize alcohol does not
make
one fight. The idea that drugs can make one do something horrific is due to two phenomena—scapegoating and fearmongering.

As a public defender I witnessed countless people convicted of actual crimes (crimes with victims) excuse their actions ad nauseam by implying “it was the drug that drove me to do it.” It is a great excuse because the government cannot call this posturing a sham. To challenge drugs’ evil power would undermine the fearmongering that drives the drug war. If a prosecutor pointed out to the sentencing judge that almost all drug users and most drug addicts never resort to non-drug crime,
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it would raise the question, “Then why are we throwing them all in jail?”

The idea that drug addicts will “do anything” to avoid withdrawal is grossly exaggerated. Perhaps the most feared addiction withdrawal is from heroin. One addiction expert called it “hell” and the “gold standard” of withdrawals.
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Beginning with the “self-pitying vaporings of the Romantics” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey in the early nineteenth century, literary and screen presentations
of opiate withdrawal have been even less restrained.
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Although heroin withdrawal is uncomfortable it is never fatal. At its worst, it is comparable to having the flu.
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(Opiate withdrawal symptoms have been found to be frequently psychosomatic or faked.)
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For many heroin addicts withdrawal merely means taking off some sick days.
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In fact, some addicts intentionally go through withdrawal to lower their tolerance and the cost of their habit.
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Alcohol withdrawal, on the other hand, can cause psychotic experiences (delirium tremens) and can be fatal. Despite this, Hollywood presents heroin withdrawal—not alcohol withdrawal—as the demonic possession in which an addict will do literally anything to get a hit.

One woman, who used to be a heroin addict but now only uses intermittently, has led a successful professional life as a secretary and now as a social worker. The only crime she has ever committed was shoplifting a raincoat for a job interview.

The idea that drugs make people do bad things is due to the samples of drug users who are exposed. The people who abuse drugs irresponsibly and commit crimes are the ones that get caught by the authorities and can be paraded through our courts and the media as examples for the community. The citizens who use illegal drugs responsibly and are otherwise law-abiding are much more likely to escape apprehension.

This is magnified because the media usually consult law enforcement, physicians, and drug treatment personnel for drug articles. This is the equivalent of talking to someone about ladders who has never used a ladder but is called every time someone falls off of one. For example, in 2007 I heard a therapist on a Christian
radio program say that in all of his years of counseling he had never encountered a marijuana smoker without problems.