You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (48 page)

This biased exposure is called the “clinician’s error,” and it has also skewed views of homosexuals in the past.
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When psychiatry stopped labeling homosexuality a mental disorder in the early 1970s, therapists complained, “How can you say that homosexuality is normal? I have treated many homosexuals, and they all had psychological problems.”
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This was probably true but
all
the people they saw had psychological problems—well-adjusted homosexuals never visited them.

In addition, there is a large incentive for drug users to tell the police and treatment personnel (and the media accompanying them) exactly what they want to hear—“Drugs are horrible. Don’t do drugs.” Any other message results in a tougher sentence or more treatment because they have not yet learned their lesson.

Even if the public saw more than just the drug-using wrecks, illicit drug users’ behavior would still be a poor indicator of drugs’ effects. Criminalization and media propaganda can statistically link anything with crime—even bananas.

This Banana Effect can be demonstrated with a hypothetical scenario. In an imaginary United States, bananas are made illegal and the media begins spouting the idea that eating bananas is irresponsible, dangerous, and horrible for one’s health. Responsible, law-abiding, health-conscious citizens would stop eating bananas.

Surveys of banana eaters would start to show that they commit more crimes and are unhealthier than non-banana eaters. Bananas did not change. The population using them changed. This is exactly what happened when drugs were criminalized at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Numerous studies have found that drug-using criminals usually were criminals before their drug use began. One study found that a heroin user’s first arrest typically occurs eighteen months
before
heroin use begins.
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The ridiculously exorbitant costs of drugs caused by criminalization undoubtedly drive some addicts to crime, however, most addict-criminals were criminals first. The drugs and crime nexus is driven more by the population using drugs than by the drugs themselves.

Despite the Banana Effect and the fact that almost all research is aimed at damning drugs, statistical evidence still seeps out challenging the drugs-delinquent
connection. Some of this evidence has shown that casual drug users earn as much as non-drug users,
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and are just as likely to be employed.
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Drug use is more common among people earning less than $12,000 a year, but also among people earning $100,000 a year or more.
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A 1999 study of sixty-three Silicon Valley companies found productivity was sixteen percent lower in firms with pre-employment drug testing and twenty-nine percent lower in firms with random drug testing.
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Perhaps this is because, on average, drug users have higher IQs than their peers.
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Another study that tracked kids from preschool to age eighteen found that adolescents who had engaged in some drug experimentation were the best adjusted. Adolescents who, by age eighteen, had never experimented were “relatively anxious, emotionally constricted, and lacking in social skills.”
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If the government’s gross generalizing of drug users is applied to non-drug users, then all non-drug users are uptight cowardly geeks.

This is perhaps the most galling misconception. In high school in the early 1990s a question on a health test was, “What are the reasons for drinking alcohol?” I got the question wrong as did most of the class. The “correct” answer was there are no reasons to drink.

This concept has been foisted on Americans for the past century with regard to illegal drugs. It is ridiculous. There are numerous valid reasons why people take drugs. Some of these include:

Hallucinogens have been used in religious rites for tens of thousands of years. The sacred scriptures of India contain over one thousand hymns in praise of soma, a psychedelic mushroom.
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This drug use has not been a trivial sideshow but a hallowed mystical experience central to these religions.

The importance of drug rituals can be seen with the Eleusinian Mysteries. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a cult based at the Athens temple of Eleusis. Up to three thousand people a year were initiated in an annual week-long affair that culminated in the Mysteries, rites kept secret under the penalty of death. The cult had amazing endurance, beginning around 1500 B.C. and not ending until the Romans’ enforcement of Christianity shut it down at the end of the fourth century A.D.

Cult members included such celebrated figures as Aristotle, Sophocles, Plato, and several Roman Emperors. The poet Pindar wrote of the Mysteries, “Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and its god-sent beginning.”
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The Roman Emperor Cicero believed them to be the greatest contribution of Athens. It is now believed that the Mysteries’ rites incorporated a natural form of LSD.
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This powerful mystical experience held the cult together for two thousand years.

A mystical experience is a profound event in which one is “left with a greater awareness of God, or a higher power, or ultimate reality.”
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The ability of hallucinogens to facilitate these revelations was demonstrated in numerous studies
conducted before hallucinogens were outlawed.
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In one 1962 study, before a Good Friday church service, fifteen theology students and professors were given psilocybin and another fifteen were given placebos. Despite not knowing who received the placebos, those who received psilocybin had experiences dramatically more mystical than those who did not. The researcher behind the study later wrote,

One of the participants who received psilocybin said over thirty years later, “it enlarged my understanding of God by affording me the only powerful experience I have had of his personal nature.”
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Some people enjoy stimulants like cocaine for confidence in dealing with people, while others prefer sedatives, like alcohol, to help them relax. Other social motives are more esoteric. For example, Louis Armstrong said of marijuana, “When you’re with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship.”
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