From: dolan@nrlmry.navy.mil (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: prohibition
Date: 5 Oct 92 21:24:29 GMT


>> Per stats quoted from another pro-legalization
>> correspondent, back in 1919 when drug access was much
>> easier, only 75% of constant drug users were capable of
>> gainful employment.

>> Knocking 25% out of our GNP by making the whole nation
>> eligible to be constant drug users seems to me sufficiently
>> scary a proposition to justify a strong crusade against
>> drugs.

> The whole nation (ok, those over 21, who produce 99% of
> GNP) *is* eligible to be constant drug users -- alcohol is
> freely and readily available, with at most a 30 minute
> drive to a non-dry county necessary to get it.

True, but alcohol, for those not unfortunate enough to be
genetically predisposed to addiction, is a desperately
difficult drug with which to achieve physical addiction. It
takes _years_ of drinking to get physically addicted.

> So why aren't you constantly drunk?

I was lucky enough 1) not to have that genetic
predisposition, 2) to indulge heavily in alcohol only for a
fairly short portion of my life (about three years), and 3)
to have enough sense to realize the psychological tendency
toward addiction in my personality and voluntarily to taper
off drinking until a bottle of wine lasted me a month or
more. Now, married to a Mormon, I drink less frequently
than once per month, a relatively non-hazardous level of
alcohol intake from the viewpoint of addiction, and I drink
less as time goes on.

> Why did you stop using caffeine?

Here I was _severely_ physically and psychologically
addicted, in part because I didn't realize at the time that
it was a very dangerous drug (to me), in part because I had
been drinking coffee steadily for over 20 years. I stopped,
cold turkey for two years, because I was confronted
believably with the alternative of imminent death. Breaking
the psychological addiction was relatively easy, I left
that doctor's office and drank nothing more caffeinated.
Breaking the physical dependency took over two years of
sleeping up to 14 hours per day until my nervous system
regained the ability to function effectively without the
constant stimulation of caffeine.

> Are you somehow special, or don't you think those reasons
> hold true for the vast majority of Americans?

I'm incredibly special; in some psychological tests, I come
out 4.5 standard deviations from the mean, a region so
rarified it was long thought to be uninhabited. Only the
very strong of will can get as far into danger as I was and
extricate themselves by their own efforts.

And I certainly don't think the majority of Americans,
addicted already beyond recovery to a severely addictive
"substance" of abuse, television, are in any way capable of
recovering without help from the rest of society, and
expensive help at that, once severely addicted to anything.

An acquaintance of mine is a literal rocket scientist, he
designs the thrusters for the big lifters.  He has been in
and out of halfway houses, unable to gain and hold employment
in his field of expertise for years, because of alcoholism.
Losing even one such trained and valuable person is too many.

> The same people who have trouble with alcohol are the same
> people, with few exceptions, that will have trouble with
> other drugs.

No, alcoholism, of the acute onset variety, is known to be
a genetic problem in and of itself.  That doesn't say anything,
pro or con, about the likelihood of a similar susceptability
to acute onset addiction to any specific or all in general of
the recreational drugs.

On the other hand, those who are genericly "addictive
personalities", whatever exactly that might mean, are
probably going to start with alcolhol merely because access
is easier, and try, and become addicted to, other drugs as
opportunity allows.

That says nothing about what the experience might be if the
accessibility were reversed.

> If you notice when people with drug problems are mentioned
> in the press, you'll always see them mentioned as having
> drug *and* alcohol problems, be it Richard Dreyfus, the
> late Sam Kinnison, Albert Belle (plays for the Cleveland
> Indians), ex-DC mayor Marion Barry (though that could be a
> smoke screen), Drew Barrymore, and many, many others.

Sure, but you have a crowd rigorously selected for wealth,
notoriety, and other conditions that put them in the stream
of easy access to expensive drugs, and also similarly
selected as people the newspapers are going to write lots
about. As a sample for statistical purposes, that's pretty
worthless.

> Since I've been keeping my eyes open for that sort of
> thing, I've yet to see anyone mentioned as just having an
> illicit drug problem -- invariably they've had alcohol
> problems as well.

Hm. Not depending on other people's sensationalist
reporting, nor private-agenda research, but on my own
observation, my experience is the opposite. I've seen
people going from alcohol to drugs, drugs to alcohol, drug
users that used no alcohol, and many more alcohol users
that used no other drugs.

> Outlawing the other drugs but keeping alcohol legal is like
> plugging all but one hole in a boat -- it's still going to
> sink.

You really, really should think to whom you're writing
before you spout nonsense like this. As a retired sailor, I
know several things you don't. 1) All boats ever made leak.
That's why you keep a bailer in a small boat, a pump in a
large one, and use either on a regular basis. 2) Training
for rescue of ships taking on water concentrates on
plugging the most voluminous, easily accessible leaks until
the pumps can handle the rest, then you're back to
situation #1. No one _ever_ takes the trouble to plug all
the leaks. It is less cost efficient than an appropriate
sized pump.

More to the point, with perhaps 20,000 years of fermented
beverage use in human history, the boat has _not_ sunk with
that one leak. We manage to patch and pump fast enough to
keep that one problem from sinking us, but take a look at
the absolute costs associated with alcohol use, multiply by
the essentially unlimited number of new drugs of abuse the
legalization proponents propose to allow accessible to
widespread use, and then determine if you are interested in
bailing that fast, that is, in paying the social costs,
prosperity losses, and tax increases associated with that
level of potential addiction.

The limitation to a society is like the limitation to a
ship; once the needed bilge pump is beyond the ship's
carrying capacity, the ship _will_ sink. Long before, it
will be incapable of gainful use for its intended purpose,
carrying cargo, and will have been reduced to merely a
bailing mechanism. The current America is dangerously close
to being merely a bailing mechanism as it is; we have no
identifiable national agenda beyond curing an ever
expanding list of ills. Better perhaps, never to let the
boring worms take hold in the first place, or to pay the
"drug war" costs to haul out and sandblast away the rust
and repaint, so that we can set a course again, stay afloat
with minimal bailing effort, and put the bulk of the crew's
bailing efforts instead to following that course.

> Either outlaw all drugs, including alcohol, or the whole
> thing is clearly pointless.

And, continuing your flawed analogy correctly, it is
plugging _every_ leak that is obsessive and pointless. More
to the point, the remaining recreational drugs do _not_
have the high social acceptance and use rate that make
patching that "alcohol abuse" hole extremely expensive, the
equivalent of fixing a leak in a ship's plumbing that is in
a convoluted piping nest. Doable, but only with great pain
and expense, and by hauling the ship and incapacitating it
for a considerable period of time.

The other leaks, however, are easily accessible and can be
patched with much less effort, and patching them may save the
ship where it would sink if you concentrated all your effort
on the inaccessible leak and let the others flow and grow.

> Now I believe that Prohibition did more harm than good, and
> would do so if reinstated, and thus the only workable
> alternative is legalization.

Prohibition tried to remove, for very just cause, the high
societal costs of use and abuse of alcohol, a substance of
abuse that was widely accepted and widely used and had a
history of use older than human memory. Such a program,
undertaken by the methods chosen, was probably doomed to
fail. The recreational drugs proposed for legalization have
none of these qualities that made alcohol prohibition
difficult, but potentially if in wide use the same high
social costs _each_, and so getting ahead of the game and
stopping the leaks before they are grown large is the
sensible approach. Prohibition that could not work for
alcohol can work for these other recreational drugs. Don't
compare apples to oranges and expect the flawed analogy to
be an acceptable argument.

And you cut too binary a choice.  Prohibition on the 1920's
level is not the only alternative to legalization.

> This isn't a complex argument here.

How I wish you'd taken a realistic, rather than an absolutist
approach.  Painting grey in black and white loses so much
information that your argument is valueless, certainly in the
simplistic "I want it so it must be good for me" results you
achieve by your approach.

> There's really 3 possible points on which you can object:

>   1) Whether the vast majority of people who would have drug
>      problems have alcohol problems already

Countered.

>  2) Whether Prohibition did more harm than good

Shown to be not pertinent to the current case.

>  3) Whether something has changed such that Prohibition
>     would work now.

Shown to be a false analogy to the current case.

> If you don't object to any of those, the conclusion is
> inescapable.

The conclusion is self-indulgent nonsense, based on a skein
of misdirection and misguided analogy.

Sigh.

I expected better of you, unlike most of the crowd with whom
I correspond on these questions.  You, at least, are still
sometimes capable of abstract thought.  Try some, it isn't as
painful as advertised among the drug proponents.

Kent, the man from xanth.
"The Birthright of humankind is the stars!"
--
Ignore the header, and don't expect me to see a news reply.  We don't get news.
Use email to: <dolan@nrlmry.navy.mil> or <dolan@192.138.87.240>