You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (53 page)

205.
    Pat Blashill, et al., “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,”
RollingStone.com
, 2003.

206.
    Jacob Sullum,
Saying Yes
(2003), p. 157.

207.
    Ibid.

208.
    He went off amphetamines for a month to win a bet and said, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” Bruce Schechter,
My Brain Is Open
(2008), p. 196.

209.
    “I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written,” “I Take Illegal Drugs for Inspiration,” ret.
susanblackmore.co.uk
, 15 May 2007.

210.
    Keay Davidson,
Carl Sagan
(1999), pp. 217–218.

211.
    Kick,
Disinformation
, p. 14.

212.
    Alun Rees, “Nobel Prize Genius Crick Was High on LSD When He Discovered the Secret of Life,”
Mail on Sunday
, 8 Aug. 2004.

213.
    See John Markoff’s
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
(2005).

214.
    Ann Harrison, “LSD,”
Wired
, 16 Jan. 2006.

215.
    Kick,
Disinformation
, p. 22.

216.
    Sadie Plant,
Writing on Drugs
(1999), p. 121.

217.
    Ibid., pp. 120–121.

218.
    Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), p. 306.

219.
    Paul Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
(2001), p. 353.

220.
    Kick,
Disinformation
, pp. 15, 22.

221.
    Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
, p. 36.

222.
    The other two reasons were to rebel and to feel good. “Kings of Drugs,” Q, Feb. 2001, p. 88.

223.
    “Watch Out Needle’s About,” Q, Feb. 2001, p. 58.

224.
    Ibid., p. 60.

225.
    Tony Wilson, who founded Factory Records, said, “It’s quite clear that smack [heroin] is not a problem drug for a musician. One of history’s most successful record executives, who obviously I can’t name, said, ‘Some of my biggest acts are junkies and they’ve been giving me platinum albums for twenty years.’ Now heroin is not a nice drug, but it doesn’t take away creativity. Only cocaine does that. So I told Alan McGee to fuck off. I mean, how long did Coleridge keep writing poetry for?” Ibid., p. 58.

226.
    For example, Guns N’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone” and “Nighttrain” (1987) and Eminem’s “Drugs Ballad” (2000) celebrate drug use but also imply horrible repercussions.

227.
    Rap star Ludacris was fired as a sponsor by Pepsi in 2002 when a conservative television pundit called a Pepsi boycott for hiring someone who “encourages substance abuse,” Timothy Noah, “Whopper of the Week: Bill O’Reilly,”
Slate.com
, 14 Feb. 2003.

228.
    “Captain Beaky and his Bands,” Q, Feb. 2001, p. 53.

229.
    Researchers call this the “forbidden fruit” effect. Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter,
Drug War Heresies
(2001), pp. 89–90.

230.
    Julie Deardorff, “Emerging Health Concern,”
Chicago Tribune
, 21 Nov. 2006

231.
    One historian believes that drug use did not become an integral part of the rock star mystique until some London police officers in the late 1960s went on a crusade to get their face on the front page with a busted rock star. “Junk Science,” Q, Feb. 2001, p. 57.

232.
    Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), pp. 193–197.

233.
    Jacob Sullum,
Saying Yes
(2003), p. 276.

234.
    Bill Masters, ed.,
New Prohibition
(2004), p. 16.

235.
    Mike Gray,
Drug Crazy
(1998), pp. 175–176; and ibid., p. 171.

236.
    Bill Masters, ed.,
New Prohibition
(2004), p. 164.

237.
    Paragraph from Paul Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
(2001), pp. 37–39.

238.
    Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan,
Mean Genes
(2000), pp. 74–75.

239.
    Edward Hallowell and John Ratey,
Driven to Distraction
(1994), p. 173.

240.
    R. Milin, et al, “Psychopathology Among Substance Abusing Juvenile Offenders,”
J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry
, July 1991, pp. 569–574.

241.
    T.F. Denson and M. Earleywine, “Decreased Depression in Marijuana Users,”
Addict. Behav
., Apr. 2006, pp. 738–742.

242.
    John Markoff,
What the Dormouse Said
(2005), p. xix.

243.
    Bruce Rogers is a pseudonym. Unless noted, quotes from Sullum,
Saying Yes
, pp. 133, 156, 207, 217, 218.

DRUGS II

T
HE
T
ABOO

Y
OU
J
UST
D
ON
’
T
K
NOW
,
Y
OU
A
SSHOLE
!

A taboo is a topic that a culture prevents its people from discussing freely. The American government and media have done this effectively to drugs through almost a century of dishonest propaganda driven by a lust for votes and quotes. The two characteristics of a taboo, its unsettling nature and ignorance, are now prominent with regard to drugs.
¹

I was not certain whether drugs qualified as a taboo until I started talking to other people about heroin in social situations. The reactions were startling. People not involved in the conversation would overhear part of what I said and would come over to preach to me. The emotional reactions sometimes verged on violence, as when an enraged off-duty police officer protested that I had not seen the tragic domestic situations he had seen caused by junkies.
²

As someone who has interviewed hundreds of heroin addicts (many of whom were detoxing as we spoke) upon their admittance to prison, represented numerous
“junkies” in court whose lives had been destroyed, and has read extensively on the subject, very little of what I said could return me from pariah status in these social situations. Most of what I said would be dismissed out of hand, or narcophobes would offer silly arguments lapped up by all those around.

A surprising example of pat dismissals came when I blamed heroin overdoses on its criminalization while talking to a student pursuing his doctorate in psychology. He refused to believe me despite being well-educated in the realm of drugs, open-minded,
and
having tried heroin himself. I had to go to one of
his
textbooks to finally prove to him that there was an antidote for heroin overdoses.

An example of silliness was when I explained to one testy eavesdropper that if legalized heroin would be about as deadly as alcohol. He got emotional and angrily whipped out the fact that he knew someone who had died of alcohol intoxication. At no point did he make the connection that he was arguing that alcohol should be criminalized.

In 2004 Dr. David Hillman was to defend his doctoral thesis at the University of Wisconsin. A classics scholar with a biology background (M.S. in bacteriology), he was uniquely qualified to present his dissertation on classical pharmacology. He was grilled for hours about only one chapter of his 250-page thesis on medicinal drugs in ancient Rome. This chapter showed that “just about everyone in antiquity” enjoyed recreational drugs and that they would have thought it ridiculous to outlaw them.
⁴

Hillman was given the choice to either remove that chapter or fail. The department head refuted Hillman’s chapter by saying, “[The Romans] just wouldn’t do such a thing.”
⁵
After a decade of study to attain his Ph.D., Hillman capitulated.

Hillman’s excised chapter would later become his 2008 book
The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization
. In it Hillman shows how modern translators have manipulated individual words, like opium, and entire concepts, like sorcery. Opium is translated to poppy seeds even where this makes no sense, and sorcery’s true power is obscured.

Sorcerers, magicians, and witches abound in classical literature. Translators rarely reveal that their power stemmed from their great expertise in drugs. Sorcerers were classical drug dealers and the effects of drugs were seen as magical in those times. Drugs and magic were one.

For example, Medea, the wife of Jason the Argonaut, is frequently portrayed as a witch. She aided Jason by putting fire-breathing bulls asleep and giving him amazing courage. Hillman shows how translators mistranslate
polypharmakon
and
pharmaka
to present her as being skilled in the “magical arts” and a possessor of “charms.” Medea was actually “drug-savvy” and possessed “drugs.” She gave the bulls and Jason drugs, not spells.

Sorcerers were honored and respected members of society. They and the more run-of-the-mill drug sellers, “root cutters,” had to know how to extract desired chemicals from plants and animals. This was an exact science, for the wrong amount or the wrong extraction could kill.

History scholars have also skewed the concept of libations. The Greeks’ and Romans’ favored method of drug administration was to mix it with wine. (The wine of most early peoples contained psychotropic drugs.)
⁶
This has allowed history teachers to present ancient drinkers like Plato and Jesus Christ as merely drinkers— not “illegal drug” users.

Hillman wrote about his doctoral experience:

The amount of misinformation that the government and the media flaunts is breathtaking in scope. Dr. Paul Gahlinger commented about conducting research for his 2001 guide to illegal drugs:

The government is the master manipulator in numerous ways. First, it controls the manufacture of information. It collects the statistics and it finances the research. In America drug research is largely run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). With its billion-dollar budget, NIDA decides what studies and what institutions are allowed at the funding trough. Researchers who do not focus on the “negative consequences” of drug use do not get funding.
⁹