Tales of Un-DARE-ing Do
Good afternoon.
Let me begin with a story:
A friend of mine, a mother of two in
My friend was caught off-guard for
a moment, then replied, “Why honey, which ones?” After some conversation with the child, my
friend learned that a police officer had come to class and explained that drugs
were dangerous, would ruin your life, and that only bad people used drugs.
That was enough for my friend to
hear, and, after a few weeks planning, she flew both daughters to
“See that woman? With that briefcase, and
wearing the business suit? She’s
smoking marijuana. It’s completely
normal for her, and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. She’s just enjoying herself. She’s not a bad person, and she’s not
breaking the law.”
Her children, somewhat astonished,
listened on as their mother told them that many Dutch people – and people from
all over the world – came to these coffeehouses to smoke marijuana and enjoy
themselves. These people, she hastened
to point out, were perfectly normal, healthy, happy folks – quite a different
picture than the one painted by a stern police officer standing in front of a
first-grade class.
Her children learned the lesson,
and, when the time came, would make sensible and safe decisions about how, when
and why to use all sorts of things that the might otherwise have condemned as
wrong, the province only of evil people.
So now we come to this week, with
the electoral debacle that arguably reversed the trend toward greater public
participation in the creation of drug policy.
It may not be a permanent reversal, but we can’t expect the DEA or the
White House to change their tune any time soon.
There’s too much political hay to be made decrying the evil of illegal
drugs.
This, despite the announcement,
reported this week in NEW SCIENTIST, that they’ve discovered that MDMA can be
used to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s – which is a whiplash reversal from
the announcement just a few months back that MDMA might accelerate the
occurrence of Parkinsonism in the population of MDMA users. This, despite the clear
sentiment of a majority of the population that cannabis should be available as
a medicine for those who need it.
And this, despite the fact that nearly every one of the right-wing
neo-Puritans, up to and including the President of the United States, have
surely tried a broad sampling of the devil’s delights.
We all know the extent of the
hypocrisy which surrounds the War on Drugs; that it is, at essence, a Class
War, or, if you will, a Race War, which criminalizes the undesirable elements
of society – precisely the rationale behind the Marijuana Tax Act, which
provided the legal ammunition to expel with those pesky Mexican immigrants in
Texas and California back in the 1930s.
But for the last twenty years, they’ve
been peddling this hypocrisy as truth; that’s the real danger. Every child who hears, “Just say no,” without
any understanding the political context in which these words make their own
curious sense, is being brainwashed, pure and simple,
and loses the freedom to think and choose for his or her self.
What can we do about this? First we need to look to the inciting
incident which allowed the present state of affairs to develop. That event lies not back in the 1930s, or
1950s, but at the end of the counter-cultural period of the 1960s. During the 1960s millions of young Americans
experimented with all kinds of consciousness-altering drugs, and it had a
profound effect on popular culture, producing a new aesthetic, with music and
art transformed by psychedelia and the radicalized politics of rage tempered by
a new vision of human possibilities.
Those folks – some of them hippies,
some just plain, middle-class kids – did a horrible thing to all of us: they
fled the scene, running off to communes, cults or corporations (not that
there’s all that much difference between them), and left my generation, which
grew up just behind them, in the 70s and early 80s, with our asses hanging in
the proverbial breeze, wondering what the hell was going on.
These “elders” pushed the reset
button on any sort of sensible development in drug policy or drug-positive
culture, because they refused to take a public stand in defense of the values
that they practiced, and neglected to pass down to their juniors any hard-won
wisdom about the right and wrong way of using these peculiar substances. What we got, instead, was a burned-out
Timothy Leary, who preached the gospel of space migration, then cyberspace
migration, and a plethora of somewhat addled and not-very-clear-thinking New
Age prophets. Fiddlefaddle at best, and
positively dangerous at worst.
It was against this backdrop that
the DARE program and “Just Say No” emerged.
The druggie generation either found itself so embarrassed by its acts -
or so afraid of the long arm of the law (which, due to some clever advertising,
we greatly exaggerate) – that it remained silent as their own children were
taught that white was black, slavery, freedom, and ignorance, bliss.
To put it in the current
vernacular: you’re all here today, at the SSDP/MPP conference because you’re
all of Satan’s party. You want to see
these drug laws repealed – laws which protect the health and lives of our most
precious resource, our children. This
can only lead to the ruination of countless lives, and will turn our schools
and cities in to war zones reminiscent of William Burroughs’s best evocations
of the Interzone.
Baldly put, that’s the linguistic
magic we’re up against. And if we choose
to take it on directly, we’ll lose, because once you even admit to the
existence of their mind-set, you’ve bought into the entire thing, and can only
find yourself making some weak harm-reduction arguments. That’s really where we are today.
I would like to suggest a much more
radical proposal. We’ve all got to come
out of the closet. We have to make a
forward step – both individually and collectively – into a world where the
statement “drugs are bad” makes about as much sense as “food is bad”. We all know that some foods are poisons, some
are healthy only in small quantities, and some can form the basis of a
reasonable diet. But we have no similar
public understanding around drugs. Yet,
within this room there is an enormous resource of both knowledge and courage
that can be tapped to foment a subtle revolution in popular thought.
I know what I’m talking about here: as an
openly queer man I know that coming out isn’t a one-time affair. It happens every time I meet someone, when
the conversation gets around to
why-I’m-not-married-and-don’t-have-any-kids.
It’s certainly gotten easier to talk about it over the last twenty years
– in part because I haven’t been alone.
Millions of other Americans have taken the same step forward, into the
light of public scrutiny.
It’s a dangerous position; you can
get beat up, or even arrested for expressing a sexual preference, and the same
is true – in spades – when it comes to drugs.
I look at Richard Glenn Biore, who has a delightful two year-old son,
and I worry that someone in the FBI or DEA might deem him an “unsuitable”
parent because of his outspoken political views. But the only reason that can happen is
because Richard is nearly alone, out there on the front line, fighting the good
fight.
He shouldn’t be alone. He should be shoulder-to-shoulder with the
thirty or forty million Americans who share his views. And that, I think, is the reason you’re here
today: you realize that there is an opportunity to create a new way of
thinking, something that doesn’t just turn back the tide, but declares it
irrelevant and ridiculous.
You can speak truth to Power, but
it’s often more effective just to laugh it away. With a large enough laugh, anything is possible.
More than that, more than
organizing the young people across the country – which is important work, and thank you for doing it – but beyond this you must
dedicate yourselves to an honest sharing of what you know and what you
believe. We’ve had to make all the
mistakes that the folks in the 1960s committed, all over again, because they
weren’t around to mentor us. We can not
make the same mistake.
I look to people like the pair of
librarian-slash- revolutionaries who created Erowid,
the comprehensive Internet resource for information about drugs in all their
forms – legal and illegal, safe and dangerous.
Their only objective is to get the information out there, making it
accessible to people, who can then make their own informed choices. If they can do this for all of us, can’t we
step forward and do it for our parents, our children, our friends and our
communities? Cognitive liberty begins at
home, behind your eyes and between your ears.
The first act of liberation is to step forward, and be counted as one of
us.
Yes, there is a danger. There is a war on, and the law is silent in
time of war. But are we truly content to
remain inside another kind of prison cell, created with the “Mind forg’d
manacles” of hypocrisy, lies and propaganda?
I’m not. And I hope you’re not
either.
Thank you.
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Chicchan (9 November 2002)