Let's talk about drugs.

This particular story starts in the continued discussion of a particular website, Slate, on a particular drug, nicotine. Perusing their archives one day, a few heretofore unknown facts became clear: 1. the Americans are fucking around with cigarette laws again; 2. There is a buzz about "harm reduction" methods, a long-time standby of the med-weed camp; and 3. Obama is fighting an publicly admitted nicotine addiction.

As odd and partially encouraging to the drug war as some of these facts were, they weren't even the highlight of the session. What struck most odd was the article context-linked at the bottom of one of the stories--one about junk food and taxes. If an article about junk food in a populist magazine doesn't sound particularly new and intriguing, well, it wasn't; what was, though, was the discussion surrounding the proposed new treatment and classification of junk food--specifically, soda pop--by the FDA.

Turns out the FDA thinks junk food is bad for you. Bad as in "DRUUUUGS!!!" bad. Which is fine, really. Take the simple example of processed sugar--sucrose--which fits two important qualifiers for consideration as a harmful psychotropic-like substance: 1. it has a noticeable cognitive profile shift; and 2. sugar crashes make you fiendy. Processed table salt, although it lacks a noticeable cognitive profile shift, is also known to incite binges. It's hard to look at the obesity epidemic in North America and not link it to the arguably drugged-out behaviour of addiction to one or both substances.

What's not fine about the findings is the hypocrisy evident. If we can look at junk food additives as "drugs" and propose a tax scheme to minimize the social impact of their consumption rather than just busting down the chip factories with draconian prohibition style policy, why can't the same thing be done with marijuana? Or harder drugs?

Turns out the easy answer comes from a completely unexpected direction: the War on Terror. Similarly to the War on Drugs, here a fight has been fashioned against a force that is as easy to antagonize as it is difficult to define. Of course, we don't want terrorists in our midst, and little more do we want fiends. By analogy to the War on Terror, and with respect to the fact that North Americans are not too keen on giving up on battles that they or their ancestors have proclaimed of dire import, we can see the true seeds of hypocritical reasoning at the core of the move to legislate harm minimization in cigarettes and junk food but not pot. It's simple: terrorists don't think they are terrorists, and the meaning of "drug" is equivalently as much in the eye of the beholder.

Wiktionary can be a big help here. According to them a "drug" is

drug (plural drugs)

1. (pharmacology) A substance used to treat an illness, relieve a symptom, or modify a chemical process in the body for a specific purpose.
2. (pharmacology) A substance, often addictive, which affects the central nervous system.
3. A chemical or substance, not necessarily for medical purposes, which alters the way the mind or body works.
4. A substance, especially one which is illegal, ingested for recreational use.

Ignoring the first two, technical, definitions--which may just be well suited to crafting sensible drug policy--the definitions of interest are the third, a colloquial definition, which is most likely what average people think of as they condone or condemn the subject matter, and the fourth, a Hunter S. Thompsonism that makes it exceedingly clear how easy it is to disdainfully write off drug supporters as anarchic hedonists.

With strict attention on the third definiton, however, a mere moment of consideration is an enlightening thing. Unless you are unwilling to consider information susbtantial, this definition applies to literally everything that exists in the sphere of human sensory perception. At the very least, for those unwilling to admit the rapturous internal change occasionally induced by the delivery of a great line in a movie or seeing a painting in the right light, the definition certainly applies to such obviously non-drug things as cheese, cloth, and strobing lights.

And to those of you who think this is an incomplete argument, an attack on one tiny definition's arguably inefficient rendering of a concept, consider the interesting challenge in proposing an alternate that is neither too broad to be meaningful nor too narrow to capture the deepest and darkest corners of the concept of "drugs" as it is heavy-handedly doled out by drug warriors. It's tougher than it sounds!

Ultimately, the War on Drugs is going to be as fruitless and infinite as the War on Terror unless we can shift the jargon in new and meaningful directions. Excepting that, for instance, we can ever come up with a suitable definition of what they even are, there will always be a contingent of culture that won't get on board with the government's message that they are too harmful, and neither will the government ever be complicit in a plan to minimize their harm and perpetually dismiss them. Some discussion clearly needs to occur here. So let's talk about drugs.

Wait, let's talk about what, again?

       

Written by :

Chip Dingo