Wednesday, May 16, 2018

The High Road


All of my grandparents were born in or before 1900, a time when hashish, cocaine, and opium were legal. Laudanum (opium and alcohol) was available over-the-counter as a pain reliever. The nation was never so high before or since. It didn’t hurt productivity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the U.S. economy grew at a 6% annual rate – not smoothly by any means but on average. The Drug War began in earnest during World War One and alcohol Prohibition began in 1920. The latter was famously a failure. The former was less famously so, but a failure nonetheless. Despite spotty loosening of laws against marijuana in recent years, the bulk of the drug war continues to this day. So far as I know, my grandparents stuck with alcohol. Both sets fermented their own wine during Prohibition. (I still have their equipment in my garden shed.) One grandfather was fond of whiskey, but not so much as to noticeably interfere with his work or family life. That this properly was anybody else’s business was a notion alien to all of them.
The wine kit in the shed

This bit of history was brought to mind in the past few hours by the news and by a TV show. Let’s address the news first: there are very few pronouncements from the politically divergent inhabitants of the White House and Drumthwacket (the NJ Governor’s Mansion) that bear much similarity to each other, but the ones on “the opioid crisis” are interchangeable. Both threaten to double down on traditional Prohibition-style penalties and both promise to spend more money. The federal spending bill approved last month boosted spending to “combat opioids” by $3,300,000,000. Despite severe budget problems, the new NJ governor has proposed to spend $100,000,000 to do the same including $31,000,000 for “social risk factors,” which sounds deliberately vague, and $13,000,000 for improved data collection, which does also. I think we can assume these efforts on the federal and state levels will be as effective as all the other wars against drugs and alcohol have been in the past. The biggest effect of recent efforts to limit access to prescription opioid painkillers has been to drive pill users to heroin, which besides being more effective is (precisely because it is entirely illegal) cheaper, more available, and highly likely to be contaminated with deadlier substances such as fentanyl.

Said Aldous Huxley in his 1958 essay Return to Brave New World: “The habit of taking vacations from the more-or-less purgatorial world, which we have created for ourselves, is universal. Moralists may denounce it; but, in the teeth of disapproving talk and repressive legislation, the habit persists, and mind-transforming drugs are everywhere available. The Marxian formula, ‘Religion is the opium of the people,’ is reversible, and one can say, with even more truth, that ‘Opium is the religion of the people.’”

After the news was a rerun of Mom. I usually don’t discover favorite TV series during their initial broadcasts. Typically, while I might be aware of them, I don’t try them until a year or two after cancelation: a delay that at least can provide the advantage of several seasons on which to binge. Mom is an exception. The notion of taking on the dark subject matter of addiction as comedy appealed to me with the first episode back in 2013. It’s now in a fifth season on CBS and the first four seasons are already syndicated to other channels. In an age of prickliness and intentional humorlessness, modern edgy sitcoms of the old Norman Lear variety are rare, and this one is welcome. (Soap box aside: All humor that matters is inappropriate, but we can’t get it without allowing space for inappropriate humor that doesn’t matter too. Not even death is off-limits. GB Shaw: "Life does not cease to be funny when someone dies, any more than it ceases to be serious when someone laughs.") Recovering (sometimes relapsing) alcoholics with dysfunctional family and personal relationships who nonetheless struggle to get on with their lives make surprisingly good comic characters. Anna Faris and Allison Janney are ideally cast as mother/daughter alcoholics Bonnie and Christy. They and the rest of the cast successfully express the absurdity in life events that are not in and of themselves funny at all. The characters’ humor in desperate circumstances is their biggest strength and the show’s biggest asset. (I wrote a short story years ago about substance abuse called Blow though I neglected to make it funny.)

Few of us have escaped being harmed by addiction, either directly or by the actions of other people in our lives. This is why proponents of Prohibition of this or that substance continue their well-intentioned crusades in the face of a history of counter-productivity – the old saw about good intentions and pavement is no less relevant for being hoary. Attempts at authoritarian solutions, aside from being ineffective, raise a host of other issues as well. The only kind of war on drugs that has been shown to work is the kind represented in Mom: personal choice. Until an individual wants to stop (and we have to acknowledge that some folks never will), no amount of punishment or “help” will succeed. The desire to stop can’t just be a passing thing in the midst of a hangover either; it has to persist after the hangover wears off, too. With that choice, while there are no guarantees, help might actually help.


Ringo Starr – No No Song

6 comments:

  1. I think I heard Colbert take a potshot at Ringo's lyrics tonight in his TV show for kids, Strangest Things. Thanks for reminding us of the basis for that joke.

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    1. I’m glad it chanced to be a reminder. One of the few advantages of a chronometer reading as lofty as mine is a stocked pantry of aging pop culture references. (Forgive the mixed metaphors.) Thanks for commenting.

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  2. I had a friend that was addicted to opioids. (He eventually died.) I believe he was introduced to them via a neck injury. At times I believe he wanted to stop (not an easy thing, the way he described opioids was it was legalized heroin), but still had the injury to contend with afterwards. It's hard to say unless one wears their shoes which course to take or what is to be believed. He was a child of the 60s too, better living through chemistry, which he didn't have a problem with either. But overall he was just a regular guy, friendly, fun, tall stories, that type thing. It's easy for those in power to just say, just say no, go to rehab, but that's not always an easy process if you think about it. Most people do have a life to contend with as well: children, jobs, sometimes that will cost money as well, etc. I saw a news show that reported at one time doctors were told to recommend strongly (big pharma) these drugs to their patients as well, probably not even knowing the consequences themselves. Quite the conundrum and problem now.

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    1. I’m not minimizing the harm people with substance abuse problems can do to themselves or how upsetting a person’s behavior can be to people around them, but I’m not a big fan of saving people against their will, even if that were possible. Free people are free to make bad choices. (That doesn’t mean they should drive or otherwise risk others’ lives, of course, whether the intoxicant of choice is legal or illegal.) I know that’s not a prevailing opinion at present, but as a first step I’d like at least to legalize opium. It is relatively mild compared to the derivatives and synthetics. Besides, it inspired Lewis Carroll to give us “Alice in Wonderland” and Thomas Jefferson found enough inspiration in it to grow opium poppies at Monticello.

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  3. Your aside on humor is something I agree with too. The human reaction to uncomfortable situation is to laugh. That is why the absurd can make us chuckle. So we need to reach that level of discomfort and to do that, you have to break some rule. I thinks the guys at "South Park" explained it all pretty well in their episode that had a cross over with Bart Simpson. I'm blanking on it now, but there was a great scene where Bart and Cartman discuss humor and how far they are willing to go. Was humorous and explained why the South Park team goes as far as they do.

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    1. Context matters, naturally. A friend of mine was a long-time volunteer on the local EMS. (Yes, we have a volunteer fire department here.) She would relate the jokes and dark humor made by police and EMS at gruesome scenes; yet, they were not callous. She wouldn't have been an EMS volunteer if she were. It's just a way of dealing in the moment with an awful situation. It sounds terrible to civilians who overhear it, of course, so they try not to let that happen. This also brings to mind a Bill Mauldin cartoon from WW2 in which GIs enter a ruined town and one says, "We sure liberated the hell out of this place."

      While I'm not a fan of "South Park" (I liked the movie but show didn't snare me), I approve of it.

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