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 19^th and early 20^th 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