The "War on Drugs"

FREE INQUIRY does not have a political agenda. We recognize that our readers

represent a wide range of political opinions and that they differ sharply on issues, candidates, and political affiliations. This issue presents articles by Thomas Szasz, Steven Wisotsky, and Tom Flynn that advocate the legalization of drugs. My own views are somewhat less radical. I believe that the War on Drugs has unleashed a kind of self-righteous hysteria that may under-mine the very fabric of American democracy and may be worse than what it seeks to eradicate. It is even reminiscent of a new fascism—and I use the term advisedly—in the guise of stamping out "moral turpitude."

Let me hasten to say that I think it is folly for anyone to use drugs, and that addiction is a tragedy. Yet I submit that the all-out war to achieve a "drug-free society" is counterproductive. We ought to explore rational alternatives. There are at least three options: (1) prohibition, (2) legalization, and (3) decriminalization, education, and re-habilitation.

Absolute prohibition is the policy of President Bush and his drug czar William Bennett, as well as many in Congress. Prohibitionists wish to use all the powers of the state to stamp out drugs. The current War on Drugs is not new, however, and one would think that prohibitionists would learn from history. They seek to intensify policies that have failed for decades. The results of today's drug policies are property crime, high murder rates, corruption of public officials, the spread of AIDS, and the overloading of our courts and prisons. The War on Drugs even permitted the Bush administration to launch a questionable war on Panama, killing hundreds of GIs and innocent civilians, wounding thousands, and causing great property damage. The capture of Manuel Noriega and his transport back to the United States for trial has raised serious questions of legality. Indeed, virtually every South American nation has condemned this invasion, as have most countries of the world. The entrapment of Marion Barry by the FBI further illustrates the lengths to which the prohibitionists are willing to go. Today's "drug lords" have replaced the Communists of the 1950s and the secular humanists of the 1980s as the main satanic

foe in American life. Some people need a scapegoat, and drug users and traffickers have become the focus of all that is evil in America.

Unfortunately, in the service of this anti-drug campaign all too many people are willing to permit the search and seizure of private property, and the sealing of our borders by the military. America now has more people in prison per capita than any other nation in the world, and about 40 percent of the newly incarcerated are serving time for drug offenses. In the past few years about three-quarters of a million drug arrests have been made annually, and about 75 percent of these are not for producing or trafficking drugs, but for the mere possession of illegal substances, primarily marijuana. Marijuana is legal in many countries, including the Netherlands, where it is sold openly in the shops. But the anti-drug mentality has indiscriminately lumped all drugs together, and prohibitionists classify even casual users as "dope fiends." For example, though cocaine is considered by many to be the demon incarnate, federal statistics show that only 20 percent of the very small percentage of the population that uses cocaine becomes addicted. No doubt that figure is disturbing, but it hardly makes cocaine the ominous social scourge that moral absolutists consider it to be. In fact, the most dangerous drugs in America are alcohol and cigarettes: the toll in health and death exacted by these substances is enormous.

In recent months a number of libertarians and conservatives, including Milton Fried-man, William F. Buckley, and George Schultz, have been calling for the legalization of drugs. Anything is better than the present situation, they argue, and to legalize drugs would at least remove the profit motive, and thus much crime and corruption, from our society. Many people object to legalization because they fear that it will encourage drug use and increase the number of addicts, but it is difficult to test this policy a priori.

There is a third option that would be far less risky, and that is simply to decriminalize drug use. This would be a policy of benign neglect; that is, we would not go all out in pursuing adults for the mere possession or use of drugs. At a minimum, we should reduce the campaign against marijuana. This would free our resources for substance-abuse

treatment programs, including clean-needle distribution so as to prevent the spread of AIDS. In the current federal budget pro-posed by Bush, the lion's share of public funds goes to police interdiction, while education, research, and rehabilitation get short shrift. We should attempt to reduce the demand for drugs by emphasizing positive humanist moral virtues, especially the need for self-respect, self-reliance, and long-term happiness, as opposed to short-term pleasures that can have long-lasting negative consequences.

When I was a youngster, the newspapers reported daily police raids on "dens of iniquity." The most evil people in the world then were not only bootleggers, but gamblers and bookies, and the puritans of that era would swoop down on poker and crap games and betting parlors, and arrest those involved in the numbers racket. Today the government sponsors lotteries and off-track betting, and the Catholic church is able to keep solvent only by holding bingo games! One person's permissible temptation is another's sin. At different times in history we single out one kind of substance or activity as sinful, and condemn those who use or engage in it as benighted social pariahs. But perhaps the rarest virtue in our sin-conscious society is prudence and common sense. I suggest that there is a sensible middle ground in dealing with excessive drug use. Perhaps we should begin by attempting to reduce the current moral hysteria and to discuss rational ways of regulating drugs, ways that would not risk the creation of a police state or the compro-mise of our cherished constitutional liberties.

African-Americans for humanism

This issue of FREE INQUIRY presents a bold new initiative in its "African-

American Humanist Declaration." As a group, blacks are the most religious people in America, yet they are also among the most disadvantaged. Christianity plays an inor-dinate role in the black community, and has undoubtedly had some positive effects; for instance, it was a force in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. But in our judgment, Christianity has also had negative effects for African-Americans, for it has cultivated an ethics of obedience rather than self-reliance, and has hardly rescued the inner cities from crime, violence, and despair.

Recently Islam has been competing with Christianity and making powerful inroads into the black community. But few African-Americans have adopted a secular humanist outlook. With this in mind, Norm Allen,

Notes from the Editor

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working with the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, has founded African-Americans for Secular Humanism, which seeks to spread humanist ideals. The group faces an uphill battle; unfortunately, many African-Americans find atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism anathema to everything they have been taught to respect.

A significant number of African-Americans have studied at colleges and universities; a growing sector has entered into the middle classes and many are even successfully entering politics. African-Americans have made significant progress during the past three decades, and we believe that the ideals of secular humanism—self-reliance, self-discipline, science, reason, and education—can help them to achieve even more. It is time that an effort be made to enlist African-Americans into the ranks of secular humanism.

Related to this initiative are our efforts to extend secular humanism to the Third World. The International Humanist and Ethical Union has placed a high priority on the need to develop humanism in Africa and Latin America. African-Americans for Humanism has been working to assist new humanist groups in Nigeria and Ghana. Concomitant with this are our efforts to establish humanist groups in Mexico and Costa Rica. Though such modest projects no doubt pale in comparison with the massive efforts to convert Africa and Latin America to Christianity, we are making some headway.

Reflections on the democratic revolutions of our time

been vindicated by history. Marxist-humanists in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania also suffered great personal risk by criticizing party control and demanding human rights in an open society. Today many humanists, such as Dubcek of Czechoslovakia, have assumed positions of power. It is an irony of history that the kind of humanistic democracy crushed by Rus-sian tanks in Czechoslovakia in 1968 has moved to the forefront, demonstrating again that the deepest revolution of our time is the democratic revolution.

According to Stojanovic, Marxism has been so thoroughly discredited in Eastern Europe that it is now all but dead as a viable alternative. No doubt Marx will continue to be read as a seminal thinker, but only one among others; he can no longer be taken as Holy Writ.

The outbreaks of hatred and violence between nations in the Soviet Empire and throughout Eastern Europe are quite a surprise. Little did the world imagine the extent to which Armenians, Azerbaijanians, Georgians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrain-ians, and others would reject Marxist-Leninist ideology, and turn on one another. Seventy-two years of strenuous efforts by the Soviets to tame the passions aroused by nationalism have not succeeded. We detected a glimmer of this during the International Humanist and Ethical Union's 1989 dialogue with Soviet atheists (see FREE INQUIRY, Fall

1989). But few were aware of how massive these animosities were.

No one can hope to build a "new society" by attempting to repress national aspirations or destroy deep-seated religious identity. The right to freedom of conscience—whether to believe or not believe—must be respected. A powerful temptation for religiosity continues to persist within the human breast, and ethnicity has proved to be more recalcitrant and enduring than "class interests." The blunder of the Soviets was that their fear of an open democratic society prohibited people of different racial, reli-gious, and ethnic backgrounds to share their cultures, move about, commingle, and intermarry, and thus the government failed to create a melting pot based on a more universal identity. Instead, by using methods of repression, party leaders succeeded only in intensifying smoldering resentments and irreconcilable hatreds in large sectors of their populations. It is questionable whether the atheism imposed by Leninist-Stalinist regimes will be replaced by genuine secular humanism. Unfortunately, it is more likely that new waves of divisive ethnic religiosity and nationalism will emerge.

There is a lesson for all of us: We need to build a world community and new global ethics in which there is some common ground for all of humanity. In this noble venture the high ideals of humanism and democracy should brook large. (PK)

Editorial

The Salem Witch Trials and the Modern Media

Vern L. Bullough

Revolutionary events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union continue to

unravel at a breathless pace. These dramatic changes hold forth tremendous promise, though unpredictable dangers may emerge to inflame the European continent. What is happening demonstrates anew that ideas have consequences, and that what is unthink-able in one generation may suddenly take hold in the next.

Marxist humanism, which had consis-tently defended freedom against totalitarian repression, now has had remarkable influ-ence in Eastern Europe. For example, former president of Yugoslavia Milovan Djilas, Svetozar Stojanovic, and Mihailo Markovic, members of a group of Yugoslavian Marxist-humanists called Praxis-8, courageously advocated pluralistic democratic institutions twenty or thirty years ago, when it was extremely dangerous to do so. They have

Spring 1990

Outbreaks of mass hysteria similar to that which occurred during the Salem witch

trials seem to be part of the recurring pattern of American history. The triggers vary, but the results are the same: a significant number of Americans are labeled as being sufficiently deviant that the public must be made aware of the dangers of their existence. Individuals

Vern L. Bullough is SUNY distinguished professor and senior editor of FREE INQUIRY.

believed to fit the description of each new kind of dangerous pervert are exposed, pilloried, and often jailed, and then after a time disappear from the public eye.

For many years after World War II, adherents of the political left were labeled as Communists. Eventually many were called before congressional committees, shunned by their neighbors, and fired from their jobs. Ultimately most slunk off into media oblivion. Obviously some of these people were Communists, and some were not particularly democratic, but the term was

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