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Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use
Jacob Sullum goes beyond debate on legalization or the proper way to win the "war on drugs," to the heart of a social and individual defense of using drugs.
Saying Yes argues that the all-or-nothing thinking that has long dominated discussions of illegal drug use should give way to a wiser, subtler approach. Exemplified by the tradition of moderate drinking, such an approach rejects the idea that there is something inherently wrong with using chemicals to alter one's mood or mind. Saying Yes further contends that the conventional understanding of addiction, portraying it as a kind of chemical slavery in which the user's values and wishes do not matter, is also fundamentally misleading.
Writing in a lively and provocative style that earned him critical acclaim for his previous book, Sullum contrasts drug use as it is described by politicians and propagandists with drug use as it is experienced by the silent majority of users. The lives they lead challenge a central premise of the war on the idea that certain substances have the power to compel immoral behavior.
Saying Yes argues that the all-or-nothing thinking that has long dominated discussions of illegal drug use should give way to a wiser, subtler approach. Exemplified by the tradition of moderate drinking, such an approach rejects the idea that there is something inherently wrong with using chemicals to alter one's mood or mind. Saying Yes further contends that the conventional understanding of addiction, portraying it as a kind of chemical slavery in which the user's values and wishes do not matter, is also fundamentally misleading.
Writing in a lively and provocative style that earned him critical acclaim for his previous book, Sullum contrasts drug use as it is described by politicians and propagandists with drug use as it is experienced by the silent majority of users. The lives they lead challenge a central premise of the war on the idea that certain substances have the power to compel immoral behavior.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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May 27, 2020
"Humans have brains that are built to work on anecdote rather than real data." [Jeffrey P. Utz, MD]
Man's relationship with drugs has been one long and turbulent ride. Since first contact they've been consumed, smoked, inhaled and injected for everything from their mood-altering effects to their analgesic properties. Across generations and cultures, the legal status of nicotine, ethanol (the ingredient that supplies alcohol its intoxicating highs), cannabis and a congeries of other psychoactive substances has oscillated from complete prohibition to medicinal use only to nonmedicinal recreational, with some blurry shades in between.
In the United States, the posture on narcotics is one of quick suspicion and reproach, tilting lopsidedly toward criminalization. Columnist Jacob Sullum explores this general attitude in Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use with a data-centric focus, asking whether existing drug policies and popular perception are sensible or whether the conversation has been hijacked by false prophets and disinformation.
After canvassing the world religions for their perspectives on various euphoriants, Sullum transitions to the pith of his ensuing narrative: the statistics on drug usage. Any attempt to dissect the war on drugs must at minimum involve a familiarity with the hard data on psychotropic substances both licit and illicit. Sullum provides this in spades, chronicling usage statistics and dozens of studies on marijuana, methamphetamine, LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), PCP, cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin.
Anti-drug activists rely primarily on a two-pronged prosecution: 1) an inordinate amount of crime is caused by drug use and 2) moderation is impossible or something like impossible. But are these persevering assumptions tenable? What does the research show?
The literature simply does not support these claims, no matter how loudly the media and abstinence hounds continue to repeat them. Above all, Saying Yes takes aim at the myth of "voodoo pharmacology," which Sullum defines as the notion "that drugs control people rather than the other way around" (p. 268). The idea that drugs in some tangible or abstract sense recircuit the brain and neutralize free will is certainly a valuable defense for a user who stands convicted of a crime, but it reflects a misimpression of the particulars of substance dependence (the medically preferred term to 'addiction') as well as a failure to zoom out and examine precursor effects.
What the data indicate is that actions and conduct while under the influence of narcotics, and the level of substance dependence achieved, have more to do with the user's preexisting psyche and his or her sociocultural circumstances than anything inherent to the drug itself. Someone down on their luck not only may be more likely to use in the first place, but their personality, ongoing situation and expectations of taking the drug tend to steer the attendant psychoactive effects in consistent, if not altogether predictable directions.
When we take a look at crimes alleged to be the result of drug use, we consistently find that the perpetrator had a history of crime, violence and/or antisocial tendencies. Rarely do we find a pattern of nonviolence abruptly interrupted by a drug-fueled spree of immoderate behavior and crime. If any one drug had a direct tendency to warp human behavior in ways that enact unprecedented transformations on the part of the user, then we should expect to find a distribution of users with dissimilar backgrounds exhibiting similar behavior while under the influence of said drug.
We do not find this: drug-associated crimes and the extent to which they are abused tend to draw more from proximate circumstances like one's social environment and lifestyle. Thus contrary to the spurious connections found in mainstream rhetoric, recreational drugs do not regularly turn docile, reticent individuals into unfeeling, reckless, sex-crazed brutes, or vice versa.
The Golden Mean
On the second point almost universal to drug prohibitionist rhetoric, the copious data indicate that most narcotics users—the statistics are more or less consistent for all drugs surveyed—do so in moderation and lead functional, productive lives. Questions over how to define 'moderation' can be disambiguated by looking to alcohol as a proxy. All of us either know people who consume alcohol more than occasionally or do so ourselves without manifesting life-destructive patterns. Just as most are not burdened by their forays with alcohol, the data-driven profile of the typical narcotics user is someone who indulges their desire for certain substances while being fully moored as a functioning unit of society.
To understand why moderation is the rule and not the rarefied exception requires nothing like the bad-faith moral authority deployed by anti-drug lobbyists. It merely requires we approach the question in terms of benefits and risks. Often enough, one's desire to return to the drug is overridden by one's commitments to family, friends and other social and occupational obligations. Conversely, those with low economic security and no social safety net are more likely to develop drug dependency issues.
Much like alcoholism, without a resume of responsibility to attend to and other societal pressures in place to curb excess, it becomes decidedly easier to fall prey to overuse. Yet for the vast majority of more than one-time users, their drug of choice yields temporary highs, in between which they are free to pursue the activities that fill up the remainder of their day without negative interference. While the war on drugs tends to dichotomize usage in terms of extremes, there is clearly ample space between abstention and enslavement.
Deconstructing the Dysmorphia
Given the limpidity of the data on narcotics usage, what can explain the abiding cultural stigma? A lot of it, Sullum recommends, is grounded in misjudgments by people who have never used the drug in question or recreational drugs in general, who jump to hasty conclusions based on superficial connections. 'Since Tom is a junkie and has done nothing with his life, drugs must be to blame', or 'I see what drugs have done to this person and I don't want it to happen to me.'
But it is the media that have reinforced these latent preconceptions by playing up anecdotes and downplaying the (admittedly less captivating) empirical side of the equation. Sullum lays special emphasis on alcohol throughout, one of humanity's eldest drugs, refusing to keep it far from overheard while assessing the risk of currently targeted illicit substances. After all, alcohol went through its own prohibition period and over the decades precisely the same arguments leveled at alcohol to keep it off the shelves have been redirected at the menace of the week.
Indeed, the statistics on crime and violence can be easily torqued to incriminate alcohol, too. Just as the media played central roles both in the declamation and legalization of alcohol, so it plays equivalently critical roles in the domain of nonalcoholic substances. As more of the silent majority opens up about their drug habits, the quicker entrenched stereotypes will dissolve.
Another key to changing public perception is attention from the medical establishment. There are a number of accepted therapeutic treatments that overlap significantly with narcotics in terms of the ailments they target as well as their pharmacological effects. In many cases the disorders certain popularly prescribed drugs purport to treat are only hazily distinguished from reasons users turn to illicit substances with similar pharmacological profiles. Ecstasy, for example, is often taken to improve one's experience in social settings, and there is no evidence that MDMA involves higher substance dependence issues than commonly prescribed remedies.
Marijuana, once characterized as a gateway drug on the road to ruin is of course well on its way to mass legalization. Its medicinal value as an antiemetic and antispasmodic and its subtle analgesic effects have led to relaxed legal controls in the US. As of this writing, marijuana possession and sale is legal in twenty states and the District of Columbia.
The Exacerbations of Embargo
Toward the close of the book, Sullum spends some time analyzing how usage patterns might shift following a removal of the drug ban. For one, any time a product is sequestered to the black market, the opportunities for violence multiply. A move toward decriminalization would reduce crime associated with sales, acquisition and distribution. Second, unregulated markets translate to heavily inflated prices. Heroin, for example, can cost forty to fifty times more than a legal dose, making illicitly obtained substances more likely to drive users into economic instability and social and physical degeneration.
Third, absent regulation a whole miscellany of hazards comes into play including dummy doses, poisoned doses and overdoses. Fourth, due to the high costs, heroin and other opiate habitués are more likely to inject the drug—a more guaranteed and efficient method of uptake—raising the potential for transmission of diseases through shared injection materials.
In a post-criminalized world, the aforementioned social safeguards that promote healthy usage patterns would remain intact, thereby reducing the overall number of poor outcomes. And on a more philosophical level, the repeal of our regulatory apparatus would force us to come to grips with the dark side of human nature that feeds into the pernicious behavior for which drugs have often been substituted as a scapegoat.
Closing Thoughts
Saying Yes isn't the lengthiest book on the topic, clocking in at just 284 pages, but Sullum manages to cram a Titanic's worth of useful information into its slender form. It is a balanced, data-sensitive look at an uneasy and highly controversial topic. In navigating the divide between use and abuse, Sullum forthrightly avoids the monochrome portrayals of drug users prevalent in media caricatures in favor of thorough, wide-angle analysis. Many of my own preconceptions were challenged and tossed aside. Read the hard statistics on "hard" drugs and decide for yourself whether the criminalization paradigm is worthwhile, whether it creates more harm than good, and whether psychoactive effects reflect more the properties of the drug or the individual.
As I progressed and read about how (and how quickly!) public perception has changed with respect to certain drugs, how stereotypes and stigmas have rotated among different drugs at different times, in some cases even different classes of drugs, and how media and social cues completely parameterized the debate and national discourse, the more I recalled the quote preceding this review. We are wooed by anecdotes and tranquilized by data. Efforts like Saying Yes have the potential to reverse this asymmetry.
Perhaps the only knock against the book I could muster is Sullum's early fixation on religion's history with forbidden substances, which read like an extended preamble and seemed somewhat removed from the regime of relevance to the war on drugs. Quibbles aside, Saying Yes should be requisite reading for an informed discussion on the longstanding war on drugs, for relating to friends, family and relatives who may be recreationally friendly with narcotics, and for anyone considering incorporating them into their own regimen.
Note: This review is republished from my official website. Click through for additional footnotes and imagery.
Man's relationship with drugs has been one long and turbulent ride. Since first contact they've been consumed, smoked, inhaled and injected for everything from their mood-altering effects to their analgesic properties. Across generations and cultures, the legal status of nicotine, ethanol (the ingredient that supplies alcohol its intoxicating highs), cannabis and a congeries of other psychoactive substances has oscillated from complete prohibition to medicinal use only to nonmedicinal recreational, with some blurry shades in between.
In the United States, the posture on narcotics is one of quick suspicion and reproach, tilting lopsidedly toward criminalization. Columnist Jacob Sullum explores this general attitude in Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use with a data-centric focus, asking whether existing drug policies and popular perception are sensible or whether the conversation has been hijacked by false prophets and disinformation.
After canvassing the world religions for their perspectives on various euphoriants, Sullum transitions to the pith of his ensuing narrative: the statistics on drug usage. Any attempt to dissect the war on drugs must at minimum involve a familiarity with the hard data on psychotropic substances both licit and illicit. Sullum provides this in spades, chronicling usage statistics and dozens of studies on marijuana, methamphetamine, LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), PCP, cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin.
Anti-drug activists rely primarily on a two-pronged prosecution: 1) an inordinate amount of crime is caused by drug use and 2) moderation is impossible or something like impossible. But are these persevering assumptions tenable? What does the research show?
The literature simply does not support these claims, no matter how loudly the media and abstinence hounds continue to repeat them. Above all, Saying Yes takes aim at the myth of "voodoo pharmacology," which Sullum defines as the notion "that drugs control people rather than the other way around" (p. 268). The idea that drugs in some tangible or abstract sense recircuit the brain and neutralize free will is certainly a valuable defense for a user who stands convicted of a crime, but it reflects a misimpression of the particulars of substance dependence (the medically preferred term to 'addiction') as well as a failure to zoom out and examine precursor effects.
"...the conventional understanding of addiction, which portrays it as a kind of chemical slavery in which the user's values and wishes do not matter, is fundamentally misleading." (p. 27)
What the data indicate is that actions and conduct while under the influence of narcotics, and the level of substance dependence achieved, have more to do with the user's preexisting psyche and his or her sociocultural circumstances than anything inherent to the drug itself. Someone down on their luck not only may be more likely to use in the first place, but their personality, ongoing situation and expectations of taking the drug tend to steer the attendant psychoactive effects in consistent, if not altogether predictable directions.
"...it's clear that happy, well-adjusted people are less likely to get into trouble with drugs." (p. 280)
When we take a look at crimes alleged to be the result of drug use, we consistently find that the perpetrator had a history of crime, violence and/or antisocial tendencies. Rarely do we find a pattern of nonviolence abruptly interrupted by a drug-fueled spree of immoderate behavior and crime. If any one drug had a direct tendency to warp human behavior in ways that enact unprecedented transformations on the part of the user, then we should expect to find a distribution of users with dissimilar backgrounds exhibiting similar behavior while under the influence of said drug.
We do not find this: drug-associated crimes and the extent to which they are abused tend to draw more from proximate circumstances like one's social environment and lifestyle. Thus contrary to the spurious connections found in mainstream rhetoric, recreational drugs do not regularly turn docile, reticent individuals into unfeeling, reckless, sex-crazed brutes, or vice versa.
The Golden Mean
On the second point almost universal to drug prohibitionist rhetoric, the copious data indicate that most narcotics users—the statistics are more or less consistent for all drugs surveyed—do so in moderation and lead functional, productive lives. Questions over how to define 'moderation' can be disambiguated by looking to alcohol as a proxy. All of us either know people who consume alcohol more than occasionally or do so ourselves without manifesting life-destructive patterns. Just as most are not burdened by their forays with alcohol, the data-driven profile of the typical narcotics user is someone who indulges their desire for certain substances while being fully moored as a functioning unit of society.
"The portrait of predictable escalation from experimentation to an unbreakable habit was wrong when it was applied to drinking, and it is no less mistaken as a description of illegal drug use-even such reputedly powerful substances as heroin, crack, and methamphetamine-do not typically become addicts." (p. 27)
To understand why moderation is the rule and not the rarefied exception requires nothing like the bad-faith moral authority deployed by anti-drug lobbyists. It merely requires we approach the question in terms of benefits and risks. Often enough, one's desire to return to the drug is overridden by one's commitments to family, friends and other social and occupational obligations. Conversely, those with low economic security and no social safety net are more likely to develop drug dependency issues.
Much like alcoholism, without a resume of responsibility to attend to and other societal pressures in place to curb excess, it becomes decidedly easier to fall prey to overuse. Yet for the vast majority of more than one-time users, their drug of choice yields temporary highs, in between which they are free to pursue the activities that fill up the remainder of their day without negative interference. While the war on drugs tends to dichotomize usage in terms of extremes, there is clearly ample space between abstention and enslavement.
Deconstructing the Dysmorphia
Given the limpidity of the data on narcotics usage, what can explain the abiding cultural stigma? A lot of it, Sullum recommends, is grounded in misjudgments by people who have never used the drug in question or recreational drugs in general, who jump to hasty conclusions based on superficial connections. 'Since Tom is a junkie and has done nothing with his life, drugs must be to blame', or 'I see what drugs have done to this person and I don't want it to happen to me.'
But it is the media that have reinforced these latent preconceptions by playing up anecdotes and downplaying the (admittedly less captivating) empirical side of the equation. Sullum lays special emphasis on alcohol throughout, one of humanity's eldest drugs, refusing to keep it far from overheard while assessing the risk of currently targeted illicit substances. After all, alcohol went through its own prohibition period and over the decades precisely the same arguments leveled at alcohol to keep it off the shelves have been redirected at the menace of the week.
Indeed, the statistics on crime and violence can be easily torqued to incriminate alcohol, too. Just as the media played central roles both in the declamation and legalization of alcohol, so it plays equivalently critical roles in the domain of nonalcoholic substances. As more of the silent majority opens up about their drug habits, the quicker entrenched stereotypes will dissolve.
Another key to changing public perception is attention from the medical establishment. There are a number of accepted therapeutic treatments that overlap significantly with narcotics in terms of the ailments they target as well as their pharmacological effects. In many cases the disorders certain popularly prescribed drugs purport to treat are only hazily distinguished from reasons users turn to illicit substances with similar pharmacological profiles. Ecstasy, for example, is often taken to improve one's experience in social settings, and there is no evidence that MDMA involves higher substance dependence issues than commonly prescribed remedies.
"Taking MDMA to overcome shyness is drug abuse, but prescribing Paxil to treat "social anxiety disorder" is good medicine. Legally, the distinction between medical and nonmedical is clear. Conceptually, it has never been blurrier." (pp. 252-253)
Marijuana, once characterized as a gateway drug on the road to ruin is of course well on its way to mass legalization. Its medicinal value as an antiemetic and antispasmodic and its subtle analgesic effects have led to relaxed legal controls in the US. As of this writing, marijuana possession and sale is legal in twenty states and the District of Columbia.
The Exacerbations of Embargo
Toward the close of the book, Sullum spends some time analyzing how usage patterns might shift following a removal of the drug ban. For one, any time a product is sequestered to the black market, the opportunities for violence multiply. A move toward decriminalization would reduce crime associated with sales, acquisition and distribution. Second, unregulated markets translate to heavily inflated prices. Heroin, for example, can cost forty to fifty times more than a legal dose, making illicitly obtained substances more likely to drive users into economic instability and social and physical degeneration.
Third, absent regulation a whole miscellany of hazards comes into play including dummy doses, poisoned doses and overdoses. Fourth, due to the high costs, heroin and other opiate habitués are more likely to inject the drug—a more guaranteed and efficient method of uptake—raising the potential for transmission of diseases through shared injection materials.
In a post-criminalized world, the aforementioned social safeguards that promote healthy usage patterns would remain intact, thereby reducing the overall number of poor outcomes. And on a more philosophical level, the repeal of our regulatory apparatus would force us to come to grips with the dark side of human nature that feeds into the pernicious behavior for which drugs have often been substituted as a scapegoat.
Closing Thoughts
Saying Yes isn't the lengthiest book on the topic, clocking in at just 284 pages, but Sullum manages to cram a Titanic's worth of useful information into its slender form. It is a balanced, data-sensitive look at an uneasy and highly controversial topic. In navigating the divide between use and abuse, Sullum forthrightly avoids the monochrome portrayals of drug users prevalent in media caricatures in favor of thorough, wide-angle analysis. Many of my own preconceptions were challenged and tossed aside. Read the hard statistics on "hard" drugs and decide for yourself whether the criminalization paradigm is worthwhile, whether it creates more harm than good, and whether psychoactive effects reflect more the properties of the drug or the individual.
As I progressed and read about how (and how quickly!) public perception has changed with respect to certain drugs, how stereotypes and stigmas have rotated among different drugs at different times, in some cases even different classes of drugs, and how media and social cues completely parameterized the debate and national discourse, the more I recalled the quote preceding this review. We are wooed by anecdotes and tranquilized by data. Efforts like Saying Yes have the potential to reverse this asymmetry.
Perhaps the only knock against the book I could muster is Sullum's early fixation on religion's history with forbidden substances, which read like an extended preamble and seemed somewhat removed from the regime of relevance to the war on drugs. Quibbles aside, Saying Yes should be requisite reading for an informed discussion on the longstanding war on drugs, for relating to friends, family and relatives who may be recreationally friendly with narcotics, and for anyone considering incorporating them into their own regimen.
Note: This review is republished from my official website. Click through for additional footnotes and imagery.
January 17, 2019
I read this book for a public policy class at Duke and remembered finding it enlightening, so I picked it back up from the shelf for a second look (now to go to a Little Free Library).
Saying Yes is a courageous, convincing book. The main point is that we have been fed a lot of misinformation and stereotypes about drugs and drug users, at the expense of being able to have a conversation about moderate and safe use. While some of the arguments and history I could have told you, much of it was new information. I found the studies and statistics particularly interesting in showing that excess (addiction, ruining one’s life) is the exception rather than the rule.
In correcting my stereotypes, the book makes me less judgmental about drug use. It also leaves me sad and frustrated at our laws—
The arbitrary boundaries between alcohol and cigarettes versus illegal drugs, and between medical and non-medical drug use. (“If an unhappy person takes heroin, he is committing a crime. If he takes Prozac, he is treating his depression”... Taking MDMA to overcome shyness is drug abuse, but prescribing Paxil to treat ‘social anxiety disorder’ is proper medicine....)
The way prohibition creates or exacerbates risks associated with drugs- arrest, overdose (as users are driven to the black market where doses and purity are uncertain), AIDS and hepatitis (as limited access to injection equipment drives people to share needles)
Cool to see how attitudes and laws towards marijuana have started to shift since the book was published though!
Saying Yes is a courageous, convincing book. The main point is that we have been fed a lot of misinformation and stereotypes about drugs and drug users, at the expense of being able to have a conversation about moderate and safe use. While some of the arguments and history I could have told you, much of it was new information. I found the studies and statistics particularly interesting in showing that excess (addiction, ruining one’s life) is the exception rather than the rule.
In correcting my stereotypes, the book makes me less judgmental about drug use. It also leaves me sad and frustrated at our laws—
The arbitrary boundaries between alcohol and cigarettes versus illegal drugs, and between medical and non-medical drug use. (“If an unhappy person takes heroin, he is committing a crime. If he takes Prozac, he is treating his depression”... Taking MDMA to overcome shyness is drug abuse, but prescribing Paxil to treat ‘social anxiety disorder’ is proper medicine....)
The way prohibition creates or exacerbates risks associated with drugs- arrest, overdose (as users are driven to the black market where doses and purity are uncertain), AIDS and hepatitis (as limited access to injection equipment drives people to share needles)
Cool to see how attitudes and laws towards marijuana have started to shift since the book was published though!
July 17, 2007
Did you know not all users are abusers?
That, according to gov't stats, millions of Americans do (illegal) drugs regularly and still manage to be productive, good citizens? If you find yourself demonizing your use or that of others, this book may just turn those notions on their head.
That, according to gov't stats, millions of Americans do (illegal) drugs regularly and still manage to be productive, good citizens? If you find yourself demonizing your use or that of others, this book may just turn those notions on their head.
January 24, 2008
All drugs should be legal. If you think I'm a stupid libertarian asshole for saying that, then you should read this book. It's a great primer on the issue and provides compelling arguments in support of the legalization of all drugs.
October 28, 2019
Yes it is very very good and a lot of shibboleth's are deconstructed. I use a great deal of this book in the harm reduction sections in my Social Work university training module (both BA & MA cohorts). Vigorous debate flows forth!
August 30, 2011
Amazingly persuasive! Very good points, aimed at people who accept alcohol. The argument for temperance is organized in a way I bet some people would find neat or helpful, but after a while it becomes apparent this guy knows a lot more about certain drugs than others, and the fire in his argument slows to a flicker... One thing about this book versus another regarding today's drug laws is this has minimal stats and numbers and numbers and percents and cases and numbers like so many others are saturated with to the point that you kind of lose the point in all the stats. Had he done research regarding a few other branches of the subject, this would be among my top favorites. Otherwise, still good.
May 12, 2012
awesome book. well worth the read. the author first tackles the myths of instant addiction, insanity etc etc that have been associated with illegal drugs throughout history. he also shows how most drug users are well adjusted and successful people and not the down and out junkies we are told to expect. using all this he makes a strong case for individual responsibility and general moderation in drugs and really the idea of use without apology. whether you are pro legalization or on the fence and worry about the dangers of drugs, you will get something out of this book. and it may just change your mind on the subject.
May 5, 2009
Before the advent of Harm Reduction really came about in the public arena, there was this book which I read in the mid 1990s. It's argument is essentially along the same lines, that drug use is not a criminal act to be prosecuted and that users have rights and the ability to manage their own use without fear of stigma.
September 1, 2010
This book is the paper equivalent of a rant from a former-addict with a fine arts Associate's degree using the language (but not structure or seriousness) of logic to defend his conviction that drug use is benign. Lots of citations that will appeal to a specific viewpoint, but that don't hold up under scrutiny.
May 5, 2012
Sullum's clear writing style and no-nonsense analysis of this issue is a breath of fresh air. I strongly suspect the only folks who will pick this up are ones already "saying yes" - so to those people I say: practice your arguments on the non-believers! And share this with other friends "saying yes" - this viewpoint deserves wider acceptance.
January 12, 2012
Typical, degenerate users:
If I need to clean the house, I do a little heroin, and I can clean the house, and it just makes me feel so good.
I take heroin at the weekends in small doses, and do the gardening.
If I need to clean the house, I do a little heroin, and I can clean the house, and it just makes me feel so good.
I take heroin at the weekends in small doses, and do the gardening.
June 14, 2012
Fascinating and humorous. I learned a lot, and recommend it to friends.
May 13, 2013
The best case for legalizing drugs that I have ever read.
August 31, 2019
Just say yes!?
It really doesn't matter how thoroughly columnist Jacob Sullum argues for the legalization of street drugs. He can demonstrate the hypocrisy of marijuana prohibition, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that alcohol is more dangerous than the killer weed; he can document the misinformation and outright falsehoods that masquerade as truths about illegal drugs; he can cite scientific studies that show that marijuana is less debilitating than alcohol; he can do these things and more (and he does) but it won't make slightest difference. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, PCP, and other street drugs will remain illegal.
The reason is simple: the laws are predicated not upon rational debate or the presentation of evidence one way or the other. The prohibitions are the result of emotional attitudes held by the people who make the laws and by those who elect them. Sullum knows this; in fact this is one of his major points. He shows how the current attitudes toward illegal drugs are just the reprise of historical attitudes toward not just the same drugs but toward tobacco, alcohol, and even coffee. Any substance that has a mind-altering effect on people will be controversial at some level. People are naturally suspicious of anything that alters their consciousness or the consciousness of their neighbors. Consequently all such substances undergo the most strenuous test by the society into which they are introduced and will not be easily accepted.
Marijuana continues to be tested by our society and rejected even though millions use it. Alcohol was tested, as Sullum chronicles, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the culmination occurring with the Volstead Act of 1919. At first it seemed that the prohibitionists had won. But a few years later it became clear that prohibition would not work and the act was repealed.
Marijuana has not done as well. The reasons for this are complex, including opposition from the established nicotine and alcohol purveyors who lobby against legalization, and from a law enforcement bureaucracy which has a vested interest in keeping pot illegal, but also from millions of non-users who want to stigmatize users as lawbreakers and members of a lower social class.
Perhaps the best thing Sullum does in this book is to show that street drugs are not nearly as debilitating as the prohibitionists would like us to believe. He also does a good job of recalling the historical context that has led us to the present legalities. However what he doesn't do very well is see the human drug experience from a biological and evolutionary point of view.
I think it's important to understand that the yeast, for example, that produce alcohol (as well as the plant that produces the sugars that the yeast feeds upon) have formed a symbiotic relationship with human beings, a relationship that may be mutually beneficial--or not, depending on your point of view. Marijuana in particular is an example of a plant that has been in a symbiotic relationship with humans since well before the dawn of history. We can see this in the cannabis hemp that humans have found useful and in the seeds that we have eaten or at least fed to our animals. However the resin that the female plant exudes is variously seen as the door to another consciousness by its champions or a noxious substance that saps our strength and leads us into immorality by others. With such a divergent point of view, it is not surprising that marijuana is illegal.
Other drugs are the highly concentrated products of plants, heroin from opium, cocaine from coca, etc., while still others are manmade chemicals patterned after natural occurring ones, amphetamines and LSD, for example. Sullum argues that people once told lies about alcohol, coffee, tobacco, tea, etc., and are doing the same thing again about heroin and marijuana. Yes, they are; however it does not follow (and Sullum acknowledges this) that the conclusions society will ultimately come to will be the same. Each substance must be evaluated on its own merits, and on how the substance is taken, whether it is ingested, inhaled, injected, drunk, or snorted. Sullum makes the further important point that dosage must also be considered. How highly refined is the drug and how much of it does a user typically use?
I think this book would be more effective if Sullum had emphasized the differences among the various drugs and had presented his arguments more succinctly. Clearly he wanted to err on the side of being thorough. But many of the points he makes are familiar articles in the on-going debate. Furthermore his unabashed touting of drug use is certainly decades ahead of its time. It is only when it becomes clear that legal drugs, such as produced by the great pharmaceutical companies, are being used because people like the effects they have on their minds, that the public will begin to look upon the taking of drugs for pleasure and recreation in a positive way.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
It really doesn't matter how thoroughly columnist Jacob Sullum argues for the legalization of street drugs. He can demonstrate the hypocrisy of marijuana prohibition, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that alcohol is more dangerous than the killer weed; he can document the misinformation and outright falsehoods that masquerade as truths about illegal drugs; he can cite scientific studies that show that marijuana is less debilitating than alcohol; he can do these things and more (and he does) but it won't make slightest difference. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, PCP, and other street drugs will remain illegal.
The reason is simple: the laws are predicated not upon rational debate or the presentation of evidence one way or the other. The prohibitions are the result of emotional attitudes held by the people who make the laws and by those who elect them. Sullum knows this; in fact this is one of his major points. He shows how the current attitudes toward illegal drugs are just the reprise of historical attitudes toward not just the same drugs but toward tobacco, alcohol, and even coffee. Any substance that has a mind-altering effect on people will be controversial at some level. People are naturally suspicious of anything that alters their consciousness or the consciousness of their neighbors. Consequently all such substances undergo the most strenuous test by the society into which they are introduced and will not be easily accepted.
Marijuana continues to be tested by our society and rejected even though millions use it. Alcohol was tested, as Sullum chronicles, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the culmination occurring with the Volstead Act of 1919. At first it seemed that the prohibitionists had won. But a few years later it became clear that prohibition would not work and the act was repealed.
Marijuana has not done as well. The reasons for this are complex, including opposition from the established nicotine and alcohol purveyors who lobby against legalization, and from a law enforcement bureaucracy which has a vested interest in keeping pot illegal, but also from millions of non-users who want to stigmatize users as lawbreakers and members of a lower social class.
Perhaps the best thing Sullum does in this book is to show that street drugs are not nearly as debilitating as the prohibitionists would like us to believe. He also does a good job of recalling the historical context that has led us to the present legalities. However what he doesn't do very well is see the human drug experience from a biological and evolutionary point of view.
I think it's important to understand that the yeast, for example, that produce alcohol (as well as the plant that produces the sugars that the yeast feeds upon) have formed a symbiotic relationship with human beings, a relationship that may be mutually beneficial--or not, depending on your point of view. Marijuana in particular is an example of a plant that has been in a symbiotic relationship with humans since well before the dawn of history. We can see this in the cannabis hemp that humans have found useful and in the seeds that we have eaten or at least fed to our animals. However the resin that the female plant exudes is variously seen as the door to another consciousness by its champions or a noxious substance that saps our strength and leads us into immorality by others. With such a divergent point of view, it is not surprising that marijuana is illegal.
Other drugs are the highly concentrated products of plants, heroin from opium, cocaine from coca, etc., while still others are manmade chemicals patterned after natural occurring ones, amphetamines and LSD, for example. Sullum argues that people once told lies about alcohol, coffee, tobacco, tea, etc., and are doing the same thing again about heroin and marijuana. Yes, they are; however it does not follow (and Sullum acknowledges this) that the conclusions society will ultimately come to will be the same. Each substance must be evaluated on its own merits, and on how the substance is taken, whether it is ingested, inhaled, injected, drunk, or snorted. Sullum makes the further important point that dosage must also be considered. How highly refined is the drug and how much of it does a user typically use?
I think this book would be more effective if Sullum had emphasized the differences among the various drugs and had presented his arguments more succinctly. Clearly he wanted to err on the side of being thorough. But many of the points he makes are familiar articles in the on-going debate. Furthermore his unabashed touting of drug use is certainly decades ahead of its time. It is only when it becomes clear that legal drugs, such as produced by the great pharmaceutical companies, are being used because people like the effects they have on their minds, that the public will begin to look upon the taking of drugs for pleasure and recreation in a positive way.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
July 28, 2017
Some very good arguments in defense of drug use. Doesn't really get into the logistics of legalizing drugs, how they might be regulated and so fourth, but does bring to light, in an almost embarrassing fashion, some of the misconceptions the general public has about recreational drug us
July 24, 2018
Interesting and thoughtful argument for relaxation of drug rules based on evidence that drugs are not as dangerous as we've been led to believe.
May 16, 2021
A great book that reveals and takes apart the scare tactics used to justify drug prohibition. Disclaimer: I don't do anything stronger than Almaden, myself. But you don't have to be an illicit drug user to recognize that the war on drugs is being fought with propaganda that actually works against reason, moderation, and tolerance.
March 8, 2013
Some very good arguments in defense of drug use. Doesn't really get into the logistics of legalizing drugs, how they might be regulated and so fourth, but does bring to light, in an almost embarrassing fashion, some of the misconceptions the general public has about recreational drug use.
January 12, 2008
Shows the other side of drug use.
Currently reading
April 4, 2008Who couldn't use a little vindication? :)
June 17, 2008
Incredibly disappointing. After two logical fallacies within the first seven pages, I punted on this one. Stick with Huxley and (early) Leary.
April 9, 2009
Sometimes wonky, but drives the point home and makes you think. Always good to think
October 21, 2009
Sociological examination of why people use drugs. Interesting if a little soft.
February 17, 2014
Stellar read. Avoid false prophets; avoid voodoo pharmacology.
July 1, 2015
Parts of the book were interesting but I can't really recommend this.
June 28, 2017
An interesting and sober perspective on drugs. Consider this your anti-DARE.
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