As extrapolated by Mary Ann Sieghart in yesterday’s Independent , the next Presidential elections in the US may well have, at their core, the ever contentious question of ‘the war on drugs’ and the battle lines may well be about to be redrawn.
Americans go to the polls today for the US mid-term elections to deliver their verdict on Barack Obama’s first two years in office. Away from questions about the economy, defence and the wild protestations of the tea party, a question is being put to voters in California which could mark a sea change in US drugs policy.
Californians will today vote on Proposition 19 – the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. If the electorate return a yes vote, cannabis will for the first time be decriminalised in the state and local government will be able to tax and monitor its consumption.
The vote will be watched intensely by a Democrat party struggling to reenergise the voters who swept Obama, typically those sympathetic to article 19, young, liberal, black and Hispanic voters, are sympathetic also to the democrats and Obama. Surprisingly though, as observed by Sieghart, the right wing of the US are also increasingly seeing the potential financial and law and order benefits of easing restrictions on marijuana and are framing the right to smoke as being fundamental to the US constitution – currently a favourite document for rallying the right wing.
On this side of the pond meanwhile Professor David Nutt, thorn in the side of drugs policy in the UK, has once more ruffled feathers. A report co-authored by Nutt and appearing in the Lancet, has claimed that alcohol is more harmful than heroin, reigniting the debate he began this time last year when he, and many of his colleagues, quit his position as drugs advisor to the UK government.
What does all this mean however philosophically speaking and where did the relationship we now have with drugs come from – why, in other words, are developments such as the above – especially the hyperbolising of David Nutt – viewed as being, not just controversial, but dangerous.
The criminalising of mind altering substances is as old as the human, and animal urge, to consume them. To understand the particularly zealous approach to this issue seen in the Western world however we need to go back to the enlightenment.
The enlightenment sought to liberate Europe from the shadowy thought structures of the dark ages. No longer could arguments be made on the basis of divine knowledge or esoteric secrets. The enlightenment insisted upon the scientific method, faith not in unseen forces but in empirical evidence. A noble ambition indeed but one with unforeseen consequences.
This tradition invalidated knowledge that could not be readily isolated and experimented upon in a laboratory. Altered states of mind came to be seen as irrational and irrelevant. As argued by Michelle Foucault these definitions of rational/irrational soon came to control the parameters of human experience and more everyday definition flowed from them. The most notable being the definition of sane/insane.
Thus it was that the West was born, an entity that set out to capture the world from a dark and irrational natural world. Dualistic thought was enshrined and the greatest duality of them all, that between human (European) culture and wild, primitive nature was institutionalised. This duality persists to this day. As argued here, the schism between man and beast is as strong as it ever has been.
The desire to control states of mind is part of this continuum and popular, everyday discourses around drugs focus heavily on the notion that drug consumption takes you to another place, mentally speaking. It takes you out of the everyday, away from the system, ‘out of control’.
The government concerning itself with which herbs or mushrooms you choose to ingest or not ingest is therefore part and parcel of the dismissing of pagan religion, the definition of peoples against an historical timescale (developed and developing nations) and the perception, intrinsic to our society, that animals are somehow inferior because they don’t have the gift of consciousness as defined by enlightenment philosophy.
This is why this blog eagerly awaits the result of the article 19 vote. Should California say yes, and political elites in the UK and the US awaken to the expediency of legalising and managing marijuana and whatever else, the legal limits of human consciousness will be expanded ever so slightly and states of mind that were once considered to be within the realms of ‘mad’ will now be permissible in the comfort of the home.
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