I remember as a teenager feeling completely betrayed when I realized that the Just Say No Just-So Story that everyone who tried pot ended up friendless and alone and with Bs on their homework was false! Some even went to Harvard! The war on drugs would clearly be the dumbest policy we’d come up as a society with if only it didn’t have so much competition.
That said, I don’t think much of this kind of anecdote argument. Not that I don’t agree with the conclusions. But I suspect that the productivity of Wilkinson and others like him has less to do with the fact that pot isn’t dangerous and more to do with the fact that if one is well-educated and well-off one has to really screw up before anything affects one’s expected life outcomes. They have a safety net made of money. Upper middle class kids enjoy heroin and cocaine, too, but I wouldn’t take their general success as a reason to legalize either of those. Even if the kids go to Harvard!
Still, if I imagine a world where coffee, alcohol, and marijuana had been discovered and analyzed chemically yesterday, I have a hard time imagining that anyone in that world would be all that worried about marijuana.
27 comments
April 3, 2009 at 8:31 am
JPool
Because of their dense mix of cotton and linen fibers, US currency, properly stitched together, in alternating directions through overlapping corners, produces a surprisingly effective and durable safety net. It is, however, both more expensive and unwieldy than more traditional netting materials, which is why my Financial Safety Net venture remains unfunded.
No, I’m not high right now. Why would you ask that?
April 3, 2009 at 8:41 am
Urk
“But I suspect that the productivity of Wilkinson and others like him has less to do with the fact that pot isn’t dangerous and more to do with the fact that if one is well-educated and well-off one has to really screw up before anything affects one’s expected life outcomes.”
-I think that the second half of your formulation here, especially emphasizing “anything” overstates the case, and doesn’t get at all at questions like how much of pot’s negative effect on outcomes is connected to it’s imbrication in a socio-legal world of substances that will inarguably mess up those outcomes. People without Wilkinson’s safety net manage to survive and progress in a beer-legal world. Which to be fair, is your point at the end right? Still, it’ s a lot less dangerous than stuff we don’t prohibit.
I guess my sticky point here is that the differential in safety nets is a much bigger point than what effect that differential has on people who smoke pot and people who don’t. I don’t think you really disagree with this, and I realize that i’m in danger of arguing in favor of a post I think you should have written as opposed to disagreeing with one you did, so I’ll quit . but I admit to being bugged by something in there I can’t quite articulate.
some of my view on this may be generational. By the time the “just say no” campaign started I already knew it was bullshit. my disappointment and skepticism were formulated around the hypocrisy in the legal policy and less around dire warnings about individual outcomes and bad grades. I grew up surrounded by happy and relatively succsessful (to differing degrees) people who either smoked pot or knew that it wasn’t a big deal.
April 3, 2009 at 9:47 am
kid bitzer
imagine how betrayed i felt to wind up a lone, friendless failure despite *never* smoking dope.
April 3, 2009 at 9:56 am
eric
It’s not too late to take up dope, kb.
April 3, 2009 at 10:02 am
kid bitzer
it was always already too late.
April 3, 2009 at 10:39 am
dana
Urk, I just don’t much care for the argument from well-I-turned-out-okay, because the reverse (i-knew-a-pothead-who-dropped-out or i-knew-a-case-where-it-was-a-gateway drug) isn’t a good argument either. And this is leaving aside the legal consequences (hell, Wilkinson is announcing his lawbreaking publicly; leave those aside.)
April 3, 2009 at 11:40 am
Urk
Dana, I agree that that’s a weak argument. But isn’t Wilkinson also at least gesturing beyond his own anecdote by linking to Sullivan’s series (which admittedly I haven’t read)? also: I think that part of what Wilkinson is doing has to be anecdotal because he’s responding to a societal double standard where smoking pot is:
1) illegal
2)an accepted coming of age ritual at least since the 80s (see the Breakfast Club, Risky Business, etc.)
3) culturally associated for good and ill with an urban, non-white underclass
4) still illegal
5) readily available tho with varying degrees of risk depending on the same social safety net you cited in your post.
It’s really the last point that makes, for me, Wilkinson’s article a little different than simply reasoning by anecdote. Well-to-do pot smokers can usually indulge with very little risk, and often without even running in the same circles that the more dangerous drugs circulate in. so they have very little motivation to face the kind of legal and social sanctions that could come their way by publicly advocating for legalization. This of course inhibits the push towards legalization because the people that have the most political capital to spend on it have the least motivation (of anyone who smokes pot) to spend that capital on legalization.
And, for many of those people, the social sanctions generally outweigh the legal ones. After all, lots of famous but not entirely “respectable” people have admitted to actively smoking pot in various forms of print, text, media, public speech, etc. without serious threat of legal action.
so, given all this, it seems to me that what Wilkinson is doing is responding to a social sanction that applies specifically to respectable, well to do individuals, and neutralizes what might otherwise be a powerful voice in pro legalization efforts. And, I don’t really see what kind of response to this set of circumstances wouldn’t be anecdotal to some degree. Unless of course other folks in his position follow his lead, which I think is the whole point.
April 3, 2009 at 11:59 am
Carl
I had a former student come back and use me as a credentialed sage for a legalization documentary he was doing. He assumed I’d be all for it what with my famous countercultural elan and all. Little did he know I don’t like any orthodoxy, including his. So instead I talked about the inescapable ubiquity of foucauldian disciplinary regimes and the utility of transgression thresholds. I don’t know what happened to the video but I’m guessing my bits all found the cutting-room floor.
Basically as soon as drugs are defined and identified as a disciplinary domain, the line has to be drawn somewhere. As part of an evolutionary process of trial and error it gets drawn according to the logic of the transgression threshold, with the last acceptable substance on the other side of that line, so that kids and the young at heart think they’re getting away with something by doing something we all don’t actually mind much. (Similarly, you set speed limits at 55 if you want people to keep it in the low 60s.) Selective enforcement is part of how that logic plays out as a theater of discipline, with unprivileged groups as usual supplying the whipping boys.
From this perspective legalization would accomplish little, because it would simply take pot out of the transgression zone and move whatever is next most noxious into it.
April 3, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Urk
Carl, by that logic alcohol has no transgressive value at all. Is that the case now? Do we define discipline regimes entirely by whether there’s a legal sanction or not? I think that the answer to both questions is no.
I think that we have different amounts of trust that we’re willing to put into an “evolutionary process of trial and error” and how much trusting in that process mitigates an obligation or at least a desire to work towards a more just outcome.
It’s not that I can’t see some sense in what you’re saying, that in practical terms it’s better to have pot as a relatively safe signifier of transgression IF the alternative is to have something more dangerous (cocaine, meth) assume the same role. But not only do I disagree that the “if” necessarily follows, I do think that some of those people in that underpriveliged class of whipping boys who are paying pretty heavy tolls for “something we all don’t mind much” ought to be considered as real people and not jus written off.
April 3, 2009 at 12:52 pm
JPool
It also implies that the main reason folks use drugs is because of their transgressive associations. This is at best a minority expression. Lots more people drank and smoked in this country (and others) a couple of generations back, not because these substances were more transgressive, but because they were more quotidian.
April 3, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Carl
Hm. Something funny happened to what I said in between my brain and yours, Urk.
I didn’t say it’s better to have pot as a safe signifier. I said that’s how disciplinary regimes work, and pot is now occupying that position. If it weren’t pot it would be something else.
I didn’t say I trusted the process of trial and error. I said that’s how transgression thresholds are arrived at. In this case, the threshold gets pushed around by interest groups until it settles in a place where no one with too much push objects enough to do anything about it. So to pull JPool’s point in, at one time an experiment was made in prohibiting alcohol. It turned out doing so engaged powerful pushback and alcohol got moved back just inside the line as a permitted transgression (the liminalities are not exactly linear), for adults under prescribed circumstances. Prohibiting alcohol to minors makes it especially effective as both a carrot and a stick. The traces of its disciplinarity are installed in us early on and keep us looking over our shoulders even when we become ‘legal’.
Re: historical consumption forms and levels, it would be possible and has been the case not to regulate drug use at all, that is, not to define chemistry as a site of social discipline. Laudanum and cocaine used to be sold over the counter without causing society to collapse. I don’t have a dog in that fight. But the way modern social discipline works is that something (usually a variety of somethings; sex is a favorite as Foucault shows) has to be performing society’s control over the individual. Drugs are in this sense both arbitrary and essential. In effect we are all imprisoned by this disciplinary regime.
And I did not say that the whipping boys should be considered less than real people or written off. If they weren’t real people, they’d be useless as whipping boys. The spectacle of their fall is only instructive insofar as it’s possible to identify with them. As for whether it’s possible to apply justice more evenly, I’d say it’s always worth pushing at (in exactly that sense of trial and error over thresholds) but ultimately utopian in a capitalist system that’s fundamentally, not contingently structured by inequality.
Finally, if alcohol were just a food among others and pot was no different than bowling as a source of recreation we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So yes, folks use drugs as such because of their transgressive associations. Without those associations they wouldn’t be ‘drugs’ and we’d use them or not for other reasons.
April 3, 2009 at 2:44 pm
kid bitzer
“Without those associations they wouldn’t be ‘drugs’ ”
why do you think they call it “dope”?
April 3, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Carl
Because the umlaut was lost in translation?
April 3, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Urk
“I didn’t say it’s better to have pot as a safe signifier. I said that’s how disciplinary regimes work, and pot is now occupying that position. If it weren’t pot it would be something else.”
-Carl I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. To some extent I guess I was taking your argument with your student’s orthodoxy and applying it to my own argument that legalization would be an improvement over the current situation. So, I assumed that your argument that another substance would simply take over that place in the disciplinary regime to infer that this wouldn’t be an improvement. That’s what i was pushing back against. If the point is just that arguments for legalization can be stupid orthodoxy too, well, i’d agree, I just don’t think mine is.
I’m pressed for time, so I’ll just say that the problem that i have with social theory here is: now what? i mean, ok, we’re all imprisoned by this disciplinary regime. Fine. Now, can I go back to advocating for those things I think would make things better or should I just agree that it’s all futile and utopian? My preference is for option A.
April 3, 2009 at 9:51 pm
JPool
So yes, folks use drugs as such because of their transgressive associations. Without those associations they wouldn’t be ‘drugs’ and we’d use them or not for other reasons.
Carl, honestly, this is pushing words in a circle. So we drive “cars” because of traffic regulations and otherwise we’d make use of wheeled transport and internal combustion engines for other reasons? No, seriously, I get the disciplinary regime thing, lets just not pretend that it’s all consuming or even determinant.
It seems to me there’s an older structuralist logic at play in this Foucauldian/Bahktinian maneuver. As Stanley Cohen (you’re really pushing me to work back through the Gelder and Thornton Subcultures Reader lately, so thanks for that) observed thirty years ago in another context,
One could just as easily slot “transgression” or “disciplinary logic” into that list. Cohen’s point was not that these macro forces aren’t real, but that invoking them doesn’t substitute for ethnography or empiricism in explaining behavior.
Look, I enjoyed soft drugs back in my day. I don’t use them anymore, not because they’ve lost transgressive appeal, but because I’m older, with a more fragile psyche and I get tired more easily. I take your basic argument above to be, “If we legalize pot, then heroin will be the new pot” (and more people will use heorin? this second bit seems less clear). Yes, something has to be forbidden or else everything will be allowed, but forbiddenness isn’t always the most important thing structuring our relationship to substances or practices.
April 3, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Walt
Carl’s argument is the dumbest argument disguised as a sophisticated argument that I’ve read all day. (Though most of the dumb arguments I’ve read today haven’t been disguised.) Yes, it is literally impossible to stop putting pot users in jail, because of capitalism. Uh huh.
April 3, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Carl
JPool, when people enjoy substances for reasons other than the transgressive ones, which some certainly do because everything is “complicated, contradictory [and] ambiguous,” they are not doing ‘drugs’ in the sense defined by the disciplinary regime I am discussing. Again, this conversation is predicated on that disciplinary regime, which functions precisely by uncomplicating and disambiguating concepts, e.g. by deploying the power to turn ‘other’ enjoyments of substances into instances of ‘drug use’.
I agree that this is a way of pushing concepts in a circle. I disagree that I’m the one who’s doing it. Again, again, this is how disciplinary regimes work.
April 3, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Urk
“when people enjoy substances for reasons other than the transgressive ones, which some certainly do because everything is “complicated, contradictory [and] ambiguous,” they are not doing ‘drugs’ in the sense defined by the disciplinary regime I am discussing.”
so, what you’re discussing has little or nothing to do with whether or not it’s a good idea to legalize pot, or to be more specific, the validity of a particular argument for legalization which ws the subject of Dana’s critique and my reply to said critique? Because that’s what my conversation was about, at least as far as I knew.
April 4, 2009 at 6:15 am
Carl
You’d have to specify what would make it a ‘good idea’. If we just want more options on the shelf at the supermarket and that counts as freedom, then sure it’s a good idea. I’m all for choices.
I’m saying two things. One, the legality or not of pot has very little to do with any kind of rational argumentation. It’s about discipline, just like the contraception thing in Catholicism is about discipline, which is why arguments never work. The problem’s in the premise.
Two, I don’t think more options on the shelf at the supermarket counts as freedom, and therefore if that’s the objective no, I don’t think legalization is non-trivially a good idea insofar as it takes any time or effort whatsoever. Squishing unfreedom from one place to another doesn’t seem like a net gain to me and it’s not compelling on my attention.
Like I said, pushing back on selective enforcement when there are patterns of demographic discrimination involved seems worth doing, just to get where the line’s drawn a little more friendly. Seeing if a conversation is possible where we re-evaluate whether we want to call things ‘drugs’ and use them to act out our power dynamics would be even better, but as long as the game is squabbling over which drugs are ok, that’s not going to happen.
April 4, 2009 at 7:10 am
Walt
So when LSD was legal until 1966, it wasn’t a drug? When Ecstacy was legal until 1984, it wasn’t a drug?
And based on the exact same reasoning, wouldn’t a thirty-years-ago-Carl make confident predictions that gay sex would remain illegal because of its transgressiveness? The same reasoning would have applied.
April 4, 2009 at 10:37 am
Colin
I’m sympathetic to Carl’s approach because it draws the camera back and asks what is going on more broadly with legal/illegal and enforcement. OTOH it’s curious how hard it is to say that people use drugs because they like them. And it seems weird to gloss that enjoyment under complicated/contradictory/ambiguous. Sometimes a buzz is just a buzz, man.
April 4, 2009 at 2:05 pm
JPool
Shorter Carl: Aint no conversation but a meta-conversation cause a meta-conversation don’t stop.
So, because the disciplinary regime will inevitably prohibit something, any discusion of whether or not to prohibit any particular thing is just a pointless exercize in capitalist choice mongering? If some things are forbidden then it really doesn’t matter which ones? You say that Urk or others would have to specify what would make legalizing a particular substance “a ‘good idea,’” but you don’t offer any such rationale yourself. You simply say that more choice isn’t more freedom and therefor (somehow) it’s only worth talking about at the categorical level.
Almost everyone, pro-decriminalization or con, agrees that, precisely because people use “drugs” for reasons other than just their transgressive appeal, more folks will use a legal substance than use an illegal one. That is, legalization would mean an increase in drug use. For some people the conversation ends there and legalization is banished to the Very Bad Ideas section of the library. Others would argue that the harm caused by criminalization (regimes of violence financed by drug profits, incarceration of otherwise good or good enough people for victimless crimes, collateral damage to those communities and individuals caught in between criminal syndicates and the state) outweighs the harm that would be done by increased drug use. Again for some (presumably including CATO Institute staffers) the conversation ends there and we must legalize everything; decriminalization shelved prominently in the Very Good Ideas section. But because different substances carry different kinds of risks of harm (more physically damaging, greater likelyhood of addiction or habitual use, different effects on ones ability to economically or emotionally support oneself or one’s family) the costs associated with their legalization are going to be different and the resulting balance against their continued criminality also different.
The meta converstion you want to have is an interesting and important one to engage in at a philosphical/cultural critique level. But from a policy point of view (which was the realm dana was initially suggesting for considering the parallel falseness of annecdotal claims), unless you explicitly take the “forbid nothing” angle, which is a hard sell, you’d want some rational basis for deciding what to forbid. Cause, you know, forbidding everything just seems impractical.
April 5, 2009 at 11:20 am
Urk
Carl, I’m not arguing that legalizing pot would create “freedom.” Maybe your former student was? for a host of reasons I think that legalizing it would be better than continued criminalization. It does amount to more options on the shelf at the supermarket rather than blowing up capitalism.
No it isn’t freedom in any absolute or (on the meta level) meaningful sense, tho I think that some people doing time might be less demanding regarding how “freedom” was defined. They might think that being out of jail and being active participants in capitalism would fulfill their definition of freedom. They might be wrong, but maybe they could take one of your classes (do you do adult education?) and you could explain to them that their return from incarceration is just a matter of squishing unfreedom around, that, since their still subject to the same discipline regime but in a more subtle way they might even be less free than when they were in the joint, and they might roll your their eyes and say “look dude, by that formulation you’re really an important part of the discipline regime because you understand it, you can see that the difference between meaningful change and more options on the shelf at the supermarket, but instead of blowing up capitalism you’re textualizing your understanding of the situation for profit, because you know, some of those things on the shelf at the supermarket cost more than others, and it’s nice to be able to afford the good coffee. I mean that is one clever discipline regime, that it gets all the people smart enough to figure it out and puts them in one big conversation with each other, and since that conversation boils down to a choice between blowing up capitalism or continuing to write about how anything short of blowing up capitalism is just squishing unfreedom around and not worth pursuing, they generally only minimally interfere with the process. Great! So, since we’re not free anyway, lets go outside and burn one. Can’t do that in jail!”
Snark aside, I do get the importance of the meta conversation but it’s not the one I was having nor is it he only one worth having. Maybe squishing unfreedom around isn’t worth your time. That’s great, I wouldn’t want to distract you from your plans to overthrow capitalism all together (Must. Not. Snark.) or from doing things short of that that you think are non-trivial good ideas. Certainly there are plenty of things that are are a hell of a lot less trivial than legalizing pot. Still, I wonder what, under the set of stakes you propose and claim to operate under, isn’t just squishing unfreedom around?
And, whether the legality or illegality of pot is a function of rational argument or not doesn’t, I think, determine whether or not as an actual set of enacted policies, it’s immune to the effects of either rational arguments or modification according to the kinds of evolutionary processes that, under the existing regime, determine where that line is, with some of said modification following rational argument.
and, regarding “drugs” as a shell game for power, I think that we’re [as a society] actually a lot closer to a conversation about the coherence of that category as currently constituted and the unproductive contradictions created by the place of marijuana in that category (relative to say beer or cocaine) than we are to undoing the idea of drugs as an arena for the exercise of power.
April 5, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Carl
Fair enough, Urk. I’ll forego snark altogether since we seem to understand each other now.
April 5, 2009 at 8:18 pm
URK
Thanks. I likely should have 86′d everything except the last 3 paragraphs. No offense intended.
April 6, 2009 at 7:34 am
Carl
None taken. I actually thought you made a number of very good points in that second paragraph. Most folks probably would prefer the big prison to the little one. I and my progressive academic colleagues are part of the discipline regime (although I wouldn’t say especially important parts) as pimps and legitimators. We are bought off and assembled together in a big conversation with ourselves – which I might add we’ve cleverly extended out into the infinity of blogtastic irrelevance as if that makes us extra edgy.
A couple of points while I’m at it. I do teach adult education, a lot of it, mostly to military students and their dependents. They of course are involved in the disciplinary systems in a big way both as purveyors and clients. In any event what they share with most adults is a lot of priorities that come way before whether they can spark up legally.
Re: smashing the state, blowing up capitalism, etc., that project has been off the table for lots of us who study these things since the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution and the killing fields. Replacing one Big Other with another Big Other didn’t work out so well over the last century. As for what little things we can do, I teach. It’s as open to criticism as any other kind of activism.
Cheers!
April 6, 2009 at 9:49 pm
jeffbowers
Sounds like a discussion to have while you’re stoned.