Human Rights, Human Rites (book review)

Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, editors University of California Press, 1997 ISBN 0-520-20241-4

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in el Barrio Philippe Bourgois Cambridge University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-521-43518-8

Review by Peter Webster©

One

It seemed a good idea at the time. In December 1948, and with the intention that the second half of the Twentieth Century should not repeat the unprecedented human disasters and suffering of the first, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. In the immediate aftermath of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and a genocide beyond comprehension, there was a natural and strong resolve to create organizations and establish firm principles that might finally spur mankind to more humanely guide the course of events he had so often let descend into barbarity.

Today, although we hear much impressive rhetoric about human rights, there seems a general mood that the original idea might have been overly idealistic, even naive. Many unwritten escape clauses appear to have encroached upon the originally-stated principles of the Universal Declaration. We seem to have outgrown that 1948 idealism as if it were a mere style of thinking and social philosophy, suitable for that time perhaps, but like all styles, routinely cast off for newer models.

Quite in keeping with recent styles of social criticism, many of our politicians, writers and intellectuals have been lecturing us about what might be the duties and responsibilities of citizens. These self-appointed lights appear to be saying that although human rights are a fine thing in principle, there is a wider and more comprehensive paradigm that must be our guide in today s Brave New World Order. As noted in a recent column by Ronald Koven in the International Herald Tribune (January 28, 1998), 24 former presidents and prime ministers (including Helmut Schmidt, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Jimmy Carter) have proposed for consideration by the U.N. a companion document to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a "Declaration of Responsibilities". These 24 luminaries wrote, "exclusive insistence on rights can lead to endless dispute and conflict."

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of 1948, for example, states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood." Many exceptions would have to be appended to just this one Article were we to maintain that it is honestly and widely practiced, even in the West. For the United States especially, the long list of escape clauses might begin with, "Unless you live in an urban slum." There would be no other way to reconcile Article 25 with facts such as: more than one in four American children living in poverty; an 18-year waiting list for subsidized public housing in New York City; and volumes-full of other wrenching statistics. And it is easy to see how "exclusive insistence" on such a principle as Article 25 most certainly leads to "endless dispute and conflict" as the rich and ruling classes bicker incessantly about how such benefits should 'trickle down' to the less rich who prove themselves deserving by taking part in the common goals, living up to their "duties and responsibilities", rather than being provided outright to a burgeoning class of immoral hedonistic free-loaders. Caveat number two of the 1948 Declaration might today be, "Such benefits and rights as listed herein shall be granted only to the worthy."

Accusations of flagrant hypocrisy and callous disregard of basic rights attract indignant denial from those having a big stake in the status quo, to be sure. Our leaders would no doubt call the above assessment radically-motivated and insulting -- not a fair interpretation of their true intentions, (for are not those such as the 24 luminaries of the "Declaration of Responsibilities" all, honorable men?) Good intentions and honor must produce more than mere consensus among those professing them however, and we must search far below the surface into the collective psychology of the times to discover the reasons why good intentions and honor can fail so miserably, can produce such serious disparity between our fine words and our often not-so-fine deeds. Such a search reveals not merely a few minor irrationalities concerning our post-1948 'maturity and pragmatism', our hubristic notions of world leadership and control, and the use of OEescape clauses to ignore fundamnetal principles, but rather that modern man and his times must still be in the grip of tendencies we believe we outgrew long ago. And as a prime symptom of such tendencies, there is perhaps no better candidate than the action we take in response to that mother of all evils, the clandestine use and traffic in prohibited drugs. Here, our collective behavior and psychology have descended into an irrationality of some considerable magnitude.

As a modern 'rite of purification' no more logical than the mumbo-jumbo of some long-decadent exorcism we have designated in our midst a devil incarnate, a supreme evil, and projected upon it not only our fears and prejudices, but our failings in upholding principles we ourselves know to be inalienable, principles we can all agree upon in proximity to a great genocide or World War when the stench of death is fresh in the nostrils, but principles which, in the very nature of such things, are in the long-run not practical for the amassing of great power or fortune. The connection between these latter avarices and the shrouding of same through ceremonial distractions and scapegoats is neither coincidental nor new to our times.

Such rituals have been a constant feature of civilizations both large and small, both sophisticated and primitive, but seldom have they been performed or believed as literally as today. The classic scapegoat ritual, in which a bundle of symbols and attestations representing the accumulated evils of the city was strapped atop a goat and the poor beast driven into the wilderness to die, was a ritual taken seriously by perhaps the simple-minded, but any thinking citizen of those ancient times knew full well the ceremonial nature of the rite. Today, like the soap that washes whiter than white, our devils, and our rituals, are more real than real. We fail even to recognize them as rituals. Confusion of symbol with reality, ceremony with principle, leads us today to no small amount of mischief and collective delusion. Illicit drugs and their users as the devil and scapegoat, and the War on Drugs as the Rite of Purification is merely a replay of a very old scenario, and the similarities between the current screenplay and former ones proves their common authorship. The constant reappearance of this infamous plot in inquisitions and purges down through history would indicate that mankind s propensity to enact and re-enact this designating and extermination of the mythical demon is a very tenacious habit indeed, and its high-fidelity replay today makes a mockery of the purported scientific rationality of our age and our insistence that the principle of human rights is our guiding paradigm. And far worse, the show has always a disagreeable ending: the latest remake is leading to destructive tendencies last seen in the 1940s when it was not goats being prepared for the transport of symbolic accumulated evil but boxcars bound for Auschwitz.

Two

The two recent books under review here illustrate in a very definitive way our modern complicity in the present opus of this recurring ritual persecution, the underlying psychology of which permits even honorable men to abrogate eternal principles of human rights in pursuit of mere decadent ceremony. Both books deal primarily with the latest great incarnation of the archetypical OEdemon drug and evil-in-our-midst, crack cocaine, but by speaking truth to established ignorance on this specific topic they succeed once more in bringing into the cold light of rational thought that great fraud and crime of Substance Prohibition, responsible for as much human suffering and misery as many of the great historical crimes we cannot let ourselves forget.

As with the long series of books published in the last several years on the destructive folly of Prohibition, these two volumes would, if rationality, scientific evidence and common sense were the most effective guides to timely policy change and the evolution of public opinion, be important enough to influence immediate and far-reaching changes. They would be as influential to leaders, intellectuals, and the public as was the knowledge of the great human tragedies that galvanized our 1948 forebears to such great works as the Universal Decalaration of Human Rights. The fact that such books notoriously result in little or no change is above all a measure of the degeneracy of our times and goals, the hypocrisy and mendacity of our modern paradigm and belief that we live in an age of rationality and boundless opportunity for all, guided by our findings in the sciences and tempered with our humanistic vision of the sanctity of life; the fact that they do not dispell our mania forthwith exposes as delusion the paternalistic notion that we have slowly and painfully transcended our primitive past when superstition and ignorant ritual predominated and controlled the minds of men. The books to which I refer show that seldom has the dream and the reality been more at odds.

In Philippe Bourgois' now famous study, "e;In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio"e;, an inside view of Spanish Harlem drug culture in New York City, we have both a literary and anthropological classic: Bourgois proves himself as 'street-wise' to the locale of his study as were any of the great anthropologists 'culture-wise' to the societies of their attention. He lives and works as one of them, and we are not allowed to view the inhabitants of the world he portrays as members of some OEprimitive tribe of mere scientific interest, for we are constantly reminded by the facts he so well presents that "there, but for the grace of God, might have gone I". The common characteristics of the drug users and entrepreneurs that supposedly separate them from mainstream America are shown to be illusory, much as the Jews in the 1930s were one minute Germans, and by magic spell the next minute not even human. We find these supposed evil-others of El Barrio merely to be pursuing the American Dream through the most realistic mechanism that presents itself under the circumstances, the underground economy, and so we find not vermin for burning at stake in these ghettos and Barrios, but we ourselves.

At the very beginning of the book Bourgois warns us of the danger that such a study might be used against the poor, might add to the 'blame the victim' tendencies now so common, or fall prey to a 'racist voyeurism' as do other books such as the stark pictorial study of inner-city crack cocaine culture, "Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue"^*. His portayal, read in its entirety however, needs little such warning for it humanizes the 'public enemies' he has lived intimately with, without at all sanitizing or glamorizing them. We come to see the inevitability of the way of life in El Barrio and other such inner-city areas, given the social and economic structures installed and maintained by the rich, an inevitability as easy to understand as was that in the former South Africa under apartheid, or of any other example of a social system that enforces an apartheid on a class of its citizens.

Bourgois shows overall that the ritual of drug prohibition allows the middle and upper classes to scapegoat their guilt and complicity for economic and racial apartheid: the ignorant rich can look at El Barrio and say, "these people would be good Americans were it not for drugs, and see!, once in awhile one of them escapes the dope and the ghetto and becomes a doctor or lawyer". It is no coincidence that in the U.S. the Reagan-Bush years saw a great redistribution of wealth upwards and a corresponding impoverishment of the economically-lowest strata of American society, and at the same time the great War on Drugs was instituted providing the cover story for the effects of this redistribution. Instead of blaming their policies for poverty, homelessness, unemployment and all the rest, so-called conservatives could blame demon drugs in an ongoing ritual persecution. The question should be, "who" is to blame for the ghettos and the drug problem, not "what".

It would serve no good end here to present out of context a summary and an analysis of the several chapters of "In Search of Respect", suffice it to say that Bourgois leaves no stone unturned, no aspect unexamined in his valuable study, and it is best read and contemplated as a whole. By the time he finishes his story of the residents of El Barrio we know the shame of complicity in having allowed such poverty to arise and continue in the midst of fabulous wealth, and new meaning comes to the words, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Anyone pretending to know the least thing about poverty in the U.S., or who has avoided or rejected the fact that (to quote Bourgois) "Substance abuse is merely a symptom -- and a vivid symbol -- of deeper dynamics of social marginalization and alienation," cannot be taken seriously without having fully read and comprehended this book. Bourgois concludes,

"...we can safely ignore the drug hysterias that periodically sweep through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence."

The accompanying statistics reveal all: Between 1968 and 1992 poverty in the U.S. rose by one-third, with a 100% increase for the number children living in poverty. And yet, to distract our attention from Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we now hear lectures about "duties and responsibilities". To shroud the deeds of that organized hypocrisy of American-style conservatism we hear the escalating call to arms against a mythical enemy, in other times a sure harbinger and esssential seed of fascism. And finally, Bourgois points out the unfortunate reality of today s America: Political feasibility for accomplishing any of his recommendations is nil. Never have we needed clear thinking and political will power more, and never has it been so remote. If required changes are deemed impossible, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that America is headed for decline and catastrophe, and the pitiful posturing and ill-advised tampering being done instead is not so much a re-arranging of the furniture on the Titanic as tossing it overboard in hopes of slowing the sinking. And it seems that the third-class passengers, the inner city poor, are included as if mere furniture.

Three

"Crack in America" is another of those long and sometimes badly-organized collections of papers assembled into a composite whole, and for which the editors have usually written interludes in the attempt to tie together the diverse viewpoints. Whether it is the importance and unifying nature of the subject matter, or the expertise of Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine as editors however, (it is probably both), this collection is superb, and among the included papers are some of the most powerfual and convincing of any ever written on the subject of Drug Prohibition and its reform.

The book has "a thematic and conceptual unity uncommon in edited collections," say the editors, and may be read as if it were the report of an expert commission charged with a specific task. And not least in importance or quality are the several papers written by the editors themselves: they go far beyond the mere unifying interludes seen in other such books. From their opening essay in chapter 1, "Crack in Context," through to their concluding remarks in chapter 17, "Real Opposition, Real Alternatives: Reducing the Harms of Drug Use and Drug Policy," there is no letup in a devastating indictment of Drug Prohibition. And lest the reader might misinterpret the content of the book from its title, let me stress that "Crack in America" is not just about crack cocaine. It certainly is the definitve work on this subject, but the collection of views and facts presented here make the book a definitive volume on the 'drug problem' as a whole, on the stupidities, contradictions and delusions of Prohibition in general and the critical need and recommendations for reversing this utterly failed policy.

We discover early on in the book, in chapter two, "The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare," exactly where the editors place the blame for the crack hysteria. After meticulous examination of the evidence, we read under the subtitle "The New Right and its Moral Ideology" a similar accusation to those I have made above and elsewhere. We see in the post-Watergate rebuilding of the Republican Party and the emergence of the "New Right" the vehicle through which the re-enactment of the ancient scapegoat scenario has so malignantly reoccurred:

"Crack was a godsend to the Right. They used it and the drug issue as an ideological fig leaf to place over the unsightly urban ills that had increased markedly under Reagan administration social and economic policies. OEThe drug problem served conservative politicians as an all-purpose scapegoat."

A stark and ugly truth, the tragedy and irrationality of it all surpassed only by the gullibility of a large segment of the public in voting for it.

Among the authors represented in the central chapters of the book are John P. Morgan and Lynn Zimmer, and their essay "The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine: Not All It s Cracked Up To Be" is, like their recent book "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts", a one-stop all-purpose handbook of facts, statistics, and copious references exploding all current Prohibitionist myths and mendacities about the drugs. One might say it is even too powerful in its completeness and authority, for it leaves no other position but utter shame for the Prohibitionists and Drug Warriors who have manufactured and broadcast these myths. Like Nixon insisting to the end that he "had no knowlege of the crime," the Drug Warriors have no alternative but obfuscation and pitiful intransigence in reply to such powerful exposition. And although dyed-in-the-wool Drug Warriors will, like Nixon, never admit nor even perhaps suspect the wrongness of their position, they may at least be stimulated to statements and acts which, again like Nixon, make it transparently obvious to an increasing section of the public that they are very wrong indeed and should simply be ignored and removed from positions of influence as soon as possible.

Other important essays of the book concern the comparison of the 'crack epidemic' in America with that in other countries, and surprise of surprises, we discover that it is practically non-existent elsewhere. Even in such a 'drug-liberal' country as Holland, as Peter Cohen shows in his "Crack in the Netherlands: Effective Social Policy is Effective Drug Policy," crack use is almost impossible to find, even in Amsterdam. Likewise, in "Crack in Australia: Why is There No Problem?" by Stephen K. Mugford, we read the author s reason: "The central point, simply put, is that Australia does not have an underclass in the same way that the U.S. does." In Cohen s essay we read, "In the history of modern [drug] use in the Netherlands, the political system has never had to cope with drug use as visible proof of the deep impoverishemnt of a large segment of the population." But conservatives in the U.S. continue to insist that drugs cause, and are not just symptoms of the problems they themsleves have done so much to create. Neither does typical U.S. Drug Warrior rhetoric that crack cocaine "is the most addictive drug ever known" or that crack is an "epidemic that spreads like a plague" stand up well in the face of such international evidence. In light of the evidence, such claims seem the ravings of fools.

In part 3 of Crack in America we find an analysis of the "Price of Repression," and the chapter here by Ira Glasser and Loren Siegel, the title of which is a quotation of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, "When Constitutional Rights Seem Too Extravagant to Endure," is the most superb essay to be seen on the topic of the erosion of Constitutional rights inherent in the methods and practices of Drug Prohibition. The chapter is a resounding indictment of the abandonment of the very founding principles of a free society for which America has long been famous, all in the name of a "New Right" frenzy of scapegoating and ritual persecution. The eventual price of repression of drugs is shown to be very expensive indeed, an abrogation of rights and freedoms that once removed will in all probability be impossible to restore.

Not until the end of the book however, do Reinarman and Levine state something that should have been shouted from the rooftops long ago, something that needs to be repeatedly and insistently interjected into every debate and every forum about drug policy reform from here until the repeal of Prohibition, or totalitarian doomesday, whichever occurs first. The authors call it "the dirty little secret of drug prohibition":

"The dirty little secret of drug prohibition is that most recreational users find their drug experiences valuable for a wide variety of reasons, including physical pleasure, release from stress, mental health, spirituality, intellectual stimulation, self-medication, enhanced sociability, or just plain fun. And because their drug use arises from these purposes rather than some pathology, the vast majority do not become abusers or addicts." (p358)

Dirty little secret, yes. And "recreational users," again contrary to the myth promulgated by the drug warriors, are by far the largest category, classic addiction being far more prevalent in the imaginings of Prohibitionists and Hollywood productions. Even the 'hoods' in El Barrio "enjoy" their snort of coke or heroin, and from all available information most are no more 'addicted' than many of the middle class are to their daily doses of coffee, cigarettes, a couple of beers, mood-changing prescription drugs, sleeping remedies, et al. The experience of these hard drugs fits in quite well with the sorry details of the lives these inner city poor are coping with, just as the coffee in the morning and couple of brews after work fits in with the experience of middle class life. Attempting to suppress the one as ultimate evil while denying that the other is precisely the same phenomenon is more than hypocrisy, it is criminally insane.

Will drug legalization result in a massive increase in drug use? Very probably not, for the many reasons so well documented in these and many other informative, well-researched books and publications. Even if legalization did result in greater use of drugs overall, it is likely that the drugs preferentially chosen would be the less harmful ones, and less harmful forms of drugs. Several observers have pointed out that prohibitions have inevitably favored the production, smuggling, dealing, and use of harder, more concentrated and dangerous forms of the prohibited substances, or even the use of more dangerous drugs instead of the less dangerous, much as the War on Drugs has been shown to have promoted the use of cocaine and heroin over marijuana. And even if there was an increase in drug use we would have to assume that the great majority of that drug use would be voluntary and effectively self-controlled, just as it is now, and undertaken for the reasons listed above in the quotation from Reinarman and Levine.

In other words, people would freely decide that they wished to use their chosen drugs, just as they do now with alcohol, tobacoo, coffee and tea, et al. And who shall have the authority to decide what a person may or may not read, see, speak, or take, without in so doing removing an important portion of his rights in a free society? Is not the pursuit of happiness, insight, religion and enlightenment, and even mere enjoyment the most fundmental of human rights? If a person willingly and freely decides that the best way to pursue such inalienable rights is through the use of a book, an organization, a doctrine, a religion, or a drug, all of which might certainly be 'harmful' to some in certain circumstances, who today is so morally superior "as evidenced by his deeds" that he can in good conscience prohibit "any" such activity or method? We cannot restrict any such rights without falling into an unavoidable march to totalitarian control of society. If drug use increases, so be it: we cannot object to that if we do not object that citizens may make other such personal decisions about their activities and behavior. Once the principle is installed that one group, the government, or even a sizeable majority shall decide what books, plays, music, speech, political parties, "or drugs" shall be prohibited, we no longer have a free and open society, but the unstoppable seeds of totalitarianism. If not soon reversed, Drug Prohibition will inevitably evolve into the greatest tyranny the world has known.

If the reader can accept the principle of human rights when it comes to some of the items in my list but feels compelled to draw the line before the last item, 'drugs,' his resistance can only result from hidden prejudices and the decadent psychology of scapegoating and ritual persecution as I have discussed above, for there is simply not the evidence nor logical argument allowing the drawing of such a line. To such an objector it will no doubt seem odd to be going on at length about human rights and eternal principles of civilization in a review of two books about a rather gritty and unproductive drug. But it is again a measure of the sickness of the times that the errors of our thinking run so deep that we can believe a major absurdity and crime such as Prohibition is a policy intended to improve the world and its inhabitants, ignoring completely the evidence all around us. At every opportunity those who can see the great lie of Prohibition and its purported intentions must, as a humanitarian duty, broadcast the message. And these two books do so, very effectively, and from several different perspectives. They illustrate yawning chasms of willful ignorance in our philosophy and political directions rather than mere petty details of some minor problem. They lead to the unavoidable conclusion that our policies, collective intentions, and our very thoughts on the subject of Prohibition are not at all guided by human rights and principles of civilized living, and certainly not by logic and rationality, but by imaginary demons, hates, ritual persecutions and prejudices as old as evil itself.

Continually and repeatedly we create in our midst a portion of ourselves who we can hate, imprison, exterminate, and our overt reasons for doing so change their garb just enough each time to make the ritual convincing, until the inevitable genocide and destruction once again makes us temporarily penitent. With the War on Drugs we have created a class of the hated larger than the Jews, larger than the Communists, larger than the heretics of the Middle Ages, larger than the exterminated Native Americans, larger than any previous ritually-unclean class of persons, and if the process again ends in genocide and war, it is difficult to imagine that "any" penitence, "any" establishment of United Nations organizations and Universal Declarations will be more than a joke. There is no risk whatever in overstressing the urgency of the task of changing course immediately and radically concerning our present policies on prohibited drugs and drug prohibition as a means to desirable ends.

The conclusion we must take away from the reading of these books is that the 'addiction' we believe we are making war against in inner-city America is far more a self-medication, far more an effective but risky method for self-transcendence than a devil requiring exorcism. Concerning self-transcendence, as both Andrew Weil (The Natural Mind, 1972) and Ronald Siegal (Intoxication, 1989) have persuasively argued, the use of various methods including drugs to attain higher, or at least different conscious states is as natural and instinctual as other of the basic human drives, and the suppression such activity, especially on moralistic grounds, is neither moral nor possible. We might as well try to argue a moral case against hunger or thirst, (not that such absurdities have not sometimes been attempted by fundamentalists). And as Thomas Szasz has argued in his "Ceremonial Chemistry", the only logical way to look at such drug use is to consider it ceremonial and ritual, in the original sense of these terms, not merely empty performance of inherently meaningless gestures but as actual magical and efficacious recipes for modifying consciousness. As such, if we wish to insist on the preservation of human rights in principle, we certainly must include rights to those human needs which we know to be instinctual and universal, those which grant to mankind the seeking of his most basic needs and drives.

^*" Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue", a photographic panorama of cocaine users in three different inner-city areas by the photographer Eugene Richards. Published by Aperture Foundation, 1994.