GEFAND ON DRUG POLITICS-It's true. Rumors and denials have been put to rest. Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead, allegedly with the needle still in his arm. Packets of heroin were found near his body. How does this writer, while advocating for drug legalization, rationalize a serious loss such as this?
As a few readers may remember, I recently published an article here in City Watch arguing that marijuana and the opiate drugs should be legalized. I don't regret making that argument, but I think it's legitimate for people to question that position and for me to respond as best I can, particularly in light of this loss.
The main argument for maintaining the current prohibition on drug possession is that it saves lives. Whether this assertion is true or not, we mourn the loss of a fine artist, and we should at least be sensitive to the losses of additional people who die more or less anonymously. Some of them are skid row addicts, some are middle class suburbanites, and some are prisoners. Our humanitarian impulse should be to sympathize with any preventable death, whoever the victim, and wonder what our society could have done differently.
This is a very different position than that of the traditional drug warriors, who have condemned drug use for a different set of putative reasons -- drugs allow people to enjoy themselves in a sinful way; drugs render people less productive in our culture of work and thrift; drugs are used by members of minority groups.
Perhaps that summary sounds harsh, but revisiting the history of the drug wars shows that these accusations are valid. The argument in favor of banning marijuana included a strongly racist component, and the enforcement of laws against opiate usage (and more recently cocaine and its derivatives) is clearly and obviously slanted racially.
But what about when one of the beautiful, productive people dies as a result of drug abuse? We remember lots of remarkable musicians who hit their peaks in the 1960s and passed on just as quickly -- Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix -- and it's something notable that the brightest names at the Monterey Pop festival passed on in one brief period due to substance abuse, right along with Jim Morrison.
Could they have been saved? Would the drug war be worth it if we could know that it is effective, and that some of these people would still be alive? I think that these are legitimate questions, unlike the neo-Puritanical notion that we should have laws to prevent people from enjoying cheap thrills.
So how can an advocate of legalization defend his position?
As in so many questions that deal with liberty vs. security, it's not easy. My arguments are fairly simple, if not perfectly adequate. I don't believe that either side has an argument that is one hundred percent adequate. All we can do is toss out the reasons, and offer up what is, after all, a value judgment that society has to make.
First of all, I will offer the factual defense. Hoffman managed to find his drug of choice easily. News articles make clear that there are many brands of heroin available in New York City, and suggest that Hoffman could have obtained his drugs close to home. So from the ultimately opportunistic position in this argument, we can point out that drug penalties don't seem to make drugs much less available. Maybe law enforcement could make illegal drugs harder to obtain, but this would require a much more severe intrusion on all of our liberties.
There are countries where the police have the power to stop you and frisk you without any notion of probable cause or suspicion. They just do it, on the basis that when the people know that they can be searched at any time, they are less likely to keep any kind of contraband in their pockets. It's one alternative to our system, but I would suggest that it is contrary to our values and accepted legal principles. Actually, the Supreme Court has relaxed the limits on police searches to an alarming degree in this country. I would not want to see it go even further.
Perhaps the local authorities in Hoffman's neighborhood could and should have been more attentive to the local drug trade. Police departments have to allocate their limited resources, and they probably have decided that they have more important things to do than to abolish the drug trade. I would suspect that they view it as an exercise in trying to dry out the ocean with a tea cup.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that it would be possible to reduce the availability of heroin substantially, and that to do so would mainly cost us money, with perhaps less damage to our already seriously endangered liberties. Is this a desirable course of action?
I don't think so, but the argument is ultimately one of numbers and philosophy. Shall we sacrifice more of our freedom in order to save some lives? The counter argument is that there are also lots of people who use drugs without dying, who are not forced into their drug usage, and who will eventually give drugs up or continue to use them as their physical needs and emotional resources dictate.
In other words, there is a certain amount of opiate use in this country that doesn't have to be harmful for most of its users. The case was actually made many years ago in a book by the editors of Consumer Reports, who presented us with the book Licit and Illicit Drugs. To the naive reader such as myself, it was curious to learn that heroin is not instantly addicting, as we had been taught in school, but was (and probably still is) used recreationally by quite a lot of people. Back in 1969 when this book came out, heroin had already been a part of our wider culture for generations.
So at one level, the use of heroin is a potentially lethal activity that is indulged in by some people for their own reasons. A former user once explained to me that heroin basically shut off all feelings for him. He eventually gave it up, and seems like a fairly reasonable and productive person to me. I fail to see how a stretch in prison would have made him a better person now, and it would probably have made him a lot less able to get a job or interact with the rest of us nowadays.
The news articles relate that Hoffman referred to his addiction in interviews. He apparently was a troubled person and a heavy user early in life, but gave up serious drug abuse for at least the last couple of decades. The fact that he went back to serious, dangerous usage led to his death this week. I think we can interpolate from all of these facts to conclude that Hoffman had always had the opportunity to obtain strong drugs, from the time that he was barely twenty until the present day. The law didn't get in his way. He seems to have gone back to using fairly recently, if we can interpret press accounts reasonably, and all we can do is wonder why. But it wasn't the law or the police that stopped him from using during his remarkable acting career. That had to come from within.
The sad and ultimately painful conclusion for those such as myself is that maintaining American liberty has some costs, and one was the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's a harsh admission, but I think we are better off being honest about the trade off between liberty and security, and not pretending that it has ever been otherwise.
There is one more consideration that a civilized society ought to make. I offer the stories of Lenny Bruce and John Belushi. As many of us remember, Belushi died at a Hollywood area hotel as the result of a marathon session involving heroin and cocaine. He was only 33. Could he have been saved? Perhaps it might have been possible, but at what cost?
I think that a system in which somebody in Belushi's condition could be committed in some civil procedure might have helped him. The current system, with its accent on criminal indictment, makes it a lot harder for friends and relatives to intervene.
The story of Lenny Bruce is even more to the point. Bruce seems to have been the ultimate social libertarian. He, like Hoffman, died at home from an opiate overdose. He too left a substantial artistic record.
He had been hounded by law enforcement not so much for his drug use, but for the language he used in his comedy routines on stage. It seems preposterous to us in this modern era, but Lenny Bruce led the way for our more modern views about freedom of speech.
As to his drug usage and ultimate death thereby, I think it's tragic, but I wonder whether we can accept that some people need to follow their own path. If that path doesn't do harm to any of the rest of us, then do we have the right to tell them no?
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 10
Pub: Feb 4, 2014