You wrote:
>
>Hi Ron...
>
>Drug is a cultural category, yes.  But I think in terms of drug policy,
>it is important to point out that alcohol has lots in common with heroin,
>cocaine, marijuana and other pharmacological substances and is more
>damaging in many terms than those which are illegal.
>
>I read a very absurd passage in a new history of drug policy, Hepcats,
>Narcs and Pipe Dreams, which claimed that the reason alcohol is different
>from other drugs and should be kept legal while enforcement against the
>others should continue is that people don't always use alcohol to get
>high, but they always use other drugs for that reason.
>
>She claimed that alcohol is sometimes used to relax and for social
>connection -- of course, no one ever uses pot that way ;)
>
 
Hi Maia...
 
Yes, emphasizing the CNS-effects similarities between alcohol and illict
drugs is a two-way street, and can both (a) enhance the movement to
re-problematize alcohol and (b) (in some quarters, at least) serve to
soften the moral valence on hard drugs.
 
This small equation in sentiment has some remarkable and ironic
corollaries.  For one, it can create a slightly topsy-turvy,
alice-in-wonderland-ish political circumstance in which
pro-legalizationists on the *drug* side make common cause with
neo-temperance and anti-industry activists on the *alcohol* side.  In
effect, the culture wars of the Sixties are symbolically revived--with
pro-drug activism paired on the same side with anti-alcohol activism (*1).
Go figure.
 
The effect can be ideologically dizzying.  But it is also instructive and
interesting.  When you look at the striking difference (IMHO) between
Floyd's and your own image of the alcohol=drugs equation, you begin to
sense the remarkable multidimensionality and flexibility of the "substance
abuse" cultural domain re issues that define it.  An issue like the
alcohol=drug equivalency can be played this way or that, it can
problematize one thing while de-problematizing another, or it can
problematize both, etc., etc., etc.
 
My sense is that just such flexibility gives the "substance abuse" problem
arena and its moral entrepreneurs of various stripes both (a) maneuvering
room in the present and (b) flexibility over historical time.  In other
words, it allows the substance abuse field the necessary *vagueness* and
multiple-meaning possibilities to make for unlikely coalitions and provide
for shifting emphases with shifting historical circumstances.  Flexible
nuance can be readily converted into valuable cultural capital.
 
Note:
 
(*1) This is by no means a new phenomenon and I'm not of course the first
to have noticed it--see essentially the same point being made in David F.
Musto's 1984 *Wall Street Journal* article explaining the important role
of pro-marijuana campaigners and sentiment in reviving the neo-temperance
sensibility ("New Temperance vs. Neo-Prohibition," 6/25/84).
--
Ron Roizen
voice:  510-848-9123
fax:    510-848-9210
home:   510-848-9098
1818 Hearst Ave.
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