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. Berkeley, CA 94703 U.S.A. [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]