DRCNet
Review
Essay:
Drug
Policy
and
Prohibition
in
Context
5/26/06
Phillip S. Smith, Writer/Editor, [email protected] "Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America," by Philip Jenkins (2006, Oxford University Press, $28.00 HB)The books reviewed in these pages typically hone in on drug policy with a tight, laser-like focus, exploring the tragedy of drug overdoses, the history of prohibition, or the high wonkery of drug policy reform. This week, we're backing away from that tight focus. Drug policy and prohibition do not occur in isolation, and the two books under consideration here both do an excellent job of situating these issues in a broader context. "Decade of Nightmares" by historian Philip Jenkins and "The Devil's Picnic" by Montreal food critic and travel writer Taras Grescoe are world's apart in tone and substance, but both authors offer enlightening reflections on the role of drug policy and prohibition in shaping the world in which we live. "Decade of Nightmares" is a sweeping social, political, and (pop) cultural history of how America made the dramatic shift from the hippy hedonism of the 1960s to the mean and fearful era of Ronald Reagan, while "The Devil's Picnic" is marketed as travel/cultural studies but is really a global tour of prohibited items and the cultures that prohibit them. For people interested not only in drug policy but the broader social and political currents around prohibited items, "The Devil's Picnic" is an absolute gem. Montreal food critic Grescoe takes the reader to Norway, home of the West's most restrictive alcohol laws, to sample hjemmebrent, or Norwegian moonshine, and on to France and Switzerland in search of authentic absinthe, the wormwood liquor banned in the US and most of Europe for the past century. He smuggles narcotic poppy seed bagels, chewing gum, and pornography into squeaky clean Singapore and samples bulls' balls and tobacco-poisoned eel in Spain. He puffs on banned Cuban cigars in the smoke-easies of San Francisco as California lurches toward anti-smoking totalitarianism and sips coca tea in La Paz as the US wages war on the plant that produces it. Grescoe also investigates the case of the incredibly stinky and unpasteurized French cheese banned in the US, and he travels to Switzerland in search of the ultimate proscribed substance: sodium pentobarbital, the suicide drug that will put you to sleep forever. Grescoe's touch is light and entertaining, his prose sparkles, and his curiosity about the whys and wherefores of the various prohibitions he encounters is both delightful and enlightening. He has a vivid way with words, as witnessed by his description of the incredible French Epoisse cheese: "Tackling an Epoisse is a bit like gnawing on a urinal cake in the middle of a feedlot lagoon," he writes. "Once past the odor barrier of mingled barnyard and ammonia, however, one is reminded that Satan is indeed a fallen angel. The tongue is suddenly suffused with the divine essence of fresh milk, a pure distillation of salt, sugar, cream, and all the rich flavors of the Burgundian countryside." But if his touch is light, Grescoe's purpose is serious. In his chapter on Norwegian moonshine, for instance, he looks at -- and past -- the statistics and the official line. Norway claims to have half the per capita alcohol consumption of the rest of Europe, he notes, but then adds that the difference is largely made up by moonshine and smuggling. Grescoe talks to experts, to scientists, to entrepreneurs, to drinkers, and in so doing, reveals the hidden reality of Norwegian alcohol consumption. Likewise, as he sits at 10,000 feet in Bolivia, desperately sucking down coca tea in an effort to fend off altitude sickness, Grescoe ponders the futility of the war on the plant. He ponders how to end an absurd drug war and writes with sympathy about the traditional and sacramental uses of the plant, but scoffs at the notion of "resacralizing" it. The notion is "romantic but disingenuous," he writes. You can't undo the knowledge of how to make cocaine. What does give him hope, he writes, is his certainty that the drug war is doomed to failure. "Short of defoliating the entire planet and napalming all the Earth's arable land, the total eradication of drug crops is an unattainable goal," he concludes, rather happily. His global journey was an education, Grescoe writes. "After 12 months of traveling through seven different countries, I've encountered vastly different attitudes toward prohibitions, ranging from welfare-state tolerance to nanny-state fury, from urbane indifference to xenophobic hysteria; not to mention the perplexed patience of those in the developing world whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign prohibitions. The world changed my outlook, as it always does. If I started out as a libertarian, in favor of legalization, I ended up with a more nuanced view of how prohibition, and drug prohibition in particular, should be handled." Grescoe's education is a joy to read and will doubtless educate and entertain the reader as well. This is an ideal book for anyone who appreciates fine writing, thoughtful exposition, and the lure of the forbidden. In "Decade of Nightmares," Philip Jenkins inhabits a much darker world, that of America in the 1980s. Jenkins attempts to answer the question of how, in less than a generation, America moved from Woodstock to Ronald Reagan. Jenkins' is a big-picture portrayal of the massive demographic and attitudinal changes that resulted in the seismic political shift to the right epitomized by the 1980 election of Reagan, who only a handful of years before was considered a raving extremist. For Jenkins, the reaction to the hedonistic drug use of the 1960s was a key, if not the central, element in the massive social and electoral lurch rightward in the 1980s. For Jenkins, the successes and excesses of radical liberalism in the 1960s did not create the socially rightist reaction -- those forces are always lurking beneath the surface of American politics -- but helped awaken the dormant beast and ensure that it stayed frightened -- and angry. Gay liberation and women's liberation won great advances in the early 1970s, but those advances only served to mobilize -- to this day -- a reaction from Americans worried about traditional gender roles and morality. Rising crime rates led to a turn away from "soft-hearted" liberal criminal justice policies and toward the penitentiary. American uncertainty and timidity in foreign policy in the wake of Vietnam resulted in an ever louder crescendo of fears that the country would fall to the Soviets or Arab terrorists or Third World radicalism. And then there was drugs. The 1960s was the decade of mind-blowing drug experimentation, and by the early 1970s drug taking was relatively uncontroversial, especially when compared to the big chill that followed. Jimmy Carter dabbled with marijuana decriminalization, and his aides were spotted partying hard in DC nightclubs. But, Jenkins notes, by 1977 the first parental anti-drug groups were emerging, and they soon forged alliances with a weak and lonely drug war bureaucracy desperately searching for allies. By 1982, Nancy Reagan ushered in the era of "just say no." Since then, it has been almost all downhill on the drug policy front. The Reagan 1980s saw the onslaught against drug paraphernalia, the rise of drug testing in the workplace, the use of the military to fight the drug war, both on the US border and in foreign countries, and of course, the boom in imprisonment that has yet to end. Equally important, drug policy was key to the Reagan era's crime policy. "Though violent crime and terrorism both made a huge public impact," Jenkins writes, "the centerpiece of Reagan-era law enforcement policy was the war on drugs, a campaign against the primary symbol of the freedom, and excesses, of the 1960s." Jenkins is a historian of, among other things, moral panics, and brings a sharp eye to bear on the hysterical response to drug use that has emerged since the 1970s. In an earlier work, "Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs," he examined in great detail the creation of such panics, examining the great Ecstasy fear of the 1980s and -- surprise -- a methamphetamine panic of about the same time. In "Decade of Nightmares," he charts how fears about the demon drug of the day, PCP, morphed into an unyielding demonization of all drugs, and how that discourse tied into the other great Reaganite discourses of fear -- of the foreign, of the different, of the other, and above all, for the children. Indeed, Mrs. Lovejoy, the preacher's wife in The Simpsons who is always screaming "What about the children!?" could be an icon of the era. As Baby Boomers aged -- the 18-year-old dope-smoking hippy in 1972 was a 28-year-old parent in 1982 -- libertine attitudes toward drugs curdled into fears of what they would do to the kids, radical feminist concerns with liberating women's sexuality curdled into fear of marauding men who rape women and sexually abuse children, the notion that criminality was a social problem curdled into the cult of personal responsibility and the fear of "predators" and "serial killers" (both terms that originated in that frightened era). The Reagan 1980s birthed a perfect storm of hysterical fears. This was the time of ritual child sex abuse, Satanic cults, and highly publicized mass murderers. Although Jenkins is careful to point out that no credible evidence exists of such things as Satanic child sex abusers, they were on the evening news day after day. Jenkins does readers a service by writing not just a political history of the transition to darkness, but a social and cultural one. One can glean as much information about changing attitudes toward drugs by noting that the same comedy team that wrote the drug-drenched Taxi in the late 1970s also created Cheers in the early 1980s -- where there is nary a drug reference and the lead character is a reformed alcoholic -- than by reading reams of policy papers. "Decade of Nightmares" is rich and dense, and an extremely useful study for those of us old enough to remember the heady days of 1968 and what went wrong afterward. For those for whom the Reagan 1980s was a time of playing in the sandbox, "Decade of Nightmares" is a welcome attempt to explain how we got from Woodstock to Reagan. What makes it even more important today and for this audience, is Jenkins' elucidation of the central role drugs played as bogeyman for a frightened America. And what makes it extremely important is that sad fact that we are, to a large degree, still in Reagan's 1980s, only more so than ever.
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