A Drug Ain't a Drug
Ain't a Drug

 

 

You humans are infamous throughout the animal world for imprecise diction. More than two thousand years ago, one of you wrote of calling a spade a spade, and it's surely a shame that in all that time you haven't taken his advice. But perhaps the problem is that you have been taking it too literally after all.

Consider the term drugs. Many of you consider drugs to be a very bad thing, and thus their signifier is a very bad word. You talk about drug abuse, the War on Drugs, drug dealers, the drug culture, drug lords, and drug treatment. You construct entire political platforms, fund dozens of administrative agencies at various levels of government, and propagate slogans based on the unified menace presented by drugs. Of course, you go to drug stores and complain that your houses or cars are drugs on the market--a problematic expression if ever there were one, given that drugs tend to sell themselves without any prompting on the part of the vendor--so you do acknowledge, somewhere, somehow, that the word's meaning is not a single block of semantic corundum, indivisible and complete. But most of the time, you throw the word drugs around as though the negative cachet it carries were equally applicable to all it represents. You are, of course, utterly wrong.

Food is another word that describes a wide range of signifieds that share a commonality: edibility. And you act in accordance with this variance in value. You specify. No doctor would ever advise a patient seeking to lose weight to merely eat less food, because a huge difference exists between celery and cheesecake. Some foods are more fattening than others. No one would invite people over for Thanksgiving and serve, say, cold cuts and braunschweiger because they, like turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie, are food; the guests would not be satisfied by it merely because it shares a few carbon-chain similarities with the fare they had rightfully expected. Some foods are more palatable than others. And as a corollary, no one would ever present a friend with a birthday trout stuck with candles or a lover with a box of raw peanuts on Valentine's Day. Some foods are more seaonally appropriate than others. Why, then, can't you be as precise about drugs?

First of all, despite occasional claims to the contrary, you don't consider some drugs to be drugs at all. Many of you champion the notion of a drug-free America while sipping your beers and smoking your cigarettes. Sure, once in a while some commentator or letter writer will proclaim that even alcohol and tobacco are drugs, but few really think of them that way--few in power in Washington, D.C., at least. The most you see are statements regarding "alcohol and other drug abuse." Why differentiate alcohol at all? It intoxicates, and if you drink enough of it, you stop breathing and die. It is a drug. Tobacco is addictive and produces marked physical and mental effects. It is a drug. Period.

Second, and most important, the drugs you have made illegal are a wide-ranging assortment indeed. When you humans speak of a War on Drugs, you are speaking of a war on cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline (save for Native Americans, despite the Supreme Court), cocaine, amphetamines, phenethylamines such as MDA and MDMA, barbiturates, sedatives, analgesics, opiates, anaesthetics, and probably other things I, as a mere lizard, wouldn't be decadent enough to know by name. Now, come on, are you really, honestly thinking that marijuana deserves the same amount and degree of artillery aimed at it--if any--as does heroin? Drug users choose their substances according to individual circumstances and preferences; if the time is right for opium, methedrine will not do, and if a joint would be the perfect thing, chances are that ketamine would be overdoing it. Many of you neo-Puritans seem to think that drug users lack the power of will and discernment that mature adults such as yourself possess, but clearly they can differentiate among these substances; why can't you? Of course, federal and state statutes place drugs into several schedules, or classes of danger, but the fact that you've got marijuana listed with heroin proves that if drugs do indeed cause brain damage, you've chosen wisely not to indulge yourselves because you don't have that much to lose upstairs.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt