Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference

by Bernard M. Patten

  Consider the slogan “war on drugs.” You have heard that before. It represents a policy of the US government. Work on it now. Tell what it means. Tell why it leads us away from truth toward error. Jot down the main points of your thinking. Compare your analysis with mine. By now, your attack on stupid government slogans and programs like this one should sound pretty sophisticated. You should be able to tick off p. 164 all the big errors in thinking that the slogan implies. You should be able to break down the false analogy without difficulty.

  Item: Simple and simplistic.

  The drug problem is complex and complicated. There cannot be a simple solution to it. That is just impossible. If the problem were that simple, it would have been solved long ago by previous administrations in the previous wars on drugs. Don’t get me wrong. I want the drug problem solved. I wish that making war on drugs would solve the problem—forever. The reality is that it won’t. That is just wishful thinking, which gets us nowhere. I have a better chance of flying to the moon by flapping my arms than the government has of solving the drug problem with a war on drugs.

  Item: Assumes facts not in evidence.

  The announcement of a war on drugs implies that the issues involved have been thoroughly discussed and understood and that the people, Congress, and the president back this kind of drastic action to achieve goals that have been almost universally recognized as important. Such is not the case. Meaningful discussion of the pros and cons of drug interdiction has not and does not take place. Such discussion, if it did occur, would have to consider the pros and cons of legalization; the cost (time, energy, money) of further enforcement procedures; alternative ways of dealing with drug addiction including medical treatments; the history of previous failures of similar wars on drugs; the causes of addiction; the individual drugs and their properties; and so forth. Such an analysis would be long and complicated and, if undertaken with the proper degree of scholarship, confusing. To those who want a quick and easy solution to the drug problem, the process needed to actually solve the drug problem would be tedious.

  Item: Overgeneralization.

  Obviously, we are not about to make war on all drugs. Some drugs are good for us. Painkillers are needed for those in pain, antibiotics for those who have infections, insulin for diabetics, and so forth. In other words, medical uses must be excepted. Yet the statement does not say that. Since we are not about to make war on drugs, the type and quantity of the “enemy” drugs should be specified. Even better would be to mention the specific drugs, the quantities that would be interdicted, the reasons for the interdiction of that particular agent, and the cost-benefit analysis that shows that the interdiction is worth the effort. Other exceptions should be specified also. For example, American Indians may use p. 165 peyote and other hallucinogens in their religious ceremonies. Recreational use of marijuana in Alaska and some counties of Nevada is legal. Medical use of marijuana is legal in thirteen states, including California.

  Item: Unsupported assertion.

  The implied assertion that a war on drugs is justified or even needed must be proven by evidence. We just can’t be presented with a multi-billion-dollar program without piles of evidence that it is needed and is likely to be effective. In general, a nation makes war when its very survival is at stake. Is that the case here? If so, prove it. It is not sufficient merely to assert that the drug situation is so severe that it parallels the situation requiring a war. It is not sufficient merely to state the cases are parallel; they must be shown to be parallel. In fact, multiple important differences exist.

  Item: Vague definitions.

  Putting aside for the moment the misuse of the word war, the word drugs in this context is not adequately defined. Probably what is meant is illegal drugs, but even among these there is a variety of illegal drugs, some more powerful than others. Some, like LSD, are not addicting. Some, like cocaine, are less addicting than tobacco cigarettes. Yes, a survey of the fifty top physician experts on drug addiction lists tobacco as more addicting than cocaine. And I know why: It is. How much sense does it make to interdict a drug when a more addicting drug like it (in the dopamine-releasing family) is legal?

  Some drugs, like marijuana, are relatively harmless. Two government committees have in fact reported that marijuana is relatively harmless, as did the LaGuardia commission as did the American Medical Association.

  Yes, the American Medical Association testified before Congress that there was no medical evidence that marijuana was harmful. The American Medical Association lobbied against any federal laws restricting the use of marijuana. The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 was passed specifically exempting marijuana as a nod to the American Medical Association. In 1937, the penalties for opium, heroin, and related drugs were applied to unauthorized handling of marijuana. Subsequently, all physicians had their marijuana licenses revoked, mine included. Thus, marijuana was no longer available even for medicinal purposes. What is the consequence of lumping marijuana with heroin?

  Arresting people for possession of marijuana might jam the court system to the hilt. It does in some jurisdictions. Because of the jams, p. 166 England has effectively legalized marijuana by proclaiming there will be no further enforcement against users.

  Currently, for that reason, among others, marijuana laws are not enforced in Houston nor are they enforced in Galveston. If the marijuana laws were enforced in Houston, 90 percent of a certain segment of the population would be behind bars.

  Frankly, I don’t care if someone smokes a joint. Do you? Even if you did care, how much do you care? How many of your personal dollars are you willing to spend on the cost of arresting, arraigning, prosecuting, trying, sentencing, and jailing someone who got caught smoking marijuana?

  Item: Diversionary thinking.

  Is it possible that the idea of the war on drugs was constructed to divert our thinking from another issue or to push us in a certain direction (i.e., toward more societal control of individual lives) rather than simply a method to control drugs? If that is true, then to the extent that it is true, the war on drugs is irrelevant for all attempts to divert attention from real issues are irrelevant.

  One is reminded of the “WAR” in the famous novel 1984 by George Orwell. According to the Goldstein handbook, the “WAR” is not real. Not only is the “WAR” not real, but it will never end because it is an instrument of power, an excuse, whereby the rulers can inflict their control on the masses. The “WAR” in 1984 conveniently diverts attention from the wretched poverty and servility that the citizens of Oceania have to endure. By giving the citizens a fake enemy and a fake war for them to worry about and hate, the power elite divert attention from the real issues: loss of freedom and loss of human dignity. To Big Brother and his minions, power is not a means; it is an end. And power means the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering on another human being. It is the power, as Simone Weil tells us, to transform a living person into a corpse, that is to say, into a thing.[1]

  My point is not to debate the drug question but to point out the kind of thinking involved in this slogan. Such thinking can result in some pretty bad consequences. All this is confounded by the fact that most of us use drugs every day. My morning coffee has a drug called caffeine. Tea has the same drug, and so does Coca-Cola. Caffeine works by binding to the adenosine receptor, thus preventing the destruction of multiple neurotransmitters. The net effect of caffeine is to stimulate the brain. As a drug, caffeine works quite well. That is why we use it. By the same reasoning, in a very real sense my morning coffee mug is a drug p. 167 delivery device. Tobacco and alcohol are also drugs. Their sale is controlled and their use restricted to adults. Last night at Tony’s restaurant, there were lots of adults using alcohol—but they were not abusing alcohol. There’s a difference. Could someone use currently illegal drugs and not abuse them? Why or why not?

  Also at Tony’s, I saw some men at the bar who seemed to be enjoying cigars, and a young lady, God forbid, was smoking a cigarette.

  So wha
t?

  That’s the point. So what. Why couldn’t similar programs for controlled legalization and use work for at least some of the drugs that we are told we need to make war on? England has a program where any physician can use his judgment to support a drug addict, even by giving that addict heroin. The program has been in place for years. It’s not ideal, but it has cut drug-related crime. Could such a program work in the United States? Why or why not?

  Item: False analogy.

  The slogan compares drugs to an enemy nation and states that we will make war on it. Drugs are not a nation. Drugs will put up no fight. The war, if there is to be one, I imagine will be against someone, a person or persons unknown.

  Who?

  The slogan doesn’t say. If we are going to war, shouldn’t we know who we are going to fight? Could it be addicts? Most of them are unarmed and will not be in military uniform. If the war is against addicts, it might not be justified because many addicts are just sick people seeking in the temporary oblivion of some drugs a surcease from sorrow. Is the war against dealers? Many of them will be unarmed and not in uniform. If the war is against dealers, what dealers? The kids who do the running on the street barely scrape by with a living. Yet they are the dealers facing the most danger, mainly from other dealers. But they also face the danger of arrest and possible harm from the police. Are the kids, the runners, who are mainly black boys, the target? And speaking of police, how do they fit in here? How about corrupt police? Are corrupt police the enemy? Drugs cannot exist in Harlem without police protection. So are the police the target of this new war on drugs? How about corrupt politicians in this country and others? Do we get them, too? And by the way, how is the war to be fought? Machine guns? Antitank weapons? Ground troops? The H-bomb?

  The devil is in the details. In a democracy, to be truly informed, we p. 168 must know the details to know if the ideas and the program are reasonable or not. If people were not so resistant to careful thinking, they would realize how often the analogies like this one that encourage them to accept propositions could equally well be used to establish opposite conclusions. From which follows: How about peace on drugs?

  Item: Broadcast definition wrong.

  The word war is misused in the slogan. It is probably misused because of the emotional effects of the word, which are exactly what we are trying to prevent by clear thinking. When emotions get in the way of thought, watch out.

  A war is an open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. If the war on drugs were a real war, then Congress would have had to declare it. Since Congress did not declare a war and no military action against another nation is specified, we must conclude that the war on drugs is not real. If it is not a real war, then it must be fake.

  Have you noticed that there are too many fake things in modern America? Do we need another fake thing? Do we need a fake war? Do we need a fake war on drugs?

  Isn’t it high time to stop the war metaphor? Isn’t it high time we started thinking about the drug problem intelligently?

  Item: Begging the question.

  We will discuss this error in thinking in chapter 7. Begging the question is a subdivision of the error known as partial selection of the evidence. In brief, the war on drugs implies that we will win the war. No sane person or nation should declare war unless it has a reasonable chance of success. Previous wars on drugs have not been successful. In fact, previous wars on drugs have been failures. How those wars differed from the new one just proposed should be specified so that we can decide if the chance of this war having a different outcome is better, the same, or worse than those in the past.

  Along these lines, it would be interesting to review the nation’s experience with other drug interdiction programs that have failed. Prohibition, for instance, resulted in more, not less, alcohol consumption; introduced women to drinking in speakeasies; led to gang crime of gigantic proportions; and even worse, put on the market alcoholic beverages that were contaminated with wood alcohol, a substance highly toxic to the human visual system.

  Eventually, the great national experiment was deemed a failure, and p. 169 the prohibition (18th) amendment to the Constitution was repealed. Adult Americans can now freely imbibe the contents of bottles. Interestingly, after the repeal of prohibition, the crime wave engendered by the prohibition disappeared. The reason the crime wave disappeared is that the illegal market for the product disappeared. There was no way in either price or quality for illegal alcohol to effectively compete with legal alcohol.

  That result raises an interesting question: What would happen if all currently illegal drugs were legalized? Would the crime associated with drug trafficking also disappear? Who knows? But it is something to think about before we assume that the newest and most costly war on drugs will work.

  Consider the following thirty-second TV spots.

  The first spot, called “I Helped,” shows a series of young people saying things like, “I helped murder families in Colombia”; “I helped a bomber get a fake passport”; “I helped blow up buildings.” The spot ends with the tag line: “Drug money supports terror. If you buy drugs, you might, too.” The second spot, called “AK-47,” follows the style of MasterCard’s “priceless” advertisements by McCann-Erickson Worldwide Advertising in New York. Images of rental cars with trunks full of automatic weapons, a safe house, and a man buying box cutters—poignant images for American viewers after September 11—are flashed on the screen followed by: “Where do terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.”

  The spots were first aired during Super Bowl XXXVI at a cost of $1.9 million each, paid by (your) tax dollars. Variations of the “I Helped” advertisement appeared in more than three hundred newspapers.

  Critics, including some parents, say that the advertisements’ negative-niche strategy is unlikely to be effective. Jane Marcus, a mother of two and a member of the PTA in Palo Alto, California, said, “The argument is fallacious to begin with and plays on people’s fears—the two aren’t connected,” she said of the link between terror and drug abuse. Good for you, Jane. Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors a strategy based more on treatment, said: “This is a shameless exploitation of the war on terror. The government is trying to bolster a failing war on drugs by linking it to the war on terrorism.” Good for you, Ethan.

  That’s what they say. What about you? What do you say? Do you say no to drugs? Do you say no to the war on drugs? Do you say no to irrap. 170tional slogans in general? Let’s review without comment some war slogans of the past:

  “Save the tomb of Christ from the Heathen!”

  “Down with Popery!”

  “Liberty or Death!”

  “Cotton, Slavery, and States Rights!”

  “Libertad O Muerte, Vive Puerto Rico Libre!”

  “War to end all war!”

  “Remember the Maine!”

  “Fifty-four forty or fight!”

  Each of the above slogans is now a permanent part of the irretrievable past. They influenced thousands to go to war. They collectively must bear partial responsibility for hundreds of thousands—some of them, millions—of deaths.

  Principle: Slogans can obscure thinking.

  From which follows:

  Lesson: Slogans are suspect. Watch out for them. Watch out for slogans that are repeated over and over again. They are usually dead wrong. Slogans that are repeated imply that the opposite of the slogan’s implications is closer to the truth. Repeated slogans are a form of cheerleading, which should make us reason darkly about why such cheers are being foisted on us.

  Anyone out there remember this slogan from a previous chapter? “We are the master race!” Who’s we? The Third Reich, of course.

  Is the word are in the above slogan a predicative or an existential? Are the Germans really a race? If the Germans are a race, are they really the master race? Is it that simple? What’s the evidence? If the Germans are the ma
ster race, how do they explain their defeat in World War I? What conclusion would follow from the idea that the Germans are the master race? (Hint: If there is a master race, then there must be a slave race. In fact, Hitler used this lie as the rationalization to justify aggression against and subjugation of others.)

  p. 171 William L. Shirer’s best-selling classic about the Nazi era and World War II, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, tells how Hitler had the idea of establishing a Ministry of Propaganda (subsequently expanded to Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda). Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels minister of popular enlightenment and propaganda. Hitler directed Goebbels to make up slogans that, though stupid and untrue, would through repetition eventually be believed. All radio stations and newspapers were brought under Goebbels’s control. To be an editor in the Third Reich, one had to be, in the first place, politically and racially “clean.” The Reich press law of October 4, 1933, which made journalism a “public vocation” regulated by the state, stipulated that all editors must possess German citizenship, be of Aryan descent, and not be married to a Jew. From this it was inevitable that a deadly conformity would come over Germany’s press. Big lies became the news du jour. A few mad leaders with a talent for verbal demagoguery, mass manipulation, and deception led the world toward a tragic destiny.