read part 1

The Free Pursuit of Happiness

We could argue that all of the positive effects of moderate intoxicant use would be better achieved through such practices as prayer, meditation, good works and simple clean living. At the same time, all of the obvious negative effects of intoxicant overuse and abuse would best be avoided altogether. So we might all be better off, and better people, if society just eliminated the use of all intoxicants. There are some individuals who have already achieved such purity; it might indeed be a better world if everyone did likewise.

But which is the better path to such a world? Prohibition, moral‑mongering, judgment and punishment? Or freedom, individual responsibility, education and growth.

We are gradually coming to understand that human beings learn better when treated with respect, given the truth, and encouraged to make intelligent choices. Positive reinforcements work better than negative conditioning. People of all ages grow more sound and vigorously while in the free pursuit of happiness than while reacting to threats and punishments.

Simply stated, the free pursuit of happiness works. To the extent that intoxicant use is truly enhancing one’s happiness, it is enough to gratefully enjoy such use and all that it brings. When instead one is overusing or abusing, and thus diminishing happiness, the challenge is to learn, to moderate present and future behavior, and to get one’s life moving on a more positive track.

Society’s challenge, in turn, is to provide an environment in which such positive learning and growth is strongly supported. This means taking all of the immense effort and resources of our failed war against drugs and shifting to a policy of honest education, compassionate treatment, and reasonable regulation. This means, in essence, becoming fully committed as a society to the basic entitlements of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

read part 1

Overuse

No major American decision was ever made without the influence of alcohol, nicotine or caffeine­‑often all three. —Peter McWilliams

Yet all intoxicants can be overused. This is the ‘tox” in intoxication. Use any intoxicant too much or too often and its positive promise invariably turns poisonous.

The overuse of any intoxicant has a temporarily sickening effect upon one’s body and mind. The stumbling stupidity of too much alcohol, the hacking cough of too much tobacco, the wired agitation of too much coffee, the glazed over eyes of too much marijuana: any intoxicant can be overused and such overuse always results in a short term loss of wellness.

It must be noted, however, that our experiences with specific intoxicants are subjectively determined and therefore personal. One person’s happiness enhancer is another person’s poison. Some people can derive pleasure from scotch, some can’t. Some people can enjoy chocolate every day, some shouldn’t. Even for the individual, moderate use at one time in one’s life might constitute overuse or abuse at another time. All of which argues for social policies that encourage individual responsibility, rather than the promulgation of oppressive dogma and fruitless punishment.

The effects of intoxicant overuse are mostly temporary. They serve as clear feedback to help the individual to moderate any future use of the intoxicant. In some cases, a single instance of overuse (or even just witnessing overuse by another person) may be enough dissuade the individual from ever using a certain intoxicant. Or, some experience with overuse may lead to moderate use, ie, “I never drink more than one beer or “I only get high on weekends.” Or, the individual may miss the lessons of overuse and fall into destructive abuse.

As a species, we will continue to play with half a deck as long as we continue to tolerate cardinals of government and science who presume to dictate where human curiosity can legitimately focus its attention and where it cannot. Such restrictions on the human imagination are demeaning and preposterous. —Terrence McKenna

Lately there have been several articles in the mainstream press discussing the merits of legalizing marijuana and other intoxicants. While most politicians remain obdurate on the subject, the mere possibility of having a frank and spirited public debate, free of “just say no,” knee‑jerk hysteria, is encouraging.

This article is not an advocacy of intoxicant use, nor a denial of the very real problems of abuse and addiction. It is a plea for consistent, humane, and effective substance use and abuse policies. Our current policies inflict unnecessary suffering — on users, abusers and nonusers — while utterly failing to reduce substance abuse and addiction. It is time to try something different; let’s wind down the drug war and get on with the more rewarding work of teaching tolerance and the free pursuit of happiness.

For clarity’s sake this article is limited to a discussion of intoxicating substances. These same arguments can also be applied to the use, overuse and abuse of certain intoxicating activities, such as having sex, watching television, gambling, wielding power, and spending money.

About 80% of all births worldwide are attended by midwives. In America, some 10,000 midwives attend 5% of all births. —”Mothering” Fall 1995In 1979, [California] appropriated $750,000 for the first scientific study ever made of the root causes of violence. Two years later a first paper was issued, listing the ten principle causes of crime and violence in our nation. At the top of the list was the violent way we bring our children into the world. —Joseph Chilton Pearce

For most of human history, the two primary causes of premature death have been traumatic injury and infectious disease. Mainstream American medicine, with its heavy emphasis on hardcare practices, grew out of the challenge to solve these two problems. To a great extent it succeeded, with at times miraculous results. Yet the development of hardcare — a combination of complex diagnostic technologies followed by treatments of drugs and/or surgery — has come with unintended consequences that have brought American society to a profound crisis.

Hardcare medicine creates a specialized class of experts to administer to the sick while diminishing individual responsibility for the health of one’s body and mind. Hardcare drugs and surgeries can cause serious side-effects, often worse than the symptoms they attempt to cure. Hardcare treatments prove inadequate against a host of modern illnesses, yet hardcare tends to screen out, deny, and actively campaign against other healing approaches. Finally, hardcare medicine is extremely expensive and thus exacerbates all of our current economic difficulties.

The failings of hardcare medicine have arisen where it has over-reached its ability and over-stated its role within society. Though hardcare medicine provides excellent tools for dealing with the problems of traumatic injury and infectious disease, it fails terribly for most other health problems.

Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries. —Dr Christopher Murray, head of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington

It’s getting to be old news, but a recent study has further clarified the dismal performance of the US healthcare system. In the past twenty years, the US has fallen from 11th to 42nd place in life expectancy. Nations doing better than America include all of Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Jordan.

Researchers cite two main factors: the ridiculous costs of health insurance, and the trend toward obesity in America, especially among the poor.

Neither of these factors will ever improve as long as we continue down the hardcare path. Indeed, both factors would be immediately improved by a shift to a single-payer system that stresses prevention and softcare.

As he retired from office, Dwight Eisenhower imparted a scary warning about the “military-industrial complex”: an insidious merging of America’s security apparatus with private and corporate profiteers that gobbles up vast national resources while spewing waste and destruction in its wake. (Early drafts used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, but the President was persuaded to remove “congressional.”) Though there’s long been much nodding in agreement with Ike’s assessment, nothing has slowed the growth or dimmed the power of the military-industrial complex.

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” promising a cure with the decade. Like the current president, Nixon totally misunderstood the “enemy” and committed the nation to an endless war of attrition and frustration. Even worse, he committed vast amounts of wealth to the funding of the “medical-congressional-industrial complex” that, like its military counterpart, drains the public treasury while providing a too often unhealthy medical product.

These mammoth conglomerates share a number of traits:

During the 14th century the bubonic plague struck with devastating results, wiping out half of the population of Europe and much of Asia. Called the Black Death, it was caused by an infectious bacterium which was spread by flea-infested rats.

I can remember as a child watching a movie about that time and being struck by one scene in particular: a big man, all dressed in black, drives a cart from house to house, picking up the dead and carrying them off for burial. I remember thinking, “How is he getting away with this?” Here is an incredibly bad bug, killing one out of every two people, and this guy is going into infected households, and touching infected bodies, and somehow still managing to put in a sixteen hour day!

“We will never solve our problems using the same kind of thinking
that caused them in the first place.” —Albert Einstein

The healthcare debate of the past few years must have Einstein nodding sagely from the grave. For all the volumes that have been written, for all the legislative starts and stops, for all the heated discussions of experts and pundits, little has been said about the medical thinking that underlies our current healthcare crisis. We have fixated on the secondary concerns of administrative bureaucracies and payment systems, when we should be exploring long-overdue changes in societal attitudes, lifestyles, and healing practices.

American medicine grew out of and remains mired in the Industrial Age. The “kind of thinking” that characterizes an industrializing society is reflected throughout our current healthcare system:

• the turning of “healthcare” into a mass-produced consumer item; the imbalanced relationship between so many doctors and their patients;
• the overuse and abuse of invasive drugs and surgeries;
• the shifting of power and prestige from general practitioners to overpaid specialists;
• the discounting of mental, emotional, and nutritional causes of illness;
• the over-medicalizing of the should-be sacred events of birth and death;
• the granting of ultimate authority to distant, profit-driven bureaucrats;
• the fundamental dis-ease of the modern hospital;
• and the continuing failure to see polluted air, water, and soil as vital public health issues

All healthcare practices, techniques, treatments, devices, and medications can be placed on a spectrum ranging from softest to hardest. At the soft end of the spectrum we find such approaches as massage, herbalism, diet, yoga, and emotional counseling. At the hard end of the spectrum we find most surgeries, most prescription drugs, acute and traumatic injury care, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and extreme psychiatric practices, such as electroshock.

The basic premise of commonhealth is that to the extent that a community or nation has over-committed to hardcare approaches, its heathcare expenses rise precipitously, fewer community members have secure access to regular care, and overall outcomes — as measured in such areas as infant mortality, life expectancy, and iatrogenic illness — worsen.

Conversely, when we commit time, money, energy, and attention to softcare approaches, expenses fall, everybody has secure access to quality care, and medical outcomes improve.

While America’s healthcare crisis is in part due to its inane aversion to “socialized medicine,” even if we remove the insurance companies from the equation and adopt the single-payer system that works so well for other nations, many of our problems will remain. Indeed, the proponents of “anti-social medicine” may be proven right: there’s way too much hardcare in our current system to fund with a tax-based approach, so there would definitely be long waits and/or rationing for hardcare treatments.

Even as it shifts to a single-payer system, America must also undergo a total rethink of its medical practices. As we lessen our reliance on hardcare, and commit to a softcare lifestyle, we’ll all feel a whole lot better.

The debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip) — whether to continue it, and for how much money and how many kids — is providing a clear view into the ugliness of anti-government conservatism. Nobody contends that the program isn’t successfully providing much needed care to millions of children, or that providing the care via SCHIP is less expensive for the nation than having all of these uninsured children show up at emergency rooms when sick.

But Mr. Bush, with the blessings of many Republicans, promises to veto any legislation that attempts to expand the program. Not because we can’t afford it: the proposed expansions would amount to a couple months of the war in Iraq, and would be paid for by taxes on tobacco. No, Bush’s real objection is that if we do this, and it works, then we’ve opened the door to more government healthcare:

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

But it has taken the fight over children’s health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view.

There are arguments you can make against programs, like Social Security, that provide a safety net for adults. I can respect those arguments, even though I disagree. But denying basic health care to children whose parents lack the means to pay for it, simply because you’re afraid that success in insuring children might put big government in a good light, is just morally wrong

So, we will go on with our ridiculously bad healthcare system, refusing simple changes that have worked for so many other nations, because the men running our government are committed to proving that government can’t do anything right. Which explains the missing WMD, the bungled occupation, Katrina, and so on. Those who voted for Bush can hardly be surprised at the gross levels of criminal incompetence — it was the bottom line of his “government sucks” philosophy.