Szasz (Psychiatry/SUNY at Syracuse) at his abrasive best, skewering
the shibboleths of the War On Drugs and giving historical context
to the current national hubbub. The prohibition of drugs abrogates
our constitutional right to property; Americans have lost the
freedom to control their bodies; until 1914, Americans had
unrestricted access to drugs of their choice without government
control of the market: Thus begins this reasoned and passionate
treatise, in which Szasz denounces both the prohibitionists ("the
War On Drugs is itself a giant quackery") and the legalizers -
"paternalistic prohibitionists" whose agenda, the author says, is
to transfer control of drugs to the medical system and to continue
prohibiting substances, albeit only certain ones (e.g., tobacco
rather than marijuana). After a scathing indictment of Nancy
Reagan's "moronic anti-drug slogan" and her encouragement of
children who report their drug-using parents to the police, Szasz
dissects a cast of antidrug crusaders (Father Bruce Ritter, Betty
Ford, Kitty Dukakis, William Bennett) and concludes that drug
education is the "name we give to the state-sponsored effort to
inflame people's hatred and intolerance of other people's drug
habits." Turning to legalization proponents - Lester Grinspoon,
Ethan Nadelman, Eric Sterling, William F. Buckley, Jr. - Szasz
analyzes their proposals as new prohibition schemes. Why do we fear
making drugs freely available? Because people would choose "an easy
life of parasitism over a hard life of productivity" and become
"drug-crazed" criminals? According to Szasz, economic productivity,
crucial for the survival of society, has "nothing to do with drugs
but has everything to do with family stability, cultural values,
education, and social policies." And, as for crime, it is caused
not by drugs but by their prohibition. Places the rhetoric and the
players in clear positions on the board, whether or not you agree
with the Szasz prescription. (Kirkus Reviews)
.In Our Right to Drugs, Thomas Szasz shows that our present drug
war started at the beginning of this century, when the American
government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent
medicines. By the end of World War I, however, the free market in
drugs was but a dim memory, if that. Instead of dwelling on the
familiar impracticality or unfairness of our drug laws, Szasz
demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws which
place people under lifelong medical tutelage. The result is that
most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug
economy to a free market in drugs.
Throughout the book, Szasz stresses the consequences of the
fateful transformation of the central aim of American drug
prohibitions from protecting us from being fooled by misbranded
drugs to protecting us from harming ourselves by
self-medication--defined as drug abuse. And he reminds us that the
choice between self-control and state coercion applies to all areas
of our lives, drugs being but one of the theaters in which this
perennial play may be staged. A free society, Szasz emphasizes,
cannot endure if its citizens reject the values of self-discipline
and personal responsibility and if the state treats adults as if
they were naughty children. In a no-holds-barred examination of the
implementation of the War on Drugs, Szasz shows that under the
guise of protecting the vulnerable members of our
society--especially children, blacks, and the sick--our government
has persecuted and injured them. Leading politicians persuade
parents to denounce their children, and encourage children to
betray their parents and friends--behavior that subverts family
loyalties and destroys basic human decency. And instead of
protecting blacks and Hispanics from dangerous drugs, this holy war
has allowed us to persecute them, not as racists but as
therapists--working selflessly to bring about a drug-free America.
Last but not least, to millions of sick Americans, the War on Drugs
has meant being deprived of the medicines they want-- because the
drugs are illegal, unapproved here though approved abroad, or
require a prescription a physician may be afraid to provide. The
bizarre upshot of our drug policy is that many Americans now
believe they have a right to die, which they will do anyway, while
few believe they have a right to drugs, even though that does not
mean they have to take any. Often jolting, always stimulating, Our
Right to Drugs is likely to have the same explosive effect on our
ideas about drugs and drug laws as, more than thirty years ago, The
Myth of Mental Illness had on our ideas about insanity and
psychiatry.
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