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The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
14. Psychopharmacology
IN THE WESTERN WORLD, THEN, BY THE 1970s, THERE COULD NO longer
be any doubt that the attempt to control drugs through the crimino-legal
system had failed; and though there was great reluctance to admit
as much, there was more of an inclination to explore alternative
possibilities. And science was at last beginning to help, by beginning
to investigate the social effects of drugs.
d'Abernon: the effects of alcohol
The first tentative exploration of this territory was made in
the First World War, when the d'Abernon Committee was set up to
advise the Government on the effects of drink on the war effort.
Drink taken during the day, Lloyd George believed, made workers
slower and clumsier; and drink taken in the evening was apt to
cause absenteeism 'the morning after'. To what extent, the d'Abernon
Committee were asked to estimate, was the war effort thereby disrupted?
In their report, the Committee had to admit defeat. It was not
merely that scientists had not provided them with the answers;
scientists had not even asked the relevant questions. They had
conducted a great deal of research into alcohol in the laboratory,
but none into alcohol in the pub, the factory, or the home. Did
the drunkenness caused by beer or wine differ from that caused
by spirits? Did mixing drinks tend to produce drunkenness? How
far did the dilution of a drink—whiskey with soda, say—modify
its action? What was the effect of taking food in conjunction
with alcohol? Did fatigue alter the effect of alcohol on performance
of skilled movements? Was alcohol more injurious in dry than in
moist climates? To what extent was alcoholism caused by physiological
disturbances? And did the psychological effects of alcohol—cheerfulness
for example—improve resistance to adverse physical circumstances
such as cold? None of these questions had been put.
Nor, the report continued, had there been research into an aspect
of drug-taking about which a misconception was firmly rooted in
the public mind. It was widely assumed that alcohol, like other
drugs, caused addiction. Yet the great majority of drinkers did
not become addicts. There must, presumably, be something in an
individual which predisposed him to addiction; but what? Again,
the scientists had evaded the question. As a result there was
'an almost entire absence of reliable data regarding the psychology
of the drunkard, though adequate information on this point is
obviously essential in devising rational methods of treatment
of the inebriate. Little is known of the progress of the drinker
from occasional excess to chronic alcoholism. Are the occasional
drinker and the habitual drunkard two distinct types, or is the
former an early stage of the latter?'
The reason scientists had neglected applied research, the Committee
suggested, was partly that they were reluctant to involve themselves
in social, as distinct from academic, issues (sociology was not
yet accepted as an academic discipline); and partly that they
did not care to venture into unexplored territory—the choice
of subjects for investigation had 'often been determined by the
ease with which they could be put to the test, or by their bearing
on some theoretical controversy, rather than their intrinsic and
practical importance'. This was a shrewd criticism; and the guidelines
which the Committee offered for the future were also sensible—that
researchers should now begin to concentrate on finding out why
people took drugs, and what effects the drugs had on the people
who took them and on the community in general. But the Committee
suffered from a limitation. Although it lacked the necessary evidence,
there were some assumptions which, it felt, could safely be made.
Most of them were little more than pious aspirations: 'the ordinary
use of alcohol', its report advised, 'should not only be moderate,
but should also be limited to the consumption of beverages of
adequate dilution, taken at sufficient intervals of time to prevent
a deleterious action on the tissues'. But one assertion, 'that
alcohol is narcotic rather than stimulant in action', revealed
that the Committee shared the orthodox view of the time that it
was possible to categorise drugs as either narcotics or stimulants.
And it based its classification not on everyday experience, but
on research into the effects of alcohol on the body and the nervous
system. Asked to examine alcohol's social effects, the Committee
had castigated scientists for their reluctance to venture out
of the laboratory. Yet its own diagnosis was derived from the
lab, rather than the pub.
Louis Lewin: Phantastica
The most influential pharmacologist of the time, Louis Lewin,
suffered from the same limitation. He was anxious to show that
drugs had been one of the most important of man's discoveries,
and could be one of the most valuable of man's allies, and he
did his best to popularise mescaline—without success, though
experiments by Rouhier in France and Beringer in Germany bore
out his claims. In his Phantastica, published in 1924,
he set out his creed.
If human consciousness is the most wonderful thing on earth, the
attempt to fathom the depths of the psychological action of narcotic
and stimulating drugs makes this wonder seem greater still, for
with their help man is enabled to transfer the emotions of everyday
life, as well as his will and intellect, to unknown regions; he
is enabled to attain degrees of emotional intensity and duration
which are otherwise unknown... By the exercise of their powers
on the brain, they release marvellous stores of latent energy.
They relieve the mentally tortured, massage the racking pains
of the sick, inspire with hope those doomed to death, endow the
overworked with new vitality and vigour such as no strength of
will could attain, and replace for an hour the exhaustion and
languor of the overworked by mental comfort and content.
Lewin was also well aware of the prevailing weakness of pharmacology;
and he mocked those whose contribution had been simply to produce
impressive-sounding terminology. 'Even today,' he wrote, 'we frequently
meet with interpretations of the action of medicinal and poisonous
substances which are merely pseudoscientific descriptions of their
effects.' They reminded him of the scene in Moliere's Malade
Imaginaire when the examination candidate, asked the reason
for opium's soporific action, replies 'because it is endowed with
narcotic and soporific properties'—which so delights his examiners
that they immediately pass him. But Lewin then proceeded to follow
the same course himself. He had not received the formal academic
recognition which his abilities as a researcher and a teacher
merited—perhaps because he was a Jew, and not given to disguising
his contempt for those rash enough to disagree with him. The easiest
way in which he could obtain it, in his own time, was to provide
the classification of drugs according to their pharmacological
properties which had eluded earlier researchers. He decided that
there were five categories:
1 Euphorica—'sedatives of mental activity, these substances
diminish or even suspend the functions of emotion and perception'.
2 Phantastica—hallucinating substances.
3 Inebriantia—causing cerebral excitation followed by
depression.
4 Hypnotica—sleep producing agents.
5 Excitantia—mental stimulants.
The trouble began when Lewin tried to squeeze all known drugs
into the separate categories. His Euphorica were opium
and its derivatives, and cocaine. Indian Hemp, however, was classified
with the Phantastica, along with peyote the fly agaric,
henbane, datura and caapi. In the Inebriantia section,
alcohol was accompanied by chloroform, ether and benzine. The
Hypnotica included chloral, veronal, paraldehyde, potassium
bromide and—remarkably, in view of the results of his own research
into it—kava. And the Excitantia had to provide room
for all the rest—a weird miscellany; including camphor, betel,
kat, coffee, tea, kola, mate, coca, tobacco, arsenic, and mercury.
Lewin was not unaware of the inconsistencies, which he did his
best to iron out by tortuous rationalizations. Some Hypnotica,
he admitted, were capable of being Excitantia; the reason
was that 'like all toxins, they act on the brain', producing a
euphoric state. The fact that the American Indians used tobacco
not as Excitantia, but as Phantastica, to produce
visions, proved more troublesome to explain. The best he could
do was suggest that the hallucinatory effects must have been due
to the carbon monoxide which they inhaled, together with the tobacco
fumes, whenever they lit their pipes.
The book had other limitations. Well-versed though he was in the
pharmacological literature, Lewin's reading outside it was less
than comprehensive; he quoted Surgeon Crombie's statistics about
the insanity caused by hemp drugs, unaware that they had been
demolished in the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.
But this was of little importance compared with the decision to
try to classify drugs according to their effects. Not that his
categories were accepted; but they gave rise to further futile
attempts along the same lines. The basic premise remained, that
it ought to be possible to think in terms of the chemical
action of a drug, rather than of the reaction of the people who
take it; leading to such pontifications as the argument that the
St. Bernard dogs who found lost travellers in the snow ought not
to have carried brandy in their little barrels, because brandy
is a depressant.
Largely as a result of this fixation, pharmacologists could not
come to grips with the most serious problem which drugs presented:
addiction. They could not even accept the traditional premise,
that addiction represented a failure of will power, because will
power was not quantifiable. A favourite proposition in the 1920s,
as Evelyn Waugh recalled in Brideshead Revisited, was 'it's
something chemical in him'; applied to alcoholics, it became 'the
cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misapplication
of popular science'. The available research funds were channelled
into the search for metabolic disfunction, or defects in the endocrine
system. And although by the 1930s there was more of a disposition
to admit the explanation might be psychological, research in that
area continued to be hampered by lack of resources, and by the
divisions among the psychologists themselves. The Freudians looked
for the causes of addiction in unconscious conflicts; the Pavlovians
preferred to regard it as another conditioned reflex—similar
to that which B. F. Skinner induced in rats, so that when they
experienced the joy of a certain type of electric shock, they
would return to it again and again, sacrificing food, fighting
and sex for the chosen form of stimulation.
Auto-suggestion
The break-through to a better understanding of the effect of drugs
can be traced to an experiment undertaken in 1933—though it
was to be many years before its significance was appreciated.
In the Quarterly Journal of Medicine in 1933 two London
cardiologists, William Evans and C. Hoyle, described how they
had given out pills which their patients, suffering from angina,
assumed were pain-killing, but which were actually made from bicarbonate
of soda. Over a third of the patients reported that their pain
had been satisfactorily relieved.
It had long been known that people could be fooled by the fairground
quack's coloured water, and come back for more. But it had been
taken for granted they must be gullible souls, who only imagined
they were better, or who perhaps had only imagined they were ill.
This could hardly account for so high a proportion of angina patients
reacting to a placebo, as if it had been the real thing. And by
this time, there was a widely-publicised alternative explanation.
From his experience as a chemist in Troyes, Emile Coue had become
convinced that what cured many of his customers was not his medicines,
but their belief in them; a conviction which he was able to test
by giving them placeboes.
At the time, Evans and Hoyle's paper aroused only mild curiosity;
and Coue's fame, though world-wide, turned out to be transitory.
The imagination could be stimulated, he had suggested, with the
aid of a simple formula; 'every day, in every way, I get better
and better'. It was a reversion to ritual; and in a ritual-starved
civilisation it caught on, throughout Europe and America, as well
as in France, with people intoning it in the bath or on the bus.
But his basic proposition, that the formula's function was simply
to help bring the imagination into play—just as a drug might—was
not grasped. It was assumed that he was calling for an exercise
of the will. The ritual became a music-hall joke and, like many
another craze of the twenties, Coueism soon became only a mildly
absurd memory.
After the Second World War, however, research began at last to
broaden its base. The psychologists did not compose their differences,
but they managed to establish a measure of common ground, leading
to acceptance of the proposition that there are addiction-prone
individuals—or, rather, that some people are more addiction-prone
than others, and are therefore more likely to become addicts if
nudged in that direction by any of a variety of forces.
At first sight this was not far removed from the earlier idea
that addicts lacked will power. But there was one essential difference.
It had been believed that the addict could extricate himself if
he really wanted to, by an effort of will. The new theory came
closer to regarding addiction as a neurosis. There was no point
in telling an addict to pull himself together, because the fact
he had become an addict itself revealed that he was incapable
of such self-discipline.
The reasons why one individual was more addiction-prone than his
neighbour proved difficult to pin down. It was easy enough to
show with the help of statistics that the Italians, in proportion
to the amount of wine they drank, were far less likely to become
alcoholics than the French; not so easy to determine why. Long-term
monitoring projects began to turn up clues; they revealed, for
example, that alcoholics were more likely to come from homes where
there had been parental conflict. But there were scores of similar
environmental possibilities to be considered, as well as interactions
between them. All that could be claimed with assurance was that—as
Howard Jones put it, in his study of alcoholism—addiction was
not 'the invariable result of particular kinds of personality
constellation', but 'the solution found when problems of adjustment
arise because certain types of personality are confronted by certain
types of environmental stress'.
This research therefore, though it contributed to a better understanding
of the drug problem, did little to assist either prevention or
cure. For a time it was hoped that new institutions, specialising
in the treatment of drug addicts, would be the answer. Even hardliners
like Anslinger approved, because they wanted it to be demonstrated
that addicts could learn, or be taught, self-control. The first
such establishment was opened in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1935,
subjecting heroin addicts to a rigorous course designed to dry
them out and refit them for society; and by 1953, Anslinger was
able to boast that of the 18,000 patients who had been through
it, two-thirds had not returned. This should, he felt, give everyone
confidence that the system worked. That confidence was soon shattered.
Follow-up studies of those two-thirds, to find how they were faring,
revealed that the great majority had relapsed. Lexington s success
rate, it was estimated, was only around three per cent. Other
institutions, more sympathetic in their approach, were to do a
little better; but not much. As Brecher sadly noted in his Licit
and Illicit Drugs, 'no effective cure for heroin addiction
has been found'.
One reason for the failure of institutional treatment emerged
when a few doctors began to study placebo effect in its own right.
They found that the pharmacological content of a drug was not
necessarily the determining factor in the patient's reaction to
it For example, when Dr. Stewart Wolf—one of the pioneers of
such studies in America—gave a woman an emetic, telling her
it was a medicine designed to stop her feeling sick, not merely
did she stop feeling sick, but her stomach juices, which were
being monitored reacted as if they were dealing with an anti-emetic—in
other words, to her mental picture of what the drug's effects
should be, rather than to the drug.
In his Drugs and Human Relations, published in 1970, Dr.
Gordon Claridge set out the evidence which had been accumulating
to show the extent to which it is not the drug, but the expectation
of the drug taker, which determines reactions. In a trial where
one group took barbiturates, while a matched group were given
placeboes, the barbiturates proved to be more effective sedatives
only when the members of the group which was taking them were
expecting sedation. Where they did not know what to expect from
the pills, the reaction was the same whether they took the placebo
or the drug. An experiment which Claridge himself undertook on
behalf of the British army in 1961, to find out how the tranquilliser
meprobamate affected soldiers' reactions, had a similar result.
Although there was no significant difference between the reactions
of those who took the drug, and those who took the placebo, both
performed their set laboratory tasks less well than a third group
who had not been given pills at all. The fact of taking pills,
in other words, led to a deterioration in performance 'Although
none of the subjects was told what to expect'; Claridge observed,
'most of them clearly associated drug taking with "being
drugged", or being made less efficient in some way'.
It was not simply the lay public who could be deceived by placeboes.
Doctors had been inclined to think they would not be good subjects
in such tests, because they would know from training and experience
how to recognise a drug's effects. But when in the late 1960s
the members of the staff of the Department of Psychological Medicine
in Glasgow University who had volunteered for tests were given
pills which might be either amphetamines or placeboes, and were
invited to guess which they had taken, their replies were scarcely
more accurate than if they had decided by spinning a coin. One
psychiatrist of several years' standing recognised his symptoms
as coming from dexamphetamine. According to Claridge, 'during
the next few hours he became more "high", and the following
morning announced that participation in the experiment had considerably
enhanced his enjoyment of a party the previous evening'. It had
then to be broken to him that he had taken a placebo. Other members
of the staff, equally convinced that they had taken placeboes,
found that they had in fact taken amphetamines.
In search of reality
At first sight, such evidence may seem hard to reconcile with
the accounts of the effects of the vision-inducing drugs. It is
conceivable that Huxley knew enough about mescaline, when he took
it, for his imagination to take over; but not that Hofmann could
have known what was going to happen when he took LSD. Another
experiment described by Claridge provides a clue. In it, one of
the subjects who thought he had taken LSD described what he saw:
... a lot of strange shapes and brilliant colour, after images,
as if I looked through pebble finished glass, particularly this
morning. Especially this morning colours were more brilliant than
I have ever experienced. Voices were at times somewhat in the
distance, along with a feeling of being in a real situation, a
dream kind of state, time is distorted, goes rather slowly, and
an hour is only 10 to 15 minutes when I look at my watch...
'A perfect description of the LSD state!', Claridge commented—but
the subject had in fact had a placebo. The mind, in other words,
is capable of duplicating any drug experience; but this is not
the same as saying that the drug is irrelevant. LSD is obviously
a highly potent substance, capable of inducing striking changes
in perception. What it cannot do is produce more than is already
within the mind's own capability. The drug is essentially the
trigger mechanism. That is why at different times, or in different
cultures, reactions to the same drug have been so very different.
Take, for instance the passage
Shivering I rose from my seat, incapable of rest, when that heavenly
and harp-like voice sang its own victorious welcome... a chorus
of elaborate harmony displayed before me as in a piece of arras-work,
the whole of my past life—not as if recalled by an act of memory
but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful
to dwell upon, but the details of its incidents removed, or blended
in some hazy abstraction, and its passion exalted, spiritualized,
and sublimed
This, too, might have been written about an LSD 'trip'; it is
in fact, de Quincey's description of the effects of laudanum.
Jean Cocteau reacted similarly to opium. All of us, he claimed,
carry something folded up within us like those Japanese flowers
made of wood which unfold in water
opium plays the same role as the water. None of us carries the
same kind of flower. It is possible that a person who does not
smoke may never know the kind of flower that opium might have
unfolded within him.
On other writers, however, the opiates have had the opposite effect.
For William Burroughs, they diminished awareness so that they
could only, he felt, be a hindrance to the artist; whereas cannabis
gave him what he needed: 'unquestionably this drug is very useful
to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise
be inaccessible'. Others, again, have derived their inspiration
from tobacco, about whose effects J. M. Barrie wrote in terms
ordinarily applied only to a loved one.
An attempt to account for these variations was made by William
James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, where he
recalled the effect ether had had on him. He had found no reason,
he wrote, to change the impression he had formed at the time.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness
as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst
all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there
lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may
go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply
the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their
completeness... How to regard them is the question—for they
are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may
determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open
a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid
a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
The function of the drug is to provide the stimulus: and any drug
may serve, if it happens to suit the individual concerned. Ether
had suited James; peyotl had made him sick—perhaps because he
literally could not stomach it, perhaps because the circumstances
in which he took it had been unfavourable.
But how does a drug, any drug, liberate the mind? Huxley believed
the explanation must be sought in a theory advanced by Henri Bergson,
and later elaborated by the Cambridge philosopher, Professor C.
D. Broad. The original function of the brain, Broad thought, was
basically not productive, but eliminative. It was designed 'to
protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by the mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most
of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment,
and leaving only that very small and special selection which is
likely to be practically useful'. This, Huxley decided, would
explain what had happened to him, and to others who had had similar
drug experiences. Ordinarily we get only a 'measly trickle' from
the mind's vast resources. But a few individuals have a by-pass
mechanism, enabling them to open the doors of perception; others
construct one with the help of spiritual exercises; and others
can utilise drugs.
On this hypothesis, the vision-inducing drug could be described
as a password to open doors which, for most people, are ordinarily
closed. There is no single password; each individual may have
his own—or none. Only one drug in common use has rarely been
employed for the purpose: alcohol. Alcohol and the hallucinogens,
Humphrey Osmond has argued, are actually antithetical; alcohol
produces a downward transcendence, peyotl an upward one—the
difference between levelling up and levelling down. Alcohol allows
one to relate to others by being more sure of one's self. This,
in small doses, is much better than not being able to relate at
all, but it is a very precarious business, and selfishness may
soon end in brawling and ill-temper. Peyotl acts not by emphasising
one's own self but by expanding it into the selves of others,
with a deepening empathy or in-feeling. The self is dissolved,
and, in being dissolved, enriched...
Anthropological field workers, too, have reported that the shaman
who takes a drink loses his powers of divination. It remains possible,
therefore, that the pharmacological action of alcohol will eventually
be shown to be qualitatively different from that of other drugs,
so that the doors which it opens do not expand awareness but instead—as
Malcolm Lowry suggested in Under the Volcano—facilitate
the emergence of a second self, ordinarily kept hidden.
Even this, though, is uncertain. Alcohol may have the effects
it does because in some as yet unexplained way our minds are programmed
to react to it—as a shaman's is programmed to react to tobacco
as a vision-inducer.
The most likely hypothesis is that although a measured quantity
of a specific drug can, other things being equal, have statistically
predictable effects within a culture, its effects can vary greatly
with different cultures, as well as with different individuals,
or with the same individual at different times—as Oliver Sacks'
experiences treating patients with 'L Dopa', described in his
Awakenings so strikingly illustrated. The reactions to
the drug, he found appeared to be dictated not just by the personalities
of the patients, but by fragmented elements of those personalities,
too.
In ordinary circumstances, however, expectation is the most potent
force in determining a drug's effects. When Dr. Walter Pahnke
tested a psilocybin mushroom derivative on theology students at
Harvard, he found that the visions the students reported were
indistinguishable from the visions they would have expected to
get from a mystical experience. And from his study of the peyotl
cult among the Huichol Indians of Mexico, Peter Furst concluded
that beyond any sensations which could be attributed to the chemistry
of the plant, 'there are powerful cultural factors at work that
influence, if they do not actually determine, both content and
interpretation of the drug experience'.
Drugs and drink
Scientists, then, have at last begun to ask relevant questions
about drugs, and are beginning to get some answers. But the answers
have been largely ignored, or rejected, because they do not fit
in with society's preconceptions about drugs. One of the commonest
assumptions, for example, is that alcohol has in some measure
been tamed, and consequently can safely be put in a different
category from other drugs. But a research project undertaken by
Dr. Harris Isbell and his associates at Lexington has revealed
that almost all the reactions of subjects who were given barbiturates
in the experiment, from mild tipsiness to delirium tremens, duplicated
those of alcohol—so closely, Brecher thought, that 'the barbiturates
might be labelled a "solid alcohol" and alcohol classed
as a "liquid barbiturate".' The differences between
them were chiefly the consequence of the barbiturates being available
in more concentrated form. Otherwise, the evidence suggested,
there was no logical reason why the barbiturates and alcohol should
not be placed on the same legal footing. Yet in practice, as Brecher
put it,
society takes a very different stance with respect to the twin
drugs. Alcohol is treated as a non-drug; it is on sale in multidose
bottles at 40,000 liquor stores and in countless other outlets
as well; it is freely sold to those 'of age' in saloons, taverns,
cocktail lounges, nightclubs, roadhouses, and even ordinary family
restaurants; and more than $250 m a year is spent on advertising
alcohol. The barbiturates, by contrast, are legally saleable only
on prescription in pharmacies; other sales are severely punishable
criminal offenses.. It is a curious fact, indeed that Americans
today are bombarded with advertising urging them to buy a liquid
that, if secured without a prescription in tablet or capsule form,
could lead to imprisonment for both seller and buyer.
In clinical terms, Isbell's experiments have also showed that
the effects of alcohol and the barbiturates on health are more
serious than those of the opiates. If its social side effects
are taken into consideration, alcoholism emerges as by far the
most serious of the Western World's drug problems. According to
an estimate published early in 1972 by the National Institute
on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in America, nearly ten per cent
of the nation's drinkers at that time were alcoholics, doing incalculable
damage to their health, wrecking their families' lives, costing
$15 billion annually in damage to property, loss of working time,
and welfare payments, and causing havoc on the roads. In the same
year, Lord Rosenheim, Chairman of the Medical Council on Alcoholism
in Britain, warned that the number of alcoholics was much higher
than doctors realised—there were 350,000 in Britain, he estimated
but there might be as many as half a million—and that alcohol
caused far more actual illness, as well as misery, than all the
other drugs such as cannabis, heroin and LSD put together.
In both countries, too, the number of alcoholics has been rising—so
rapidly, in Britain an international conference on the subject
in London was told in 1973, that they would top the million mark
by 1980. Many other countries in different parts of the world
have reported the same trend. Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda complained
that winter, was becoming a nation of drunkards; and he threatened
to resign if they did not learn to control their excessive drinking
habits. Yet the World Health Organisation, faced with such reports
from all over the world, could do little more than file them.
'So far as I am concerned', Dr. Dale Cameron, head of WHO's Drug
Dependency Unit, said in 1971, 'alcohol is probably the king of
the mountain,' but so far as the U.N. was concerned the king could
do no wrong, because by tacit consent alcohol had not been included
in drug conventions. In logic, or sense, such an omission was
impossible to justify—as the Shafer Committee recognised. American
laws, its report noted, had made alcohol the preferred social
drug, but 'that historical fact should not prevent further evaluation
of this preference'. On the Committee's own evaluation, alcohol
dependence was 'without question the most serious drug problem
in this country today'.
This is not, of course, to suggest that a campaign to wean people
away from alcohol could blithely stress the relative safety of,
say, cannabis as an alternative. Indeed the latest reports on
cannabis, published by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal
Security, strongly suggest that the drug carries greater dangers,
mental and physical, than has earlier been recognised. This discovery
appears to be partly due to more, and more sophisticated, research
projects; partly to the recent development of stronger, more dangerous
forms of the drug; partly to some as yet unexplained psychological
reaction among users (perhaps more people are taking it not for
a 'lift', but as a narcotic).
The evidence provides a salutary reminder that any drug, and all
drugs, can have adverse effects. To judge from the introduction
to the published volume of evidence, by Senator James Eastland,
though, the lesson that banning a drug is the certain way massively
to increase the sales of it has not been learned. He is aware
that ten times as much cannabis gets into the country as is seized
('a fairly conservative estimate'). He is also aware that in the
past five years seizures of marihuana have increased tenfold,
and of hashish, twenty-five-fold. But it still has not got through
to him why. Dr. Henry Smith Williams's 1938 prophecy has come
true; prohibition of cannabis has brought a five billion dollar
racket in its train.
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