Everybody listen to the magician

 Posted by on 14 March 2009  Modern Life
Mar 142009
 

Penn Jillette is the “talkative half” of comedy/illusion duo Penn & Teller (see his partner survive a zombie uprising here). Now, although a lifelong teetotaler, he’s come clean with his true feelings about drugs.

I first saw this over on BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow nailed it:

If you want to change your state of mind with a chemical, it’s your goddamned state of mind to change. What liberty could be more fundamental than the liberty to choose how you think? Taking mood-altering substances is, in and of itself, victimless (though the drug trade that’s sustained by drug prohibition has plenty of victims, and people can certainly destroy their lives with drugs, a tragedy that is vastly exacerbated by prohibition). I’ve lost several dear friends to drug overdoses and none of them were suicidal: they died because street dope varies wildly in potency and the heroin they took was purer than they’d anticipated.

As far as I’m concerned, everything that we call “drugs” — including crystal meth, heroin, crack, and other drugs that destroy lives in vast swaths — should be legalized and brought into the light of day so that the people who have problems with them can get help without the stigma of criminality and so that the people who don’t have problems with them can get on with doing their thing.

Hear, hear.

Grant Hamilton

  • Colin Corneau

    Tell it to an addict.

    Or a family whose life was ruined by one. It’s not as simple, carefree and libertarian as Cory would have us believe. And you should be suspicious of anyone who suggests that it is.

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      See also: Alcoholics and Prohibition. Despite the very real problems with drug addiction, I think he’s on to something with his assertion that the “War On Drugs” harms more people than drugs do. It’s also true that drug addicts might be better treated as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue.

      Legalize it, then tax it, and suddenly the government makes money instead of Mexican cartels and the Taliban.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Amy Breen

    Never mind that the War On Drugs in the states has been a colossal failure.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs

  • Colin Corneau

    That’s true, but George Carlin recognized a long time ago that not all drugs are equal.

    You can’t equate, say, the essential harmlessness (IMHO) of pot with, say…cocaine or heroin. In other words, some drugs are just plain f***ing evil, and no one has any business legitimizing them at all — Penn Jilette’s hippy-dippy “it’s my brain and I’ll fry if I want to” approach to the topic.

    Be very very VERY cynical when someone comes along peddling a simplistic line that complicated issues can just be wished away.

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      Well, I agree that there is a whole continuum of different drugs, but I tend towards the belief that most drugs are less dangerous than we are led to believe — and I include heroin, crystal meth and crack in that statement. Bad? Sure, but not as bad as The Man would have us believe.

      And even if they are horrifically horrible, what benefit do we, as a society, get from criminalizing their use? All we end up doing is further stigmatizing people who are already stigmatized enough. Legalization lets us do things like having counsellors present upon sale of these more-dangerous drugs, say.

  • Colin Corneau

    Decriminalization isn’t the answer, especially for drugs that are truly horrible or destructive.

    Here’s a thought, though: when it comes to users, treat drugs and drug addiction as a medical issue, NOT a criminal one.

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      I agree — it should definitely be a medical, and not a criminal issue. But the second half of the equation is the destructiveness that comes from the illegal drug trade. Keeping drugs illegal ensures that they are highly profitable.

      If drugs — all drugs — were legal, the government could regulate their availability. Nobody sells black market glue or gasoline because there’s no profit in it, even though those products are terribly destructive drugs. I just think that most of the “demand” for drugs is originally created by drug dealers who want to push their product. “The first one’s free” etc.

  • Colin Corneau

    Wrong and a shallow assumption.

    Even if you legalized heroin — a ridiculous proposition in any culture — you’d still have people producing it illegally/outside government control. People don’t stop bootlegging alcohol or selling cigarettes illegally just because they’re “controlled”, do they?

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      You know a lot of people making bathtub gin or growing their own tobacco?

      Alcohol might be the easiest drug to manufacture — and it’s still easier for most people to go buy it. The same will happen with heroin or cocaine or LSD or meth. It’s just too difficult and too time-consuming and too dangerous to make it when there’s no big profits it in.

      Without a big profit, there’s no motive to get people hooked on it. Providing an affordable, compassionate, legal supply for addicts — along with counselling or medical treatment — is the best way, in my opinion, to gradually reduce demand. Plus, it eliminates the organized crime aspect of it.

  • Colin Corneau

    Stop and listen to yourself — “legalized heroin”.

    It’s not pot and it’s not ‘shrooms. Speaking as a guy who’s spent an afternoon walking Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (with a friend who’s spent years making journalistic contacts there), you’re living in cloud-cuckoo land if you actually believe this hippy-dippy legalization dogma.

    Again: some drugs NEED to be illegal and condemned. You’re just replacing one rigid unyielding dogma doomed to fail, with another.

    Plus, Penn looks like the years haven’t been terribly kind to him and I’d be hesitant to take advice from a guy who looks like a creepy drifter.

  • Wynston

    Actually I think heroin is supposed to be a pretty safe drug (as in safer than most prescription painkillers) provided you have an uninterrupted source of quality heroin, which is what legalization would bring. A big part of what makes junkies such a problem is that the drug costs so much that most have to steal, also buying drugs on the black market is generally an unreliable process which can take hours of a junkie’s life to find a hit. This makes holding down a job pretty difficult. There are programs in Amsterdam and I think Switzerland as well where the government gives free heroin to junkies who are watched by a nurse as they take it. This means that they can get their daily hit and then actually live the rest of their day normally without thinking about smack all the time. Also, a decreased price due to legalization would probably lead to less shooting up and more people snorting and smoking it. Since a lot of users start off that way but then start to shoot up as it gives more bang for their buck, but if it was cheaper they could just snort of smoke more.

    I’m not saying that there would be no problems to legalizing all drugs, but I figure it would probably be worth a shot.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Amy Breen

    “Again: some drugs NEED to be illegal and condemned”

    I think some people probably said the same thing about alcohol, which can be just as debilitating an addiction as crack or heroin.

    It depends on the individual person and circumstance, and to say “legalize everything” or “condemn everything” are both painting too wide a swath over the issue.

  • Colin Corneau

    You’re forgetting a few things here, Wynston.

    One, is basic human nature. I’m not passing moral judgement here (not my place) but not too many people would think shooting heroin is equal in accomplishment to, say, art or music or old Simpsons episodes.

    Second is historical precedent. Opium was basically dumped on China in the 19th century by the British (government sanctioned drug pushing! On a massive, inter-continental scale!) and it caused massive social disruption, not to mention a huge war which echoes to this day.

    Not much utopia to be found there, I’m afraid.

  • Wynston

    To be fair something tells me that all those 19th century Chinese people who got hooked on opium were probably escaping much shittier lives than we live now. So I don’t really think it would be as big of a problem.

  • Colin Corneau

    Yeah…nobody suffering these days.

    Life’s a bowl of peaches in the downtown eastside, or Winnipeg’s core area, or Jane & Finch, or….

    As long as there’s people, there will be some of those people suffering. And as long as there’s people suffering, there’ll be people looking for an escape. This is unchanging human nature, and all this hippie libertarian bushwah about a utopian society where everyone will have the same enlightened approach as us comfortable, middle-class, educated white people reeks of the same (failed) absolutism as the “War on Drugs” approach.

    Buddha had it right: always trust the Middle Way approach. Avoid extremes. Looked at sans-dogma, medicalizing addiction (instead of criminalizing) and drug policy is the only way. Pot is a goofy relatively harmless drug. Heroin, or cocaine, are physically as well as psychologically addicting and demonstrably wreak havoc on both fronts…adjust policy accordingly.

  • Amy Breen

    I really don’t think anyone was claiming some great utopia by legalizing drugs. But what it can help to do, is get the control out of the dealers hands so you don’t find bleach in your crack.

    Yes, these drugs are horrible. But just like there are addicts, there are people who do it recreationally. There can be functioning coke sniffers, just like there are functioning alcoholics. What legalization can do is get the control out of the hands of dealers and pushers. No, it wouldn’t be perfect, and it would take a lot of work, but it’s not something to completely dismiss.

  • Colin Corneau

    I’m not dismissing it all; I think you & I are actually pretty close in saying not all drugs should be treated the same.

    I think that reducing harm to addicts is a higher priority than marginalizing dealers. Power will always hang on to power – I don’t think organized crime is going anywhere. By not reducing demand and actually helping people, all you are effectively doing is shifting control from dealers to government — two groups that are untrustworthy and don’t necessarily have your best interests in mind.