Drug Prohibition: A Perverted Instinct?
by Peter Webster
(former) review editor: International Journal of Drug Policy
published by International Journal of Drug Policy in 1999
pre-publication version:
Abstract:
Although many comparable collective irrationalities and social pathologies were long ago laid to rest through the influence of our modern age of science and reason, Drug Prohibition persists, and even flourishes in our time as one of the great continuing instances of crowd-madness so characteristic of the pre-scientific age. In the past few years many writers and researchers have attempted to explain Prohibition’s great hold on us, but none of the resulting hypotheses or theories seem sufficient to the task. With the view that a more radical and fundamental theory of Prohibition’s facilitating collective psychology is needed I present the following ideas, more as an exploration of possibilities and encouragement to others to augment their own thinking than a suggestion that the definitive key to the phenomenon has been found.
1
Instinctive behaviours1 routinely exhibit what might be called the ‘Tex Avery Effect’. An oft-repeated gag of the master cartoonist has a story character, when pushed down by the big bully, instantly pop up in an unexpected location. An instinctive behaviour, if inhibited or suppressed from expression in its normal guise, will unfailingly ‘pop up’ as a different or modified routine, often a strange, unprecedented, or even perverted one.
The lowly Australian digger wasp, when its reproductive behaviour is experimentally disturbed, will exhibit unusual variations of its instinctive routines. The complex nest-building behaviour of many birds, when likewise disturbed for experimental purposes, also then ‘pops up’ as peculiarly altered behaviours.2 Chimpanzees and other primates often exhibit perversely altered social behaviour when living in the stress of unnatural confinement in zoos or experimental laboratories. These examples are by no means exhaustive or the exception to a rule. In general, instinctive behaviour in the animal kingdom will always find a mode of expression despite the most disruptive interference, suppression or change in conditions, either incidental or experimentally induced, and the more severe or unusual the change, the more likely the resulting substitute behaviour will be unusually or even perversely expressed.
To return to the case of our close relatives the chimpanzees and other species of Great Apes, we find that in the wild these animals naturally live in large, complex social groups, and evolved instinctive routines of behaviour suitable for doing so. The complexities of such social living have recently been shown to be far more demanding of intelligence than had previously been surmised, and indeed, it is now strongly suspected that the extraordinarily rapid increase in brain size during the evolution of the several species which preceded the appearance of humans was a direct result of natural selection satisfying the increasing demands of living in increasingly large and complex social groups.3
In the classic scenario of Darwinian evolution, we know that genetic variations that benefit the survival and reproduction of given individuals of a species will tend to be incorporated into the permanent makeup of that species through differentially greater reproduction by those more fit individuals. More recently, some evolutionary biologists have come to see that an analogous principle applies in the case of social animals and the evolution of behaviours enabling such social living. Whatever evolving changes would favour the survival, continuance, and reproduction not only of individual genetic characteristics, but also of the collective behaviours and gene-pool exhibited by the group, would become part and parcel of the genetic and behavioural makeup of that ongoing social group. The extent to which behaviour is determined by genes is still hotly debated, and is likely to remain controversial as long as the empirical evidence connecting genes and behaviour traits remains fragmentary, but for our purposes here it matters little how closely this determinism applies.4
What we may deduce from the above considerations is that many evolving instinctive behaviour traits enabling and controlling complex social living must have played an important role during the long period of primate evolution preceding the appearance of the human species, and as the complexities of social living and its demands for increasing brain size and intelligence increased, the role of instinctive behaviours must have become correspondingly more important and pervasive, and even to some degree uniform across the several competing species of advanced primates.
One such universal instinctive trait, a tendency for strong and important xenophobic behaviours,5 would very likely have evolved as an essential characteristic favourable for preserving the integrity of simian social groups. Particularly important for social regulation were both individual and collective behaviours toward animals from neighbouring territories and the regulation of how individuals might ‘emigrate’ to a new group. In studies of some social ape species we find that the occasional individual from neighbouring areas may come to live with a social group, but is routinely accorded the lowest status and prevented from mating, particularly with group members of higher ranking.6 A given social group would thus be protected not only from immediate behavioural perturbations through an influx of ‘foreigners,’ but also the group’s gene pool would be preserved by preventing the dilution of the genetic characteristics of the top-rank and fittest individuals by ‘foreign’ genes. Thus through the isolating and protective mechanisms of instinctive xenophobic behaviour traits, social groups would have competed with each other as units under the rubric of ‘survival of the fittest’ as do individuals within groups, and the evolution of social living would have had long and stable opportunity to develop into increasingly complex forms.
The primary importance of such xenophobic instincts for evolution can be gauged firstly by the fact mentioned above that simian social living and its routines were highly demanding of intelligence and highly dependent on group stability and integrity, thus associated facilitating instincts must have been strongly and indelibly established, playing a major role along with intelligence and brain size in the development and maintenance of complex social living; and secondly that such social living was itself an important and necessary step in the evolution to more advanced primates and eventually humankind. One may say that this period of evolution and the necessary mechanisms which enabled it were of unparalleled importance for the appearance of humankind.
It would seem that we have here a possible, if not probable explanation of the origin of similar xenophobic tendencies in humans, if we can accept that instinctive behaviours as well as obsolete morphological features tend to linger on for inordinate amounts of evolutionary time if they do not become too disadvantageous. Examples of vestigial body features are widespread in the animal kingdom, such as the retention of useless but harmless digital bones in the fins of cetaceans, or the human appendix that only rarely becomes detrimental through infection.
The fact that we humans exhibit instinctive behaviours as do our simian ancestors will be denied by some, and that we may have inherited at least the traces of many such traits from our ancestral cousins even more strongly resisted. Simple examples such as innate fear of snakes, the inherent making and recognition of many universal gestures and facial expressions — both shared by many primates including man — or the common bodily and behavioural reactions to fear across a wide spectrum of animal species seem much harder to argue away through Behaviourist or reductionist convictions than to accept with the caveat that we simply do not know much about how instinctive behaviour is produced, nor the mechanisms of its inheritance. The general scientific scepticism today concerning innate biological drives or instincts in humans is no doubt a continuing legacy of the success of reductionist outlook and technique in the physical sciences and the attempted emulation of such methods by the Behaviourist school of psychology. This same trend in psychology long insisted that even consciousness was not an acceptable subject for scientific enquiry, and hopefully the recent resurgence of the study of such formerly taboo subjects will continue apace with further revivals of concepts and models ignored since the time of William James. To accept that the xenophobia at root of countless tragic events punctuating human history might well have its origins in simian evolutionary necessity should be difficult only for the prejudiced, or perhaps the religious fundamentalist, for the scientific evidence that could be cited in support of the idea is significant, if somewhat circumstantial as is much other evidence about the distant past.7
2
If originally the xenophobic instincts of our primate forbears were an essential and positive factor for the evolution of complex social living, with the advance of civilisation the trait became far less beneficial and even pathological for humankind. Especially when expressed irrationally, i.e., without conscious deliberation or calculated decision and often in contradiction with what informed conscious deliberation would otherwise produce, the xenophobic attitude toward outsiders and foreigners can become a force leading individuals and even entire nations into acts of great and malignant destructiveness. The expression of the xenophobic instinct thus appears in human societies in perverted forms, it finds outlet through whatever channel is most convenient, and perhaps the most obvious and enduring outlet has been racism. Although the specific characteristics of racism in human societies are obviously learned — the kind of individuals or groups that are to be rejected as inferior and the rituals used to express that rejection — the appearance of racism so universally and in so many different guises, as well as its ‘knee-jerk’ mechanism of expression, argue strongly for the existence of an underlying and strong instinctive tendency. The near-universal expression of racism and its parallels to common and important instinctive behaviours in our primate ancestors might even be taken as proof positive that inherited instinctive behaviours not only linger in humans, but might actually be quite rampant in our behavioural makeup.
The institution of slavery, an excellently adapted vehicle for the expression of the racism deriving from instinctive xenophobia, existed not only in the most ancient of times, but also in the most advanced, intellectually-developed societies until a mere moment ago, in evolutionary terms. Slavery as an institution has gone hand in hand with the expression of racism, both to facilitate and rationalise it, and to ignore its instinctive sources. It is not that racism and slavery are logical or necessary outcomes of xenophobic drives — which might have been channelled into less harmful modes of expression — or that they did not develop into forms and institutions whose functions became far removed from the original needs that made them attractive as satisfiers of those instinctive tendencies, but that the underlying individual and collective psychological traits inherited from a long evolutionary development found their most convenient outlet here, and in lieu of human societies failing to develop social structures and rituals for rendering the instinctive drive more benign, slavery and racism became rather permanent and pervasive features of human societies: They functioned as perverted outlets for the latent but strong instinctive xenophobia which no longer could be satisfied through the kind of social situations typical of our primate ancestors. Slavery very closely resembles the situation we find in certain simian social structures mentioned above, where newcomers to a group, when allowed at all, must take up the lowest and most subservient positions in the group, and strong taboos regulate social interaction of newcomers with ranking individuals especially with regard to mating and reproduction.
In the course of the development of modern civilisation, however, effective outlets for the expression of instinctive xenophobia have become fewer, and the requirements of civilised living more and more restrictive of the more blatant xenophobic attitudes and practices. The practice of slavery became increasingly benign, and finally was eliminated as inhuman and criminal. The wholesale destruction of Jews, indigenous tribes, the lynching of blacks, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ overweening nationalism and other of the more overt and destructive expressions of racism became impossible — or at least socially proscribed — as outlets for the xenophobic instinct except in isolated and fanatic regimes. Increasingly the expression of the xenophobic instinct has been repressed, for socially and intellectually we have become increasingly aware of the often disastrous consequences of its unbridled expression.
Yet the Tex Avery Effect, like rust, never sleeps. With such a long-surviving instinctive behaviour we may expect to see that, when repressed, it seeks outlet in another form, in a way disguised from the repressive mechanisms and conscious disapproval of society, a way not easily recognised as being an example of the original tendency — a way, in fact, completely perverted. The Tex Avery Effect predicts that as one after the next of available outlets for the expression of instinctive xenophobia became blocked, substitute behaviours and more unconscious means of expression were automatically found, and being disguised and more difficult to identify with the original instinct, were even more harmful and perverted than their more overt predecessors. In the U.S. a series of more or less perverted substitutes for the xenophobia originally expressed through racist slavery might be recognised: the continued apartheid following slavery’s banishment (which in the 1890s led to a veritable plague of lynchings in the South), the continued marginalization, even genocide of Native American populations, the blatant racism against all ‘non-whites’ continuing quite openly until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement forced it underground, the fanatic anti-communism of the McCarthy era, the disgraceful treatment of Japanese-Americans during W.W.II,8 and so on. In other countries we can also see many examples of the xenophobic instinct gone haywire: the enmity between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the Sikhs and Hindus of India, the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Arabs and Jews in Israel...
In the case of racism in the U.S., we may see aspects of this process of repression and substitution illustrated in the following quotation: As author Crispin Sartwell noted in a recent opinion piece,
The truth is much uglier....The civil rights movement did not end racism in [the U.S.] What it did was teach white folks how not to appear to be racists, not even to themselves.... We white folks have convinced ourselves that we can’t be racists because we don’t say the wrong words...or eat in segregated restaurants or teach [our] children explicitly that black people are inferior... [Yet] white Americans’ image of themselves is constructed through their exclusion of black people. The basic racism of American culture has not even been addressed much less solved.... This process is as strong now as it ever has been. 9
The actual practice of racism in the U.S. has even distorted what should properly be conveyed by the term. Racism has come to mean for many the prejudice of white America for Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, but should mean all conceivable examples of segregation, apartheid, and ‘us-them’ prejudice: In the ongoing genocidal interactions between the various factions in the former Yugoslavia, or in more than one African location, for example, opposing sides are as genetically identical as it is possible to be, i.e., they are surely not ‘races’ capable of ‘racism’ literally defined. Thus a broader meaning of racism must include the prejudicial actions and attitudes toward any perceived ‘foreignness’ whether it be based on genes, social class, religion, politics, nationality, economic status, or whatever. We must employ such a broad definition to accurately identify all cases of racism and recognise its source in the inherited xenophobic instinctive drives of our species.
3
Now it has been endlessly demonstrated that the current and past practice of Drug Prohibition is very racist indeed, and that the history of prohibitions is predominantly a history of one group or another installing a prohibition for the purposes of repression and exclusion of a perceived threatening group.10 Opium was outlawed in the U.S. because the Chinese railroad workers used it, marijuana was prohibited because Mexican farm labourers used it, cocaine because southern black men used it to work up the courage to copulate with white women and achieve immunity to bullets of less than .38 calibre (or so some white racists believed)...Today in the U.S. the great majority of illegal drugs are consumed by whites, but the great majority of prosecutions and jail terms are levied against blacks. While even many Prohibitionists accept that current practice of Prohibition may be racist, they would insist however that the fault lies in correctable policy details or in the deeds of police and prosecutors who are also racists. In other words, Prohibitionists would insist that the goals of Prohibition are noble, realisable, and transparent to race or other prejudice, but the view expressed in this essay intends to show that Prohibition is inherently and unavoidably racist because it springs from instinctive xenophobia: It is one of the last remaining possible outlets for the instinct which enjoys social approval on a wide scale. And it is a very satisfying and effective outlet at that, and functions in a multitude of ways:
1) Drug Prohibition supplies a large class of persons easily identified as ‘foreign’ and ‘inferior.’ Unlike the sometimes ambiguous judgements deciding who might or might not be a communist, for example — since that is a matter of doctrine and intellectual commitment — there seems no doubt about who is a drug-user nor that using drugs sets one apart from human normality. The fact that all known human societies have used at least some of these now prohibited drugs for a wide variety of beneficial purposes strikes the Prohibitionist not as an argument for considering drug use normal but as proof of the inferiority, the primitive and debased nature of all previous human societies, and leads to the fatuous conviction that our modern goal should surely be a ‘drug-free society.’ Drug Prohibition can thus function as an outlet for instinctive xenophobia against not only modern drug users but permit the view that only modern society is rational and civilised, all our ancestors being more or less heathen primitives whose remnants are not worthy of preservation.
2) The drug-using class does not resist. It is a class without much political or professional clout to contest the prejudice, indeed, many drug users are even prejudiced against themselves, so strong is the social demonisation of their class and their habits. And the great majority of drug users — who are in reality normal citizens otherwise unrecognisable from non-drug-using persons — can afford no public admission of their preferred consciousness-changers, nor risk any public criticism of the situation or support for anti-Prohibition groups.
3) Drug users are a class that can be easily if irrationally identified with practices ‘alien’ to mainstream society and its traditions. A reason often cited by Prohibitionists against accepting marijuana use is that society has no associated ongoing tradition of use as is the case with tobacco, for example. Thus even the most avid of the demonisers can, as did former Drug Czar Bill Bennett, ignore the contradiction evident in their own severe addiction to tobacco — which kills as many as half its life-long enthusiasts — all the while pointing to marijuana use as ‘wrong, destructive, dangerous, deviant...an evil and stupid habit.’
4) Members of the drug-using class are easily considered inferior, diseased, defective, and unworthy to socialise with ‘normal’ people. The widespread but largely mythological images in the public mind concerning ‘addicts’ and their ‘horrible lives and habits’ result in near-unanimous social approval of demonisation of the class, even by many intellectuals and scientists who should know better. The recent re-definition of Drug Prohibition as not properly served by the metaphor of ‘war’ but of a ‘cancer’ — “Federal antidrug efforts are more akin to fighting cancer” in the words of Robert Housman, Chief Policy Advisor Office of National Drug Control Policy, Washington11 — is an illustration of the trend to depict drug-users as candidates for forcible and permanent, ‘surgical’ removal from society. Whereas war can be fought against one’s neighbours for merely technical or economic reasons and implies no essential xenophobia, the image of some subgroup as being like a cancer calls forth convictions that have in the past allowed and facilitated outright genocide.
5) Association with drug-use is a convenient mechanism for rejection of viewpoints at odds with the paradigms of society. A principal justification very much in force today for the rejection of the ‘sixties revolution’ is the common perception that it was driven by drug use, that drugs were ‘responsible’ for turning so many of the young away from our ‘Great Society’:
[The hippies] rejected the accepted social definitions of reason, progress, knowledge, and even reality; they proclaimed their abandonment of the egocentrism and compulsiveness of the technological world view. American society was seen as a dehumanizing, commercialized air-conditioned nightmare, meanly conformist in its manners and morals, hypocritical in its religion, murderous and repressive in its politics.12
Psychedelic drugs in particular were seen as leading to ‘Eastern’ religion and philosophy, adherence to ‘alien’ ideas completely antagonistic to modern Western society. As a fulfilment of instinctive xenophobia by the Establishment toward a challenge by the youth movement that actually brought the former into disgrace over the Vietnam War, we can more fully understand such statements as Nixon’s: “To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs.”13 Drug Prohibition has since the 1960s increasingly functioned as a vehicle to repress not only positive memories of dissent and resistance, but to promote the conviction that those hippies and idealists and their remaining remnants are not only ‘un-American’ and traitors to Western Civilisation, but the scum of the earth, a ‘cancer,’ some sub-human class of mutants whose very memory must be expunged along with the entire world-view they expressed.14
4
Not only the practice of Drug Prohibition but the underlying paradigms supporting the Prohibitionist attitudes which condemn all illicit drug use as ‘abuse’ and think of it as a ‘disease’ are in fact racist, or to be more accurate and in line with the argument developed here, an efficacious and satisfying, but perverted outlet for the xenophobic instinct.15 Writing recently in the International Journal of Drug Policy, Arthur Gould argued that
...illegal drugs have become a metaphor for our fear of the ‘foreign.’ While it may be unfashionable and even illegal to criticise immigrants and refugees for ‘flooding into the country’ and for ‘destroying...culture with their strange cultures and alien ways,’ it is perfectly legitimate to attack foreign drugs for the same reasons.16
Gould goes on to show how Swedish drug policy, perhaps the most radically Prohibitionist in Europe, is overtly defended as a means to protect Swedish national identity from ‘foreign’ drugs and drug habits, and even “‘foreign’ debates about legalisation and decriminalisation.” Here, drugs and drug use are no mere metaphor for the ‘foreign,’ but believed to be the genuine article! But even to think of xenophobia as needing metaphor for its expression argues strongly for the claim that we are dealing with instinctive behaviour rather than overt calculated expression — the result of well-informed deliberation — for such conscious results need only clear and descriptive language to effect their understanding, not metaphor. If metaphor is required for expressing fear of the foreign, it strongly suggests that not only is the behaviour instinctive, but that its present form is one that is disguised, and a substitute for original more direct means of expression.
Xenophobic instincts evolved for good reason in our simian ancestors, but like the appendix have far outlived their usefulness. Unlike the appendix, however, the behavioural instinct of xenophobia, today expressed through that vehicle of last resort, Drug Prohibition, kills and maims more than a few, and may indeed lead to a major crisis for Western Civilisation comparable to the paroxysms unleashed in the past against designated out-groups. In light of ideas expressed here, we should have at least a strong suspicion of why Drug Warriorism is so highly irrational and resistant to logical objections, and perhaps irresistible for many in search of a satisfying means of expression for unconscious drives that have no other socially-sanctioned outlet. It is increasingly obvious to many that Prohibition is not ‘rational policy’ designed to bring the best results to the greatest number.
Bertrand Russell once quipped, “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” If some of my starting premises here do not fulfil the simplicity requirement for good philosophy, at least they enjoy solid scientific support. But for many, the second requirement for good philosophy will certainly be met by my line of argument: Prohibitionists will unfailingly find it impossible to believe they are acting out primordial instinctive xenophobia merely in their support of Prohibition, no matter whether the means of support is itself racist in practice.
If indeed we can accept that the ‘Drug War’ is a last bastion, one of the last possible socially-approved outlets for vestigial and now very destructive xenophobic tendencies evolved long ago, will such an understanding help to reverse the long-standing folly of Drug Prohibition? This is hard to say, for in dealing with such follies it is notoriously difficult to find quick-acting methods for correcting them, and mere knowledge of one’s instinctive drives can never eliminate them. Perhaps a few borderline Drug Warriors might be embarrassed by the demonstration that their support for Prohibition is a hangover from the behaviour of apes, perhaps not. But it is, I believe, of fundamental importance that we understand the roots of the phenomenon of racism and xenophobia and its possible appearance in the guise of Drug Warriorism, for such an understanding may well be essential for the eventual design of tactics for the instinct’s suppression in ways which will prevent its further escape into substitute behaviours even more destructive. Drug Prohibition in its great irrationality requires a very significant explanation of the reasons for its great hold on us — our excessive, even fanatical preoccupation with it despite its miserable failure and the simultaneous existence of far more serious and correctable problems in our world. We waste our time and resources on Prohibition to the exclusion of far more important and pressing matters, and in so doing risk the future of our civilisation, perhaps even the continued survival of humankind.
Peter Webster
email: vignes@monaco.mc
1 Most ethologists seem today to use the term innate behaviour, perhaps as a result of the long and stifling influence of Behaviourism which rejected the concept and even the existence of instinct, and much else for which its simplistic and absurdly reductionist outlook could find no ‘evidence.’ I shall use the older — and some would say obsolete — terms instinct and instinctive behaviour because as a noun, there is a valuable implication in the term that the phenomenon may well depend on the existence of an actual inherited entity. Innate, employed solely as an adjective, seems a term designed to ignore possible cause and origin.
2 Many examples of experimental interventions and resulting modifications of instinctive behaviours in animals can be found in The Animal Mind, Gould & Gould, Scientific American Library, 1994.
3 Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”. Journal of Human Evolution, 20, 469-93. This paper is discussed in relation to the present themes in The Thinking Ape, Richard Byrne, Oxford University Press, 1995. See also the collection of papers in Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, Richard Byrne & Andrew Whiten, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.
4 Not only does controversy rage about the possible connections between genes and behaviour, but the idea of group selection also separates biologists into warring camps. The widely-respected Harvard professor of biology Richard C. Lewontin recently wrote, “[The] possibility of group selection has been regarded as anathema by nearly all evolutionary biologists, although entirely without empirical evidence. The obvious hypothesis is that the exclusive concentration on the individual as the unit of selection is a direct transferral onto evolutionary theory of the central role of the individual as actor in modern social and economic thought.” (“Survival of the Nicest?” New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998.)
5 In using the term xenophobic at this point I do not mean to imply any sort of pathological connotation but merely a descriptive one.
6 On the subject of intergroup relations in simians see How Monkeys See the World, Cheney & Seyfarth, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
7 In “Social intelligence and success: Don’t be too clever in order to be smart” the authors Alain Schmitt and Karl Grammer write, “Indeed, xenophobia and ethnocentrism are universals and a primate legacy.” (Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, Andrew Whiten & Richard W. Byrne, Cambridge University Press, 1997, Chapter 4). References given are The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Jane Goodall, The Belknap Press, 1986; Human Universals, Donald E. Brown, McGraw Hill 1991; and Human Ethology, Irenäuis Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Aldine de Gruyter, 1989. The latter author writes, “Xenophobia is a universal quality...an important component of the human behavioural repertoire. Infantile xenophobia was...observed in all cultures we studied. [Even children] born both blind and deaf display fear of strangers.” (pp 174, 289). A reading of Brown’s Human Universals should convincingly illustrate even to the sceptic the poverty inherent in Behaviourist psychology’s dismissal of the existence of instinct or innate, inherited biological drives in human behaviour.
8 The particulars of the story of internment of Japanese-Americans have not been sufficiently brought to public attention, and they are indeed very disgraceful and indicative of the peculiarly vicious potential of American xenophobic tendencies to carry out atrocities well away from the limelight. A short but revealing overview of the situation is to be found in Drug Warriors and Their Prey, Richard Lawrence Miller, Praeger Publishers 1996, p. 149ff.
9 Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1998, “White America Needs Its Bigotry.”
10 Even articles in the popular press have lately stressed this theme, see Alexander Cockburn, “The Drug War, A War on Poor, Lower Classes,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1998. The phenomenon is discussed at length in the now classic volume by David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, Oxford University Press, 1973. For a recent and severe indictment of the racism permeating Drug Prohibition in the U.S. see “The War on Drugs: Race Falls Out of the Closet” by Jerome G. Miller, in chapter 2 of his book, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 80-86.
11 Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1998, Letter to the Editor.
12 Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, The Lindesmith Center, 1997 (reprint), p.71-72.
13 From Richard Nixon’s book In the Arena, cited in The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, David Wagner, Westview Press, 1997, p. 168.
14 See “Demonizing the 1960s” in The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, David Wagner, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1997.
15 The question arises, what might be considered a healthy outlet for the instinct? Perhaps there are none that would fulfil the evidently powerful needs of the instinct without transgression, but the preservation, practice and encouragement of distinct cultural forms and rituals might go some way in the right direction, so long as that cultural expression is prevented from being chauvinistic and ethnocentric. Indeed, it seems that the social coherence and long-term stability of many tribal societies were heavily dependent on the continual enactment of ceremonies and rituals, and perhaps some of these were socially-evolved forms for the channelling of the xenophobic instinct into more or less harmless, and thus beneficial means of expression.
16 Arthur Gould, “Nationalism, immigrants and attitudes towards drugs,” International Journal of Drug Policy 9, April 1, 1998, p133.