NEW WORLD ORDER DIARY
Hal Pepinsky
August 24, 1993
Today I begin by stepping out of the PCT discussion into the real world of
local drug enforcement. I then turn to trying once again to suggest that
there is a significant world of social control beyond the PCT model.
CORRUPTION OF THE WAR ON DRUGS
Last week a local elected official and white man I have known and
respected for some time got a call from the police that they had a warrant
to search his apartment for illegal drugs. He went home and let them in.
They found half an ounce of hemp leaf/blossom and some prescription
bottles of something unknown for which the official could produce no
prescriptions. The police arrested the official for misdemeanor
possession of marijuana, and for two felonies--unlawful possession of
prescription drugs and maintaining a common nuisance.
The official was released on recognizance. A deputy prosecutor was quoted
in the paper as expressing the hope that the official would not resign
over the charges. I saw him the next day at the Justice Building, gave
him a hug and told him to hang in. That day the prosecutor personally
decided not to prosecute the felonies; a misdemeanor conviction does not
take an official in Indiana out of office. The prosecutor called in the
city police chief, and told him that henceforth the prosecutor wanted a
chance to check the prior record and community standing of the subject of
a police drug search warrant request, and would block search warrant
requests where small amounts of drugs were involved. The police chief
complained that arrests for minor drug possession were a vital tool for
gaining citizen cooperation and information leading police to drug
dealers. Some members of the Fraternal Order of Police issued a statement
criticizing the prosecutor for personal favoritism in prosecution
decisions. This morning the local paper carried a lengthy editorial
criticizing the police for going after small-time drug offenders (some of
them have also been arbitrarily searching and busting kids--the police
chief promising to clean drugs off the main five-block drag from campus to
the center of town), and criticizing the prosecutor for suggesting that
prior record and community standing should determine who gets prosecuted.
The police chief and I are pretty cordial to each other, and I have
thought that sometime I may have a chance for a quiet word with him about
the perils and futility of drug wars. A friend of mine, Darrell Breeden
(Bill's twin brother), whose son and nephew have repeatedly been hassled
by officers exceeding their powers to stop, search and arrest, made some
press angrily confronting a local "gang task force" with how they and
police were demonizing the community's youth to no good purpose. One
youth reported having met a gang member from Chicago who came to town
because of he had heard the police hype about how gangs were coming to
Bloomington and the gang member wanted to check out the scene. My own
daughter has seen an innocent friend get thrown down and busted by excise
police on the main drag. She and her friends report being afraid of
police, wary of narcs at school and the trouble police can cause a young
person on the streets. In a town where many of us don't even feel obliged
to lock our doors, there is a big gap between the portrait the police are
painting of the danger young people pose and the community life we know.
Drug wars are based on a false premise, and in escalating sow the seeds of
their own self-destruction.
The false premise is that a distinct social problem is caused by certain
people bringing in particular foreign substances. On the one hand, the
drugs picked out to make war against (associated in our part of the world
with alien men of color--Chinese laborers smoking opium, freed sons of
slaves forming violent gangs of cocaine users, or Mexican "immigrants"
going on "marijuana" (not "hemp") rampages--are a miniscule fraction of
the problem posed by addiction, even substance addiction (e.g., more
people die from overdoses of prescription drugs than from overdoses of
illegal drugs, and in fact opiates, coca and hemp are among the less toxic
substances people become addicted to (except in highly concentrated form
designed to facilitate drug distribution when the distribution becomes
illegal). People commonly recognize that other over-the-counter drugs we
have legalized--notably processed tobacco and alcohol--do as much or more
damage than illicit drugs. But I think Anne Wilson Schaef, who coined the
term "co-dependency," has put her finger on the larger problem. In IS
SOCIETY ADDICTED? she finds that "process addictions"--for instance our
addiction to participating in and cheering on drug wars themselves--are
more deadly than substance addictions. Birgit Brock-Utne for instance
blames the low life expectancy of National Football League players (54
years she reports) as evidence that an addiction to competition, to
subduing opponents, kills. As Birgit suggests, a good synonym for
"process addiction" is "loyalty" to (in PCT terms) a perceived social
arrangement--a family with a patriarch in the case of someone who blames
herself for domestic violence for instance, to law-enforced streets, or to
honor and dignity for one's officials and formal leaders. The more people
there are in the social arrangement people give loyalty to, the more
deadly addiction becomes to others as well as to the loyalists: a barrage
of guns commanded by a US president has in the Iraq area for instance
killed several hundred thousand people--far beyond the killing David
Koresh's addiction could have caused, let alone a single family tyrant,
disgruntled employee, or group of young gang members on a vendetta.
We are constantly reminded that illicit drug and alcohol addicts are prone
to denial--to blaming others for their own plight. Denial of process
addiction is even more entrenched as Schaef points out, aided by
institutional channeling of blame onto dark, foreign drug importers,
unruly youth and foreign devils our presidents tend to create in the midst
of turmoil our machinations feed (e.g., turning the attempt to make peace
among Somalians into a danger presented by one leader--warlord Aidid
(formerly our national hero for overthrowing another of our devils, Siad
Barre), as with Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Milosovich, Hitler, etc.
The message is simple: as we cleanse ourselves of personal enemies and of
our own use of the substances they bring to us, all becomes orderly, and
we can resume gaining wealth and prosperity through the social
arrangements by virtue of our own loyal membership. The social
arrangements, like those which enable the addict to get drunk or stoned
and hurt others, remain beyond examination, beyond question. Raising such
questions, in the addict's view, only interferes with the business of
purging foreign substances and the foreigners who carry them from our
bodies, our streets and ultimately from our globe.
One kind of denial hurts us daily among ourselves: that use of and trade
in the foreign substances we war against is any less prevalent among those
fighting our wars--trial lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police and so
forth--than among those being arrested and put away for the crimes. If
only a fraction of the gossip I hear from friends inside and outside the
Justice Building is true, all the vices police and prosecutors have fought
against--illegal drug use and distribution, high-stakes gambling, hiring
prostitutes and prostituting oneself for money and power, driving drunk,
public intoxication, battering and sexual abuse--are probably as rife
among the law enforcers in Bloomington as they are in any other town in
this part of the world, and as they are among the groups targeted by law
enforcers. Time and again one hears how this or that offense by someone
in power or by someone who has rollicked with law enforcers has been
quietly handled without criminalization. But in this town as across the
nation, drug and alcohol enforcement remain the primary bases for
arresting and jailing people. I think it's a safe bet that every vice
offender who gets sent to prison has someone prominent in the
arrest/prosecution/judgment team who is guilty of the same self-
righteously pressing for punishment. Of course some people in law
enforcement as in any community are scrupulous about avoiding alcohol,
illegal drugs and tobacco (as Germans celebrated Hitler for being in the
1930s, perhaps even as he received morphine injections), and as a
colleague has put it, either become shunted off to the side or become
jaded and turn a blind eye to the corruption of their colleagues. The
ultimate lie wars on drugs and other vice wars are built upon is that the
enforcers are free of the vice for which they punish others. In addition,
they are the most protected and protective group for a drug/vice
distributor to corrupt and draw into the trade. One result, as Bill
Chambliss lays out so nicely in ON THE TAKE: FROM PETTY CROOKS TO
PRESIDENTS, is that cleaning out one bunch of bad guys in the trade just
opens the market to those who have bought off some of the enforcers.
Clean-up campaigns provide an attractive investment opportunity for
venture capitalists in the drug trade. After a crackdown, all the old
vices, newly protected, soon flourish again.
Herein lies the seeds of drug warriors' self-destruction. At some point
in a sustained war on vice, the improbable eventually happens and the
wrong people--those who share ties and power with enforcers--get busted.
The arrest of the local official here last week is just one case in point.
It's like an earthquake tremor, and one cannot predict which arrest will
finally prove one too many, but I've long projected that white middle-
class family members, neighbors and colleagues of law enforcers will have
to be drawn into the drug war net before politicians finally decide we
have had enough of the war--and media like the local paper decide that the
war has gone too far. The other thing that happens, which Phil Parnell,
Bill Selke and I found in Indianapolis once a decade after World War II,
is that law enforcers and the media eventually become threatened enough to
provoke a wave of anti-corruption enforcement against law enforcers
themselves. This typically results in a lot more indictments and charges
than convictions, but in the process law enforcers retreat from proactive
vice enforcement into taking crime reports from citizens more diligently
for the "reactive enforcement" offenses. Crime reporting goes up, and law
enforcers turn to crime statistics rather than arrest performance as a
justification for supporting their war efforts. As pressure mounts for
the law enforcers to do something about the mounting crime problem, they
cycle back into some new form of vice crackdown, of "proactive
enforcement"--demonstrating action against crime rather than demonstrating
the need for action. The war on drugs which Nancy Reagan set off in the
eighties has carried on so long that after a drop in reported crime,
police have resumed taking more reports AND sustaining the drug war. By
now I sense that enforcers are divided among themselves between those who
aim to feed their drug war addiction with more sweeping enforcement and
those who want out of the war. I'm hopeful that because the latest US
drug war has been so prolonged and aggressive, when enforcement topples in
a wave of corruption scandals across the country this time, proactive
enforcement itself will fall longer and harder this time than ever before
in US history. We're not there yet. As disillusionment with drug
enforcement grows among enforcers, so does the freneticism with which
drug-war addicts ply their trade. The point of eventual drug war collapse
is unpredictable but inevitable.
MAKING PEACE WITH ADDICTION
With a lot of help from Bill Powers and other on the Control Study Group
net, I can see that what I have just described fits the PCT model
perfectly. It would, as I understand it, be describable as an impending
reorganization of people's ninth-order perceptions of what "society
demands," jarred into existence by the growing gap between people's
perceptions of why the drug war is worth fighting and the results of the
drug war they see. By itself, the description of the drug war I have just
offered is also hopelessly fatalistic, for the best prediction is that the
collapse of this vice war will eventually give rise to another as surely
as the demise of one drug distributorship implies the establishment of a
rival. We cannot personally let go of our perception of the demands of
the drug war insofar as we face law enforcement against it. While PCT-
ists would presuppose that you or I have personal control over whether we
seek to conform to the drug war, we have to deal in terms of that war
whether we like the war or not.
Bill Powers has just written suggesting that the Swedish psychologist who
chided me for not understanding the distinctive importance of working WITH
others could well have been putting me on. I don't think it matters what
Magnus really meant by his remark to me; what matters to me is that when
I explored the possibility that his remark had meaning for others, I found
repeated reference to the idea of working WITH others and began to notice
when I was doing it myself, and to monitor how it felt to me as I inquired
how it felt to others. Eventually I happened to notice that motives as
perceived on occasions when I and others noticed or envisioned working
with others fit a way Buckminster had of constructing tetrahedrons--as a
pair of open triangle orbiting one another. This form, Fuller proposed,
was "synergetic" as in quartz crystals, resulting in a greater sum of
organized energy than the sum of the parts. Indeed, that structure was
the physical foundation of life forms. As I looked back on what was
claimed for this pattern of social interaction, as for instance by the
Eastern mystics you refer to, I saw that they too celebrated this
reorienting of ourselves to the orientation of others as a life force, and
as a practical way to survive personally as well as as a species. Even
Darwin projected this form of species and ecosystem interaction with
externalities to be the strongest ensurer of fitness to survive. Given
that all kinds of people past and present describe and experience life
within this model of peaceful interaction in much the same way (different
terms, same form), I postulate that all people are capable of enjoying
peace this way, and this way uniquely. As I put it in the geometry book,
we become secure insofar as we see the form of social interaction
recapitulate the form of the DNA molecule. Unilateral goal attainment, a
failure to participate in democratic interaction, resonates within our
beings with the metastatic pattern of bodily pathologies, which we feel as
a death force and which in itself generates fear of death in us. If we
use the thing we fear as the referent for our actions, we only amplify the
alarm in us that death somehow threatens (here or in the hereafter, it
matters not).
I have defined violence as attachment to a referent perception, to a goal.
Schaef and I have described addiction as another word for violence thus
defined--whether the loyalty and devotion be to attaining the next fix,
finishing the next report (or NWOD entry :-), moving up one or another
professional ladder, or destroying the enemies our patriarchs designate
for us. I would identify our peacemaking moments as those in which we
recognize that our capacity to perceive dangers of addiction in others
implies the danger imposed by our own addictions--by not being able to
treat the conflict they pose as other than their categorical problem
because it would take more time, knowledge or money than we can afford
while still feeding our own addictions. The highest test of my capacity
to free others from their addictions is my capacity to show myself and
them that I can free myself from addictions which prevent me from getting
to know them as I would have them know and respect me. The more I've been
able to do that the more I have discovered that any addiction or pathology
is less a part of the person than my stereotype of addiction would
presuppose. People forsake addictions when they become otherwise engaged.
The AA approach presumes that to reorganize out of addiction one must
substitute loyalty to a new regime. But once one gives up denying that
process addiction is as limiting and potentially destructive as substance
addictions we so fear, it is no progress to substitute one addiction for
another in the larger challenge of attaining personal and social security.
There is on the other hand a model, a way of substituting a different form
of interaction for addiction altogether.
We tend to forget how persistently and self-defeatingly we have fought
drug wars over the past century or two, even using drugs to cure
addictions--morphine to cure alcoholism, heroin to cure morphine
addiction, cocaine injection kits to cure heroin addiction, methadone to
cure heroin addiction, antabuse to cure alcoholism, thorazine and
stelazine and large doses of various zonkers to cure mental illness,
virtually all the illicit drugs as potential truth drugs to drive the lies
out of our nation's criminals and enemies--to name some. We tend to
ignore the possibility that our attachment to a political order which
directs our attention to fighting the criminal element and the foreign
devil is an addiction posing an overriding threat to species survival in
itself. I find that when I no longer let myself deny that drug wars and
anti-addiction campaigns are inherently, massively hypocritical, I respond
to my addictions and others' routinely in daily life, never for a moment
presuming that addiction is not a universal human condition--that one form
is more dangerous in itself apart from how highly socially arranged it has
become, never presuming to know that a substance is inherently addictive
as against the process by which the substance use is socially received.
Measured by inherent toxicity as we might measure the toxicity of nerve
gas or plutonium dust, crack cocaine and even pure heroin is pretty
innocuous stuff. But just look at what some people do with the stuff!
Finally, I am encouraged by moments of peaceful interaction I and others
enjoy which offer respite from our addictions of all sorts, including the
will to subdue the addicts.