There is a lot being said these days about American having a more “mature” policy on recreational drugs, and thus vastly reducing the legal penalties associated with using them or legalizing them altogether. I’d dispute the term– I don’t think an advance in maturity is on the horizon so much as a kind of resignation, and they really aren’t the same thing. In general, advocates of a thoroughly postmodern moral gelassenheit in the name of cultural or personal “maturity” rarely acknowledge how much infantilism is assumed by their notion of maturity.
For example, I remember when throngs of American commentators were impressed by the fact that François Mitterand’s illegitimate daughter and mistress attended his funeral along with his wife, and one ruefully observed (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “it’ll be a long time before America will have the maturity to tolerate that.” This about an elderly philanderer who lied about his life to his family for years, and who, once elected President of France, soon deployed the French security services to spy on the French actresses he found especially hot– either for future seductions, or to just revel in the salacious details of their lives. Is it mature to do such things? Is it equally mature to find them inevitable and unworthy of criticism?
I digress. My problem with the legalization of drugs is as follows. Most cultures have one or two or at any rate a very small number of widely used intoxicants, and their use is normally at least partially ritualized. So for example, pot may well have fewer social costs than alcohol, and if we could make that our intoxicant of choice and partially ritualize its use, in the abstract that might well be a sound reform of our drug laws. But alcohol is too deeply furrowed in our culture to go away. And it’s not simply a question of legalizing pot; many want many, many recreational drugs to be legalized. So I have no doubts that a culture can have different intoxicants as part of its culture without any grave harm, and that some of of them might well be less damaging than alcohol. What I do doubt is that you can have ten or fifteen or twenty widely-used intoxicants in a culture, largely divorced from formative or limiting rituals, without incurring serious social and personal problems. And that is the real choice before us.
