A Really Good Day(59)

In a portion of the talk during which I railed against the parental anxiety that has caused us to lock our children in our houses, letting them outside only for playdates and other adult-mediated activities, one of the moms interrupted me. She lived with her family in an affluent and safe part of Berkeley, she said, but she had only just begun to let her thirteen-year-old go on her own to the nearby shopping district. To get there the girl had to cross a busy street, she explained. Mom was very worried that she’d get hit by a car.

“Exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly what we all do. We are so plagued by unrealistic fears that we treat our preteens like toddlers! We forget that a child of seven, even five, can learn to cross the street safely. We indulge our panic at the expense of their independence.”

She smiled beatifically. No, she insisted. I misunderstood. She wasn’t confessing to maternal failing but bragging about maternal competence. She was keeping her children safe. What I was advocating was irresponsibility. I might be a Bad Mother, but she certainly wasn’t.

I wonder what would have happened if she’d learned not only that I am an irresponsible parent who advocates letting thirteen-year-olds cross streets all by themselves, but that I’m also “on drugs”? Was she the type who had Child Protective Services on speed-dial just in case she passed a bunch of kids playing alone outdoors while their lazy mom knocked back Chardonnay (or LSD) in the kitchen?

I must, however, confront the truth about why I find myself so annoyed by this woman: I am defensive. I am defensive because part of me agrees with what I imagine she would think of me. Part of me feels that what I’m doing is irresponsible. It’s irresponsible for a mother to do a microdose experiment. Not because the experiment itself is risky—I am satisfied with how carefully I approached microdosing, with the research I did and the precautions I took. Moreover, after nearly a month, the only negative things I’ve experienced are a slight increase in insomnia and an occasional irritable mood on Microdose Day, neither of which is worse than anything I regularly suffered before. The experiment is irresponsible not because of the drug itself, but because it is a crime, just like my botched attempt to buy LSD.

It’s a crime, but it really shouldn’t be.

Ever since I experienced the War on Drugs firsthand as a public defender, I have been an advocate for drug policy reform. This endless war has led to terrible injustices, far worse ones than the potential prosecution of a middle-class white lady for microdosing with LSD. It has resulted in the incarceration of millions of people, primarily black and brown. It has, as the law professor Michelle Alexander illustrated so beautifully in her revolutionary book, The New Jim Crow, been as effective at the immiseration and oppression of communities of color as segregation ever was. And yet it has failed to achieve even its most basic goals. People still use drugs. In fact, drugs like cocaine and heroin get ever cheaper, proving economically the fruitlessness of interdiction campaigns. When one drug proves harder to make or market, a more dangerous drug takes its place.

The effects of criminalization reverberate throughout the world. The United States has compelled most countries to sign on to international treaties committing them to criminalize the same drugs we do.*1 With well-regulated pharmaceutical companies out of the business of producing certain drugs, the way has been cleared for the proliferation of criminal enterprises, most of which generate the bulk of their profits right here in the States. The illegal drug market is the most profitable commercial enterprise in the world—more profitable than Apple and Walmart. Drugs that cost pennies to produce in developing countries sell for vast sums on the streets of America and Europe, thus crowding out all other products those countries might otherwise have grown or produced.

Horrific violence has periodically broken out in the United States, with waves of gang-and drug-dealing-related turf wars, but the bulk of drug-trafficking misery has been experienced abroad. Drug cartels have undermined democratic institutions in Latin America, taking over local governments with catastrophic results. In Mexico, for example, narco-traffickers have murdered as many as 120,000 people and caused the disappearance of 25,000 in the last decade alone.

Given the myriad injustices of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, and given the astonishing financial rewards that have accrued to violent criminal syndicates by our current policy, it’s time to consider a change. In May 2014, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a conservative who is the most-cited legal scholar of the last century, published a book review in the New Republic in which he argued for the decriminalization not only of marijuana, but of all drugs, including LSD. Posner argued that decriminalization would alleviate the deplorable conditions in prisons caused by overcrowding:

The sale and possession of marijuana are en route to being decriminalized; and I am inclined to think that cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and the rest of the illegal drugs should be decriminalized as well—though not deregulated. They should be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration for safety, like other drugs, and they should be taxed heavily, like alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol and cigarettes are “recreational” drugs, too—and quite possibly more destructive of the users than the illegal drugs are, and, in the case of alcohol, also of acquaintances, family members, drivers, and pedestrians. The revenue from a sales tax on marijuana alone would pay for a substantial chunk of the cost of our prison system.*2