A Moral Vision of Addiction

Here a University made moralistic proclamations while indicating it didn't have the guts to insist that a student basketball player get an education. Universities also now regularly undermine their moral and intellectual integrity by sponsoring profitable programs on chemical dependence and other behavioral diseases, programs in which minimum standards of analytical thinking and academic freedom are disregarded (Peele, 1986a). At universities and elsewhere we have elevated the self-deception of the disease theory (Fingarette, 1985) to a place of scientific and academic honor. We mainly communicate with young people about drug use through irrational, anti-intellectual speeches, arguments, and programs (of the type typified by Dave Toma). This type of communication is most readily accepted by those with the most unsure values who are most likely to become addicted in the first place and to remain addicted despite such programs (Goodstadt, 1984).

Moral Outrages

On December 26, 1985, the ABC program 20/20 ran a segment on third-party responsibility for drunk- driving accidents. After drinking at a restaurant bar where he regularly got drunk, an alcoholic man ran head-on into another car and seriously injured its driver. Now "recovered," he claimed he wasn't accountable for his behavior after drinking, and that the proprietor of the restaurant was to blame for the accident. The restaurant proprietor, the alcoholic, and the victim - who has been incapacitated since the accident - met to discuss the case before 20/20's cameras. Although she had previously indicated she held the drunk driver responsible for her pain and suffering, in an actual face-to-face confrontation with the two men, the victim blamed the restaurant owner. The frustrated proprietor could only repeat that he had no way of telling who was drunk at a crowded bar and who was not.

As a second part of this segment, the 20/20 producers arranged for a number of drinkers to be served by mock-bartenders at a Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies laboratory that simulates a bar setting. The point of the exercise was to show, a la research by Langenbucher and Nathan (1983), that for the most part people are not good judges of whether other people are intoxicated. Here the issue of whether a man should be held accountable for his actions in maiming another person was reduced to a techno-scientific matter of the accuracy of judgments of the effects of alcohol on others. It seems that, like the victim herself, we cannot confront the essential moral issues involved and instead trivialize them by burying them beneath elaborate but irrelevant scientific methodology.

An article entitled "I still see him everywhere" (Morsilli and Coudert, 1985) has been reprinted regularly in Reader's Digest ads as "The magazine article most highly acclaimed by Americans in 1984." The article is by a father whose popular, outgoing 13-year-old son, a ranked tennis player in his age-group, was run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. The driver, a 17-year-old girl, spent the day "drinking beer at a friend's house starting at ten in the morning, and later they switched to vodka." After killing the boy, she drove her car into a tree and was apprehended. "She didn't go to jail. Her three-year sentence was suspended. Her probation terms included regular psychological counseling, work at a halfway house and no drinking."

This case is an example of a trend in American jurisprudence to replace jail sentences for crimes committed by alcoholics (and other addiction-related crime) with treatment. The crimes are not only drunk driving, but felonies up to and including murder (Weisner and Room, 1984). The girl in this case may, as part of her work in a halfway house, serve as an educator, role model, and counselor for other young substance abusers. She may also (as have several young people who have killed people in drunk driving accidents) lecture ordinary school children and their parents about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. Drug and alcohol education programs regularly feature presentations by young reformed addicts and alcoholics. In this way, the emotionally crippled and morally infirm in our society are elected to positions of respect and moral leadership, based on the cultural self-delusion that addiction is a disease that may strike anyone (Fingarette, 1985), like the girl who spent her day drinking, got in her car, killed somebody, and then drove off.

Just Say No

In a nationally televised speech on September 14, 1986, Nancy and Ronald Reagan inaugurated a campaign against drug abuse in America. That campaign - like this article - emphasized positive values for young people but, unfortunately, it did so in a simplistic and a moralistic way that undermined from the start any chance it had to succeed. A keynote to the Reagan campaign (as promoted by the First Lady) has been the "Just Say No" program, whose aim is to have teenagers simply reject drugs whenever drugs are available. Of course, the idea that young people (and others) should not take drugs has been the staple of mainstream moral judgments for the last fifty years. Nonetheless, beginning in the late sixties, college and then high school students became regular consumers of drugs.

Indeed, the most notable aspect of the prohibitionist approach to drugs in this century has been its utter and abject failure first in preventing addiction, and then (in the latter half of the century) in eliminating widespread drug experimentation (Peele, 1987). It seems an impossible dream to recall that for most of human history, even under conditions of ready access to the most potent of drugs, people and societies have regulated their drug use without requiring massive education, legal, and interdiction campaigns (cf. Mulford, 1984). The exceptions to successful self-regulation have come for the most part (as in the Chinese Opium Wars and in the drinking of Native American groups) as a result of cultural denigration brought on by outside military and social domination.

Now, in a powerful, world-dominating country, we have completely lost faith in the ability of our society and its members to avoid addiction on their own. Just Say No and other government programs (along with much private advertising by treatment programs and research experts) incessantly convey the idea that people cannot be expected to control their drug use. It is remarkable under these circumstances that the vast majority of young drug users in fact do take drugs occasionally or intermittently without interfering with their ordinary functioning. Our official cultural attitude seems to be that this reality should be ignored and discouraged, with what results we can only guess. Meanwhile, the adoption of routine drug testing - coupled with increasingly compulsory treatment referrals - further infantilizes the drug-using population.

Nancy Reagan and her adherents have suggested that the Just Say No program could also be effective in discouraging teen pregnancy, which may actually be the social crisis of the 1980s. Teen-age child-bearing cost the nation $16.6 billion last year, a figure that grows with each cohort of pregnant teens. The problem is monumental among black teens and guarantees large-scale social failure for this group through the coming decades (which will provide a constant supply of drug addicts and alcoholics). Even considering only white Americans, the United States leads industrialized nations in teen births and abortions. Exaggerated teen pregnancy occurs in this country despite the fact that U.S. teens are not more sexually active than those in other Western nations. "Overall ... the lowest rates of teen-age pregnancy were in countries that had liberal attitudes toward sex [and] had easily accessible contraceptive services for young people, with contraceptives being offered free or at low cost and without parental notification" (Brozan, 1985:1).