In 1979 when Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, he did so as a Conservative, with a capital C. The liberals were hippies who smoked marijuana, got abortions for their girlfriends, and neglected their children. Such, at least, was the image into which conservative Republicans cast liberal Democrats. In contrast, Conservatives—exemplified by Ronald and Nancy Reagan—stood for morality, tradition, and family values. Those claims will, in my opinion, go down in history as the most transparent hypocrisies of the Reagan presidency. For whatever ugliness was committed in the name of drugs by President Reagan’s predecessors, it was the Reagans’ who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police.
President Reagan claimed that he stood not only for family values, but also for less government. As an abstract proposition, he surely would have agreed that a person’s loyalty to his family is more important and should be more enduring than his loyalty to a temporarily expedient government policy. But talk is cheap. When the Reagans’ vaunted family values were put to the test of practical politics, when old-fashioned allegiances came in conflict with the pursuit of personal self-aggrandizement, their noble professions were brutally belied by their ignoble policies. They embraced one of the most characteristic and most despicable practices of the great socialist states of the twentieth century: turning children against their parents in a holy war against enemies of the state. The identity of the enemy who justifies this contemptible tactic has varied from one totalitarian ideology to another. In national socialism, the enemy was the Jew; in international socialism, it was and still is the profiteer; in medical socialism, it is the drug trafficker. The true nature and behavior of these scapegoats are unimportant. What is important is that the state be able to persuade people the threat is so serious that all efforts at self-defense are justified; in our present case, this translates to the danger of drugs justifying the destruction of parental authority and its replacement by the state as parent.
Drugs: A Pretext for Subverting Family Loyalties
In August 1986, after listening to an anti-drug lecture, Deanna Young, a “blonde, blue-eyed junior high school student [in California] walked into the police station carrying a trash can bag containing an ounce of cocaine … [and] small amounts of marijuana and pills. By sunrise, her father and mother had been arrested and jailed.”2 Mrs. Reagan rushed to congratulate Ms. Young. “She must have loved her parents a great deal,” she told the press.
Ms. Young’s patriotism was rewarded by Hollywood as well. Nine major production companies were vying to acquire the rights to her story. One film producer attributed the high interest in the story to its being the reverse of the usual scenario: “The normal situation is parents trying to keep young people off drugs.”3 Thanks to Nancy Reagan, parents denouncing their children to the police was already normal in the American family in the 1980s.
The Bush administration endorsed and intensified the effort to enlist “kids” in the War on Drugs. Betraying one’s own parents was not enough; better to betray one’s friends as well. In May 1989, “federal drug chief [William Bennett] instructed students [in a high school in Miami] … to tell on their friends…. ‘It isn’t snitching or betrayal to tell an adult that a friend of yours is using drugs and needs help. It’s an act of true loyalty—of true friendship.’”4 Bennett is untroubled about the moral implications of such a practice or the potentialities for its abuse. He told the New York Times “he was not worried that students would make false allegations about their peers’ drug use.”5
Although children denouncing their parents for illegal drug possession has become commonplace, no one seems disturbed about it. In fact, as the War on Drugs escalates, ever younger children are turning their “sick” mothers and fathers over to a kinder and gentler American state for “help.” After a twelve-year-old girl in Fremont, California, turned her parents in to the police for growing marijuana and using cocaine, a spokesman for the Fremont police declared, “She did the right thing. We don’t see this as turning in parents. We would rather view this as someone requesting help for their parents and for themselves.”6 The media report this as if it were as ordinary as a weather forecast for a sunny summer day: “Parents used to turn their children in to authorities when they caught them using drugs. Today, the tables have turned—children are blowing the whistle on their parents. In California, seven children in the last three months [August–October 1986] have informed on their parents for drug abuse.”7 In September 1989 an eight-year-old Illinois boy turned in his mother and her friend. They were promptly arrested on cocaine and marijuana charges. “‘My mom’s selling and using coke and marijuana,’ the boy told [the police]. ‘It ain’t right.’ The boy’s father said the boy had listened to Bush’s talk on drugs last week.”8
President Bush’s self-advertisement as the “(drug) education president” has required certain sacrifices, but not on his part, of course. In September 1989 (a year before Saddam Hussein offered a more challenging opportunity for President Bush to posture as the savior of mankind), the president’s entourage decided on staging a photo opportunity to dramatize his heroic struggle against drugs. DEA agents lured an eighteen-yea-old high school senior to Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, and used him “as a prop in an anti-drug speech [by Bush] … to dramatize how easy it is to buy drugs in the nation’s capital.”9 Bush’s popularity rose to a new high. The teenager was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Casualties of the Children’s Drug Crusade
As illegal drug use becomes equated with illness, and its coercive control with treatment, the people caught up in this crowd madness—as anyone familiar with linguistics might expect—lose not only their common sense but their sense of humor as well. An eight-year-old girl takes an unopened can of beer to her third-grade classroom in Richmond, Virginia, for “show and tell.” She is promptly suspended and ordered to “undergo counseling for illegal possession of alcohol. It was a can of Billy Beer … and was kept at home, unopened, as a collector’s item.”10
This sort of drug education is not merely asinine; it is positively subversive of the values we ought to instill in children. Instead of teaching young people to be self-reliant, we encourage them to rely on corrupt authorities; instead of teaching them to be grateful to their parents and supportive of their friends, we incite them to betray parents and friends and disdain ordinary human decencies. A sixteen-year-old high school sophomore gives her friend two Midol tablets to ease her menstrual discomfort. A teacher sees them and reports them to the principal, who publicly humiliates the “drug trafficker” by suspending her “for five days for carrying over-the-counter medication in her purse.”11 Note that the newspaper report describes the guilty student’s behavior as “dispensing over-the-counter medication”—a remarkable choice of words in these 1990s when talk-show hostesses routinely refer to every shameless act of exhibitionism as “sharing.” But no, this gift of two Midol tablets was not an act of one young woman sharing a drug useful for menstrual cramps with another. It was the violation of “the district’s drug policy [which forbade] carrying medications of any kind.” The suspended teenager complained to the press that “she has carried Midol in her purse for two years and never knew she was breaking the rules.” Her mother complained that “the district is overreacting…. ‘The punishment should fit the crime. And in any event, this wasn’t a crime.’”12 Quite the contrary. This is a perfect example of the type of ordinary human decency that the bureaucrats who run our public schools now classify and punish as a crime.
Consider, for a moment, where our ad hoc, unprincipled approach to rights and wrongs has gotten us. Intoxicated with the rhetoric of drug wrongs, we deny a sixteen-year-old woman the right to have Midol in her purse at school and share it with a friend. But, intoxicated with the rhetoric of abortion rights, feminists and liberal Americans insist that, should she become pregnant and want an abortion, she should have a right to it—free (paid by the taxpayer) and without the knowledge or consent of her parents. Also, contrast the Midol episode with the fact that, because they are imbued with the mythology that inner-city youths need self-esteem rather than self-discipline, the educational bureaucrats look the other way when children carry knives and guns to school.
Lest the critical reader dismiss all this as too absurd to be really believed by Americans, let us recall that Mrs. Reagan believes in astrology, and Mr. Reagan in the medical mythology of personal nonresponsibility for premeditated crime. Indeed, former President Reagan has made it clear that he believes in responsibility for good deeds only. For bad deeds, someone or something other than the actor is responsible. Did he ever blame a specific Soviet leader for the misfortunes of the people in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc? Never. He blamed an abstract “evil empire.” I believe this explains why Ronald Reagan comes across as such an amiable person: He never blames anyone. Two brief examples illustrate this point.
In his autobiography, Mr. Reagan relates how, when he was a child, his mother explained to him that his father was not simply a man who liked to drink, but “had a disease called alcoholism.” He also tells us that he still prays for his would-be assassin, John Hinckley.13 The idea that Hinckley is not responsible for his crime is not a passing fancy of Mr. Reagan’s. It is his carefully considered and firmly held belief. As soon as the president recovered from his acute chest wound—long before Hinckley’s (non)trial—Mr. Reagan hurried to tell the American people that “He [Hinckley] is a very disturbed young man…. I hope he’ll get well, too.”14 Like the president with a bullet wound in his chest, Hinckley was “sick” and needed to “get well.”
These vignettes—together with our reflexive rejection of personal responsibility for alcoholism, drug use, crime, and similar misbehaviors—are ominous signs that we have let our concern about drug abuse displace our concern about matters of elementary morality. The merchandising of a new drug-detection device is illustrative. The kit, called DrugAlert, consists of three aerosol cans with which a parent can detect whether his child is “on drugs.” To use this tool, the parent need only “wipe a piece of paper on a surface that drugs might have touched, then spray the paper with the chemicals,” and—presto—cocaine turns the paper turquoise; marijuana, reddish brown.15 Does this kind of parental behavior invade the child’s privacy? “Sure, it’s an invasion of privacy,” the manufacturer acknowledges, “but so is a thermometer…. [P]arents need any tool they can get to protect their kids from drugs.”16 Unfortunately, the test is far from foolproof: It picks up over-the-counter antihistamines as cocaine. Too bad. But better safe than sorry.
Thomas Szasz – Our Right to Drugs