By Tom O’Connell, MD
Among the many consequences of the Nixon-Mitchell collaboration a.k.a. the Controlled Substances Act was the creation of two new medical specialties, Pain Medicine & Addiction Medicine, both of which get their raison d’etre (and much of their sustenance) by serving as willing acolytes in the false religion of “Substance Control” that emerged less than a year after the destructive M-N duo created it. The same pair soon flamed out in Watergate, but sadly, not before infecting humanity with a set of ideas potentially more destructive than any plague organism ever encountered.
Of the two specialties the CSA enabled, “Addiction Medicine,” now has its own residencies and boards. For me personally, it’s the more reprehensible because it specializes in a phenomenon that has never been defined and is now effectively placed beyond understanding. In 1914 the government asserted the legal authority to punish addiction, a condition it did not understand. In 1937 it expanded same punitive authority to cannabis, and in a third act of mindless expansion, the whole species has, since 1970, gone to “war” against substances decreed illegal by the US Attorney General for a variety of reasons that defy rational of scientific understanding, except that the CSA allows him to do it. The bottom line is that once a “substance” is listed on Schedule one, the only way “off” is replacement by a synthetic analogue produced with government approval (or behest) and prescribed by a licensed physician (Methadone, Marinol, Dronabinol Adderall, Dexadrine , Valium, Xanax , Klonopin , Suboxone , and, Oxycodone come to mind).
Pain Medicine, on the other had merely deals with a symptom that’s widely misunderstood and not treated as well as it could be, if Medicine had not been contaminated by the CSA.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the CSA will drive our species into extinction; only that it works against the most accessible metaphor for understanding the evolutionary glitch that has the emotional part of our brains in perpetual conflict with the rational part. Thus the drug war represents the classic dichotomy present within most crises: Danger and Opportunity.
The hour is late; our newly re-elected president has a lot on his plate, but he is the only person in the world with the legal authority to halt; perhaps even reverse, the momentum of the Mitchell-Nixon disaster. He is also a victim of the typical paternal anomaly that seems to have induced both his “Choom Gang” and most of the cannabis applicants I’ve ever interviewed to try inhaled cannabis, get “high,” and then become “heads” as adolescents.
It’s a process that needs far more understanding than punishment.
