A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

The Post-Gazette reports on the devil weed. For a little pull-quote scaremongering, they go to the local color:

"I'm not surprised that the use has stopped declining," said Holly Martin, chief operating officer at Greenbriar Treatment Center, an adult rehabilitation center in Washington, Pa., with facilities throughout the Pittsburgh area.

"We're seeing more and more younger folks who are admitting to using" marijuana, she said. These younger adults usually range in age from 18 to 25, and many behave as though using marijuana is not that serious.

"People don't see it as a big deal," she said. "That's the thing that's the scariest."

Now I bear a bit of a personal grudge against the Greenbriar and its patent-medicine peddlers. My late brother spent some time in a Greenbriar residential facility before he died. He might as well have gone to a chiropractor for a broken spine. A hotbed of disgrace and recidivism, organizations like the Greenbriar are wormy parasites on the prison and insurance industries, catering to down-and-outs on early release, spouse-abusers on strict probation, and kids like my brother, whose family-funded insurance provides a nice incremental revenue stream. As a model of healing, these centers are quakery in its purest form, combining fast detox with bowdlerized twelve-step-ism, the former presuming that temporary abstinence is an act of willful change rather than mere time-biding, the latter turning the rigor of self-directed recovery into hortatory group-meeting feel-goodism.

While I personally find the sometimes strident book-thumping of the more vocal twelve-step proponents off-putting and think that Crispin's insights (which I've linked before) into both the strengths and the contradictions of AA ands its brethren are fairly spot on, I want to emphasize a separate praisworthy point about these programs, aside from Crispin's very true note about their admirably anarchist organization: they are not advocates. In part, this is a necessary function (lack of function?) of their innate anarchy. Without leaders and spokespeople, without a capital-O Organization, without a governing body or a system of overall consensus, the program can generate no positions. But I think it worth mentioning nonetheless that AA and NA and al-Anon and others are not prohibitionist. They assume the existence of drugs and alcohol. They do not presume that anyone who drinks is an alcoholic or that anyone who uses drugs is an addict; they do not lament the existence of drugs and alcohol anymore than overeaters anonymous laments the existence of food or gravity.

That isn't to say that twelve-steppers aren't a bit judgemental outside of the rooms. Believe me. I live with one. They are fond of idetifying alcoholics, and almost any character flaw or habit of bad behavior becomes "acting like an addict." But even in judgment I have never, to my recollection, heard a twelve-stepper announce that the problem is that our society doesn't take alcohol, marijuan, heroin, ad inf. seriously enough.

Treatment facilities, on the other hand, are business ventures, and prohibitionary public policy is good for business, not only because the courts and prisons funnel thousands of people into treatment every day, but also because addicts like my brother who are insincere in their desire for recovery use treatment facilities as means of escaping and preempting social, financial, and legal problems. I mean, my brother didn't go into the Greenbriar because he truly believed himself to be an addict and sincerely wanted to stop using opiates; he went in because he had been passing bad checks and wanted to prove to friends, family, and employers that he was willing to change, either to avoid legal action or to get our financial support should some store or bank decide to take him to court.

Thus do you find these scammers and snake-oil salesment forever decrying the perfidious influence of drugs, as if drugs were animate agents, capable of evil intent. And you will also note that even the softer-seeming confidence men of the treatment industry, those who loudly regret draconian sentencing rules, push for a system of "decriminalization" that ultimately maintains prohibition but replaces jail terms with court-adjudicated probationary treatment programs.