The drug prohibition church and the adventure of reformation

Abstract

Whatever the origin of the UN Drug Treaties, and whatever the official rhetoric about their functions, the best way to look at them now is as religious texts. They have acquired a patina of intrinsic and unquestioned value and they have attracted a clique of true believers and proselytes to promote them. They pursue a version of Humankind for whom abstinence from certain drugs is dogma in the same way as other religious texts might prohibit certain foods or activities. The UN drug treaties thus form the basis of the international Drug Prohibition Church. Belonging to that Church has become an independent source of security, and fighting the Church’s enemies has become an automatic source of virtue. In the history of Western culture, we have known many churches. The best known are the Roman Catholic Church, with its Rome-based Central Office of the Faith, but also the Church of Communism as ultimately ruled by its once Moscow-based Central Committee. All these churches know and worship central texts that do not serve to promote scientific understanding and social development, but rather to promote the Church’s own dogma, faith, and the reign of its Institutions. When, for reasons that no longer count, the USA became inspired to write the first versions of the first global drug treaties slightly more than a century ago, no one could have foreseen the results. But then had anyone foreseen the ramifications of setting up central texts and later central headquarters of Christianity, or, indeed, of Communism? Sociologically seen, the equation between the UN Drug Treaties and Faith may not be immediately selfevident. As I have written elsewhere, (Cohen, 2000) the mid eighteenth century birth of individualism, with its ensuing fights against dependence, colonialism and slavery should be seen as the cradle of our modern mythologies about drugs and addiction. The concept of a drug and the concept of addiction were sincere expressions of that new ideology, the religion so to speak, of the ‘free individual’. In the cradle of individualism new movements and cultures were born and raised, trying to create ‘independence’ and ‘emancipation’ of both peoples and persons. The aim that would define Humanity, acquiring God’s ‘grace’ for the soul, was from the eighteenth century on replaced with ‘independence’ and later ‘health’ for the body. Here, I will not discuss the specific interpretations of ‘independence’ or ‘health’ that are chosen, because they do not matter for this short paper. The socialist ideologies, too, can be understood as expressions of that new vision of individuality and freedom, of which the best known and the best researched was Marxism. We should understand that The First Communist International and the First Global Drug Treaty have the same secular philosophical parents, begot similar institutional empires, and had similarly destructive Inquisitions as their consequences. In the Catholic Church, congregations of the Sacred College of Cardinals or administrative departments thereof, would decide on matters of saints, heretics and secular strategies of the Papal Office. One of the famous Congregations*/the Congregation of the Index*/would decide on what books could be read by the faithful, and for instance in one of their meetings, in 1616 (March 5) it was decided that reading Copernican astronomy would be banned, as it was ‘false and contrary to Holy Scripture’ (Sobell, 1999). In the Prohibition Church we have several of these Congregations, where the Cardinals of Prohibition compare the sacred texts with policies the world over, and decree if these policies are holy or not. It makes no sense to try to show the Congregations where the anti * Tel.: /31-20-525-4278; fax: /31-20-525-4317. E-mail address: pcohen@cedro-uva.org (P. Cohen). International Journal of Drug Policy 14 (2003) 213 /215