Reflections on Playboy: Pseudoliberal Trojan horses in <i>Playboy</i>: Frank Owen and Dr. Drew Pinsky

June 10, 2008

Pseudoliberal Trojan horses in Playboy: Frank Owen and Dr. Drew Pinsky

Bill Maher: Okay. Last time we talked to you, you wanted to say something about Proposition 215 [California’s 1996 medical marijuana ballot initiative].

Dr. Drew Pinsky: I was really offended by 215. As you know, what I am mostly against is misinformation. And 215, to me, seemed like a sham. It was some sort of Trojan horse, concocted to try to get people—using the sympathies of people about individuals with chronic illness, to try to cram this thing into legality.

—the panel discussion show Politically Incorrect, May 15, 1998.

When no one remembers a time without a Food and Drug Administration, important philosophical questions about drug policy, drug manners, and drug morals can fall down the memory hole, too. It’s intellectually irresponsible for Playboy to call Pinsky “a guy who knows how to be a responsible pleasure seeker,” as it does in the “Next Month” page anticipating the July issue with Pinsky as the Interview subject. Besides him, Frank Owen, author of the March article “The Medical Marijuana Murder,” is also dangerously overrated by Playboy as an authority on drug issues. Both men would lead us on a road to hell paved with good intentions.

I’ll give Owen his comeuppance first. (I’ve had to deal with him before, by the way.) He writes,

A close look at the customers of these dispensaries reveals a not so shocking truth: Many are not ill at all. Exactly how many medical marijuana patients are really sick and how many exaggerate minor aches and pains in order to get high is impossible to gauge....

There is as yet no solid proof that smoking pot cures anything. Instead, there is a small mountain of evidence—both anecdotal and scientific—that suggests pot is a useful palliative for some people, good for boosting appetite among HIV patients and suppressing nausea among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Patients may feel better after smoking marijuana, and life may seem more bearable, but until further research is done it’s impossible to say whether the drug is doing anything to retard the progress of their disease.

Nearly all illegal drugs possess some medical utility. Heroin was introduced in the late 19th century as a treatment for opium addicts. In the 1950s methamphetamine was used to treat everything from depression to alcoholism to Parkinson’s disease. Yet nobody is talking about medical meth.

....

A year after [Denver med-pot seller] Ken Gorman’s murder the police have yet to make an arrest. In the end, who killed Gorman may be less important than why he was killed. His friends blame prohibition: If pot were fully legal, this wouldn’t have happened. But Gorman’s death resulted from a poorly thought-out system that puts patients and growers in peril even when they act within the limits of the law.

I agree with Owen that it’s dangerous to implement a poorly thought-out system. Unfortunately, Owen’s article is a poorly thought-out system, because it doesn’t give enough thought to who is empowered to implement what kind of system at what level of authority, and why.

The medical marijuana situation in the U.S. is chaotic, and Owen is doing exactly the wrong thing in response to the chaos as far as the Playboy Philosophy is concerned. Social chaos deserves to be exploited for the purpose of everyone’s individual liberty whenever possible. Eastern Europe in 1989 is a shining example of chaos done right. “Chaotic” individuals opportunistically decided to say fuck you to the Iron Curtain. When I use Proposition 215 to vaporize cannabis several times a day psychotherapeutically (for want of a better adverb), I’m effectively saying fuck you to drug prohibition by acting as if it never happened. When I treat pot as merely another item I deserve to be allowed to pick up in a store, it acts slowly but surely as a self-fulfilling prophecy for everybody. If I claimed, as some of my fellow libertarians do, that 215 is “a bad cause in bad faith,” I would be hesitating inappropriately in the name of intellectual integrity. Excessive analysis is paralysis—especially when chaos needs to be exploited and a fuck you needs to be said.

Pinsky is as clueless as Owen on where the prerogative of a citizen to use a substance comes from in the first place. On the 1998 PI panel, he essentially agrees with the federal government that more research is needed to be sure whether the people can handle as much freedom as they get under Proposition 215. Meanwhile, history proves that the government is neither competent nor morally legitimate as the pharmacological gatekeeper of the citizenry anyway. Pinsky’s point of view on this is difficult to interpret from the show’s transcript, and it’s probably because he knows he doesn’t really have a point of view on it. He is too intellectually lazy to imagine a world that much freer than ours, so he falls back on his modus operandi of self-righteousness. He can do this all he likes, but he can’t convince me that this is the voice of “responsible pleasure seeking.”

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:45 PM

June 10, 2008

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