Cocaine: A Love Story

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A young man meets an attractive blond. He doesn’t know her at all. All he knows is that she’s physically attractive. He approaches. Nervous and excited, he makes as much small talk as he can, eventually asking her out.  She thinks it’s cute that this charming fellow is so nervous to talk to her and she’s flattered to watch him overcome himself, if only to get through a five minute conversation. She gives him her number. She feels good, he feels good, and they’ve got a date to grab coffee at Starbucks the following Monday. An hour goes by, and the young gentleman feels, well… just perfect in every possible way. She goes about her business, mildly elated, and he goes to work his ass off, making lattes or flipping burgers, making $10.00 an hour just so he can afford to take her on a date. Love doesn’t just get us through the day, love drives us!

So does cocaine. The consensus in the neurological community is that dopamine is the driving force behind love—it’s the animal part of love. If you have a ton of dopamine rushing through your brain and you meet a nice girl, odds are you’ll fall in love. Why? Because you’ve got copious amounts of the reward chemical rushing through your system and you’re associating it with the hot girl in front of you.

In other words, if you’re excited because you just met a nice girl, it’s got more to do with the fact that you’re excited and the additional reality of having met a nice girl. The excitement correlates with the presence of dopamine. It doesn’t matter whether the dopamine causes the excitement or vise versa, because they’re mutual, one won’t happen without the other.  Love, the sexual part of it anyway, appears to be nothing more than classical conditioning, plain and simple.

With that in mind, let’s talk about cocaine.

Both cocaine and amphetamines are sources of pure dopamine. Love now comes in a pill. Few people ask why giving a kid Ritalin calms him down long enough to do his math homework. The answer is that you’re giving him a pill that makes him fall in love with the processes of factoring, completing the square, taking derivatives, whatever it may be. When you have a high level of dopamine cycling through your system, you’ll do whatever you’re doing and you’ll enjoy it. You won’t get distracted because there’s no temptation to get distracted. If you snort a gram of coke, you’ll be content to do whatever you’re doing. If you pop 40 milligrams of speed, the same thing will happen.

There are some people, maybe even a lot of people, who want to legalize cocaine. I personally don’t think that’s a good idea, but they seem to think it is, so let’s examine their arguments.

1.  Advocates of legalization say that legalizing cocaine would make it cheaper, which would reduce demand for it and thereby reduce the overall crime rate. 2. They also claim that, were it to be legal, the government could generate revenue by taxing it in the same way they presently tax cigarettes. 3. Representatives from the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy continue to assert that the war on drugs isn’t working. One need only go and see the movie Miss Bala in order to see that it’s being waged very ineffectively. The war on drugs encourages corruption in Latin America, and that’s bad. What could better solve the problem of having to fight a war than ending it by giving in? 4. Lastly, it is believed by some that legalizing cocaine could offset the growing problem of meth addictions in the United States.

While it’s typically true that nothing anyone says before the word “but” really means much, I do feel that I should say that these are all very good, consistently well made, and quite compelling points. But, they all total to a certain insignificance in light of two realities. The first is that they are all refutable arguments, and the second is the reality of human biology.

In response to their first argument: by making coke cheaper, you’re not reducing the demand for it, you’re merely reducing the sense of urgency, which underlies that demand. Yes the price might go down, and with that the crime rate, but you send a greater and far more detrimental message to the world, which is that “It’s ok to snort cocaine.” As of right now, most reasonable people would consider it to be a problem if you think snorting coke on a regular basis (let alone once) is ok. If we legalize it, we will see a steady decrease in that consensus, which will make it harder to both steer people away from cocaine use and more difficult to treat addicts who wish to discontinue their use. It would, in effect, be like blowing up the wall that stands between the madness of the mob and the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness sans-stimulants.

In response to their second argument, the revenue we make from cigarette taxes does actually come at a price. The United States has the seventh highest cancer rate worldwide; fifty-ninth on the list is Singapore, where apparently the only incidences of cancer are in female patients, which may say something about the health impacts of a repressive and brutal regime. (That is to say, it may be the reason the only people who have cancer are female is because those statistics reflect incidences of breast cancer, which one need not be a smoker to contract.) Cocaine use causes irritability, paranoia, restlessness, anxiety, high blood pressure, increases the risk of heart attack, arrhythmia, visibly damages the nose, and causes problems for your digestive system, kidneys and sex organs. While I understand that there’s a precedent set by the United States government of subsidizing of tobacco farmers and levying high taxes on tobacco products, it just doesn’t make any sense to encourage the use of cocaine. Those of us who are mature enough to know better shouldn’t buy into that ridiculous line of thought.

In response to their third argument, I would say the following. The question of Latin America, if you think about it, is actually irrelevant. The inability of many Latin American countries to suppress the illegal drug trade says only one thing, which is that they’re being ineffective at it. To the United States, who ought to be producing citizens worthy of setting the highest example of decorum, behavior, moral standard and discipline (a task we’re failing at, by the way), the failure of Latin America to keep its house in order is a non-issue. Our bottom line is minimizing how much cocaine our population consumes.

In response to their fourth argument, it may not be a physiological stretch to claim that you could replace a meth addiction with a cocaine addiction, but it certainly is a stretch to say that its a good idea to encourage one. It’s an ineffective policy to simply discourage the use of one highly addictive drug by flooding the market with another.

Needless to say these are huge issues, and I certainly cannot be the grand arbiter of the merits of what ought to be our national attitude towards cocaine; certainly not in one week, certainly not as a college student. But I do think I can set a moral example, argue my views on the subject, remain a stoic and be rational in debates about it, and offer one last piece of advice to my opponents who favor the legalization of cocaine.

For me the question of prohibiting or legalizing drugs is a complex issue. Like all issues of policy debate, however, the position one takes is relatively simple. “It’s a good idea,” or “It’s a bad idea”; “I approve,” or “I don’t approve.” That’s it.

What makes any question about drug policy complicated is that one’s position on the legality of drugs is often married to one’s position on the use of drugs. The first occurs on the macro-level, and the second occurs on the micro-level.

For Legalizing: Macro: What we’re doing isn’t working so let’s just give the addicts what they want. Micro: Coke, eh… to each his own. For prohibiting: Macro: I don’t want to live in a world where snorting cocaine and then behaving like a maniac is considered to be acceptable behavior. Micro: Cocaine, NOT IN MY HOUSE!!!

The micro-level sentiment for prohibiting cocaine is the predominant emotional reaction human beings have in response to behavioral problems like drug use. The reaction of intolerance, on the microlevel, is a necessary step for coping with an addict. An addict cannot return to normal by himself, and if there is nobody around him who actually views drug use as problematic, he’ll never be able to quit, because no one will be there to show him the way. And this is the crucial point. Those in favor of legalization because they buy the macro-level reason in favor of legalizing ought not to dispense with the micro-level reason for prohibiting. The war on drugs may be ineffective because we bring a micro-level approach to a macro-level problem, but that does not mean that the necessary prohibition and stigmatization against it ought to be dispensed with merely because it doesn’t work universally. The best we can do is prohibit it at home, and compel others to do the same. We ought not throw out the micro-level baby with the macro-level bathwater.

In the end there is one very good reason to steer ourselves and our kids away from cocaine, and that is that if cocaine boosts dopamine regardless of what’s happening outside the body, and a heightened level of dopamine is necessary for people to feel compulsively attracted to one another, then it would seem plausible that being addicted to cocaine means that one couldn’t love anymore, because he’d be in love with himself. That is to say, one cannot reliably love if he’s got synthetic pleasure running through his system everyday.

Obviously, that last claim is a big stretch. I’m not a coke addict and cannot attest to it being true first hand, but if we create a culture of addiction, we might just create an entire generation of people who literally cannot feel real love for one another. As Helen Fisher, the woman who taught me about dopamine and love once said, “A world without love, is a deadly place.” I think that its something worth preventing. Don’t you?  •