Blankenship and David May Deserve Sympathy

Does society not like drugs because they are bad, or are drugs bad because society does not like them? In his column of April 23, "Ignoring Internal Decay," Joshua Kaufman offers several arguments condemning drug users and drug dealers. He concludes that Blankenship and David, two students accused of possession with intent to distribute marijuana, LSD, mushrooms and ecstasy, deserve punishment if guilty. But to agree that society should condemn the actions of such students, one should examine which of Kaufman's arguments rest on bad qualities inherent in drugs and their dealers, and which rest on society's dislike for both groups. His arguments were as follows.

"Taking advantage of line-drawing," Kaufman says that, except for "soft drugs like alcohol and marijuana,...drug use is physically and mentally harmful." While I applaud Kaufman for realizing that on the spectrum of safe to dangerous drugs, no line can be drawn that puts marijuana on the more dangerous side than alcohol, his taxonomy between hard and soft drugs is too coarse. Although there is substantial evidence that chronic cocaine and crack use cause mental damage (but Blankenship and David were not in possession of these drugs), no reputable studies have ever shown marijuana, mushrooms and LSD to have measurable long-term effects on intelligence. Ecstasy, however, has been shown to cause brain damage in monkeys under extreme dosages (the dosages were so extreme that similarly large dosages of alcohol would kill any human). It is, of course, extremely difficult to prove that any drug is damaging since most sides have an agenda other than truth (the cigarette industry, for instance, still contends that smoking does not increase risk of cancer), but numerous inconclusive studies mean we must qualify any assumption that they are dangerous. Furthermore, alcohol and tobacco are known to be dangerous, as are many legal activities, but we allow mature individuals the opportunity to decide for themselves what risks they want to take.

Drug use "immediately causes individuals to commit crime, as they disregard our rationally imposed legal norms." What crimes do drug users immediately commit, except for the crime of using drugs? Perhaps Kaufman is referring to statistics that 70 percent of violent crimes are committed by people on drugs. This is a powerful statistic, but one should also note that in the majority of these violent, drug-induced crimes, alcohol was the only drug. And the four drugs the students are charged with are not known to contribute in any way to violent behavior (many would contend they suppress violent behavior).

"Drug use spawns chemical addictions." True in some cases, but the drugs the students are charged with possessing (marijuana, mushrooms, LSD and ecstasy) are not considered addictive.

The students should not have been dealing drugs because "students are not permitted to use University facilities for private enterprise." The purpose of this rule, as Kaufman acknowledges, is to preserve the residential nature of the community. It does not forbid all exchanges of money in a student's residence (students are allowed to sell their TVs and futons). Whether this rule should apply depends on whether their drug dealing was of a scale that was disruptive, or if they were selling to only a close circle of friends and not for profit. And since their arrest came only after weeks of intensive investigation, it is doubtful that their dealing was very noticeable.

"Drug dealing fosters crime and criminal behavior." True in many cases, but crime is rarely associated with the drugs the students were allegedly dealing. No one has claimed the students were protecting their stash "by explicit threats of violence."

Kaufman's final argument is that drugs and drug dealing are illegal and anti-social behavior. Of course, he's right that drugs are illegal and anti-social in mainstream society, but we shouldn't wish to punish someone solely because the law says their actions should be punished. To avoid a circular justification of law, the two students must have done something that was wrong in and of itself. To figure out if the students deserve sympathy or scorn, we need to look further than coarse categorizations of drugs and drug dealers. Were they disruptive influences in the community, whose own lives had been ruined by their drug use and were reaping huge profits selling drugs to otherwise clean students, making so much money they needed to use violence to protect their stash? Or were they two students who were part of a culture that accepted these drugs (both were known to enjoy raves; one even wrote his senior thesis on raves), and sold only to a few friends and not for profit? Were these two (one of whom was a director of a homeless shelter) an example of the decay in our community? Or should we feel sympathy for two bright futures (one was planning to go to a top-notch grad school) potentially being destroyed because every politician wants to look tough on drugs and they were unlucky enough to be within 1,000 feet of an elementary school?

I don't know the answer, but I know the answer is not the confident cry for punishment that Kaufman supports. Without more intelligent debate on what makes society disapprove of their behavior, we cannot be sure that our system of justice will not deal an injustice to these two students. --Joshua E. Seims '96