Happy birthday, my friend

Today my friend Tom turns eighty-eight. For a variety of reasons, I have seldom contacted him lately, but I did not want to miss out the chance to express publicly my respect, my admiration and my personal gratitude to him. Tom is probably not only the world´s most important expert in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and personal and social behaviour, but also the person who has had the most significant impact on worldwide generations of social researchers, politicians, physicians, and scholars worried about the increasing medicalization of society and the progressive loss of our basic liberties on the medical-political Establishment´s hands. However, forgive me if I do not devote this space to praising his public figure right now. Check out any of the two-million Google search references with his name, or, better still, visit his website, The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility, if you want to know about his intellectual stature, his dozens of books, and hundreds of articles and speeches. Read his texts. You will realize that, the number of his works being almost immeasurable, what makes a difference is what he says, rather than how many times he says it. I am not going to talk about his magnum opus either. There are many studies, articles and reviews on The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1961) and the importance of this paramount work in the medical, social, political, and philosophical fields. What I really want to do is to talk very briefly about the Tom I had the pleasure to meet some years ago. Actually, I ‘met’ him before actually meeting him, when I read for the first time Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market (New York: Praeger, 1992), and became fascinated by the logical strength of his arguments. Then The Myth of Mental Illness, The Meaning of Mind (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), and many other of his books contributed to change the way I had thought about personal freedom issues for good. Since I started reading him and, later on, communicating with him, I have never come accross a single book, article, letter or piece of text that has not left me thinking, reflecting, and later wondering how on earth someone could possibly write such a number of masterworks. In 2001, I had the honor of translating into Spanish his book Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), and a year later I visited him in his hometown in upstate New York. I will never forget how nicely and kindly he greeted and showed us around the amazing national park surrounding Syracuse, his brilliant reasoning in our conversations, and the peaceful atmosphere of his beautiful house in the middle of a forest in the town of Manlius. I have never meet anyone with such intelligence and mental strength, and, at the same time, equally high principles, decency, kindness, and sense of humour.

Dear Tom, I hope you have had the best of birthdays, full with the love of your family, and surrounded by the Spring colors of the amazingly beautiful trees of your place. We do not forget you in this side of the Atlantic.

All the best,

Photo: Thomas S. Szasz, Syracuse, New York, 2002 © www.szasz.com

It wasn´t me, mummy!

Last month, a canadian woman won a lawsuit she had filed against a man. It was a very special lawsuit, since she was suing the dealer who sold her the drugs she overdosed with. The woman, Sandra Bergen, now 23, bought from Clinton Davey some crystal meth in Biggar, Saskatchewan, in 2004, and then smoke it with him. She had consumed the substance before, and claims she was addicted to it back then. After smoking it for a while, she felt very sick, and wound up in hospital, in a coma. She eventually got out of it and decided to sue her dealer. She accused Davey of knowing “the drug was highly addictive and harmful” without letting her know, and of intentionally wanting to “inflict physical and mental suffering” to her. She also named as a defendant the person who supplied the drugs to her dealer. In the pre-trial examination process, Davey refused to reveal who provided him with the drug and, facing the threat of a contempt-of-court charge, he agreed to have his statement of defence struck, de facto admitting his liability. That lead to Sandra Bergen legal victory. A future trial will determine the amount she will be awarded in damages. According to her statement of claim she is seeking more than $50,000.

Leaving aside some paradoxical aspects of this legal process (i.e.: may an individual be accused of breaking an implicit contract -“you give me something which I will enjoy and will not hurt me and I will give you money in exchange”- when the whole transaction is illegal, to begin with? I would really like to hear from any legal expert regarding this question), the case exemplifies perfectly well the extent towards which freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Freedom entails choosing among different courses of action and different possible outcomes, hence the need to assume responsibilities for those choices. Mrs. Bergen wants to be free to consume crystal meth, knowing such behavior carries some risks linked to the frecuency and amount of the drug comsumption, to her own physical condition in relation to the drug´s effect, and to the substance composition. In any case, no one forced her to buy and consume the drug. If she was not sure about the mentioned circunstances, she should not have bought it. However, she did it, voluntarily, and claiming she was addicted to the drug does not change the fact that it was a voluntary act. Addiction does not really exist, since any comsumption habit may be stopped (all of a sudden or in a short period of time, depending on the substance, doses and lenght of comsumption) if the consumer chooses to do so. When the undesired outcome materializes, Mrs. Bergen refuses to admit she is the only responsible for it, and starts looking for someone else to blame (her dealer, his supplier), seeking compensation.

If so called recreational drugs were legal (actually, drugs have always been legal except for the past 80 years, the years of the prohibition crusade), they would have to display an accurate description of its components and detailed administration instructions. Failing to do so would result in the banning of its commercialization, and frauds would be prosecuted. However, governments have chosen to keep the production, distribution and consumption of drugs illegal out of paternalism and other reasons, thus effectively making children out of us adults when it comes to making an informed choice about which substances we want to consume. In this day and age, it is not us who decide what we wish or is convenient to put into our bodies, but our governments, which restrict our freedom and our responsibilities in our supposed best interest. Needless to say, many adults are only too happy to relinquish as many responsibilities for their actions as possible.

As in the case of the woman who sued Starbucks Co. because she scalded herself when spilling the coffee she had just bought at one of its stores, and many other such examples (obese consumers suing McDonald´s after years of happily visiting its restaurants or lung cancer patients proceeding against the tobacco companies which provided them with so many smoky pleasures come easily to one´s mind), Mrs. Bergen´s case conjures up the tender image of a child who mischievously breaks his favourite toy. With weeping eyes, he will run to his mother, denying the evidence and pointing the finger at something or someone else instead: “Please mummy, fix it! It wasn´t my fault! I didn´t do anything…!”

P.S.: Besides her legal victory, and the money going with it, Mrs. Bergen´s story has yet another happy ending: she got a job and a purpose in life. Now she tours the country speaking of her experience for “38 cents a kilometer or airfare” and “$250 honorarium (negotiable)”, “in order to educate whom ever, where ever” about the dangers of drug consumption!

Photo: ‘Black Opium’ cover, illustrated by Robert Maguire © The Book Palace

Motives and doses

Drugs are bad, we are ceaselessly reminded. If that were true, how come millions of people want to use them? Is it possible that such a great number of individuals is not rational but purely masochistic? We take drugs because we think they are good for us. They give us pleasure or some other kind of benefits. However, drugs, like many other things -from cars to food, from swimming in a lake to climbing mountains-, may have undesired effects, and may even kill us. The two key words when dealing with drugs are ‘motives’ and ‘doses’. As with any other human action, we ought to have a rational motive to use drugs, be it pure recreation, gaining insight, be in close emotional contact with others or getting ourselves in a creative mood. Doing otherwise is likely to cause troubles. Then, having the best possible knowledge about the drug we are going to take is invaluable. This knowledge should not be restricted to the characteristics of the substances themselves but extend to our physical condition in relation to the effects of the drug as well. Only by doing this will we be able to determine the appropriate dose we have to take of each drug to reach our aims and minimize the side effects. It goes without saying that in certain cases this dose will be close to zero. If you suffer from psychotic episodes, it is not advisable you smoke cannabis or take LSD; if you have a weak heart condition, snorting cocaine will do no good to you, and so on. Therefore, states should be preaching less about what we may put into our bodies and engage in a serious effort to disclose, divulge and make easily available real information on drugs. And, above all, they should start treating us like adults and not like children, though maybe that is asking too much from our current nanny states.

Photo: Cannabis-like leaves