Drug use as side effect of suppressing innovation and risk-taking?
The other day Rob Randall posted an entry, Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria?, on which I left a long comment.
Rob’s post was about how Amsterdam is reconsidering its liberal laws regarding drugs (and prostitution). My comment wasn’t about Amsterdam or about liberalizing drug laws (as such), but more discursive, “thinking-out-loud” about our factory school system, the artificial extension of childhood into late teens, and how we rather systematically suppress creative risk-taking and innovation in young people. I went so far as to suggest that maybe that’s why we have such a big drug-use problem in the first place.
Here’s my comment:
Permissive approaches to what we quaintly used to call “vice” don’t work if there’s a network – an entire ecosystem – of crime behind the behavior. Anyone who tells me that we should just legalize everything, and that this would get rid of the criminal element, is (imo) delusional. For one thing, what’s legal in one jurisdiction (say, Amsterdam) is not going to be universally legal everywhere (say, Afghanistan), which means you can’t get rid of the criminal element.
Further to that, when people compare our current social problems that are caused by interdicted drugs to the organized crime problems we saw during the era of alcohol prohibition, I also think they’re totally mistaken. Why? The two substance categories are apples and oranges – nay, apples and rocks: totally different.
Yes, alcohol can kill, it can derange people’s lives, destroy families, and turn (some) individuals into addicts (alcoholics). But it’s in no way as quickly and massively and universally disruptive and corrosive as cocaine, crack, crystal meth, heroin, and so forth are. Otherwise, every social drinker or everyone accustomed to drinking a glass or two of wine with their dinner would be saddled with the same problems that addicts of those other drugs have.
Yet they aren’t. Why is that? It’s not because alcohol is legal while drugs aren’t. It’s because those drugs really truly are bad for you, they alter your brain chemistry, and there’s no way – except in a ritualistic, quasi-annual or seasonal Saturnalia kind of way (think Mayan ritual) – that they can be integrated into well-functioning social routines. (And, um, the Mayans mixed their rituals with heavy-duty mayhem that no one would really be cool with today…)
So I wish people would stop with the “let’s legalize this and solve the problems that way” BS.
What’s the answer? Everyone keeps coming back to “education”: that if we educate our kids to the dangers of these drugs, they won’t do them.
Yet our kids are doing drugs anyway. So what’s going on? Maybe ‘education’ means a bit more than just warning people about the dangers. Maybe there has to be more authoritative parenting – note: I don’t write (or mean) authoritarian, but authoritative.
What does that mean, from where I’m sitting? Well, a bunch of things. First off, parents should be parents – they should damn well pay attention. For another thing, speaking as a parent, I wouldn’t (and I didn’t) send my kids into the factory school system. Pink Floyd said it best on their album “The Wall”: you’re just another brick in the wall. Schools as they exist today are by and large set up to babysit kids, to get them out of their parents’ hair so that the parents can go to work, and they’re designed like factories, where it’s “one size fits all,” and you’re a cog in the machine. Whatever drive you have to take risks, to be creative, to pursue your own dream (unless it fits in with the system) is drummed out of you by the curricula you’re obliged to follow, with bells that go off every 50 minutes to tell you to move on, irrespective of any desire on your part to continue pursuing a subject you just got interested in. It’s modeled on the factory, and a factory it is. It’s the opposite of a system conducive to innovation and creative risk-taking.
It’s a system that’s designed to kill whatever entrepreneurial or innovative spark you have, and it typically channels all your adolescent desire for proving yourself and for taking risks into the most inane and puerile (immature) behaviors of the peer group.
I’ve been reading and thinking about innovation (Canada hasn’t been particularly welcoming or conducive to innovation, by the way, as we don’t celebrate risk-taking here). I’m also thinking about how the drive to innovate, to undertake (i.e., entrepreneurialism), and to take risks is tied to biology and age: in the Renaissance, 14-year-olds (if they were born into the right families) ran city-states (Florence, eg.) or became apprentices so that by the time they were 18 or 19 they were called “masters.” (This was true for boys. Girls’ options were extremely limited: they undertook motherhood, an option tied solely to biology but not skill or inclination, and one that can gravely limit all other options, especially when embarked on so young. Luckily, we don’t encourage that any more, but there are still “buts”…)
Today, we extend childhood – which is just another way of killing or subduing or controlling the natural instinct to take risks. Hell, if having sex and procreating isn’t the ultimate risk, risking your very self to keep the species going, what is? And what’s typically of interest to many young people? If they’re sexually active, they’re not doing it to bug their parents, they’re doing it because it’s bred in the bone, it’s in the DNA: you have to do it (or at least have your attention aroused by it), it’s a drive, regardless of how much you think about it. (Of course, extensive or excessive cerebration has an effect on the drives, as the Surrealists well understood – which comes out in many of their visual works.)
I have to wonder whether drug use isn’t a by-product (so to speak) of the factory school system, which (imo) tends to throttle the natural (and good) inclinations of adolescents to take risks, to innovate, to undertake (entrepreneurialism). Put a couple of hundred frustrated teens into a factory, er, excuse me, school, and add some heavy dollops of crappy absentee parenting and a home-life where no one is paying attention to anything (it has to be said: parents have a lot to answer for!), and bingo-presto, you have a setting for a nihilistic peer culture whose creativity is thwarted, and which too often doesn’t have mature outlets for risk-taking. (And remember, I’m arguing that risk-taking, contrary to some research on the teenage brain, isn’t a medical condition or a question of incomplete neurological development: I’m arguing that it’s part of our DNA, and essential for an entrepreneurial and innovative and creative culture. But we deny it.) In a “perfect storm” type scenario (absent parents, no proper outlets for creativity, immature peer group, bad role models/no leadership models), those kids will do drugs, whether legal or illegal. They will seek them out, explore them, pour their energies into them.
After all, their own parents have been doping them up since they were babies, often with Ritalin or other behavior-modifying junk. So why shouldn’t they try some little extras to help them get through the asininity of their extended, risk-free/ un-innovative, endless childhoods?
In other words, I’m arguing that substance abuse and a badly suited education system (the factory model, based on 19th and early 20th century Fordist & Taylorist principles) and the suppression of (as well as the absence of a proper object and outlet for) innovation/ creative risk-taking / independent thinking must be thought of as pieces of the same puzzle. That’s something that should be tackled at social policy level (see also Judy Estrin‘s new book, Closing the Innovation Gap.)
I’m also arguing that the other big piece in that puzzle is absentee – or outright bad – parenting, which is relatively new as a mass phenomenon insofar as it has been created by recent generations who are themselves the product of an education system that’s outdated/ innovation-killing (or, worse, who are themselves drug-users), and who most certainly are boxed into the at least partially absent parent role if they’re trying to make their career mark, or just working as much as they can to keep up with …well, with keeping up (whatever that means in each case – in many cases, basic means: keeping a roof over one’s head and food on the table).
Everything is an ecosystem, a web. You can’t tinker with stuff in isolation and expect to avoid consequences along the way. This makes me think that the much-lauded concept of a track (career track, education track, policy track, etc.) is as artificial or outdated as other mechanical (factory model based) ways of thinking. You can’t put careers on tracks or put kids on tracks or put your life on tracks or put social policy on tracks/ fast track policy without accounting in some way for the effects “your” tracks have on the ecosystem overall. It’s not “isolatable” in the bigger sense, which means we need to keep big- and small-picture views in focus.
I think you’re being a bit hard on parents. Most of them cannot afford to do anything other than put their kids in the factory. I’d rather see a thoroughgoing reform of the school system – which would mean a huge load of public investment, mainly in teachers. Either way the cost will be huge – if, for example, you go for universal home-schooling, then a lot of people will have to withdraw from the paid workforce, so wages for the remainder will need to rise sharply (as will their productivity). On the other hand, if you go for better schools, people will have to pay more taxes.
Comment by melanie — December 13, 2008 #
True, Melanie, regarding what you say about overhauling education, and that most parents don’t have any choice. I homeschooled my kids, and it cost me …a lot (ironic, because growing up with a mother who didn’t have a career because of motherhood, my most fervent wish growing up was to have a career so I could have my own income and claim independence – I can’t tell you how the irony bites, hard). At the same time, I realize how privileged I was because I had the choice (but it still makes me feel like a f*ck up? Why? Because I couldn’t have it all, of course: I grew up in that time when women were expected to be able to have it all. Haha, bitter irony there, too…)
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That said, a lot of what I wrote in the comment is in reaction to some really, really bad stuff I can see every time I walk downtown: kids on the streets, young people who are really outside of my “social circle,” i.e., not the children of parents that I can identify with. But – here’s the rub: those kids exist, on the street. That means their parents do, too. And I honestly can’t explain those kids fully except to ask, well, what of their parents?
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Quite a few of those parents would say, We did our best, we don’t know why our kids did or do what they do. Maybe what they did was their best, and their kids are a freak show that no one can explain. But I doubt it.
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So the question is, what is it about what they say is their best that’s inadequate? My response is that I think the problem is systemic. That is, in some ways I don’t “blame” the parents. But – but: the systemic problems are played out at an individual level in each family or parent-child relationship. Micro view/ macro view and all that. Parents buckle, or don’t have the backbone in the first place. It is hard work, with deferred reward (if any).
Comment by Yule — December 13, 2008 #
I grew up in a period when women could have one (stay-at-home-mum) or, occasionally, a bit of the other. ‘Having it all’ somehow turned from being a demand for real emancipation into a pressure to have two pretty much full-time jobs. Interestingly, according to the just-published UNICEF report, Canada and Australia both come out at the very bottom of the league table when it comes to adequate provision of early childcare/education. They used a 10 point checklist. Sweden, of course, scored 10/10, Australia 2/10 and Canada and Ireland 1/10 (the last 3 out of 25 countries). The Germans were 13th (I heard on DW). Not exactly helpful to mothers!Systemic issues are harder to deal with than individual responsibility – actually they require all of us to work collectively to achieve a better sense of community and fight the tendency to get whatever you can out of your cog status.
Comment by melanie — December 14, 2008 #
[…] Rob blogged about Amsterdam’s re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs. (note: I created a separate blog post about this here) […]
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