Antonio Escohotado

I’ve been working in the addiction field now for more years than I care to remember, but was recently surprised by one of my English students who put me on the trail of Antonio Escohotado born in Madrid Spain 1941. I was so impressed by his writing that I have to share at least something of his polemic stance. Very much a liberal stance, in the traditional meaning of the word in that he believes Government should have no authority over the body of an individual. Escohotado explores in his writings the mixture of euphoria, authority, control, morals, ethics and politics. I wonder how many of the people I have worked with; their friends and families have been ostracized, criminalized or pathologized by self-serving drug laws. Obviously there is no room here to explore in depth, but I’ll leave you with a small taster and just thank Elena for directing me and showing me that I still have a lot to learn.

“Prohibition might be considered “the greatest moral experiment of our time”, as F.D.Roosevelt stated in 1932. But banishing drugs from human life is, in fact, a war against self-induced euphoria, and also a war against chemistry and human invention. Such an enterprise was born in the USA, and has been exported by this country at the very same rhythm in which it became the world's superpower. The effect of this American crusade is identical to the general effect of crusades, and especially of the crusade against witchcraft: aggravating to unheard extremes a hypothetical evil, justifiying the destruction and plundering of countless persons, promoting the ill-gotten wealth of corrupt inquisitors, and creating a prosperous black market for all the forbidden items -which in the seventeenth century were sorcerer's concoctions, and today are heroin, cocaine, crack, etc.

We will not break the crusade's vicious circle, unless the standards of barbaric obscurantism are replaced by principles of enlightenment, focused on the spreading of knowledge among the populations. Drugs have always been around, and they will certainly ever remain. To pretend that both users and non-users will be better protected because some of them are impure, very expensive and sold by criminals (who are, by the way, indistinguishable from undercover police and plain businessmen) is simply ridiculous, and yet more so when the street supply grows year after year. The obvious result is a growing output of crimes and illiterate youngsters, who use the illicit substances partly as an adulthood initiation rite, and partly as an alibi that suggests declaring oneself irresponsible, unfree, victim of a chemical devil. This is very comfortable at such a critical moment of life, in which they should rather learn responsibility, imitating the abnegation displayed by their elders with them. So the true option is not vice as opposed to law and order. The real choice is between an irrational consumption of adulterated products, compared to an informed use of pure drugs”.