My friends Phil Cook (economics and public policy, Duke) and Peter Reuter (public policy and criminology, Maryland) have a very nice essay forthcoming in the journal Addiction, under the provocative title, "When is alcohol just another drug? Some thoughts on research and policy." It addresses the question of why, when people talk about abusable drugs, they aren't usually thinking of alcohol, and makes a strong case for considering alcohol and controlled substances together as a research topic - taking clues from alcohol policies and problems about the likely consequences of legalizing cannabis.

The editors were so pleased by the essay they asked other people to write short commentaries. This is generally understood as an invitation to bloviate at will, and in any case I had nothing much to add to the Cook and Reuter thesis, which is solid, important, and tightly argued. Instead, I indulged in a little bit of cultural and media criticism. The issue of Addiction containing this material won't appear until June or July, but the editors have kindly permitted me to post my musings here, in the hopes that some readers will be motivated to look up the underlying paper when it appears. It should go without saying that neither Cook nor Reuter bears any responsibility for what appears below.

If you have substantive suggestions or literary corrections to offer (in the comments section below), I still have time to make revisions.

Alcohol as a Drug: A Moral Revolution

"In terms of its effects on the human body and psyche, alcohol is simply another psychoactive substance." This sentence, with which Cook and Reuter begin their very able essay, embodies a proposition that will be taken as a truism by most readers of this journal, but would be regarded as a fallacy, an outrage, and an insult by many, if not most, ordinary citizens.

Why is that claim controversial, and why does the rejection of that claim matter?

It is controversial, I would submit, because the mood in which the public, its elected representatives, and their appointed officials consider drugs, drug-taking, and drug policy has little to do with the calm, evidence-based, policy-analytic tone taken by Cook and Reuter. The two scholars do not recite, because they do not believe, the basic credo underlying the international drug control regime, as well as the drug policies of most countries: outside a strictly medical context, drugs are fundamentally evil, drug-taking is both harmful and morally culpable, and drug-takers require some mixture of treatment and punishment. It is this credo that is threatened by any attempt to treat alcohol as a drug.

By contrast with any of the controlled drugs, alcohol use is neither statistically nor legally deviant.

In particular, those who discuss drug policy (outside Islamic societies) have no obligation to pretend they themselves are — nor any right to assume that their audiences are — abstinent from alcohol. Thus courtesy forbids even those who themselves do not drink and disapprove of drinking from referring to alcohol users generically as "drunkards" or "degenerates" or "slaves of the Demon Rum." Problems with alcohol must therefore be treated, in Abraham Lincoln's formulation, as "the abuse of a good thing," not "the use of a bad thing."