{"id":1105,"date":"2008-12-13T12:20:36","date_gmt":"2008-12-13T19:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1105"},"modified":"2008-12-13T13:01:24","modified_gmt":"2008-12-13T20:01:24","slug":"drug-use-as-side-effect-of-suppressing-innovation-and-risk-taking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/12\/13\/drug-use-as-side-effect-of-suppressing-innovation-and-risk-taking\/","title":{"rendered":"Drug use as side effect of suppressing innovation and risk-taking?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day Rob Randall posted an entry, Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria?<\/a>, on which I left a long comment.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s my comment:<\/p>\n

Permissive approaches to what we quaintly used to call \u201cvice\u201d don\u2019t work if there\u2019s 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\u2019s legal in one jurisdiction (say, Amsterdam) is not going to be universally legal everywhere (say, Afghanistan), which means you can\u2019t get rid of the criminal element.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re totally mistaken. Why? The two substance categories are apples and oranges – nay, apples and rocks: totally different.<\/p>\n

Yes, alcohol can kill, it can derange people\u2019s lives, destroy families, and turn (some) individuals into addicts (alcoholics). But it\u2019s in no way as quickly and massively and universally<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Yet they aren\u2019t. Why is that? It\u2019s not<\/em> because alcohol is legal while drugs aren\u2019t. It\u2019s because those drugs really truly are bad for you, they alter your brain chemistry, and there\u2019s 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\u2026)<\/p>\n

So I wish people would stop with the \u201clet\u2019s legalize this and solve the problems that way\u201d BS.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the answer? Everyone keeps coming back to \u201ceducation\u201d: that if we educate our kids to the dangers of these drugs, they won\u2019t do them.<\/p>\n

Yet our kids are doing drugs anyway. So what\u2019s going on? Maybe \u2018education\u2019 means a bit more than just warning people about the dangers. Maybe there has to be more authoritative parenting – note: I don\u2019t write (or mean) authoritarian, but authoritative.<\/p>\n

What does that mean, from where I\u2019m sitting? Well, a bunch of things. First off, parents should be parents<\/em> – they should damn well pay attention. For another thing, speaking as a parent, I wouldn\u2019t (and I didn\u2019t) send my kids into the factory school system. Pink Floyd said it best on their album \u201cThe Wall\u201d: you\u2019re 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\u2019 hair so that the parents can go to work, and they\u2019re designed like factories, where it\u2019s \u201cone size fits all,\u201d and you\u2019re 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\u2019re 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\u2019s modeled on the factory, and a factory it is. It\u2019s the opposite of a system conducive to innovation and creative risk-taking.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a system that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading and thinking about innovation (Canada hasn\u2019t been particularly welcoming or conducive to innovation, by the way, as we don\u2019t celebrate risk-taking here). I\u2019m also thinking about how the drive to innovate, to undertake<\/em> (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 \u201cmasters.\u201d (This was true for boys. Girls\u2019 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\u2019t encourage that any more, but there are still \u201cbuts\u201d\u2026)<\/p>\n

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\u2019t the ultimate risk, risking your very self to keep the species going, what is? And what\u2019s typically of interest to many young people? If they\u2019re sexually active, they\u2019re not doing it to bug their parents, they\u2019re doing it because it\u2019s bred in the bone, it\u2019s in the DNA: you have<\/em> to do it (or at least have your attention aroused by it), it\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

I have to wonder whether drug use isn\u2019t 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<\/em> (entrepreneurialism). Put a couple of hundred frustrated teens into a factory, er, excuse me, school<\/em>, 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!<\/strong>), and bingo-presto, you have a setting for a nihilistic peer culture whose creativity is thwarted, and which too often doesn\u2019t have mature outlets for risk-taking. (And remember, I\u2019m arguing that risk-taking, contrary to some research on the teenage brain, isn\u2019t a medical condition or a question of incomplete neurological development: I\u2019m arguing that it\u2019s part of our DNA, and essential for an entrepreneurial and innovative and creative culture. But we deny it.) In a \u201cperfect storm\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t they try some little extras to help them get through the asininity of their extended, risk-free\/ un-innovative, endless childhoods?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong> the suppression of<\/em> (as well as the absence of a proper object and outlet for<\/em>) 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<\/a>‘s new book, Closing the Innovation Gap<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I’m also arguing that the other big piece in that puzzle is absentee – or outright bad <\/em>– 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).<\/p>\n

Everything is an ecosystem, a web.\u00a0 You can’t tinker with stuff in isolation and expect to avoid consequences along the way.\u00a0 This makes me think that the much-lauded concept of a track<\/em> (career track, education track, policy track, etc.) is as artificial or outdated as other mechanical (factory model based) ways of thinking.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s not “isolatable” in the bigger sense, which means we need to keep big- and small-picture views in focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2346,358,1071,134,678,259,1002],"tags":[3897,3898,3895,3207,3896],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-comments","category-creativity","category-education","category-ideas","category-innovation","category-social_critique","tag-drugs","tag-risk","tag-robert_randall","tag-schools","tag-youth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}