You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (70 page)

74.
      Ibid.

75.
      See Note 13.

76.
      Gray,
Drug Laws
, p. 42.

77.
      Ibid., pp. 38–39

78.
      Ibid., p. 76.

79.
      Ibid., p. 74.

80.
      Ibid., p. 75.

81.
      Ibid., p. 76.

82.
      Gray,
Drug Crazy
, p. 148.

83.
      Gray,
Drug Laws
, p. 77.

84.
      Ibid.

85.
      Horner info from Gray,
Drug Crazy
, pp. 146–148.

86.
      Gray,
Drug Laws
, pp. 139–142.

87.
      Ibid., p. 141.

88.
      Sebastian Abbot and Nasser Karimi, “West Links Drug War Aid to Iranian Nuclear Impasse,” AP, 24 June 2008.

89.
      “Drug Possession No Longer a Crime in Portugal,”
Drug War Chronicle
, 7 June 2001, ret.
stopthedrugwar.org
,
30 Sep. 2008.

90.
      Andrew Downie, “Brazil’s Drug Users Will Get Help, Instead of Jail,”
Christian Science Monitor
, 4 Jan. 2002.

91.
      “Colombia Rethinks Legalized Drugs,” CBS/AP, 5 Apr. 2004.

92.
      Louisa Degenhardt, et al., “Toward A Global View of Alcohol, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use,”
PLoS Med
., 1 July 2008.

93.
      Ibid.

94.
      Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter,
Drug War Heresies
(2001), pp. 236–237.

95.
      Danna Harman, “Debate Far from Over for Mexico’s Drug Bill,”
Christian Science Monitor
, 10 May 2006.

96.
      MacCoun,
Drug War Heresies
, pp. 194–199.

97.
      Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), p. 15.

98.
      Gray,
Drug Crazy
, p. 165.

99.
      Ibid., p. 168.

100.
    Larry Elder,
Ten Things You Can’t Say in America
(2000), p. 260.

101.
    Gray,
Drug Crazy
, p. 169.

102.
    O’Reilly Factor, FOX News, 8 Dec. 2008; and Elian Wils and Robbert Nieuwenhuijs, “The Truth About Amsterdam.” 27 July 2009.

103.
    O’Reilly Factor, FOX News, 4 Aug. 2009.

104.
    Gray,
Drug Crazy
, pp. 163–164.

105.
    James Gray,
Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed
(2001), p. 220.

106.
    Glenn Greenwald, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal,” Cato Institute, 2009.

107.
    Gray,
Drug Crazy
, pp. 163–164.

108.
    Stuart Walton,
Out Of It
(2002), p. 248.

109.
    Gray,
Drug Crazy
, p. 154.

110.
    Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), p. 11.

111.
    Bill Masters, ed.,
New Prohibition
(2004), p. 33.

112.
    “Super Bust!”
NORML.Org
, 31 Jan. 2002, ret. 25 Jan. 2007.

113.
    Masters,
New Prohibition
, p. 7.

114.
    David Johnston, “Pre-Attack Memo Cited Bin Laden,”
New York Times
, 15 May 2002.

115.
    Donna Leinwand, “Anti-Drug Advertising Campaign a Failure,”
USAToday.com
, 29 Aug. 2006, ret. 24 Jan. 2007.

116.
    Arthur Benavie,
Drugs: America’s Holy War
(2009), p. 5.

117.
    Drug trends have not correlated with anti-drug spending. The 1980s saw significant decreases in lifetime drug usage by high school seniors, but the 1990s saw significant increases despite massive budgetary increases. Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter,
Drug War Heresies
(2001), p. 16.

118.
    Ibid., pp. 30–32.

119.
    In 1975, eighty-eight percent of high school seniors said marijuana was “fairly easy” to obtain and forty-seven percent had used it. In 2011, the numbers were eighty-two percent and forty-six percent, respectively. “Monitoring the Future,” U. of Michigan, ret.
MonitoringtheFuture.org
, 20 Apr. 2012.

120.
    David Alexander, “Marijuana Top U.S. Cash Crop,” Reuters, 19 Dec. 2006, ret.
news.yahoo.com
19 Dec. 2006.

121.
    Masters,
New Prohibition
, p. 71.

122.
    Paul Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
(2001), p. 5.

123.
    Jacob Sullum,
Saying Yes
(2003), p. 269.

124.
    Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
, p. iv.

125.
    In economic terms drugs’ price elasticity of demand is low, that is, its price has little effect on demand.

126.
    Ronald Rose said, “Believe me, after twenty years as a prosecutor and judge, I can assure you that we only catch the stupid ones.” James Gray,
Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed
(2001), p. 211.

127.
    Masters,
New Prohibition
, p. 45.

128.
    Ibid., p. 72.

129.
    Ibid.

130.
    Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
, p. 251.

131.
    Gray,
Drug Laws
, p. 49.

132.
    Ibid.

133.
    Paragraph statistics from Gray,
Drug Crazy
, pp. 151–152.

134.
    Edward Epstein,
Agency of Fear
(1990), pp. 185–187.

135.
    Paragraph from Russ Kick, ed.,
You Are Being Lied To
(2001), p. 249–250.

136.
    Paragraph from Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), pp. 216–217, 239, 426.

137.
    Huffing is hyperventilating from a plastic bag containing solvent, or breathing from a solvent-soaked cloth.

138.
    Gahlinger,
Illegal Drugs
, p. 186.

139.
    Ibid., p. 185.

140.
    Stuart Walton,
Out Of It
(2002), p. 192.

141.
    Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter,
Drug War Heresies
(2001), pp. 79–85.

142.
    
Hudson v. Michigan
, 547 US 586 (2006). Radley Balko,
Overkill
(2006), p. 34.

143.
    Ibid., p. 13.

144.
    One example was Salvatore Culosi, Jr., a thirty-seven-year-old optometrist. He was unarmed and cooperative but was still killed in a heavily armed SWAT team’s visit to his suburban home in Fair Oaks, Virginia. His crime was that an undercover agent had placed football game bets with Culosi. To learn more about the ongoing problem see the articles by Radley Balko on The Huffington Post. Tom Jackman, “SWAT Tactics at Issue After Fairfax Shooting,”
Washington Post
, 27 Jan. 2006, and ibid., pp. 12–13.

145.
    Gray,
Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed
, p. 49.

146.
    MacCoun,
Drug War Heresies
, p. 70.

147.
    Richard Davenport-Hines,
Pursuit of Oblivion
(2002), p. 167.

You will die. Death is inevitable. Despite weakening considerably since its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, death is still taboo in America.
¹
Death must still be discussed sensitively in many contexts and people with life-threatening illnesses are still stigmatized.
²
It is a taboo that permeates and empowers other taboos. How people consider death affects how they live their lives.

In nature, death is omnipresent. Starvation, unmitigated disease, and being eaten alive are some of the unsavory ends common in the wild. The guillotine is tender in comparison to the innate cruelty of pathogens and predators. In sharp contrast to their kin in the natural world, many Americans have never witnessed the death of a large animal, much less another human being.

The eating of meat is now so far removed from the slaughter that most McDonald’s patrons could not fathom what it is like to kill and butcher a docile cow. People approaching their deaths are frequently sequestered in hospitals, where the only witness may be a cold machine eking out the body’s life signs as long as possible.
³

Prior to the last century, death was not concealed. It was an accepted part of life. Cemeteries were in the centers of towns. Rural populations raised and then killed the animals they ate. Almost all people died in their homes under the watch of their loved ones. Today many would consider it appalling to be the mortician of a loved one, but historically it was the family that prepared the cadaver for burial and conducted the services. Children were not separated from these proceedings and would sometimes even sleep in the same room as the corpse.
⁴

While firsthand exposure to death has been almost completely removed from the non-medical population, deaths are now ubiquitous in the media. These media deaths are sanitized: they are either fictional or reduced to mere words and numbers by American news sources, which rarely show graphic images of death.
⁵

The most extreme example of this expurgation is the fact that the United States managed to wage war in Iraq for five years with over four thousand American combat deaths, and most of its population never saw an image of a dead American soldier.
⁶
In cultural contrast, the Arabic news network Al Jazeera showed a “tidal wave of very graphic pictures.” Its spokesman said of its Iraq War coverage, “Our audience actually expects us to show them blood, because they realize that war kills. If we were not to show it, we would be accused by our viewers . . . of perhaps hiding the truth or trying to sanitize the war.”
⁷

Media deaths distort peoples’ perceptions of how death occurs. Fictional shows, like the pervasive crime drama, fixate on murder. The news industry also focuses disproportionately on sensational deaths. Studies have found that people who watch the local news overestimate crime rates and have greater fear for their safety. Crime rates in the United States have been dropping for the past twenty years. However, for almost every one of those years a supermajority of Americans believed that there was more crime now than the year before.
⁸

Not only do these skewed media portrayals distort Americans’ conceptions of what causes death, but they also promote the belief that death is something that happens to us instead of something that we all do.
¹⁰
This belief is abetted by the medicalization of death. The countless medical breakthroughs of the past century have made death a medical condition to be battled unceasingly, not a natural life process to be accepted.

This overly combative view is demonstrated by the billions of dollars wasted
by Medicare annually to treat near-death patients with scant hopes of recovery. It is estimated that twenty to thirty percent of the medical expenditures in patients’ last two months have no meaningful impact, for example, surgically implanting a defibrillator for heart problems in a ninety-three-year-old man with terminal cancer or keeping an unconscious person barely alive for months in an intensive care unit at the cost of $10,000 per day.
¹¹
Even when terminally ill patients
want
a physician to help them die it is often prohibited. Physician-assisted suicides for deathbed patients are still illegal in forty-seven states.