What King Midas Taught Me About Drug Policy

It’s been nearly 10 years since I first started writing about drugs. When I first started, I believed that if only people understood how bad things were and just how many people were dying, there would be the political and social will for seismic change. This, dear friends, was not the case.

Imagine you walked into a bookstore (more realistically, browsing Amazon categories) and wanted to look at books about marriage. But as you scrolled or strolled through, the only books you saw were about divorce. You could learn how bad divorce is, how many people get divorced, and even books offering seven simple steps to not get divorced.

There are a few potential reactions you might have. You could be scared off entirely by the idea because divorce might seem like the natural outcome of getting married. Or maybe you assume that, to have a good marriage, all you need to do is avoid getting divorced. Still another possibility is that you become convinced that divorce is so bad that only someone with something terribly wrong with them would ever get divorced.

There is a lot of helpful research and writing on divorce that helps us better understand marriage. But, no matter how long you study divorce, none of that will ever add up to understanding marriage, just as no matter how much you understand addiction and overdoses, you will never fully understand drugs. And in both cases, if you focus only on the harms, you will end up with a distorted view of the underlying relationship. In other words, if your only lens for marriage is through divorce and your only lens for drugs is addiction, you might actually perpetuate some of the underlying harmful dynamics you are seeking to address.

If this is true for marriage, it is especially true for drugs. In reality, the percentage of people who get married and then get divorced is higher than those who try heroin and get addicted or overdose.

We did not invent our relationship with drugs. We inherited it.

Addiction is not the inevitable end result of substance use, just like divorce isn’t the outcome of marriage. Just because you don’t currently have a diagnosable substance use disorder doesn’t mean that your relationship with the drugs you consume is a positive or healthy one, just like not getting divorced doesn’t mean you have a healthy marriage. While addictions and divorces certainly aren’t desirable, experiencing one doesn’t mean you are a bad person, as addictions and divorces are often adaptive responses to hard and traumatic situations.

In Addiction Nation, I argued for understanding addiction not as a discrete pathology that separates humans into different categories. Instead, I argued for understanding addiction as a fundamental dynamic that each of us experiences in diverse ways, uniting us as a common human family.

In the same vein, drugs are a part of all of our lives. A “drug user” is not a discrete subset of our species defined by easily observable behaviors–it is a description of what it means to be human. Organic life has evolved in environments with toxic and potentially intoxicating chemicals that are both helpful and harmful, and everything in between. Our species evolved inside of drug-rich environments. Drug use is not incidental to who we are today as a species, but integral to our formation and evolution from both biological and cultural perspectives. If chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are any indication, long before our ancestors worked to master the technology of fire, they were working to engage the techniques and technologies of mining their environments for plants and fungi that would shift how they experienced themselves and the world around them. We did not invent our relationship with drugs. We inherited it.

While our contemporary challenges might be distinctive, they are not new. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, our ancestors have had to work to balance making good use of the chemicals they found in their environments with minimizing the risks. Our past and the myths we tell to make sense of it are rich stores of information and wisdom. The stories that have survived the longest often do so because they are the ones we can find ourselves in and still learn from today. When it comes to the dangers and opportunities drugs represent, the Greeks had many stories to tell.

It was King Pentheus, the story goes, who banned the worship of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, revelry and intoxication. The ban did not last long, as the maenads, followers of the banned god, ripped King Pentheus apart and tore off his head. It was Pentheus’s mother, while in a frenzied, ecstatic state induced by Dionysus, who paraded around with her son’s severed head unaware.

However, there was another king who readily welcomed Dionysus and was rewarded with a gift from the god that at first seemed nothing more than a pure blessing. It was only over time that King Midas realized that the golden touch he once believed would fulfill all his desires was a curse that would make the flowers lose their scent, food and drink lose their pleasure and sustenance, and end in the deaths of his loved ones and himself.

When I first started writing about drugs, I would have resonated with the story of Pentheus, with the folly and destruction that the attempted ban of Dionysus could cause. Over the past few years, and with a deepening respect and understanding of drugs as stolen fire, it is clear why the story of the Midas Touch still holds sway in our culture today; its lessons stand the test of time. My goal in writing this book was not to tell one myth and ignore the other but to hold these two stories together as deeply true at the same time.

If we are to understand drugs as fire, then we need to get comfortable with the reality that whenever we describe their powers of destruction, we describe a quality that allows them to contribute to human flourishing. When we describe how they serve our flourishing, we must be aware that the very thing that makes them useful and desirable is the very qualities that make them dangerous–just like fire.

What Are Drugs For? An Exploration of Stolen Fire is now available for pre-order. Support local bookstores by ordering through BookShop.org.

Founded by Rev. Alexander E. Sharp, the mission of Clergy for a New Drug Policy is to mobilize clergy nationally on behalf of an agenda that ends the War on Drugs by allocating resources to education, treatment, and public safety.