2010.09.09
Days Remaining: 264

1. Talking about myself gets kind of boring, and I thought that today it would be more interesting to mention some of the things we've been talking about in my classes. First, some background. I start each class, after taking attendance, with what we call "10 Minutes of Freedom." Last year it became clear to me that a lot of students are very intellectually hungry for the chance to talk about social issues, politics, etc., but that they are inundated by sound bites while lacking good models of analytical practice in handling the information overload. So the "10 Minutes of Freedom" are an open discussion session when they can ask about pretty much anything, and either I'll respond directly or I'll ask other students their ideas on the topic and I just moderate. Last year it got out of hand periodically, and we'd spend a lot of time discussing things that weren't really related to the class topics, so this semester I'm rigorously enforcing the 10 minute part of the process.

2. It's taking the students some time to get used to having the chance to talk about anything, and so far it's mostly been students I've taught before who are asking questions or raising topics. This can be very trivial (today someone asked me what superpower I'd wish for). On the other hand, some of the more experienced students have begun formulating their questions/topics in advance. Case in point: on Tuesday one of my returners asked about drug legalization. He still formulated this as "what do you [i.e., me] think about...?" but I asked for other students' responses and thoughts. In a later class on Tuesday I mentioned that question/topic, and today a student in one of those later classes brought it up, having thought about it and got to wondering.

3. The consensus of students who spoke up today in my Native American Religions class was interesting to me, but I'm not sure it's actually surprising. The majority of them seemed to be pro-legalization, although they expressed some surprise when I said that I'm pro-legalization for all drugs, and not just pot. They clearly seem to feel that cannabis should be legalized, but were very mixed about the advisability of making, for instance, methamphetamines legal. What struck me in particular was that cannabis seems to be normalized among them almost like alcohol. From what they said, I don't have any sense of how many of them actually smoke cannabis, or how regularly (alcohol use is very common Baskerville College's campus - we've had several "interventions" and "campus discussions" on the topic in the past few years due to some highly publicized medical crises). But they aren't indignant or worked up on the issue of cannabis legalization; they just take it for granted that it's not a big deal.

4. So what is the distinction they seem to be implicitly drawing between cannabis and other illegal substances? From the comments that came up repeatedly, it's all about alleged societal harm. Many of them were concerned with how drugs deform communities, and we had an interesting series of exchanges about whether drugs were the cause of such problems, symptoms, or if they were basically epiphenomena. I'm mostly in the latter camp, and it really disturbed some of the students, who seemed to think that I was nonchalant about the possible negative consequences that drug use can have. I'm not, I think that drug abuse becomes a problem in places where there are other, deeper issues that make drug use (and related black market behaviors) more appealing, and where social structures are lacking to help moderate or control said behaviors.

5. That last point managed to segue into the topic of Native American Religions, because there has been some interesting work done on ways that colonial-era Native groups attempted to deal with the influx of alcohol. The stereotype of the drunken Indian had already taken hold, and Europeans and Americans were very interested in exploiting what they perceived as an inherent weakness. This would seem to prove my students' point: alcohol led to the train-wrecking of Native societies. But the recent work to which I referred found that native groups in the Southeast (the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, etc.) tried to regulate alcohol consumption by integrating it into ritual life; they tried to make alcohol a seasonal consumable, or one which could only be drunk during very highly regulated ceremonies. The problem wasn't that they couldn't get it to work, the problem was that European and American traders kept working against them, smuggling in whiskey to folks who were drinking too much, or refusing to trade native goods for anything but alcohol (this is nefarious - because European and American manufactured goods had replaced indigenous production, and then even that was taken away, and only alcohol was offered in payment for things like deerskins or agricultural goods). Combine all of that with ongoing epidemics, military conflict and conquest, and the steady loss of land and subsistence independence, and it's not at all clear that alcohol destroyed (or damaged) Native cultures. It's indisputable that it didn't help, but we see in later (better documented) contact situations that widespread alcoholism actually follows the economic and political collapse, rather than preceding it. Similarly, the so-called epidemic of crack in US inner cities didn't lead to poverty, it followed. But, in both cases, after all hell had broken loose, the widespread development of substance abuse made it much harder to recover and rebuild the societies.

6. This is why my students' discomfort with legalizing (and regulating) drugs was so interesting: the War on Drugs totally hasn't worked in preventing drug use, but it has done a great job (much like earlier British and American public campaigns against alcohol consumption) in distracting people from issues of political disenfranchisement, socio-economic deprivation, and structural inequality. Again, I'm not saying that drugs are harmless, good for you, or anything like that. I've just never seen data that says that they are the cause of widespread social harm in and of themselves. This was actually shocking to my students, at least some of them, and therefore all the more important to bring out into the open.

7. We also talked about studying Native American religion, too, after the 10 minutes were up. But that's another topic, and this is too long already.

8. On a personal note, I've been invited to go to the beach next weekend with my sister's family and my parents. Yesterday I posted about loving the waterfront, today I get the invite. There's only one obvious next move: I'd love to have tons of money, if anything powerful in the cosmos is listening...