Re: Don't blame the doctor-- (also known as"Don't Shoot the Messenger.")

When cars were first produced, and aggressive promotion created in people
the desire to buy cars, the consumer's desire was that they should have a
car that lasts a long time. This came from a general cultural value that
existed at that time (itself a product of historical development). This
wasn't good enough for automobile makers. If they made a high quality
durable car that lasted for 20 years, and this is what people continued to
want, then automobile makers could reach a saturation point potentially
very harmful to their business. So capitalist set about figuring a way to
manipulate people into wanting a new car every year or two. They came up
with annual models of cars and an aggressive advertising campaign to
transform the consciousness of the public. To say that car manufacturing
came up with the annual model idea because the "customers demanded it" is
ridiculous. Virtually everything people want are things they were
socialized to want.

First, what people want is determined by society. Their tastes, wants,
desires -- beyond very basic biological requirements, which are in every
case historically and culturally conditioned -- are socially construction.  
Second, in a consumer culture, what people want is largely determined by
systematic brainwashing. Capitalist elites have developed an extensive
thought control regime wherein they manufacture and manipulate all manner
of cultural values to bring people en masse on-line to their commodities
and the consumer logic. Whether it is making kids feel ugly for zits and
seducing them into buying Oxy-10 acne cream, or telling women they must
paint their faces with waterproof cosmetics so that they won't look ugly
by the end of an evening trying to impress their man and showing up their
girlfriends -- almost everything desired in "advanced" society today is
the result of extensive manipulated by trained professional propagandists
and brainwashers. This is because excessive consumption has become an
essential part of reproducing capital.

The claim that restricting harmful products, such as drugs and alcohol,
always, or even for the most part, leads to greater evils is false.
Prohibition, while it expanded (many already existing) criminal networks,
it also reduced alcohol consumption and alcohol related injuries and
fatalities, which was one of its goals. Most citizens obeyed the new law
and stopped drinking. This was a good thing. The quality of family lives
was improved and alcohol dependency was dramatically reduced. But we can
put that aside, because the claim that "prohibition of societally harmful
behavior is wrong because criminal networks might expand" is irrelevant.
One does not abandon a large-scale social project because criminals decide
to figure out ways to profit from it. This is logically fallacious
argument form, analogous to arguing that we ought to abolish social
welfare because there is welfare fraud. If there is fraud, then clean up
the fraud. You don't end the program. There is a world of difference
between non-intrinsic outcomes like crime around prohibition or fraud
around social welfare, on the one hand, and the intrinsic impoverishing
effects of capitalist accumulation.

What is wrong about most drug policy is punishing the addict. But the idea
of preventing some from profiting by harming others is not a bad idea. It
is a reasonable and ethical position to deny corporation the freedom to
sell products that when used correctly are harmful to consumers. Tobacco
companies, alcohol manufacturers and distributors, and gun manufacturers,
are reasonably closed down. Freedom to manufacture cigarettes or
distribute alcohol is generally defended on the liberal notion that the
consumer determines the demand and that the capitalist is only responding
to their demand and has no ethical obligation not to profit from
endangering others and society. But this logic is warped. It is a mainstay
of our public policy that we prohibit or restrict all manner of things to
protect consumers and the public. Just as we have restricted the
distribution of DDT in our country, on the basis that when used correctly
it harms people, we may reasonable prevent corporations from selling any
substance or performing any service that when used correctly harms the
consumer. I have actually heard (on several occasions) the argument that
there should be no meat inspections in the US, since if Jack-in-the-Box
kills enough people then people will stop going to Jack-in-the-Box and
therefore the market will take care of food poisoning.

People use tobacco because tobacco companies aggressively target certain
populations inducing them to use their product and particular brands of
their product. These companies addict people to their product and in many
cases kill their customers. Tobacco farmers do not grow tobacco,
corporations do not sell tobacco, because the people came to them and
demanded they do so. The fact that capitalists manipulate people into
wanting their product, and that they do this for the sake of profit, and
that the outcome of their behavior leads to harmful effects, especially
the freer the market is, means that the profit motive is inherently
corrupt and dangerous for the public. The long-range goal should be the
abolition of the capitalist system. The short-run should be to ameliorate
it harmful effects as best we can.

Andy