Cognitive Liberty

Cory Doctorow has an excellent meditation on what a friend of his has called "cognitive liberty".

"...the freedom to choose your state of mind. The cognitive liberty cause encompasses the movements to legalize "recreational" drugs and to limit the power of the state to subject "mentally ill" people to involuntary pharmaceutical therapy (and, when it is still practiced, involuntary physical therapies such as lobotomies and electroshock).

Cognitive liberty resonates strongly for me. Like other forms of personal liberty, it is not without its perils -- when friends of mine were involuntarily medicated during acute incidents of schizophrenia, mania or depression, the interventions seemed like a good trade-off at the time (rampaging, irrational, out of control friends who are treated with meds that make them capable of reasoning with those around them are good poster children for "cognitive coercion"), and friends who've fallen down the well of addiction and ended up with ruined lives or even lives cut short are a strong warning against unbridled cognitive liberty.

But then there are friends whose touch of madness sends them on flights of brilliance, friends whose casual glass of wine, joint or hallucinogen use have made them happier, better adjusted, and more creative and fulfilled. What's more, my friends who've ODed, been committed, or who live with addiction haven't been helped by prohibition -- far from it. Some are in jail, some are medicated insensible, some are living lives of dangerous poverty.

The idea of cognitive liberty is very tempting, but I have an instinct that there's an approach to it that is grounded not in libertarianism, but in Canadian/European-style social democracy. "

Having had friends who have been addicted to various substances for the majority of their adult lives has made me feel almost exactly the same way, with the possible exception that the problems they have had with their addictions are in direct proportion with the legal status of those drugs and/or education about how drugs should be used or administered. A friend who died in the last couple of years had used drugs off and on for several years. In the 1960's she had been at art school in the UK and did what most people in their 20's did: go to a lot of gigs, party with your friends and experiment. She managed to unfortunately contract Hepatitis, which of course created all kinds of pathogenic hell. The effects of this on her liver was what finally killed her.

Or one of my old flatmates who is now in his late 40's and has been addicted for 30 years. The self-described 'Man with a Golden Arm' still manages to have something approximating what most would call a normal daytime existence, but might be swallowing 30mg of Diazepam to stave off withdrawal and get him through it. I once saw him pay $400 dollars for 40mls of Methadone from a friend because his withdrawal was so bad he was almost at the point where he was ready to punch his fist through a window. On that day, if someone had said drinking a litre of anti-freeze will stop it, he would have.

The fact is that the economies of purchasing drugs would never remain the same after decriminalisation. Or the very obvious dangers of buying drugs off complete strangers on the street would in all likelihood be ameliorated if support and access were replaced with the current ignorance.

The question of Cognitive Liberty in my mind is similar to abortion rights, or even assisted suicide: Who owns your body, you or the state? It's a question that needs to be asked more. I'm being a little facetious, but for years now i've been trying to teach my students that you are what you eat: If that means you're rearing yourself on a steady diet of Baywatch, Sahara, 50 Cent and you have an aversion to text, well, quite frankly, you're more dangerous than you thought.