A psychiatrist was once so surprised to learn that I was a regular recreational drug user and yet seemed high-functioning and successful (these terms being relative to the literary world — not necessarily meaning “able to pay rent”) that he asked to make me a case study for his group of medical residents. I don’t know which of us found the other a more perplexing specimen. I was like: Dude, you’re a physician — do you seriously believe you don’t have colleagues who are addicts? Maybe doctors are so routinely lied to about drug and alcohol intake that they have no sense of people’s actual habits (one doctor was so shaken when a friend of mine was honest with him about how many beers he consumed per week that she wordlessly left the room, returned, and handed him a pamphlet). I assured him that on the periphery of the addicted or dependent population is a vast penumbra of people who take illegal or unprescribed drugs on a regular basis while carrying on careers and relationships, paying rent and taxes, raising kids, feeding pets, attending ball games and operas. I’m not about to out any of my friends who enjoy drugs, but I can tell you that they are people in perfectly respectable, high-status professions, positions of trust.

I do drugs. I don’t think this is particularly cool, in the Romantic literary tradition of the tortured visionary, but I’m not especially ashamed of it, either, after the current fashion for confessional/redemption memoirs; I fall somewhere on the Burroughs spectrum between William S. and Augusten. I’m not making an argument for drugs’ benefits (though there are such arguments to be made): I’m not claiming they make me more creative or focused, or more insightful or present. Drugs have gutted the talents of artists I admired, and destroyed the lives of people I loved. (And let me preemptively clarify that readers’ opinions about my personal habits are of interest to me only insofar as they are nakedly obvious projections of their own histories and issues.) This is neither a defense nor an apology; I’m not writing it to be a bad influence on impressionable youths, or in the hope that Others Might Learn from My Mistakes. I’m writing it because I’m out of patience with the default pose, implicit in most public discourse on the subject of The Drug Problem, that we — both of us, writer and reader — are earnest, concerned, healthy people discussing a vexing social issue afflicting sad screwed-up people over there somewhere — friends and relatives, perhaps, but not us of course. This despite the common description of drug abuse as an “epidemic,” a term which would seem to implicate a large number of people. I guess they must all be in Kentucky.

I can understand why respectable taxpayers have to pretend they know nothing about drug abuse first-hand: they’re afraid. Afraid of losing their reputations, their jobs, even their children. I’m no braver than they are; I’m just a writer, and thus have no career to lose. There’s a long and venerable tradition, from Samuel Coleridge through Hunter S. Thompson, of writers and artists being drug-addled outlaws and maniacs. But even I have to worry about the possible consequences of publicly confessing to this boringly ordinary behavior, because I’ve also been a professor, a vocation I love, and it would be a serious loss to me if paranoid parents or timid administrators were to prevent me from exercising it again. (I will say that I have never taught under the influence of drugs, mostly because it would be so nerve-wracking worrying I was going to say something stupid, a hazard in my soberest moments.)

I mostly get away with this because I am a clean-cut, well-dressed white guy, an excellent disguise for all manner of wrongdoing. Now that marijuana is practically legal, doing drugs is getting respectable for white people: upscale parents are writing articles about the parenting benefits of marijuana; Ayelet Waldman wrote a whole book about how microdosing LSD has enhanced her life as a writer, wife, and mother. Meanwhile, drug laws serve as an excuse to continue treating black and brown people more or less like slaves: to take away their right to vote and legal status as citizens, shackle and lock up the men and put them to work without pay, split up families and take children from their mothers. Poor black people don’t do drugs any more frequently than rich white people; they just get frisked, arrested, and convicted more. If my friends and I hadn’t been white we’d all have rap sheets the length of Kerouac’s speed-fueled scroll of On the Road. I don’t want my white male privilege revoked, understand; I only wish to see it extended to all.

For some people drugs and alcohol are a fun, mostly harmless indulgence or escape, while for others they are like cyanide for the soul.

I wonder whether our complacency about living in this dystopian prison state isn’t traceable (along with its reinforcement of apartheid and convenient elimination of a lot of competition for employment) back to our drug education, which depicted drugs as a bad thing that we should choose not to do. In our sixth-grade drug education unit we were shown a sort of salesman’s sample case of fake drugs, a tantalizing rainbow array of pills with names like Pink Ladies, Black Beauties, and Yellowjackets — drugs of the ’70s, drugs I would never again encounter in life. The adults who taught us about drugs were intelligent and well-intentioned (and probably smoked pot, come to think of it), but they had to follow a pretty dumb curriculum. The problem with the Reefer Madness school of drug education — one puff of the devil weed and you’re on the slippery slope to becoming a junkie — is that when kids do eventually try marijuana and do not immediately start robbing liquor stores or giving blow jobs at the bus station to feed their habit, they figure their parents and teachers were all idiots or just full of shit. Until a decade or two later when some of them notice they’ve accidentally gotten kind of addicted and realize, in retrospect, that there might’ve been something to the whole drugs-are-bad thing after all.

The truth about drugs just doesn’t lend itself to easy legislation, or propaganda. The 12-step truism that addiction is binary and absolute — that you either are or are not an addict, and if you are one you can only ever be in recovery, not cured, and that the only cure is abstinence — has proved to be a useful, even necessary narrative for people trying to overcome their dependency on drugs and alcohol. But, like a lot of other very adaptive beliefs, it’s a fiction. Addiction is, like most things, a matter of degree, and, like everything else in life, unfair, so for some people drugs and alcohol are a fun, mostly harmless indulgence or escape, while for others they are like cyanide for the soul. But for most of us they’re something in between.

But for decade after decade Americans have kept implementing principles that insist on absolutes, on conversion and redemption — Just Say No, Zero Tolerance, Three Strikes You’re Out — policies that fail, and fail, and fail, and fail. The notion that there is some imaginable policy or program that will stop people from doing drugs is as much a puritan fantasy as the idea that we can — or should — stop teenagers from having sex. (Abstinence-only is the Just Say No of sex ed.) Drugs predate guns and electronic devices by 10,000 years, but in the U.S., at least, we still pretend that the former can be eliminated while the latter are facts of life we just have to live with.

As with the speed limit, or monogamy, there is some social value to a societal standard that is generally discreetly ignored.

Nowhere is the idea of free will more thoroughly exploded than in the realm of addiction. And at last even conservatives are reluctantly overcoming their natural love of judgment and punishment and beginning to understand — on their usual timetable, about a half-century after the rest of us — that criminalizing drugs doesn’t work. (This seems to have coincided with their discovering that it isn’t a problem exclusive to black people, but, whatever the cause, it’s nice to see our fellow countrymen catching up.) In recent years the harm reduction model, based on the controversial theory that it’s better to drink less, rather than keep trying to quit ’til you die, is gaining acceptance; Instagram spokesmodels for the “sober curious” movement are proving that you don’t need to get drunk to be insufferable. I’m not proposing that drugs like heroin and meth should be legal: murder and theft are illegal, and should be, even though laws have never put a stop to either. As with the speed limit, or monogamy, there is some social value to a societal standard that is generally discreetly ignored. Though it is worth noting that countries that treat drugs as a medical, rather than criminal, issue seem to have more success treating addiction, and noticeably lower percentages of their population in prison. Assuming that’s what we want.

Would my life improve if I stopped drinking or doing drugs? Yeah, sure: it would also improve if I rode my bike every day and practiced vipassana meditation and volunteered to teach adult literacy. But I am not going to do any of these things, because I am a lazy stubborn selfish indulgent person. If I were the only person like this, then the whole problem with everything would be me, but it turns out, on a cursory examination of human behavior and history, that pretty much everyone is. When my vet scolded me for feeding cheese to my cat, I asked her why not. “Because it’s bad for them,” she explained. “Then why does she like it so much?” I asked. “Because it’s bad for them!” she said. Or, per Dostoyevsky’s refutation of the whole of Western philosophy in Notes from Underground, “man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere preferred to act according to his own wishes rather than to the dictates of reason and advantage.”

I’m not saying that drugs are a good thing; I’m not saying they’re a bad thing. I’m just saying, they’re a Thing. And I’m sick of the puritan insistence on labeling everything Good or Bad, on cramming every complicated human reality, from drugs to adultery, into a simple-minded Sunday-school story of sin and redemption. I do not believe that people are perfectible. People are a mess. I take what I think of as an artist’s view of human nature, rather than a moralist’s or politician’s. My sister tells me I’m a Russian — a people who have been forcibly divested, by their entire history, of any delusions of human perfectibility. According to some hypotheses, human beings first developed agriculture so they could brew beer; they will be getting high on something else en route to Alpha Centauri. Reality is just a bit much to take straight; it goes down easier with a mixer. I guess it’s conceivable that we may someday be able to identify the biological diathesis toward addiction and genetically engineer drug dependency out of human beings. But if these internal modifications are ever going to take, they’re going to have to be accompanied by some more difficult corollary improvements to reality. (As Robert Stone asked in his essay on cocaine: “When they’ve said no to crack, can we someday give them something to say yes to?”) In the meantime, drugs are a fact of the human condition, ineradicable by the agents and flamethrowers of the DEA or by the grace of God as you understand Him/Her. And I don’t think the dysfunctional American legal, penal, or medical systems can begin to have any kind of realistic relationship to drug use until we start thinking of drugs not as a something that’s happening to other people, but as something we’re all doing.