Proofiness - Charles Seife [20]
Alcohol causes all sorts of problems for anti-marijuana forces. It has the same correlation to mental illness—and to taking hard drugs—as marijuana does. And if you press drug-policy causuists about alcohol, they might even claim that it’s similarly dangerous. In the mid-1990s, midway into Bill Clinton’s administration, there was a big push to classify alcohol and tobacco, along with marijuana, as “gateway drugs”: substances that lead toward the use of nastier mind-altering substances like cocaine and heroin. That push—particularly the anti-tobacco element—got a lot of momentum from studies like the one performed by the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse in 1994. The study showed strong correlations between tobacco and drug use. Kids who smoked tobacco were roughly fifty times more likely to snort cocaine and twelve times more likely to use heroin than their nonsmoking peers. The implication was clear: smoke a Marlboro and you’re on your way to being a drug-addled junkie. The head of the addiction center, Joseph Califano, told the Senate, under oath, that tobacco was the “drug of entry into the world of hard drugs.” His solution? A tobacco tax. Two dollars or more per pack of cigarettes to keep our children from buying them—it’s a small price to pay to prevent our precious kids from becoming heroin addicts and cocaine fiends.
As big a public health problem as cigarettes are, they’re almost certainly not turning our kids into junkies. The kinds of personalities that can lead to drug use—a fondness for taking risks, a sensitivity to social pressure—are probably the same ones that lead kids to try cigarettes. It’s not that the smoking was causing the later hard drug use; it’s just that smoking and drug use might stem from the same cause. Yet Califano was more than happy to make the logical leap and claim that tobacco leads children down the path to harder drugs—and to use this causuistry as a bludgeon to push for a tobacco tax.
Not so coincidentally, this tax was supported by Democrats. Big tobacco had donated more than five million dollars to Republican campaigners (much more than they donated to Democrats), thus attacking tobacco companies was good for the Democrats and bad for Republicans.20 The Democrats used whatever weapon they could to hamstring donors to their opponents’ cause, regardless of whether the logic behind the attack was sound or not. (Politicians seldom let facts get in the way of attacking their opponents.) Even though the tobacco-as-gateway-drug campaign was mere proofiness, it was a useful political tool.
Causuistry stems from our need to link every effect to a cause of some sort. Anytime we see two things that are correlated in some way, our brains leap to the conclusion that one thing must cause the other. It’s often not so. Sometimes we mistake cause for effect and vice versa. Sometimes the cause is hidden away out of reach. And sometimes the cause doesn’t exist at all. That is perhaps the most difficult idea for humans to wrap our minds around: sometimes things happen for no apparent reason, just out of sheer random chance. If there’s one concept that we humans have a hard time understanding, it’s randomness.
Our minds revolt at the idea of randomness. Even when a set of data or an image is entirely chaotic, even when there’s no underlying order to be found, we still try to construct a framework, a pattern, through which we understand our observations. We see the haphazard speckling of stars in the sky and group them together into constellations. We see the image of the Virgin Mary in a tortilla or the visage of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.21 Our minds, trying to make order out of chaos, play tricks on us.
Casinos make so much money because they exploit this failure of our brains. It’s what keeps us gambling. If you watch a busy roulette table or a game of craps, you’ll almost invariably see someone who’s on a “lucky streak”—someone who has won several rolls in a row. Because he’s winning, his brain