I always find it funny how polarized the world is about drugs. Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?
I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.
People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.
Appropriate punishmments, which drugs should be illegal and under what circumstances is a totally different area of discussion but the general attitude of most societies to the recreation use of more powerful drugs is quite sensible. Drug use is also nearly universally accepted in medical circumstances so we aren't really all that polarized.
>> Why is nearly every culture against it
Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.
>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless
This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s').
And most illegal drugs are demonstratively not harmless, to the point its almost axiomatic.
Your entire response is belied by the fact that alcohol is legal-- in fact, celebrated-- in western societies. It's even a religious sacrament (communion wine, seder wine).
Nutt found that alcohol _the most harmful drug_ -- even more harmful than meth, crack and heroin-- far more harmful than ecstasy, marijuana, magic musrooms, LSD, etc.
Indeed, the "harm" from most illegal drugs tends not to come from the drug itself, but from the circumstances surrounding its illegality. The crime, the self-neglect, the diseases from filthy needles/etc all stem from the fact that you can't partake in polite society. Compare the homeless wino to the homeless heroin user and contrast the affluent scotch drinkers and tokers (in countries and states where it's legal). The illegality of it makes a world of difference.
this isn't limited to coke. most people would be shocked b how many functional heroin, meth and crack users there are
in general, using drugs isn't illegal. using drugs and not being wealthy enough to insulate yourself from the consequences of that choice is what is illegal
Yes. I know two functional junkies. One was born into a lot of wealth, the other isn't insanely rich, but is comfortable and no longer has to work.
Your last sentence is exactly right. Neither of them will ever face legal action. But this is no different than most other things in the US (and elsewhere, usually to a lesser extent): law-enforcement-related outcomes react strongly to the presence of wealth.
I agree and to the point I upvoted your comment :)
I think that a key part of this discussion is making the distinction between saying which drugs are illegal and whether drugs should be illegal at all.
Alcohol is particuarly interesting. It was a crucial part of pre-modern society in creating clean drinking water and even for nutrition in the case of beer. Not only that but alcohol, as opposed to LSD for example, can be taken in doses that range from completely benign to powerfully intoxicating.
Defining what drugs should be illegal, how to punish the crime, and all the other details around it are more difficult to navigate.
> Not only that but alcohol, as opposed to LSD for example, can be taken in doses that range from completely benign to powerfully intoxicating.
I think perhaps you have no idea what you're talking about. The available range of doses for most psychedelics are "microdosing" (about the same taking any nootropic, including strong coffee) to far in excess of safe levels of alcohol. (I met someone once who claimed to have (accidentally) snorted a line of LSD crystals. She was fine, but said it took a couple of days)
> Defining what drugs should be illegal....
I think the better question to start with is why drugs should be illegal. Then you can see whether (and when) a drug matches that description, and proceed accordingly.
Ironically, the "Schedule" system lays out pretty good categories, they just apply the rubrics unreasonably and with Catch-22's.
>Not only that but alcohol, as opposed to LSD for example, can be taken in doses that range from completely benign to powerfully intoxicating.
This is false. For example, people microdose LSD for a more clear headed, caffeine-like stimulant effect. People microdose psilocybin to treat migraines. DXM, one of the most powerful dissociative psychedelics that exists, is sold over-the-counter in convenience stores to treat coughs. Research before your talk.
Interesting aside: DXM cough syrups just require that you be over 18 to buy them in some places. OTC pills containing pseudoephedrine require them to write down your name, date, qty purchased (can usually only buy 1 small pack at a time) since they're used in the production of meth.
There is some debate nowadays about the use of alcohol as a substitute for bad water(1).
I think the reason you find alcohol so interesting because of the Iron Law of Prohibition(2): 'The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Cowan put it this way: "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."'
I'm reading the Kalevala (The National Epic of the Finns), and there is a lot of talk about brewing "table beer". I didn't know the term, so I had to look it up: beer of 1-2% alcohol, suitable for drinking during meals.
I think the reason you find such a range of "responses" to alcohol is not the drug itself, but because of the fact that it's legal, and therefore not subject to the Iron Law of Prohibition, you can buy it in a variety of strengths-- from beer to wine to liquor. It's not the drug per se, but its manufacture.
But, if you're going to go through the trouble of breaking the law to sell or buy and use illegal drugs, you might as well make it "worthwhile". That's why you could not find beer or wine during Prohibition, but you could get hold of high-content whiskey and vodka, even white lighting, moonshine, etc.
Likewise, contraband drugs have from from morphine to heroin to even more powerful manufactured opioids. If you're going to risk buying a sheet of LSD, get a dose of 70 micrograms, instead of 20.
Meanwhile, in silicon valley and other places, there is a new trend of microdosing(3): taking sub-threshold doses of "hallucinogens" to the point that _you're not even hallucinating-- but you do experience the "side effects" of increased alertness, awareness, creativity, memory, and problem solving. So there are doses of LSD, mushrooms, etc you can take that are not very powerful at all. It all depends on how they are manufactured and sold, just like alcohol.
Even now in South American countries, the most popular form of "cocaine" is coca leaves-- which, by contrast, are actually very healthy, and the first response to potentially deadly altitude sickness when pills aren't available.
I would suspect that if drugs were legalized, you would find a lot more forms with a lot less power.
I would suspect that if drugs were legalized, you would find a lot more forms with a lot less power.
As an anecdote, I once had the opportunity to sample coca tea - not the kind with the cocaine removed that's legal to sell in the US, but the real stuff. The magnitude of the effect was similar to a strong cup of coffee or energy drink, but the feeling was a little different. It was pleasant, and I would do it again if it was readily available.
I don't know how I'd obtain it in the US or Europe, but I'm quite certain I could obtain refined cocaine if I wanted that.
This is a really good point. It's likely not just the case of "you might as well make it "worthwhile"" - economics plays a big part too. Once transportation and handling (and smuggling) costs make up the majority of the price of a product, the only products that are worth supplying at those of the (perceived) highest quality.
A classic example is the observation that the average orange sold in New York City is of significantly higher quality that the average orange sold in Florida.
On the face of it, this sounds silly - NYC doesn't grow oranges and Florida has lots of excellent orange trees, yet what happens is that given the high costs to ship fresh fruit, it makes sense (from a marginal cost perspective) to send mostly above-average fruit to NYC because the people in NYC who are already paying a much higher amount than the people in Florida for the same orange likely won't care very much about an extra five or ten cents to get the better orange while the people in Florida could see the extra five or ten cents as a 100% increase in the price of a good.
Would you agree that defining which drugs are illegal ought to be a science-based process and not an ideological/policy-based one?
And if you agree to that, would you agree that the current policies based on racism and political goals would benefit from reform or do you think we should continue supporting them and the intentions behind them?
> Would you agree that defining which drugs are illegal ought to be a science-based process and not an ideological/policy-based one?
Deciding the criteria ultimately cannot be anything but an ideological policy decision. Deciding which specific drugs meet that criteria may be a scientific questions (if the criteria is such that that is the appropriate method of determining it.)
> Do you see the possibility for a scientific process which would help define criteria?
At root, criteria are a value proposition, not a fact proposition. Science answers (or, predicts answers to) fact propositions, not value propositions.
Similarly, tobacco is another extremely harmful drug which is legal. I think tobacco is even more problematic than most other recreational drugs because of second hand smoking.
Your entire response is plainly untrue and it is just a demonisation of alcohol and a promotion of meth, crack and heroine.
I really wished that certain comments that tend to minimise the effect of the most dangerous drugs were prohibited here.
But apparently it is full of people that enjoy that shit and absurdly try to convince other people that a glass of wine is worse than a spade.
His response comes with a citation. So I'd say there are plenty of people here who enjoy science and the Economist's reporting.
Without data, any opinion of this subject is bound to be based entirely on society's collective opinion or individual anecdotes. Within those limits, I'd argue that "people that enjoy that shit" are actually more reliable.
I believe the partition made by the the post you're replying to gets pretty close to my anecdotal reality. I'm somewhat convinced that heroin/crack/meth are addictive and that alone will always scare me off. Whereas LSD/mushrooms/ecstasy have almost no potential for addiction.
And, yes, having experienced them tends to make you run around telling people that it's part of the human experience – much like I'd tell people that they'd miss something essential if they never got slightly drunk on white wine watching the sunset on a beach.
But the citation doesn't support his post. Overall it cites the researchers as listing alcohol causing less mean physical harm than heroin and cocaine, less acute physical harm than both, and almost as much chronic physical harm as heroin (both rated higher than cocaine). The only category it rates alcohol the highest in is social harm caused by intoxication.
edit: I may be looking at a different study (I can't read that economist link). I'm referring to "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs," though I do see another study "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis" that corroborates his post.
>> Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.
Yes, but we tolerate alcohol. We tolerate getting high - but we are selective about which drugs you can get high on. If we tolerate alcohol, so why don't we tolerate cannabis, psychedelics and other "soft drugs"? It's because of misinformation, fear, taboo and stigma.
>>>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless
>> This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s').
But if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime. Victimless crimes do nothing to help society - in fact, it degrades society, marginalizes and criminalizes otherwise respectable citizens, and in case of drug prohibition, guarantees that drug money goes to black market, which in turn potentially increase violent, real crime.
What particular drugs should stigmatized is another discussion and there are no doubt many inconsistencies in our legal system. However, that some drugs should be stigmatized is reasonable and what I was suggesting.
>> but if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime
This is where I would push back a bit and say that line of reasoning is too individualistic. Again, I'm not drawing lines between substances (that is another discussion) but I suggest that substances which significantly diminish your reasoning capacities and self-control do harm society. The entire project of democracy requires self-governing citizens. It only makes sense that if we want to have the freedom to live as we see fit we must be able to control ourselves. If a drug causes a person loose their reasoning capacities and self-control, as many do, they do damage society. Individuals who take such drugs are not respectable citizens because they are forfeiting a primary civic duty of self-control.
Again, because I'm staking out a narrow piece of ground here, I am not saying at this point which drugs ought to fall into the criminal category. Nor am I denying there are inconsistencies and perverse incentives in our existing system. I'm simply arguing that its reasonable for some drugs to be outlawed.
Capacity for reasoning and self-control vary highly from context-to-context while completely sober. The cognitive affects of psychoactives lay on a humongous spectrum and vary in context of their use. Research these topics before you form strong opinions about them.
Also no one reasonable is recommending to drop acid right before going to the voting booth.
If a drug causes a person loose their reasoning capacities and self-control, as many do, they do damage society.
The effects of most drugs are fairly short-lived. I can drink whiskey until I'm incoherent tonight and be perfectly lucid and productive tomorrow. Maybe there's something more pro-social I could do than get drunk and there's an opportunity cost argument to be made, but there are a great many other socially neutral things I could do, like play video games.
It's not good for a society if too many people are too disengaged, incoherent or intoxicated to participate constructively, but I'm not convinced that prohibiting access to drugs is an effective means of causing people to participate constructively. I think it's more likely people who would withdraw from reality by taking drugs will withdraw by some other means if the only change made is to deny access to the drugs.
In short, I think the focus must be on the carrot, not the stick.
>> the freedom to live as we see fit we must be able to control ourselves
Who defines control and how do you do so without inevitably reducing the freedom said control exists to preserve?
If you want people to engage is their societies and being good citizens you don't do so by banning the alternatives. By and large we're programmed so that if given the opportunities to successfully engage and contribute we do.
I think that the issue is that there is a fundamental difference in the entire view of drugs between people in society, one that is so large that it is nearly impossible to see across. This is what he is referring to.
We permit, encourage or even glorify countless destructive, risky, or dangerous forms of behavior, including various legal mind altering substances. Alcoholism is known to be a serious issue, but alcohol and the vast ways that it is treated in our culture is widely accepted and encouraged. We allow extreme sports, or even "traditional" sports like gymnastics, most of us drive every day in conditions that should be objectively terrifying, we allow recreational firearm activities in most countries, smoking is legal, etc.
But when it comes to drug use we put this huge social stigma on somewhat arbitrary substances, we impose significant punishments, we potentially ruin people's lives in the legal system, and all of this is so ingrained in our culture that even considering alternative systems is so radical that it seems like a fantasy. It's bizarre that such normal behavior is so incredibly reviled, when almost all of the negative consequences of it are due to the culture and legal system surrounding it rather than any physiological facts.
"Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society"
Are you saying you think sobriety and self-control at all times by everyone is essential to a functioning society?
If so, that's clearly false for virtually every functioning society. The widespread use of alcohol in many functioning societies is the most obvious counterexample.
On the other hand, if you are saying that you think sobriety and self-control sometimes and by some people is essential to a functioning society, then I don't think you'd find many people disagree.
Most societies where drug use is rampant (and that's pretty much every society) consists of some people who are sober some of the time, some who use drugs some of the time, and some (usually sick or dying) who use drugs all of the time, though the proportion varies widely depending on your definition of "drug" (ie. is chocolate, tea, and coffee to be drugs? do you consider legal, prescription or over the counter medications as drugs?)
On the issue of self-control: though widely considered to be essential in many western societies, in some other societies the loss of control is highly valued. I'm thinking primarily of some religious contexts. For example, glossalalia in some Christian sects, possession in Voodoo, etc. In all of these cases, self-control is deliberately relinquished to another -- usually to a god. This loss of self-control is not seen to be negative, but rather to be highly positive and desirable.
Drug use also has very deep roots in religion, from the role of alcohol in Judeo-Christian religions and the various "pagan cults" that preceded them, to an enormous variety of other drugs in various indigenous cultures around the world. Once again, the societies in which these drugs are used in religious contexts consider such drug use to be very positive, and the societies of which they're part tend to do quite well -- well, if you discount the destruction brought on to them by military, economic, and cultural invasion from other, more technologically advanced societies.
> Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.
Connecting sobriety to prohibition stands on the premise that people need a nanny state to decide what they are allowed to put in their bodies. And on the premise that prohibition has a positive effect.
I don't believe in the first one and am very open to seeing any proof of drug prohibition resulting in sobriety.
What I can see clearly as it is very well documented, is the prohibition-related incarceration (of mostly people whom the police or government wants incarcerated anyways).
>> And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh.
Except their not. There's vast bodies of research suggesting the war on drugs has been largely ineffective and encouraged a massive amount of related crime. If your focus is on reduction criminalization is proven to be ineffective. The major point of the article is that to reduce drug use your most effective at reduce the societal problems that lead to drug use.
I imagine its more acceptable to prohibit or demonize affectations of a minority culture than it is to prohibit the culture itself. The original American war on drugs has testimonies to suggest it came from a desire to persecute blacks and anti-war protesters.
Anecdotally, where I live the city has passed ordnances against selling or displaying wire-wrap jewelry on the streets, and I can't think of a reason to single that out except that, because the materials are cheap it is a common source of income for transient populations. You can't make them illegal directly, but you can make all their activities illegal and arrest them when they inevitably break the law.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Well, unless it's alcohol or tobacco. Or in the Muslim world just unless it's tobacco. Or Khatt in Somalia. etc.
It's a mess and entirely determined by cultural history. I'm not aware of any culture that comprehensively bans all drugs, they just dodge the issue by weaseling the definition of what constitutes a drug.
Coffee was banned - even labelled Satanic - a number of times [1][2].
And whilst I don't know of any earthly bans on chocolate, the Aztec god Quetzacoatl was condemned by his fellow deities for sharing chocolate - reserved for the gods - with humans. They punished him by getting him drunk.
>I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.
I assume it's mostly to ensure your culture has a suitable fighting force. If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up.
It's only in the last hundred years or so that most nations have made most drugs illegal (there have been many exceptions of course but I'm talking about that mass banning across almost all nations that we see today).
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the British went to war with China for the right to keep selling their citizens opium.
I think there's probably some original wisdom in most taboos. Drugs are a clear case of something that can seriously threaten sanity and at the same time are exploited by the unscrupulous (dealers, cult leaders, etc.)
Alcohol is a drug which has been deemed acceptable by western culture, perhaps because suppressing it is impossible and it's (relatively) innocuous. But it still ruins many lives.
Changing attitudes to pornography are an interesting test case for the slow rehabilitation of a taboo activity.(Whether, in future, it does become completely normalized, or alternatively is definitively identified as an activity that, in its industrial form, is harmful to producers or consumers)
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?
Are you sure about this? My layman's observation has been that all societies have some list of approved drugs and drugs approved for specific purposes, then demonizes the unapproved drugs and unapproved use of drugs. Your general point still stands, but we need to be careful about romanticizing groups just because we think they're "closer to the earth" or whatever.
I think it's because 'civilization' is fundamentally about getting everyone to agree to abide by a common code of conduct. The restricted standards of behavior that follow offer various advantages over anarchy, albeit with fewer freedoms. Drugs are essentially anarchic because they inevitably lead to less constrained behavior and thought, which are threats to those standards and the willingness of others to play by the largely arbitrary set of rules that define and sustain civilized behavior in a fundamentally uncivilized world.
Yes, but even indigenous tribes surround usage with rituals, it's not a free-for-all. I disagree strongly with criminalisation, but almost universally, drugs make people extremely selfish and very easily destroy the sense of responsibility needed to work within a society. You can be incredibly reductive and say it's to have a firmer control on the population, and in some ways it is, but at the same time there are perfectly sensible reasons why there is a taboo. If I've had some acid, I'm not going to look after my kids very well. If I've smoked a load, I'm going to prefer sitting on the couch rather than going and doing some work. If I've taken a very strong opiate, that will make me feel better than almost anything else I can possibly do, so why not do that instead of other things. If I take ecstasy on Friday night, I'm going to stay up all night and then come down hard over the next day and I'm going to miss that family get together. All of these things are my choice, and criminalisation [I feel] is staggeringly wasteful and counterproductive. But drugs are often [cumulatively] socially destructive. I agree with you, but a helluva lot of time it's not as clear cut as just an easy excuse to imprison people
Imagine you are trying to keep a city functioning well. You've never met most of the people. Then some parts of the city start falling apart, and you notice a lot of people using drugs, fighting, and not working.
The correlation would be obvious to anyone. You don't need a grand conspiracy to imagine why a leader might try to stop drug use.
That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But it can be easily explained without ulterior motives.
If you're running a city, you should be part of the community to a degree that there are no parts were you're just operating on the level of some sort of 19th century explorer living with indigenous tribes.
In fact, I think your allusion to some caricature of a (probably black) inner city and its problems is part of the problem more than the solution.
Unless you're talking about a mayor from the projects who outlaws coke after hearing of its rampant use among investment bankers, and their propensity to fight each other over territory. In that case, I'd love to see the movie.
I said clearly that I was not implying that it was right. Just that it could clearly be explained without ulterior motives, which was a direct relply to another post.
I think the more effective approach to preventing parts of a city from being overrun by drug use and violence, is to find out why people are turning to drug use and violence in the first place and then address those underlying issues. And yes, there are ulterior motives behind criminalizing certain activities, especially if you know the actions you take will disproportionately harm a specific group of people.
i don't think there's reason to go for the conspiracy here.
Firstly, the effect of drug use in indigenous cultures may be limited (strongly) by culture: smaller communities having much stronger social controls on individuals' behaviour, which may in practice result in rules for drug use (and consequences for misuse) much like our's, just not in writing.
Secondly, there seems to be a mechanism by which a culture develops shared methods to handle drugs by various means. See for example the difficulty indigenous cultures have had again and again in adapting to alcohol – compared to western cultures' relative benign[0] relationship with alcohol. Even within western cultures, there are differences in adaptation, with good adaptation usually being anti correlated to level of regulation. From the jewish and southern European cultures where 8-year old get a glass of red wine with lunch to the inebriated inanity that is the UK at last call.
[0]: "relative" being the operative word here – alcohol obviously is a huge burden on western societies, in direct health effects, domestic violence, traffic deaths etc.
Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural forms of transportation. 160 mph on the freeway? That sort of transportation destroys lives.
You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.
I really only have a passing academic interest in drugs, and don't tend to take sides when it comes to legalization, but "unnatural/manufactured/hardcore" vs "natural/indigenous/mild" is a silly view of things.
What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural?
What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What?
While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.
And humans used to chew on bark, whereas we now have aspirin in pill form. We don't have some of the ills of the past either, though new ones take its place.
Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today.
Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.
Refined, concentrated drugs are dangerous in general -- even distilled alcohol. Look at the impact of gin on England in the 1700s, which was at least as bad as the crack and meth epidemics put together; maybe worse, since all social classes drank gin dangerously heavily, and it was always available legally and cheaply.
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?
> I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way
That's hardly an explanation. Then why would nearly every culture like to have an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them?
These kind of cultural traditions represent the lessons learned over many generations: it's because drugs tend to cause trouble. Not for everyone, but for enough people to cancel out the benefits.
I don't think that argument holds up to reality. In fact the saying "opioid for the masses" seems to indicate that drugs could potentially be an effective tool to control "the masses".
There's a lot to criticise in the war on drugs. But I don't think it involves a conspiracy to stun some imagined society of free-thinkers. If I had to name the worst mechanism at play here, it's the tendency of people to buy into law-and-order rhetoric and the lack of empathy for anybody who is seen as (even potentially) transgress.
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?
Countries often pressure one another to make their laws as strict as their own, to prevent people from traveling abroad to break their laws (drug tourism, sex tourism). For instance about 5 years ago in The Netherlands, under pressure from neighboring countries they officially banned foreigners from buying pot from coffee shops (although this law is often ignored or overridden by local municipalities).
It's inaccurate to say that nearly every culture is against "drugs" -- nicotine and caffeine are both relatively powerful drugs, and are widely accepted by most cultures on Earth, freely sold in vending machines and at corner shops.
Moreover, most cultures accept the use of (generally poorly understood) mind-altering psychiatric medications.
The question is why cultures accept some drugs but not others.
Exacty which indigenous culture is pro-drugs? Some certainly promote some very specific practices that have long been part of thier culture, but that is hardly an endorsmemt. From austrailia to canadas north, indigenous groups are being hammered by alcohol an opiod epidemics, hammered harder than the non-native populations. None of them would ever promote increased drug use.
> All of this leads to my final big point: “drug problems” are really “society problems.” Consider the current opiate crisis. Do you know when authorities in Ohio, where I reside, became convinced that Ohio had an opiate problem? When opiate deaths began to approach, and then surpassed, the number of car crash deaths in a year. This raises an important question: why are we so tolerant of car-crash deaths, so much so that their frequency has become our baseline for unacceptable accidental death in America? Harry Levine back in the 70s encouraged us to consider a similar question when he asked if drunk driving was really a drinking problem, or if we might better think about it as a transportation problem. Given that we allow people to drive around in 4,000 pound heaps of steel equipped with maps that need to be programmed, and hookups so they can plug in their telephones, and so forth, this strikes me as a pretty good question. Our tolerance of car crash deaths tells us a lot about us: we are highly tolerant of those things that make our economy go, but many of those things create just the kind of conditions that make “bad” drug use outcomes more likely: stress, isolation, overwork, loneliness, endless change, dislocation, and insecurity. When stressed, isolated, lonely people are exposed to new, stronger drugs, you end up with a problem. Our current opiate crisis is a case in point.
One thing about cars is a higher proportion of people are ramming phone charging cables into them and scrolling around gps maps and mashing and spinning knobs and buttons of radios or texting or eating mcdonalds or falling asleep or whatever non driving activity you can think of that clearly jeopardizes everyone else's well-being than are driving under the influence of some drug. So really I think the penalty isn't proportional necessary to the harm but instead to likelihood it's some risk you are taking. If you are taking that risk then you don't want the penalty to involve being smashed in the face with a book large enough to massive impair your ability to lead a reasonable life on the first or second offense.
There is very little in this article specific to knowledge held mostly by academic historians. If you are familiar with the general left-coast stance and arguments around drugs, which is popular on HN, then there won't be much in this article that's new to you.
It also makes claims like
> drugs are not either “good” or “bad.” All drugs can be both “good” and “bad” in their interaction with humans"
This can said about "guns" too, but these sorts of cliches won't be very illuminating for thoughtful people.
Not necessarily. Wasn't there an article recently about prescription drug abuse being more of a problem in areas of economic instability, higher stress, etc.?
In fact, the previous article in the blog is looking at the correlation between drug abuse problems and areas of the country that voted for Trump---a hypothesis being that poor social outcomes are linked with both political upheaval and addiction.
Hari digs in to the history of the demonization of addicts in the United States. This started about a century ago as a federal police initiative, in the predecessor to the DEA.
If Hari's to be believed, the anti-addict stuff in the US was, at its core, racist. Cannabis was, he says, believed to cause violent insanity in black and brown people. The same was true of opium and similar drugs.
He doesn't make the argument that addiction is good, only that addicts are not evil or morally deficient. He does make the argument that prohibition causes addiction for several reasons:
(1) the iron law of prohibition: when a substance is prohibited, it drives out all but the most potent formulations of the substance from the market. Nobody smuggled lite beer during alcohol prohibition; they smuggled white lightning and 151-proof rum. The most potent formulations are most addictive.
(2) the various dealer effects.
a) Addicts to prohibited substances sell some to their friends to support their habits. This introduces more people to the substance. (This happened to me many years ago with cocaine. Fortunately for me I was broke at the time and my experience with the stuff seemed like dentist novocaine: boring).
b) Retail dealers cut the wholesale product with nasty adulterants to get more stuff to sell.
c) Dealer bigshots (guys with names like El Chapo) have an underworld kind of glamour to them.
d) Dealers outside the law have zero incentive to keep their products away from children.
(3) the unpredictability of dosage. Wildly swinging dosages cause higher highs, which in turn encourages dosage-seeking, which encourages, and is, addiction. One of the problems of Oxycontin is this. See the LA Times series on that formulation of an opiate and its marketing. http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/
(4) the lack of supervision of addicts getting their doses. Experiments in parts of England, Portugal, and Switzerland show that addicts who can safely get their doses in clinics lead productive lives and can, when ready, take on the task of curing their addictions.
It's counter-intuitive but true: decriminalizing drugs reduces addiction.
But, it will happen slowly. The narco-industrial complex is too powerful. Decriminalizing drugs means police layoffs. It means an end to most civil forfeiture property seizures, which will cut into government revenue. It eliminates a rich source of scare tactics for politicians. It takes a fat chunk out of gun and ammunition sales.
Just look at Massachusetts, where I live. Cannabis was decriminalized in November, and the law has been in effect for about a month. Police and politicians are wringing their hands about what to do.
I should add: A Peruvian buddy of mine told me that aboriginal Inca people historically have chewed coca leaves when laboring (carrying stuff, plowing, etc) at high altitude. It enables them to live and work at high altitude. My hypothesis: Coca and Humanity co-evolved in the Andes. Maybe a paleogeneticist knows how to disprove, or prove, that hypothesis.
No paleogeneticist here but from what I know from : Andean people benefit from a genetic adaptation to high altitude and don't need coca leaves (Himalayan people also benefit from a different genetic adaptation). It does make work more enjoyable though.
Also, coca was reserved to higher classes in the past so laborers probably didn't have access to it. [1]
Interestingly enough, the darknet may alleviate some of the dealer effects (and others not mentioned).
- Prices are 70% lower (although I believe the consumer-to-dealer mechanism is limited to very few drugs – you could be the world's #1 consumer of LSD for less than the price of cable)
- Reviews and shared tests create incentives for dealers to improve their products. I think Vice had an article about MDMA nowadays being 90%+ pure
- (not mentioned) Using the net and the post office as the only points of contact, drug consumers no longer get into contact with the "underworld". I have no idea how prominent this effect was in the past, but I could imagine that some criminal activity and relationships started from dealer<->consumer relationships.
Take a look at the second previous article in the blog, part 1 of this series. It discusses drug prohibition in this country being shown as a foreign problem, starting with China exporting opium abuse to the US.
I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.
People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.