A
recent conversation with someone dealing with a particularly old-fashioned substance
issue brought to mind how fashions come and go in such matters, but never go
completely.
There
are fads in intoxicants and fads in moral panics over them. There always will
be another one because users and abusers of intoxicants, faddish or otherwise,
are a constant. Author of Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, writing about the fictional “soma,” had no doubt about how
popular it would be if it were real: “Today alcohol and tobacco are available,
and people spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants
and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the education of their children.”
Most
people like a chemically assisted bump in happiness from time to time (alcohol
still being the first choice) while some find life intolerable without it. These
latter are people whose rest state is unhappy: that is to say they are unhappy
unless fun things are happening, as opposed to mellower folks who are happy
unless bad things are happening. We all know people who are uncomfortable in
their own skins in this way, and they are the most likely to be substance abusers.
I remember being in a car in the 1990s with some friends including a troubled and
chronically unhappy young lady who had just left the Limelight disco in NYC.
“Some guy gave me this Ecstasy,” she said while holding a pill twixt thumb and
index finger. “Just throw it away,” I said. “You don’t know what that is.”
Instead she popped it her mouth, entirely willing to take the risk rather than
face the risk of feeling normal. By dumb luck, whatever it was did her no obvious
harm that night, but the choice she made (however stupid) was not so very
uncommon.
The
poor results of attempting a law enforcement solution to intoxicant abuse during
the moral panic over alcohol in the 1920s apparently taught us nothing about
how to respond – or rather not respond – to later moral panics. In my youth the
faddish panic was over psychedelics. It was followed in turn by ones over
cocaine, PCP, crack, and meth. The current one is over opioid addiction. Don’t
get me wrong. All these stuffs do real and sometimes deadly harm to the people
who use them. Even leaving aside (which I don’t) the right of free people to
make bad choices, however, it’s pretty clear that Prohibition isn’t working any
better today than it did 90 years ago with alcohol. Our tendency is to get
worked up politically about one substance at a time, so the current focus on
opioids has diverted attention from the return of meth, use of which in the US had
declined a decade ago after a crackdown on kitchen laboratories temporarily reduced
supply. (One wonders how much Breaking Bad
had to do with that.) The supply is once again bountiful since (as always
happens after domestic crackdowns) foreign criminal cartels stepped in to meet
the unfilled demand. Usage is back up.
Meth,
Ecstasy, Bennies, et al. are all closely related and are at bottom
amphetamines. Chemist Gordon Alles synthesized amphetamine in 1929 and tested it
on himself. He was looking for an asthma treatment. It wasn’t effective on
asthma, but it did make him feel alert and better. (It turned out Alles wasn’t
the first to synthesize the substance, but he was the first to claim medical
value for it and he received a patent for that.) It was marketed as treatment
for mild depression, for which it works in the short term, though in practice
it was mostly used recreationally for the euphoria. As a pep pill it also was
far more effective than coffee; it became popular for this reason in the ‘30s
with college students cramming for exams. In World War 2 the militaries on all
sides of the conflict provided amphetamine to soldiers and pilots to keep awake
and alert. After the war it became one of the go-to recreational drugs
(especially in inhaler form) of the Beat Generation. It was much beloved by the
likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. It sped up metabolism (hence “speed”), which also
gave it popularity as a diet pill. By 1962, when the U.S. population was little
more than half of what it is today, 8 billion amphetamine pills were sold
domestically annually by legal manufacturers. Though usually prescribed (quite
freely) for various reasons (mild depression still being a big one), most continued
to be used recreationally as uppers even if many of the users denied it.
By
the mid-60s, the addictive nature of the drug was impossible to ignore. So were
the deleterious mental and health effects of amphetamine abuse. Blood pressure
related illnesses including heart attacks were among the risks; paranoia was a
common effect of large doses and there were cases of full-blown amphetamine
psychosis. Ginsberg changed his mind about the drug at this time, saying in
1965, “Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body,
bad for your mind.” Nevertheless, while it wasn’t the preferred drug of
hippiedom, it was still present. Speed freaks weren’t well regarded in 60s
counterculture but were definitely in the mix. In 1971 amphetamine was
classified as a Schedule II drug along with opium, cocaine, and morphine. Yet
it keeps making a comeback in one form or other thanks to its short-term
feel-good effect. For regular users that’s enough. As Lenina says about soma in
Brave New World, "Was and will
make me ill, I take a gramme and only am."
I
offer no “solution.” I don’t think there is one. (On a societal scale, I mean; individuals always have a chance of cleaning up their acts.) As long as large numbers of people
want to get high (which is to say always), mitigation of harm is the most for
which we have a realistic chance. The Portuguese have done a better job than we
at reducing the harm to the users and also to the rest of society by legalizing
hard drugs as well as soft. They thereby eliminated much organized and petty crime
at a stroke of the pen. There has been no increase in addiction rates. This
approach is a tough sell in most of the world. The U.S. is still fitfully
coming to terms merely with marijuana. Nonetheless, it is a model worth noting.
Canned Heat – Amphetamine Annie
Brilliant as usual
ReplyDeleteThanks much. No uppers were employed. Well, maybe a little caffeine.
DeleteI thought your video at the end would be the Stones' Mother's Little Helper. :) I'm mixed on the legalization topic as well, but I think I favor legalizing the soft stuff: weed, cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine as opposed to the harder ones. That's because the harder ones seem to drag down the other parts of society that don't want anything to do with drugs generally speaking.
ReplyDeleteHarder drugs also I think adds to homelessness, living on the street, prostitution, thief, murder, gangs, driving under the influence (not only on harder drugs, but many combinations of stuff), and also overdoses. It's a complex issue for sure.
This was an eye opener for me in perhaps being too permissive:
https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw
I fully understand the desire to curb hard drug use due to the undeniable harm users of them do to themselves and others. Quite aside from civil libertarian arguments however, the question remains whether outlawing them does in fact curb their use and harm. Reasonable people can disagree. Switzerland, interestingly, legalized heroin but not marijuana. The Swiss don't like the thought of grungy tourists smoking up Zurich the way they do Amsterdam. One can see the point.
Delete