Intoxicating Trends Making A Comeback
‘Smoking’, wrote Aldous Huxley in 1954, is ‘hardly less normal and natural than eating’. Not anymore. Smoking can kill you. Before it does, its active ingredients re-program your brain, making you crave it. Hardly natural. Even eating, which western abundance has robbed of its natural historical function as nutritional necessity, has become suspect. Sugar, scientists claim, is as toxic to the liver as alcohol. Both, suggest doctors and politicians, should be subject to increased taxation and restriction.
Conversely, psychedelic drugs are making something of a comeback, at least in the press. Psilocybin mushrooms help combat depression. Ecstasy and LSD relieve post-traumatic stress disorder. Cannabis, too, reduces the pain of cancer and contains tumour-shrinking oils. In February 2012 Sir Richard Branson urged the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Committee to relax drug laws. When asked about the advisability of his own past cannabis use, Branson replied: ‘If I was smoking cigarettes, I would be very worried.’
There are a number of tempting historical explanations for this shift. A history of scientific progress would assert that throughout the centuries new knowledge has led to reassessments of various scientific questions, intoxicating substances included. Economically, one could contend that the big businesses which, in modern times, have tried to make us fat, drunken, cigarette addicts, have either been supplanted by pharmaceutical companies or now view other intoxicants as better sources of profit. A politcal approach suggests that the United States’ 20th-century obsession with enforcing global prohibition is over, its political dominance finally challenged by organisations including the Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose 2011 report declared President Nixon’s 1971 ‘war on drugs’ a failure. Alternatively, press reports about relaxing drug laws serve as mere distractions from increasing restrictions on legal intoxicants.
While these scientific, economic and ideological factors are apparent, it is also clear that the prohibition of drugs is ‘out’, while harm reduction and decriminalisation of all intoxicants is ‘in’.
Fashion - the cyclical approval of certain intoxicating substances and the disavowal of others - has shaped the entire recorded history of intoxication. In the modern period these cycles have speeded up due to increased globalisation, which has introduced us to substances from other parts of the globe; and increased technology, which has allowed us to create altogether new drugs. Fashion is an important and often overlooked aspect of human culture and is crucial to the history of intoxicating substances. In the western world we have seen crazes for and moral panics against pepper, coffee, chocolate and tea, as well as substances more commonly labelled intoxicants today. Scientists, politicians and businessmen are no more immune to fashion than any other individuals or groups. Together all these actors have at various points in history conspired to create ‘the next big thing’ and ‘the next big killer’.
Germany, for example, whose pharmaceutical industry created many of our now illicit drugs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had clear intoxicant trends, where professional advice and business strategy both shaped and were shaped by the views of users. In 1897 Bayer pharmaceuticals produced two new drugs, one a pain medicine, the other a cough suppressant. The first, aspirin, was a moderately beneficial alternative to salicylic acid, which caused stomach problems, but it was not heavily marketed. Beyond concerns about aspirin’s effects on the heart, Bayer had another focus: heroin. It was, quite simply, a wonder drug, being ten times more effective than codeine in suppressing coughs during an era of rampant tuberculosis and considered non-addictive when compared with opium and morphine.
Why rush to market a drug so closely related to substances known to cause addiction? Scientifically it was exciting and met a serious need; ideologically it promised to reduce the scourge of ‘morphinism’; economically it looked set to make its producers a fortune. Patients and early recreational users alike admired the sterile presentation and fast action of the syringe, a new method of delivery that was far more modern than a pill. While the dangers of heroin were soon realised, they are not the only explanation for its medical demise; a new vaccine for tuberculosis, discovered in 1906, rendered it less necessary. However heroin is still used in palliative care. Why is this not more publicised? Because the connection between heroin, junkies and its international criminal status makes its medicinal benefit politically unpalatable.