The opiates of the masses... and the war they've provoked

By Christopher Caldwell
The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, March 14, 2001

Pulverized Green Turtle penis, dissolved in beer, was Cotton Mather's preferred remedy for kidney stones.

Otto von Bismarck and Hermann Goring differed in the power they wielded over Germans but not in the power their decades-long morphine addictions wielded over them.  Ulysses S.  Grant wrote his memoirs while guzzling cocaine-spiked tea.

In "Forces of Habit" ( Harvard, 277 pages, $24.95 ), University of North Florida historian David Courtwright shows that drugs -- from caffeine to cocaine -- are woven more tightly into Western history than we recognize in this modern era of moralistic prohibition.  Armenians fermented wine at least 6,000 years ago, Andean peasants have chewed coca for five millennia and Herodotus writes of Scythians "howling with pleasure" while burning marijuana.  Intoxicants, Mr.  Courtwright concedes, are "unexpected weapons against the human condition." How we use and regulate them can tell us what kind of society we are.

There's a point to drugs.

Alcohol has been cleaner than water through centuries in which water-borne diseases were man's leading health risk.  Coffee drinkers commit suicide at a third the rate of abstainers.  Tobacco warded off bubonic plague and today helps Parkinson's and Alzheimer's sufferers.  That's leaving aside drugs' usefulness for sex, conviviality, consolation and ( lest we forget ) "getting high," or whatever phrase best captures the altered state of mind that certain people so crave.

James Thomas, British American Tobacco's man in China in the early 1900s, used to watch a native smoking his cigarette and reflect: "Nothing in the world he could have bought at the price would have given him the same amount of pleasure and comfort."

Add all this to addiction, and drugs make terrific products.

Perishability, evanescent highs and "tolerance" -- users' need for more and more of their drug -- provide a "built-in profit escalator." It's not true that addicts will pay any price for a fix, but demand is relatively inflexible.  Quintupling the British unemployment rate from 2% to 10% cuts tobacco use by only 1%.  Drugs create other avenues for profit, from bongs to martini shakers.  Even more lucrative are products that seek to undo the effects of drugs, like the multibillion-dollar treatment industry.

Until very recently, governments had a vested interest in the drug trade.  Colonists exploited Chinese laborers by getting them hooked on opium and debt.  Jamaicans could work longer hours on ganja ( cannabis ), just as Peruvian slaves could do with less food thanks to coca.  All governments tax narcotics -- and wind up codependent with the subjects they seek to fleece.  The diarist John Evelyn remarked that Charles II's government was so dependent on alcohol and tobacco revenues in the 17th century that it would have gone bankrupt if its citizenry had behaved as their betters urged.

By 1885, the British crown got half its revenues from taxes on alcohol, tobacco and tea.  Exploitation could be moral as well as economic.

Volunteers for executions at Auschwitz got vodka and cigarettes, theoretically to dull the moral senses -- but not really: "Because of the special rations," wrote one SS doctor, "the men all clamor to take part in such actions."

Our current drug situation is the legacy of a mid-19th-century "psychoactive revolution" that began with the isolation of alkaloids like morphine and the invention of the hypodermic needle.

Merck patented cocaine in 1862.  Vin Mariani ( cocaine + wine ) and Coca-Cola ( cocaine + wine + kola nuts ) soon followed.  Bayer marketed heroin as a cough suppressant.  Smith, Kline peddled amphetamines as decongestants.  In World War I, Harrods offered morphine and cocaine gift baskets.

In World War II, American soldiers swallowed 180 million pep-pills -- and our middle class was buying 12 billion uppers a year by 1971.

Meanwhile, governments were slowly changing course, from drug exploitation to drug prohibition.  Mr.  Courtwright notes that government attacks on profitable industries are historically rare.  Why did powerful forces with an interest in banning intoxicants arise in the 20th century?

For one, intoxication was less compatible with industrial society.  ( "A drunken field hand was one thing, a drunken railroad brakeman quite another." ) The result, after decades of political haggling, is our $35 billion War on Drugs, an effort with which -- despite a few quibbles -- Mr.  Courtwright is in sympathy.  He dismisses legalization as "a form of reactionary libertarianism" and complains that the social costs of the black market are "seized upon and given wide publicity by prohibition's ideological opponents."

But that opens the question of which drugs get chosen for prohibition, and why.  The mysterious "narcotic poison" alcohol, listed in some pharmacology texts as the most addictive drug, is legal, while tens of thousands languish in jail for smoking marijuana -- a drug less physically harmful, less disruptive and less addictive.

Mr.  Courtwright sees alcohol's survival as due to custom and vested interests: For much of the 20th century, 13% of Frenchmen owed their livelihood to the drinks trade.

Caffeine survives because it "lacks the equivalent of cirrhosis or lung cancer." But tobacco is vulnerable to banning, because it has been abandoned by the ruling classes and become a "losers' drug."

Those are explanations of our policy, however, not justifications for carrying it out in a free society.

Mr.  Courtwright's book assembles riveting data to negligible intellectual ends and lacks a coherent thesis.

Maybe the incoherence of our present-day drug regime is to blame.

But rather than imagine an alternative, Mr.  Courtwright concludes that governments should "adjust the system, eliminating its worst concomitants and plugging its most conspicuous gaps." As conclusions go, that one's not exactly mind-altering.

Mr.  Caldwell is senior writer at the Weekly Standard.