Book Review - Forces Of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern

Barbara Liss
Houston Chronicle (TX)
Sunday, April 01, 2001


FORCES OF HABIT: DRUGS AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD By David T.  Courtwright.  Harvard University Press, $24.95.

THE movie Traffic offers a discouraging picture of the way the war on drugs is being waged by the United States.  It leads us to wonder how we came to the sorry state in which fear and anger, more than rationality, shape the drug debate.

Although historian David Courtwright doesn't set out to examine our failed drug policy in Forces of Habit, he goes a long way in his clearly written, thoughtful book toward explaining why the drug war has gone so badly for us.  His message is delivered less grimly than the movie's.  Drugs, he maintains, are a defining feature of the modern world, but societies make choices about which drugs they will and won't accept.

The book is unique in its broad scope.  Most drug scholarship focuses on a particular substance in a specific place.  ( An earlier Courtwright book, Dark Paradise, which has become a standard reference in the rather nonstandard field of drug history, is a study of opium addiction in America before 1940.  ) Forces of Habit undertakes to link together "the separate histories in a big-picture narrative of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet's psychoactive resources."

There is a lot to keep straight in this readable account.  Though not a comprehensive history of drugs, it is good at identifying the trends and patterns from about the 16th century that have brought about Courtwright's "psychoactive revolution." This is the book to go to when planning an assault on Jeopardy!

If Courtwright fails to answer completely his thorniest question -- why tobacco, caffeine and alcohol ( Prohibition notwithstanding ), with their toxic properties, escaped harsh regulatory action -- he does suggest some reasons they received more liberal treatment than opiates, cannabis and cocaine.  Especially interesting are the author's ideas about why some psychoactive substances come to be defined as licit while others are labeled illicit drugs.  And he argues -- without convincing evidence -- that legalizing drugs drives up their use.

Readers may be surprised to find their morning coffee, heart-healthy wine and cigarettes -- unhealthy though smoking may be -- on Courtwright's drug list.  He uses the term "drugs" neutrally to include "all psychoactive substances, licit or illicit ...  deployed for medical and nonmedical purposes." Drugs are not, he writes, "inherently evil." His interest in them lies less in their potential for abuse than in their potential for profits and market share.

Courtwright loosely divides the book into three sections, with some overlap between sections.  The first describes the way drugs, originally geographically confined, entered the stream of global commerce.  He compares the history of drugs to the history of infectious diseases in that travel and transport were the variables that influenced the spread of both.  Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine ( the "big three" ) and opium, cannabis and coca ( "the little three" ) all owed their success, he claims, to the expansion of oceangoing commerce.

Some plant drugs, such as kava and betel, remained regionally popular but did not find the global acceptance that, say, opium and wine did.  Courtwright explains, "For reasons that ranged from limited shelf life to cultural biases against their effect, Europeans chose to ignore or suppress many novel psychoactive plants."

Beyond shelf life and bias, feasibility of shipping and affordable cost were also necessary historical conditions for drugs to become highly prized, highly taxed global commodities.  Courtwright contends that the profit motive helped shape the way we are hooked on drugs.  ( "By 1885," he writes, "taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and tea accounted for close to half of the British government's gross income." )

But it is harder to accept the idea that without grasping governments we wouldn't be hooked on drugs.  After all, why do drugs promise such profits? As one commentator has said, "No greedy government has conspired to make tons of money by forcing Tang down our throats." ( Well, at least not recently.  )

The second section takes up the issue of drugs as medical and recreational products.  Most drugs, Courtwright holds, began as "exotic medicines" handed out by doctors -- he calls them the "sorcerer's apprentices" -- to treat vague complaints.  "The more pharmaceutical companies promote a drug and the more physicians prescribe it," maintains Courtwright, "the sooner the drug is democratized."

The author believes that a drug generates demand because it is useful as a "coping tool." Who is on the "A-list of susceptibility"? According to Courtwright, "Young, single, undersocialized urban males." He quotes actor Robert Downey Jr.  on the powerful appeal of drugs: "There are certain, practical things that doing lots of heroin or cocaine takes care of."

In section three the author discusses the pressures and developments that influenced governments to discard their policy of taxed, legal drug commerce in favor of restriction and, in some cases, even prohibition.  ( In the United States opium, as a substance for smoking, was the first narcotic banned.  )

The psychoactive revolution initially occurred, Courtwright argues, "because it served the interests of the wealthy and powerful." But the modernizing world began to worry about the social costs that drug use incurred: among them, decreased worker productivity, increased crime and harmful effects of addiction, especially on children.  For Courtwright, the "central moral and political conflict running through the history of psychoactive commerce is the clash between drugs as a source of profit and as a concern about health."

A supply sider in the chicken-or-egg debate about the way to curb illegal drug use, Courtwright holds that there would be no mass addiction to cocaine and heroin without global production and distribution of the substances.  He uses China's diligent campaign against opium early in the 20th century as an example of how a society can eliminate a drug it deems harmful to its people.  But even as he makes this argument, he acknowledges how resistant individuals are to giving up the gratification they find in drugs.  His case study here is the Soviet Union's failed experiment in banning alcohol.

So, is the drug war winnable? Not if you believe Traffic.  Courtwright's view is marginally more optimistic.  "National will," he says, counts in controlling drugs.  Stay tuned.

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