May 18, 2006
Notes on the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture (#4): America's Angels and Demons
Later this year, Duke University Press will publish my history of drugs in 20th century America. Here’s an intro, the book’s preface and a link to download the DUKE catalogue (PDF).
from the book jacket…
America had a radically different relationship with drugs a century ago. Drug prohibitions were few, and while alcohol was considered a menace, the public regularly consumed substances that are widely demonized today. Heroin was marketed by Bayer Pharmaceuticals, and marijuana was available as a tincture of cannabis sold by Parke Davis and Company.
Exploring how this rather benign relationship with psychoactive drugs was transformed into one of confusion and chaos, The Cult of Pharmacology tells the dramatic story of how, as one legal drug after another fell from grace, new pharmaceutical substances took their place. Whether Valium or OxyContin at the pharmacy, cocaine purchased on the street, or alcohol from the corner store, drugs and drug use proliferated in twentieth-century America despite an escalating war on “drugs.”
Richard DeGrandpre, a past fellow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and author of the bestselling book Ritalin Nation, delivers a remarkably original interpretation of drugs by examining the seductive but ill-fated belief that they are chemically predestined to be either good or evil. The determination to treat the medically sanctioned use of drugs such as Miltown or Seconal separately from illicit use of substances like heroin or ecstasy has blinded America to how drug effects are transformed by the way in which society deals with them.
Bringing forth a wealth of scientifi c research showing the powerful infl uence of social and psychological factors on how the brain is affected by psychoactive substances, DeGrandpre demonstrates that drugs are not angels or demons irrespective of why, how, or by whom they are used. The Cult of Pharmacologyis a bold and necessary new account of America’s complex relationship with drugs.
from the book Preface…
The Cult of Pharmacology
How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture
England began importing coffee from the Muslim East in the seventeenth century. At first many Britains viewed the brewed substance with suspicion, and some groups made efforts to demonize it. The “coffee-house” was a threat to English ale houses, and thus the economy, and of course was counter to Christian values. Worse still, its stimulant actions caused impotence and “made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought.” England eventually made peace with the popular and profitable bean, however, reclassifying it as a harmless beverage. Today coffee is not just the working person’s daily wake up fix and the café philosopher’s stimulant of choice, it is also a global billion-dollar business.
This about sums up the modern history of drugs: irrational and unpredictable, full of fear and loathing, with a strong theme of commerce running right through the center. Far from being deviant on this score, America in the twentieth century dealt with drugs in a fashion as irrational and seemingly unpredictable as had any nation in history. The only obvious constant in America’s relationships with mind-altering substances, whether from the street, the store, or the pharmacy, was that, like the history of coffee, nearly all these substances carried at one point or another a strong emotional charge in society. This was as true for heroin and alcohol as it was for popular “medicines” like Benzedrine, Miltown, and Prozac.
Drugs in America thus became a vast and layered realm of significance in the twentieth century, a territory of meaning fought over with great zeal. For the meaning of a drug not only determined its legitimacy, it also determined who could use it and how, and who could not – at least not legally. By mid-century, drugs in America began to be divided up accordingly, as the market for mind-altering substances fractured into two and then three pieces: there were the “illegal drugs” in the black market, the “ethical medicines” in the pharmaceutical marketplace, and the drugs of the gray market, which by the end of the century included alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine.
Whether a drug fell into one category or another at any particular time was viewed not an irrational and unpredictable enterprise driven by the historically contingent forces of culture and commerce, but a straightforward scientific issue. Even many respected drug scholars and researchers held throughout the century that drugs acquire special powers by entering the blood stream and directly impacting the brain.
Modern science did not do away with myth, in other words, tearing down the ancient view of drugs as powerful spirits. Instead, a cult of pharmacology emerged as pharmacological essences replaced magical ones. The former were said to act in much the same manner as the latter, in that a drug’s powers were still viewed as capable of bypassing all the social conditioning of the mind, directly transforming the drug user’s thoughts and actions. As “soul” was reinterpreted as “mind,” and “spirit” was reinterpreted as “biochemistry,” magical explanations of drug action fell out of use. Indeed, psychobabble and biobabble had taken their place.
But do not misunderstand me. In suggesting that a cult of pharmacology came to reign supreme over America, I am not also suggesting a conspiracy theory. In this book I describe various networks of understandings within which drug-related phenomena, both praised and condemned, were interpreted, and how these understandings caused the social and historical determinants of “drug effects” to be overlooked. The pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, modern biological psychiatry, the biomedical sciences, the drug enforcement agencies, and the American judicial system – all these institutions were quick to embrace and promote a cult of pharmacology, not as a conspiracy, but as a belief system that served their own interests, albeit in varying ways. In fact, to suggest an active conspiracy would be to miss a central theme of this history, for the power of the cult of pharmacology to classify drugs as angels and demons stemmed largely from the fact that it was widely embraced. America became the world’s most troubled drug culture not because the government conspired to allow some access to drugs while keeping them away from others, but because more than any other nation, it was a full member of the cult – it truly believed.
* * *
Still, there were moments during the century when the ideology of the all-powerful drug came into question. A handful of instances that exist in print include Peter Laurie’s Drugs, Alfred Lindesmith’s Addiction and Opiates, Stanton Peele’s The Meaning of Addiction, Oakley Ray’s Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise, Eric Schlosser’s Atlantic Monthly essays on “Reefer Madness,” Thomas Szasz’s Ceremonial Chemistry, Andrew Weil’s The Natural Mind, and Norman Zinberg’s Drugs, Set and Setting. These and other interrogations of drug issues implicated a variety of non-pharmacological factors in the shaping of drug outcomes and the shaping of America as a drug culture. Although they were of little effect in tearing down the cult of pharmacology, they remain today significant for understanding how drugs work.
Weil’s Natural Mind, for instance, published in 1972, lays out a first principle about drugs and society: the desire for “periodic episodes of altered consciousness” is a natural drive among human beings; indeed, the only culture in the world ever to lack a tradition of drug use was the Eskimo. Much of what has taken place in the name of drugs, throughout history and in twentieth-century America, boils down to this fact and one other, namely, that given the basic human tendency toward altered states, society is always confronted with the problem of how to deal with mind-altering substances and activities.
Weil also later co-wrote From Chocolate to Morphine, an equally lucid work that, among other things, attempts to clarify the differences between drug use as a description of behavior and drug abuse as a moral judgment of that behavior. “Any drug can be used successfully, no matter how bad its reputation, and any drug can be abused, no matter how accepted it is. There are no good or bad drugs; there are only good and bad relationships with drugs.” Here Weil presents another basic principle for drugs and society: in its inevitable response to drugs, society has a tendency to imbue them with added meaning – with myth. Often gradually, but sometimes very quickly, this meaning joins with the drug ritual itself, animating drug outcomes.
* * *
Looking at drugs in twentieth-century America, I pick up the story where the nineteenth century left off, in the middle of an ongoing drug drama. This drama would spill out into the twentieth century with great effect. It is also a drama that derived from the same two principles of drugs identified by Weil: drug use is ubiquitous, and the meanings drugs acquire in society often go on to transform their effects, their uses, and their users.
But something specific to drugs in twentieth-century America was also evident by the end of the century: below the surface of an influential pseudo-science of drugs that emerged was a strong and growing undercurrent of understanding, both scientific and conceptual, that, had it been appreciated in western society, could have undermined the mythologizing of drugs as angels and demons.
America became the world’s most troubled drug culture instead, never making peace with drugs. Much like the case of the US government protecting settlers from the “transgressions” of American Indians more than a century ago, the US government defends one side of drugs (pharmaceutical drug use and “misuse") while trying to exterminate the other (illicit drug use and “abuse"). What is more, it does this in large part by promoting the mythology that “drugs” and their users, like the American Indians, are demons in need of total destruction.
That a cult of pharmacology continues to prevail reveals for us a final, basic principle about mind-altering drugs: any society that allows their meaning to go unhinged from the everyday reality of how drugs work puts that society at risk for great misadventure and even unprecedented human tragedy.
