The undiscussed history of recreational drugs
Drugs as history, plus history of american drug policy
If you’re talking about death and destruction, there’s only one drug that matters. Tobacco kills far more people than every other drug combined, even including the secondary deaths like people hit by drunk drivers. Tobacco is the basis of american supremacy—half our founding fathers were drug dealers, and via pipes or snuff they strung out the world hundreds of years ago. It dovetails nicely with the way americans keep the boot on the domestic population, too—get all the addicts living in denial. It was only in the early 1990s that the US government admitted tobacco is addictive, and if you notice the wording on a vape, nicotine still isn’t classified as a drug. Denial is what keeps the pyramid from collapsing. Denial is how they make slaves without whips; if you can’t see that, check out my explanation here:
A lot more drugs have shaped history. We don’t think of tea as much of a drug, but it was addictive enough for the chinese to take the british treasury, and this was back in the empire days when the brits had the precious metal wealth of all the colonies back home under lock and key. It took a while, but the chinese needed to pretend that there was nothing worthwhile on the other side of that wall to keep their people in, so they’d only trade tea for gold and silver. Eventually the brits wanted their treasury back, so they forced the indians to grow opium and started slinging something harder than tea to the chinese peasants. The money started moving back across the globe so the chinese banned opium. You might have heard of the opium wars? They were the first drug turf war. The brits sailed a couple warships up the yangtze and threatened to shell the cities until the chinese backed down. ‘Twas right about then that the chinese lords started to regret sitting on the sidelines for the gunpowder era of warfare.
Let’s bring it home to the US. An important thing to remember when analyzing anything the american government does is that, if you can see it as an outsider looking in, so can the people who devoted their lives to making policy. There are no unintended consequences, just backhand ways of doing things. Morphine policy is where it all started. Everybody came back from the civil war hooked to the gills on morph. Narcotics certainly help you function while traumatized. For the next 40 years, all that was necessary to get a script for morph was an addiction, and the system regulated fine. Then somebody stirred up the xtians and made a little rule change—an addiction was no longer a good enough reason to buy morphine. There was no black market yet, so the users of narcotics mostly substituted alcohol. We created a million and a half problem drunks with that move in the early 1900s.
A dozen years later, AA was formed. AA is simply evangelical xtianity, and wasn’t pretending otherwise at the outset. There were enough atheists still alive that the government forced the xtians to use the whole “higher power” bullshit, but the purpose of AA is to get you to substitute a god addiction for whatever was giving you trouble. Remember—those same xtians shape policy to create and destroy addicts. It’s all a game, and people forget that we had real science over a hundred years ago. In that era, we had nerve agents, and could mechanically time a machine gun to shoot between the blades of a spinning airplane propellor. That’s the brag in the BMW emblem. So we knew for a fact that substituting a god addiction wouldn’t work, but our government made it the gold standard of addiction care anyway—see how “compassionate” xtians are? This can be seen by the results, where AA has a self-reported success rate of 5%. Finland’s science-based recovery system boasts a 75% success rate. There’s a paywalled article about this in The Atlantic if you want to dig deeper.
There was still no black market in the 20s, and we were learning from the triads and yakuza and bratva. We were learning the usefulness of crime syndicates, which are just another locus of power. That’s why the feds banned alcohol—our government needed organized crime it could control and make use of. It only took a decade or so to get that established, then we gave the booze back to the white market. J Edgar was a hugely influential part of this kind of thinking long before kissinger had his first wet dream about dead babies.
I’ve done all the drugs, and the only one I needed help quitting was cigs, but that’s for another post.
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