Reflections of an addict
PERSONAL COLUMN J. H. PLUMB
New York, vital, beautiful, rich, is smeared with a grey slime—poverty, decadence, decay and drugs. Amidst the power and glittering riches, there are pools of human debris, lives broken by opulence as well as poverty. Univer- sities are particularly prone—Oxford and Cam- bridge, as well as Harvard, Yale and Berkeley, acquire increasing numbers of addicts as well as experimenters, playing, it is true, mainly with hemp, LSD and, less frequently, with heroin. And what the youth of America and England do today, the youth of Europe, east and west, will do tomorrow or the day after. Personal tragedy will sear homes from which want, disease and cruelty have been banished. Why can this be?
Of course, it is easy to trot out all the old clichés about youth's loss of Christian morality, of the breakdown of the family and marriage, of the artificiality of modern life with its emo- tional emptiness and boredom in an age of machines,.. of , the lack of those deep satisfac- tions felt.by the peasant and craftsman, hungry and downtrodden though they were. Is the very affluence which gives youth much leisure and too little work, too much security but too little direction, the key to its wantonness? If the breadline were just around the corner, would the desire for dope vanish? After all, the youth of Athens or Cairo are not riding high on Lsn. amphetamines, heroin and the like. Ad- vanced industrial society would seem to be a prerequisite for adolescent drug addiction.
Indeed, the spread of drugs gives the castiga- tors of our civilisation a wonderful time. Few Jeremiahs have had it so good as those who prophesy the doom, and revel at the decadence, of modern youth. And too many, far too many, ordinary decent liberals go along with them for at least half the way. Much of the adult population suffer, where drugs are concerned, from a semantic blockage and, as ever, they rarely think historically. It is hard to get drugs in perspective.
What society in recorded history, save per- haps a few of the most primitive, has not tolerated, indeed sometimes welcomed, the use of drugs? None that I know. Take alcohol. Once invented, maybe very very early in the Neolithic revolution, its use by kings, priests and people spread like a bush fire. The earliest farmers in England were buried with their beer beakers with them, presumably so that they could wassail through eternity. And peasant societies do not just take alcohol, they get drunk. Look at Brueghel's pictures, or any film of a festivity in Nepal or in the High Andes or anywhere else where primitive agrarian production is the dominant way of
life. And, of course, millions of men and women in industrial society get high on alcohol week in and week out, year in and year out. And the wastage in human life is colossal. The weekend automobiles with their broken and lifeless bodies that result from over-drugging with alcohol are the price society seems willing to pay for its addiction to drink. A powerful automobile in the hands of a cocktail-happy adolescent is far more lethal than a couple of reefers or, for that matter, than heroin inflicted on himself. One kills the innocent, the other himself or fellow-addicts. And add to the wrecked automobiles, the broken homes of alcoholics, their self-destruction, the huge waste of social capital invested in human lives that drink brings about year in and year out throughout the world from Mongolia to Patagonia.
Yet temperance is akin to crankiness. Maga- zines as well as men would wilt without their alcohol. I am addicted enough to loathe the prospect of a world without wine. But let us be honest, we are drug-addicted. We need a chorus of Gertrude Steins chiming in our ears, 'a drink is a drug is a drug is a drink is a drug.' We accept it, we have socialised it; and we have shut our eyes to the immense damage that total addiction causes because we handle our own addiction competently, well within the tolerances that our temperaments and physiques permit. But could anyone possibly claim that marihuana is worse to the individual or society than alcohol?
Of course, someone is about to say, 'What about Islam?' There, surely, is freedom from alcohol? Yes, but not from hashish, which is as common in Islam as drink in the West. In most oriental, near-Eastern societies, as well as in Mexico and elsewhere in the Caribbean or Central America, hashish, or hemp, has been socialised as we have socialised alcohol: indeed, almost certainly, at a lower social cost in human wastage. Addiction is less; the results physically not so destructive.
What is regarded as perfectly normal and respectable in Karachi, Cairo or Algiers, is decadent, anti-social and illegal in San Fran- cisco, Boston and New York. La Guardia,
way back in the 'thirties, set up a high- powered commission of medicals, biologists, educationalists and sociologists. They found
that marihuana was not being peddled in high schools, that it was not $1) reaking up families, plunging adolescents into decadence or inflict- ing physical or mental breakdown on its users. Indeed, on the face of this evidence, it would seem to be far less harmful not only than alcohol but also than tobacco—another killing drug which we permit, knowing as we do its evil long-term effects on the human body. But as yet no government in the world, whether bright red or deep blue, whether dictatorial or democratic, has made anything but token gestures to reduce or suppress tobacco ad- diction.
Once more let us have a chant by the Ger- trude Stein chorus, 'a drug is a drink is a smoke is a drug is a drink.' James I hated tobacco —a beastly, filthy habit which he naturally associated with subversives as well as deca- dents. New drugs to those who do not use them always seem the peculiar prerogatives of subversives. When James l's grandson, Charles II, came to the English throne, he grew very apprehensive about the spread of coffee-drink- ing and particularly coffee-houses, where he felt opponents of his regime came together not only to drug, but to breed sedition. He sub- jected them to rigorous control and thought of suppressing them altogether, but, as ever, the drug won.
As did tea. Tea was initially regarded as such an effeminate drink that the heavy manual worker sneeringly stuck to his early morning beer, but once his prejudices were overcome, a deep reddish-brown brew of Indian tea was discovered to be a more effective stimulant. The drug in fact worked better: under tea-stimulus he was a more effective worker. But still a drugged one, as are the caffeine addicts of America or Europe.
Drugs everywhere abound. And when any- thing abounds there is investment, private and public. Vast fortunes can be, indeed are, being made from drugs—alcohol and nicotine—as well as caffeine and the host of minor drugs and sedatives and stimulants that we all use. And because of these strong vested interests, there is always resistance to new drugs which may swamp the market and cut sharply into profits. Whatever their wastage of human life, nicotine and alcohol are not going to be put on to the prohibited drugs list. But human beings are odd, curiously persistent, and often very lawless where social prohibition cuts across their needs : and if the industrial west wants to adopt marihuana, or anything else for that matter, punitive actions will be as useless as James l's fulminations against tobacco or as incompetent as Prohibition in the 'twenties.
And it should be realised that drugs become less harmful when ,socialised. If one could only purchase alcohol in the company of alcoholics it would be infinitely more dan- gerous. Drug-taking, like most human addic- tions, needs a long, cool, dispassionate and scientific appraisal. With technological advance more drugs will become available, and easily available: and we have been drug-taking ani- mals for millennia. These two factors would indicate sensible permission rather than punitive prohibition. And for a society to ban marihuana and permit alcohol is ripe for the satire of a Swift. However, we are not alone in our folly; after all, Islam permits marihuana and bans alcohol. Will mankind ever be truly conscious of its absurdities? To that question, history gives a gloomy answer.
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