The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [37]
Drugs
It is a modern myth that some mood drugs are good and some are bad. We are devoted to an anti-mood-drug rhetoric that does not match our behavior. We scold ourselves, as a society, for proscribing too many legal drugs and for indulging in too many illegal drugs, and many of us reject some drugs as bad. That still leaves a lot of drug-taking. Overall, our public rhetoric is mythically against drugs, and yet our individual lives include all sorts of intoxicants, stimulants, antidepressants, and other happiness drugs. It is powerful simply to realize that all these different drugs, the “good” and the “bad,” are essentially the same: they are potions people use to get a little happy. Drugs can be dangerous; either the illegal or the legal ones may affect your health or turn out to be more than you can handle. But that is not enough to explain our attitude toward them. We need to see that we play down the pleasure aspect of the drugs that we allow, and that we do this for dumb reasons—in support of productivity and in defense of our war against the drugs we don’t allow. At the very least it is worthwhile to think clearly about the drugs that we do take as happiness drugs under the cover of drugs to make us alert, asleep, or pain-free. It also seems reasonable to think about whether the “bad” drugs are really bad, and to remember that perhaps in a changed form these drugs might come back into the legal world again.
People have always used happiness drugs. Drugs that are now illegal were, at various times, used openly, as we use Prozac and caffeine. That seems odd to us, because modern technology, and modern markets, have made some of those traditional drugs a lot stronger. Also, consider that being involved in a normal life today requires more alert lucidity than ever before. We have appointments that begin promptly at 11:45 A.M. and not “near midday”; we deal in numbers and other symbols rather than in, say, people and cows. Another big explanation for why historical drug use surprises us is that we culturally disguise our own legal happiness drugs, calling them antidepressants, numbing agents, soporifics, or stimulants. Just what are modern “prescription” happiness drugs? We know what the pharmaceutical companies say on television commercials, and what a number of actors think about the question, and we also know that much of the medicine of mental health is either luck or bad luck. Still, savvy as we are, we are generally trapped in our era’s assumptions and anxieties. Again I find only the terms “trance” and “trap” sufficient to describe the situation, and it takes a lot of effort to negotiate awakening and escape.
There are several reasons why it is worth the struggle to rethink this whole subject of happiness and drugs. One reason is to better understand what illegal-drug users are up to, given the perspective of several millennia. We also want to notice more about the way we use legal drugs today, perhaps to be more suspicious of them, but also to appreciate them more, as happiness elixirs. Once we notice that many drugs are, at least in part, happiness drugs, we also begin to notice the way a given society values happiness. As we have discussed, people want euphoria, but they also want their days to pass pleasantly, and for their lives to be good ones, overall. If a drug is understood as providing a nice burst of euphoria, how much risk to our pleasant days and good, long life will we tolerate from the drug? Or if the drug is understood to provide pleasant days, how much will we tolerate it if it steals euphoria from us? Or if it dampens our will to work and build? Happiness drugs offer a unique window into our individual and cultural balancing