The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [38]
People keep a lot of secrets about what drugs they take. Even if some people know what you take, and how much, other people in your life would probably be surprised. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2002 and 2003 (the most recent tallying), for every hundred women from eighteen to forty-four years old, thirty-five had antidepressants prescribed, and seventeen had narcotic painkillers prescribed; from age forty-five to sixty-four, the numbers are fifty-eight and twenty-eight, respectively; and for every hundred women over sixty-five, fifty-three had antidepressants prescribed. For every one hundred men from eighteen to forty-four years old, eighteen had antidepressants prescribed, and eleven had painkillers prescribed; from age forty-five to sixty-four, the numbers are thirty and twenty-three, respectively; and for every hundred men over sixty-five, thirty had antidepressants prescribed. For every one hundred women and men over seventy-five, the numbers are sixty and thirty-two, respectively.1 Sixty prescriptions for every hundred women over seventy-five! That’s a lot of grannies on goofballs. Think of the people you know. Consider the proportion of people on one of these types of drugs. Is it consistent with the number of people whom you know to be taking one? If the numbers don’t match up, your friends may be keeping this information to themselves. Some people brag about their gonzo Hunter Thompson moments, but, throughout history, many have been secretive about their drug use. Some people even hide their aspirin use. All this caginess makes it tough for the historian. It is like researching the history of cheating on your taxes, or the history of religious doubt. Still, some people have made public their private beliefs and habits and have called on other honest and intelligent people to “come into court, weigh up the evidence, and return their verdict,” as Cicero said about the question of the existence of gods. It is worth the trouble to work to see beyond politics and propriety.
This section has four chapters. The first chapter addresses why some drugs are thought of as good and some as bad. The next chapter goes into the histories of cocaine and opium. I then discuss the way drugs have dropped out of religion but are yet understood as revelation. Finally, a look at drugs today brings us to the music show and drugs as solace. Some of this is imagined as what good people do, some as what bad people do, some as what good people do in secret. Again, my central point will be to demonstrate that these divisions are absurd. We believe them because we are lost in a trance of value, but that is all it is—a cultural trance.
5
What Makes a Good Drug Bad
Experts and parents used to say sports were bad for women. The idea was that exercise depleted the biological energies that women needed to be mothers. At that same time, experts and parents freely gave opium—often in the drinkable wine mixture laudanum—to girls and women at all stages of life, including pregnancy, nursing, and mothering. Today women are told that opium is bad for them and exercise is good, even in the final months of pregnancy. The change is not due to the progress of science. To the best of our knowledge today, exercise is associated with some risk in pregnancy and opium is not associated with much more risk. Drug users today might be more likely to also be poor, badly nourished, and overworked, but still opiate use is correlated only with a tendency toward low birth weight. The real difference is cultural. Victorians were most worried about women being too strong and rejecting the role of wife and mother. So girls and women were encouraged to be physically delicate and to alleviate their frustrations with drugs. Today it is commonly assumed that most powerful, world-wise women still want a husband and a baby, if later in life. So muscular girls are no longer our chief anxiety. It would seem, from the way we treat our pregnant women, that our chief worry today is whether this unnatural American life