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By Root 1108 0

you to see when you were finished. Terms of endearment were common forms of address among strangers. This was about home and rest. Present-day coffee bars provide strong coffee again and offer themselves as offices and childcare centers: bring your own computer or toddler. At most of them, like in a nightmare of bureaucracy, the person who brings you your drink is not the person who took your order. This coffee place is not to be mistaken for a home: it is a place of efficiency. The method often slows things down, but it looks like an assembly line of individual service, and that’s what felt right about it as it expanded across America and showed up on every city block through the 1990s. The values of the modern coffee bar are clear: you can stay forever if you’re working, but even with a purchased chai latte on the table in front of you, you are not supposed to take a nap.

The overworked twenty-first-century American loves coffee. Not only do we drink it; we think of new ways to sell it, buy it, and make it. Our love of coffee will be part of our legacy: in our time, Americans worked long hours, and used strong caffeine derived from the coffee bean. We always speak of caffeine’s effects as waking us and helping us to work. We rarely speak of it as a happiness potion, a calmative, or a break from work. Yet a less overt part of the cultural conversation indicates that we do still use the drug this way, especially as a happiness drug. Think of how we act out our coffee experience: longing for it, sighing with pleasure when it arrives. High-caffeine drinks are bought in cans also, especially by the large consumer block of drowsy high-school and college students. The strongest canned caffeine drinks are imagined for the industrious, the hyper-alive risk taker, and the teenager wanting a buzz. We allow it because we need these kids to be awake in class. Red Label, a whiskey, is not sold in college food courts, and Red Bull, a caffeinated drink, is. They are both powerful drugs. This is not about health; it is about culture.

Why did the people of the 1890s like opium when we like Lexapro? We drive cars. On a horse, even if you are very drunk, you are unlikely to accidentally run at full gallop into a brick wall. Clearheadedness has never been so important in all of human history. Goofiness is to be avoided. We are maddeningly productive, and so, since there is often no test to determine which person is actually being productive, we do not want to seem stoned. Our successes are often somewhat dependent on the efforts of people who are strangers to us. We want them sober. We mostly want clearheadedness in our school-bus drivers and our commercial-jet pilots. For our own sake, to function in the world, we cross busy roads, handle money, show up exactly on time for meetings, have professional conversations, and try not to be asleep when the train arrives at our stop. Not drooling is a big priority for us. What makes opium a bad drug and Zoloft a good one has a lot to do with fogginess. We think of the good happiness drugs as fixing something medically wrong with the depressed person, and of the bad drugs as masking the problem with a gauzelike inebriation. It is more accurate, and useful, to note that the degree of inebriation, or gauziness, it causes is one of the main differences between a good and a bad drug, and not whether one heals and the other masks. We have no evidence of that; it is an interpretive idea. Rather, the gauziness is a problem for drivers of machinery and yeomen of industry—that is to say, all of us.

The other part of the good or bad reputation of a happiness drug is the risk of dependence, but that is not as straightforward as it might seem at first. Many of today’s celebrated prescription happiness drugs are difficult to stop using. It always takes society a while to figure out which drug can be put down and walked away from. Starting in 1898, heroin was produced by Bayer, and so named because it was of heroic help for coughs. It may seem to us that the cure was a bit extreme for the problem, but in the