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By Root 1157 0

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europe and the United States were savaged by tuberculosis. A young man or woman might one day start coughing blood, look pale, sometimes feel weak, and then cough more blood and eventually die. It sometimes happened fast, but he or she could walk around like this for ten or twenty years, infecting other people, trying not to get too depressed. Heroin helped immeasurably. When it first appeared it was touted as having all the benefits of opium with none of the addiction. People were told to eat or suck on the heroin, and so they didn’t get as high or as addicted as they would later by injecting it—but it was still heroin, and it provided a burst of well-being. There were concerns, but the impulses that ruled the day were to benefit the suffering, who were doomed anyway, and to get them to stop coughing for the sake of everyone else. My question is whether the infamy of some drugs is primarily due to their addictive properties. It is not entirely silly to note that we are dependent on food and we manage the problem, though we have to spend much of our time at it, and such happiness is nothing to dismiss just because it is difficult to arrange. Also, not all illegal drugs are addictive: generally speaking, there are no withdrawal symptoms when a pothead stops lighting up. Note, too, that it can be relatively easy to deal with addiction if the whole of society is in on it with you: if it wants to, society can allow you your time, supply the drug, and have a few all-night kiosks available in case you’ve planned badly. In the Middle Ages and today, places in the Muslim world make it possible to get opium if you need it, and even in Catholic France on a Sunday you can find a place to buy coffee and cigarettes.

Which drugs are seen as worth the risk and which disdained? One big answer is that drugs become associated with either the upper or lower classes and this association sticks for a while, and then shifts. For a while in the modern West, poor people snorted cocaine, which seemed boorish and grotesque to the rich, who injected it; a century later the rich would be the snorters and the poor would smoke the stuff, in the form of crack. A report from Bengal in the late nineteenth century explained how opium was for the rich and marijuana smoking was for the poor, though at celebrations both rich and poor, men and women, old and young—all partook in a marijuana (bhang) and sherbet concoction famous for inducing hilarity.4 Why do we have such a strong feeling that using happiness drugs of any sort at all is a little “bad”? As drug historian Richard Davenport-Hines has put it, drug campaigns that arose in the early twentieth century are responsible for characterizing drug use as “naughtiness.” It is a cultural trance at this point, an incredibly tenacious one, such that even when we are intellectually aware of the history of drugs, we still respond emotionally with our era’s codebook of concerns. How to break the trance? We need immediate examples to strengthen our guess that these anxieties are half hobgoblin.

Humanity takes happiness drugs to quiet the pain of bad memories, to escape a bad situation, to increase sexual desire, to shake off boredom and lethargy, or just to feel normal, to stop crying so much. We have also counted on a number of powerful intoxicants as protectors from disease. This wasn’t just a coincidence, or just an excuse to take drugs: the ability of these agents to affect the body was taken as evidence of their efficacy at other tasks. Civil War soldiers took opium to prevent malaria and diarrhea. It was opium, so they were also taking it to get high, but the experience is not an easy one to classify. It wasn’t “naughty.” Now we label some happiness drugs as “good person” drugs and some as “bad person” drugs, and you might take a whole lot of legal drugs before noticing that taking them is a bad idea for you. Or take a few illegal ones and feel guilt. Or take the legal kind and feel guilty anyway, because you associate all drugs with naughtiness. You might avoid