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By Root 1134 0

concluded that the stuff was dangerous, and the use of it began to connote a risky lifestyle, a certain kind of person. As crack, cocaine had a whole new life as part of the underworld, used by people who had become very desperate. Dirty once again. In the present decade, cocaine is back, understood as a risky behavior, but a privileged one. Life is full of risky behaviors, such as mountain climbing or, more commonly, driving in cars, drinking alcohol, having unprotected sex, and being sedentary. Maybe cocaine shortened the lives of the people who carved those ancient statues with the bulked-out cheeks. Still, across coca’s history, many people seem to have wanted to live with cocaine in their lives, treating it as a mood-managing happiness drug.

We fall into an error of thinking about drugs in black-and-white terms: that some drugs are good and some are bad. This idea is in the minds of users as well as abstainers. We all inhabit a cultural frame wherein some drugs are for normal people and some are for naughty people—and none of them are understood as happiness drugs. The only drugs our present-day culture might call happiness drugs are modern prescription psychopharmaceuticals—and even these are more likely to be called antidepression than pro-happiness. In fact, these drugs can provide happiness, just not usually euphoria, and it is strange that we do not seem to want to acknowledge that. Good drugs are only supposed to cure illness, to fix something wrong, so if we want a drug to be seen as a good drug, we don’t talk about it as providing happiness. Obviously, it is not reasonable to claim that our modern antidepressants are curative, as against all the other drugs in history, which were recreational, deviant, or dulling. Today, drugs that are illegal are also not credited with providing happiness, though people privately know that they do, and some will snicker when they have to disavow the joy of drugs. Illegal drugs, including cocaine, are usually depicted in the culture as mentally and emotionally numbing, perhaps providing a kind of sped-up (in the case of cocaine) or slowed-down stupid giddiness and blank disassociation. Sometimes illegal drugs are culturally connected with euphoria, but never happiness. But, again, many people have chosen cocaine as a happiness drug for millennia. Only in the last two centuries has it become common to use cocaine in such strong forms, though. Perhaps if North America and Europe had simply adopted (and made commercially viable) the leaf-chewing habit of the South Americans, we would today find cocaine at newsstands and supermarkets, like chocolate and coffee. Likewise, imagine that coffee beans could be cultivated so that they packed more of a euphoric punch. In a hundred years coffee might be illegal, and high-school kids will hide behind the gym to chew the beans. Will they look back and be amazed that once upon a time it was served on almost every street in America? ( Or maybe it will be chocolate that gets chemically goosed into providing a serious high, and thus becoming dangerous.) People love having a “cure for the blues” or, to use Freud’s words, to be “lifted…to the heights in a wonderful fashion.” It is very hard to determine what harms and what benefits are really attached to a drug in any given form, in any given amounts, over any given amount of time, as taken by any given person. So we are largely thrown back on culture, which is also tricky.

The cultural meaning of every historically important drug is complicated by its origins, but cocaine may be particularly burdened. Trenchant images of race, class, and sex are attached and reattached to different forms of the drug. A crack high is drawn as brief euphoria amid despair and a coke high as a brightening up of preexisting abundance. The middle class may use cocaine in order to declare access to luxury, but it doesn’t mind if celebrities are punished for their use of it, precisely because it is a mark of their privilege. As for crack, the middle class uses it as a definition of falling out of their class and into