The W.o.D, Continuum Drug Use
The W.o.D, Moral Panic II
The W.o.D, Prostitution
Examples of this sort are by no means limited to the Holocaust. Drugs in duce or facilitate all sorts of labors that men and women, in a sober frame of mind, would ordinarily spurn.
To what extent this is due to the drug’s effect on brain chemistry or to a given culture’s rules about drug use (for example, drinking excuses misconduct) is debatable.
The effect, nevertheless, is real and troubling. Drinking has accompanied many unpleasant and dangerous tasks: inform ing, burying battleªeld remains, dragging corpses out of slavers’ holds.
How ever, one of the commonest and most consistent associations has been with prostitution. In 1909 the Nebraskan Josie Washburn published a memoir of her long career as a madam.
In it she described the many ways in which li quor was entwined with prostitution. Men did not just stroll into her brothel, she explained. They went ªrst to the saloon, where they took a “personal li berty” bracer or two to work up their nerve.
Once inside the parlor, they were plied with drink, beer going for as much as a dollar a bottle. It was by pushing drink that madams obtained their greatest proªt. They expected their girls to drink with their customers.
Considering the volume of the nightly trafªc and the nature of the work, servicing drunks and listening to their smutty jokes, this was a sure route to alcoholism. Some prostitutes had tricks to reduce their intake: switching glasses or discreetly dumping wine into the nearest cuspidor.
(“Men little realize how much money they spend to ªll this ves sel.”) But in the end, Washburn judged, most of her girls became drunkards themselves.
Or they became drug users. After a year a woman was either a hard case, “ready to take part in every kind of depravity,” or was “stupeªed with dope, lovers and more dope,” or had come to her senses and made plans to get out.
Drugs have ªgured prominently in sexual bartering, a form of quasi-prosti tution common in many cultures.
Kola nuts in the central Sudan; beer in Papua New Guinea; cigarettes, coffee, and Coca-Colas in postwar Germany have all served as inducements for sexual favors. In American ghettos, illegit imate children of unknown paternity are sometimes called “staircase babies.”
The reference is to their place of conception by drug-dependent mothers who offer their bodies to men bearing marijuana and crack. Bartering has also occurred across cultures, most notoriously between European men and native women bribed with alcohol.
“Thre is anothr thing that we do not like, & complain of vry much,” runs a hasty transcription of a 1766 address by a delegation of Delaware Indians, “thre are some that do at times hire some of our Squaws to goe to Bed with them & give them Rum fr it[,] this thing is very Bad, & the squaws again selling the Rum to our people make them Drunk.
Tobacco—“the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor,” as Hitler ominously put it—seems like the opposite case.
In fact, the white man’s plantation tobacco quickly be came a major item in the Indian trade. The Jesuits employed it, though not without mixed feelings, as a bribe to induce Indians to attend their sermons and destroy their own sacred objects.
For reasons not entirely certain, but possibly stemming from the spiritual prowess imputed to distant goods, Indi ans preferred imported Brazilian tobacco.
They also traded for burning mir rors, steels, and tinder boxes, which simpliªed smoking while traveling, and pipes of European manufacture. Around 1700 an unknown genius devised an iron-bladed tomahawk that featured a bowl above the blade and a hollow stem for smoking, conjoining war and peace in a single implement.
Pipe tomahawks proved an irresistible trade good, becoming standard equipment of braves from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. Tobacco pouches were furnished by the Indians, who sometimes severed and preserved the hands of their enemies for the purpose.
By 1700 the tobacco and rum that Europeans supplied to Indians were largely produced by African slaves, who were fast replacing native laborers and indentured servants.
Slave production had in fact become circular: rum and tobacco were commonly used to acquire more Africans, most of whom were bound for large tropical plantations.
Tropical slavery was fundamen tally a product of comparative immunological advantage. Black Africans who survived their childhood—and at least half did not—had typically ac quired immunity to yellow fever, a mosquito-borne disease widely fatal to Eu ropeans and Amerindians.
They were also more resistant to malaria. Ac quiring African slaves for Brazil and the Caribbean necessitated offering trade goods in return. Textiles were the most important, though fortiªed wine and, from about 1650 on, rum were also among the items commonly bartered for slaves.
How commonly varied from region to region. The Portu guese and Brazilians seem to have been the most inclined to use alcohol for slave trading.
The historian Jose Curto estimates that imported alcoholic beverages, mostly Brazilian rum, amounted to 27 percent of the value of the 1.6 million slaves exported from Luanda and Benguela during the period 1700–1830.
Convergence, then, seems to be a more realistic prospect for tobacco than for alcohol.
The days of prescription sale may not be far off. But this should be taken only as a summation of current trends, not a prediction. Technolog ical change has a way of reshufºing the drug-policy deck.
The development of safer nicotine-delivery devices would alter the situation, just as a vaccine for AIDS might take the steam out of harm reduction. Copyright © 2001. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
One thing, however, is not likely to change. It is the political awareness of the dangers of exposing people to psychoactive substances for which, it is in creasingly clear, they lack evolutionary preparation.
Psychoactive technol ogy, like military technology, has outstripped natural history. The question is what to do about it. The answer, whatever it may be, is not a return to a mini mally regulated drug market.
The movement toward restrictive categoriza tion was fundamentally progressive in nature. Like most reforms, it was partly motivated by self-interest, tainted by prejudice, and imperfect in its execu tion. But its basic premise was both correct and humane.
The drive to maxi mize proªt—individual, corporate, and state—underlay the explosive global increase in drug use. Checking the increase meant restricting commerce and proªts, which meant regulatory laws and treaties.
The task now is to ad just the system, eliminating its worst concomitants and plugging its most conspicuous gaps. Plugging those gaps will not be easy, particularly in consumer societies.
Pleasure is to consumerism what winning is to sports: an imperative pursued by all means short of cheating with certain chemicals.
Even if policymakers (or athletic governing bodies) succeed in scheduling drugs more rationally, they cannot avoid the fundamental contradiction.
The emergent global capi talist system—McWorld—depends heavily on the commercial exploitation of innate drives, such as sex or the taste for sweet and fatty foods.
Its products are often dangerous, yet individuals are free to ignore, assume, or work around the risks. Advertisers systematically encourage them to do so for the sake of transient pleasures.
The very essence of modern culture, as Daniel Bell remarked, is that of sovereign individuals “ransacking the world store house,” casting aside traditional restraints in pursuit of self-fulªllment.
So why should certain drugs be off limits? Be happy and partake, except of the forbidden fruit, has always been a hard message to swallow.
Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve could not abide by it in the old Eden. It is hard to imag ine that our prospects are much better in today’s new one.
