Opioid Crisis
The Big Three
Understanding the War on Drugs
The War on Drugs
If you want to understand why the wear on drugs started and how the drug laws and policies work then this is the book you must read. David Courtwright's forces of habit and the making of the new world.
It takes you back in time even before the British Empire and explains and analyses why and how the drugs end up to be a big business, billions of profits and millions of people dead in the name of power, inequality and money.
Next time if you find yourself in a big shopping center visit one of the shops who sell magazines chocolate and coffee. have a good look and see how many different kind of chocolates are out there different coffee alcohol. And wander how did they get here, we eat chocolate and I can speak for myself I love it.
We drink coffee everyday, and we never ask ourselves how do they make the coffee where is chocolate come from. The big question will be how many people died in the farmhouses and how many children are slaves and work since they are seven years old and we enjoy the products who cause death and massive slavery.
Let us follow D. Courtwright to his journey and find out who is behind the drug business and why the war on drugs?
The Book
The book’s first section describes the confluence of the world’s principal psychoactive resources, concentrating on alcoholic and caffeinated bever ages, tobacco, opiates, cannabis, coca, cocaine, and sugar—the last a key ingredient in many drug products.
These substances, once geographically confined, all entered the stream of global commerce, though at different times and from different places. Coffee, for example, spread from Ethiopia, where the bush was indigenous, to Arabia, and then throughout the Islamic lands and Christian Europe.
Europeans took the taste and the beans to the Americas, which produced 70 percent of the world’s coffee crop by the late nineteenth century.
European farmers and planters, employing indentured and slave labour, enjoyed great success cultivating drug crops in both hemispheres. Their collective efforts expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less afluent purchasers into the market, democratizing drug consumption
A number of regionally popular plant drugs—kava, betel, qat, peyote—failed to become commodities in both hemispheres in the way that wine or opium did. Global drug commerce, propelled by European overseas expansion, was highly selective.
For reasons that ranged from limited shelf life to cultural biases against their effects, Europeans chose to ignore or suppress many novel psychoactive plants. The ones they found useful and acceptable they traded and cultivated throughout the world, with social and environmental consequences that are still very much in evidence..
Why the Name is Drugs?
The term “drugs” is an extremely problematic one, connoting such things as abuse and addiction. For all its baggage, the word has one great virtue. It is short. Indeed, one of the reasons its use persisted, over the objections of offended pharmacists, was that headline writers needed something pithier than “narcotic drugs.”
In this book he uses “drugs” as a convenient and neutral term of reference for a long list of psychoactive substances, licit or illicit, mild or potent, deployed for medical and nonmedical purposes.
Alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, cannabis, coca, cocaine, opium, morphine, and to bacco are all drugs in this sense, as are heroin, methamphetamine, and many other semisynthetic and synthetic substances.
None is inherently evil. All can be abused. All are sources of profit. All have become, or at least have the potential to become, global commodities.
This might not be apparent from a casual inspection of drug histories. Most scholarship deals with particular drugs or types of drugs in a particular set ting: tea in Japan, vodka in Russia, narcotics in America, and so on.
Courtwright have tried to connect these scholarly dots, linking the many separate histories in a big-picture narrative of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources.
He aim to do for drugs what William McNeill did for diseases in Plagues and Peoples (1976), a world-historical study of the exchange of microorganisms and its impact on civilizations.
Disease and drug exchanges have many close parallels. That imported alcohol, for example, acted as a deadly pathogen for indigenous peoples is more than a metaphor.
But there are also important differences. McNeill’s story was largely one of tragic happenstance. Invisible germs spread by human contact had lethal but usually unintended consequences.
The spread of drug cultivation and manufacturing, however, was anything but accidental. It depended on conscious human enterprise, and only secondarily on unconscious biological processes.
Psychoactive Substances
Once their pleasurable and consciousness-altering proper ties became known, they escaped the therapeutic realm and entered that of popular consumption.
As they did so, their political status changed. Wide spread nonmedical use of spirits, tobacco, amphetamines, and other psycho active substances occasioned controversy, alarm, and official intervention.
All large-scale societies differentiated in some way between the medical use and the nonmedical abuse of drugs, and eventually they made this distinction the moral and legal foundation for the international drug control system.
