Greetings, fellow drug fiends.

Aha: drugs. You know, I could quite easily fill up the entire blog with this topic... and in the process, quite likely incriminate myself towards enough fixed-penalty short-term sentences to see out the remainder of my natural lifespan in jail. So, let's not.

One point, though, that Gerry was polite enough not to belabour in class (I'm not) is that you are all drug users. Many of you, moreover are certainly drug abusers--assuming we broadly define abuse as irresponsibly health-damaging consumption.

Do you, perhaps, smoke and/or drink frequently? Get pissed, even? Then you--yes, you--have a drug habit; and one, incidentally, which carries significantly greater health risks than those associated with the abuse of almost any illegal recreational drug.

Similarly, if you use prescription medication regularly--for anything from allergies to emotional disorders--odds are that whatever stuff you're taking is more dangerous to misuse, and has more unknown side-effects, than (say) speed or coke.

Anyone drink coffee? I know from experience that a lot of us seriously struggle to regulate our mood without our appropriately-scheduled caffeine infusions. Again: drug-taking; addiction; deliberate alteration of mental states.

Hell, I daresay most of you eat meat. "What the crap is this about now?", you ask? Well, your farm-reared sacrificial offerings are pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones and goodness knows what else. So when you chow down, you're effectively choosing to deliberately ingest whatever biochemical residue is still stagnating in that dead tissue. Mmmm.

All that being said, though... In the interests of topical focus, I'm not going to get into the issue of recreational drugs' preposterous illegality here. Nor the question of why religious and state authorities have relentlessly persecuted personal drug use, which I think was covered pretty well in class. Nor even how drug laws cause far more (and far worse) social problems than those they purport to solve, because that's a whole book on its own.

We know the facts of government policy regarding drugs. What I'd like to ask is: why do we buy it? Why do we, as a society, largely support heavy-handed, invasive drug laws--especially when we freely (indeed, according to some, endemically) abuse dangerous legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco?

We know that, medically speaking, the government is pulling our collective chain when it describes drugs like acid or Ecstasy as "dangerous." You don't need to hold a distinguished professorship in sociology¹ to observe that the problems so often attributed to 'drug use' are, in fact, caused by an illegal drugs trade, which encourages exploitation as the inevitable consequence of its prohibition. National authorities clearly feel that their gains in terms of social control via criminalisation outweigh any potential gains in revenue via regulation--or else they wouldn't do it. Attempts to prohibit drug use have, historically speaking, not only failed dismally in their stated objectives but also perniciously undermined our civil liberties. So why does a majority of the population tacitly condone that rationale, and accede to its implementation, even to the point of putting their own kids in jail for smoking dope?

It can't be adequately explained by simply pointing out that the vast majority of people are idiots, and therefore naturally inclined to mindlessly obey laws and conventions that are manifestly stupid and irrational (which they are, by the way). The specific issue requires a little more analysis than that. There are no doubt all sorts of complex social factors at work. I'd just like to throw out a personal theory regarding one of them, in the context of why drug use is so widely regarded as "being bad."

I suspect it ties back to the social concept of personal freedom vs social progress--something which seems to underpin our collective cognition with regard to 'bad behaviour' in general. This got me thinking on the topic of masturbation² again--or more accurately, back to the point Mark made in the Week 5 lecture regarding the nature of modern social stigma attached to masturbation: the fact that it was a form of sexual activity that (in common with 'sodomy' and so forth) had no potential 'issue', and was thus regarded as a waste of (reproductive) resources, thereby attracting the opprobrium of religious authorities concerned with social stratification and control.

The nation-state may have replaced the religious hierarchy as the de facto social authority, as far as contemporary Western society is concerned; but I think the principle remains the same, in terms of drug use. We are trained and conditioned literally from birth as social units; we subconsciously process everything we do through a dichotomy of 'constructive' vs 'indulgent' behaviour--and we're taught that the two are wholly separate are antithetical. Our social conditioning is based on the premise that only behaviours contributing to a lifestyle that endorses and engages with the social system (mostly in terms of definition through gainful employment, societally-improved models of 'relationship', and especially the avoidance of social criticism or introversion) can be considered 'constructive' or worthwhile. It's all about making your investment in an artificial, control-based system for (wholly subjective) mutual benefit.

To use drugs recreationally--to intentionally trip or get high on whatever--is to make an investment in yourself. The experience itself is not something that you can contribute to society, or even effectively share with anyone else.³ You've got nothing material to show for it once you come down; the benefits are entirely internal, and entirely personal. Recreational drug use cannot, therefore, ever be termed a 'constructive' activity in the conventional, social sense... and I think it's that which subconsciously informs the systemic social prejudice against it. People are artificially wired to object to anything which appears to represent unsanctioned self-indulgence. It doesn't need to be harmful or destructive in order to be 'bad'.

¹ Just for the record, I am not attempting by this remark to discourage anyone from pursuing a distinguished professorship in sociology, if they really must.
² Because most things do.
³ I'm thinking mostly in terms of hallucinogens as my example here, but the point also applies to stims and other 'party' drugs to a less exclusive degree.