User:Sixthsense1

Recreational Drug Use

Recreational or Non-prescription Use of Drugs: An Overview

The destinies of humans and the drugs they put to ‘’’non-prescription or recreational’’’ use are so intertwined that the relationship bears thorough and continuous investigation and negotiation/renegotiation. These aims are not furthered by either outright prohibition or uncritical acceptance. The purpose of this article is to stimulate critical thinking instead.

‘’’Non-prescription or recreational drugs’’’ are valued for their psychoactive properties. Barring Inuit societies, to whom the frigid temperatures of the North Pole had traditionally barred their availability, humans in all other societies have reserved their use for occasions to be merry, to celebrate the ceremonial and heraldic aspects of life, to be introspective, to be productive, to promote group solidarity and to supply such other anticipated and desired effects as fortitude, combat-readiness, creativity, effort, perseverance and relaxation. They have been used in religious practices, divination and cuisine. They have also been used as social markers to distinguish one group from another within a society. For example, when coffeehouses were first established in England, they were known as “penny universities,” as their clientele, who paid a penny for a cup of the brew, were most likely to be educated or literate persons who used these meeting places to showcase their talents: other Englishwomen and men remained loyal to tea (see below). In caste India, marijuana was prepared as a drink for upper caste consumption, while lower caste users smoked it. A similar distinction was to be found in rural Jamaica, where younger users smoked ganja (marijuana) publicly in boisterous groups while their elders, anxious to preserve their anonymity and their reputations as respectable senior citizens, discreetly drank it in tonics, teas and tisanes. More recently, low-income, minority, urban populations in the United States smoked cocaine as crack, a pre-prepared and pre-packaged product: more affluent, white cocaine smokers prepared the smokable precipitate at home for themselves, using their own purchases of the actual cocaine hydrochloride powder, and called it freebase. Laws that punished possession of crack ten times more harshly than cocaine hydrochloride powder were therefore eminently discriminatory, as both substances generally had the identical pharmacological outcome.

Recreational Drug Use in America

Popular Drugs and Their Use

In America, the drugs most frequently used for the aforementioned purposes include: alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, chocolate, marijuana, cocaine, the opiates (including heroin and synthetics like fentanyl), amphetamine, ketamine, Ecstasy, and the barbiturates. Occasionally, the recreational user stateside may also come into possession of substances that are more commonly available abroad, such as the fly-agaric or other magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, pituri, betel nut, ayahausca, the San Pedro cactus, kava kava or khat. When drugs that medical practitioners prescribe to treat specified, diagnosed medical conditions are used without sanction of such a prescription and for any of the aforementioned purposes, ipso facto they cross the classificatory line into ’’’non-prescription or recreational use.’’’ Serotonin inhibitors like Valium, Prozac, Elavil and other antidepressants, which have a valued place in the treatment of clinical depression, are a class of drugs which routinely crossover because they also diffusely elevate users’ mood and effect euphoria: painkillers like Percodan or Demerol (both synthetic opiates), which are indispensable during major surgery or other cases of extreme physical trauma, are similar, as the feeling of painlessness is independently pleasurable and empowering. (The medical use of marijuana is an example of an attempted crossover from the other direction.) And it should be borne in mind that, with ingenuity, home-based chemists (often amateurs trained on the Internet) may convert into powerful psychoactives many substances that are readily available over the counter in groceries and health food stores. The number of drugs to be considered in this article is therefore virtually unlimited.

The ‘’’recreational or non-prescription use’’’ of drugs is of the greatest antiquity, and scholars have asserted that it originated in the Paleolithic Age. Some have speculated that the first human users were mimicking the behavior of other animals and that the meeting between psychoactive plants, which contain the drugs, and psychoactive animals, as humans are, was inevitable. Altered states of consciousness could well have prompted humans to acquire an inner life, mentality, memory, language and self-consciousness generally. Mystically inclined writers even appeal to the notion of a consciousness-at-large, which transcends individual nervous systems and of which these plants are repositories, providing knowledge about the universe and existence that humans incrementally access as needed. Far from delusional, therefore, experiences encountered in the psychedelic state connect users to a more fundamental or spiritual reality.

In his “Cocaine Papers,” Freud maintained that drugs have an important function in the chemical economy of the brain. Because human life is so fragile and so much at the mercy of external forces, because happiness can never be sustained but is always only episodic, drugs deliver individuals from an inherently frustrating condition. In his “Varieties of the Religious Experience,” William James has suggested that drugs are valuable as an aid in the religious quest for self-transcendence. He argued that initiation and subsequent drug use might resemble religious conversion and the life of a devotee, who surrenders utterly and completely to the Beloved.

Of course, ‘’’recreational or non-prescription drugs’’’ having psychoactive, therapeutic or other desirable effects can still be dangerous. As they are no different from poisons except in dosage, most cultures have regarded them as Janus-faced: from this angle smiling benignly, from the other side ugly, ominous and even lethal. Many other cultural objects or activities are characterized by the same duality. Even in so far as such drug taking is risk taking, however, its apologists have asserted that both are necessary for human evolution and progress. The species could not have advanced, they submit, if pioneers had not abandoned the comforts of the safe and familiar and ventured into the hazardous unknown.

Drugs and the Law

Traditional or pre-modern societies, recognizing the potential for harm, reduced it by completely circumscribing drug seeking and drug use by rules. While cherishing them, they were not indiscriminately permissive and did not tolerate any and all drug use under any circumstances. On the contrary, elaborate customs, rituals and belief systems combined to define and limit the appropriate settings, behaviors and attitudes for acceptable drug use. These tightly interrelated patterns of cultural life imposed a compelling set of social controls that averted drug abuse and related risks. Indeed, drug-using traditional cultures effectively maintained remarkable social cohesion, and some, surviving genocidal assaults against them in the modern age, have endured for thousands of years. It is noteworthy that drug users today often spontaneously and informally recreate modern versions of these elaborate customs, rituals and belief systems that had worked so well as safeguards for their predecessors, albeit in the teeth of fierce societal opposition, illegality and harsh criminal justice punishments.

Foremost among traditional safeguards was the requirement for youth to be initiated into ‘’’recreational or non-prescription drug use’’’ under the personal supervision of respected elders, whether their own fathers, uncles, female relatives or the shaman of the tribe. It is a safeguard that modern users also strive to replicate, however fragmentarily. These experts determined the eligibility of participants, the appropriate dosages and the hour and circumstances of use (often preceded by preparatory ritual cleansing or abstinences from certain activities or other substances). They participated during the drug-using session itself, giving practical guidance and alerting their charges about what effects to expect and how to deal with them. These sessions were frequently ceremonial and communal, attended again by the initiate’s closest kin, intimates and co-workers, a circumstance that by itself encouraged control and decorum. Additionally, the socially accepted drugs in traditional societies were almost always locally grown plants from the nearby habitat. Naturally diluted by other, non-psychoactive ingredients, the drugs in these plant or liquid forms were usually less potent than the refined powders, pills and injectants that chemists now derive from them.

Diverse traditional societies thus furnish a treasury of examples of how human actors can deliberately mold and craft the effects that ’’’recreational or non-prescription drugs’’’ will have upon them. Cross-cultural comparisons, for example, demonstrate how the same drugs have encountered contrastive responses in different local contexts because of this deliberate molding and crafting. Even chocolate, as harmless as it appears to modern Americans, was proscribed in some places as a dangerous, habit-forming aphrodisiac.

Modern society has drastically altered the human-drug interactions sketched above. The market economy, with its emphases on earning and spending money; the formation of nation-states and the conflicts among them; American hegemony since the late twentieth century; the emergence of a global economy and the polarization of wealth and control of resources; ethnic divisions and cultural strife; and the threat of environmental collapse, overpopulation and nuclear disaster have forged modern humans who have vastly complicated their relationship with ‘’’recreational or non-prescription drugs.’’’ Of course, the rise of professional associations of chemists and drug manufacturers, which reserve for themselves exclusive rights under licensing arrangements to make and prescribe drugs, played a decisive role (see under).

Modern society connotes especially the replacement of traditional social classes and the relationships among them, and the substitution has especially modified the human-drug equation. For example, the Western European consumption of exotic and intoxicating substances in the medieval period was linked with changes in labor, class structure and leisure, through which the shift from feudal, agrarian economies to their bourgeois, industrial successors was mediated. At first, upwardly mobile Western Europeans clamored for exotic, “oriental” and tropical goods, and the consumption of intoxicating or psychoactive substances was particularly associated with a rise in status. The nobility was demarcated by its fondness for spices, tobacco and coffee. Eventually, tea was favored by the emerging industrial bourgeoisie in England, chocolate by the leisure class and alcohol –the indigenous European intoxicant- by the working masses. While serving thus as indicators of metamorphosing class structure, these stimulants and intoxicants helped to acculturate and socialize users to the new social order by satisfying desire and supplying pleasure. Other imported luxuries, such as spices, fabrics and furniture and (sometimes) whole systems of mathematical or philosophical thought, were adopted to confer and affirm status.

This initial enthusiasm was soured by the colonial relationship into which Western European nations then entered with the territories that supplied many of these goods. Tropical countries with their native populations, flora and fauna turned especially disquieting. Their initial appeal had to be subordinated to the trade in slaves and the justification for slavery, and distaste and condemnation soon set in. The colonial ideology eventually reduced the actual diversity of the tropics and projected the darker elements of experience –greed, lack of control, incivility, ignorance, crude intoxication, barbarism and inhumanity –onto subjugated, tropical peoples, monopolizing their opposites as the virtues of the colonizing Europeans. Recreational or non-prescription drugs -heroin, cocaine, marijuana, tobacco, tea, chocolate, coffee etc- are all, with the exception of alcohol, tropical in origin- were thus drawn into a brutal, political drama. King James of England lashed out against tobacco, and Roman Catholic Spaniards against coca, because they represented the Devil, another increasingly tropicalized, folklore figure.

Intolerance was pushed to new heights in the nineteenth century by a small but powerful and influential number of Puritanical Americans with the declared intention of making their fellow citizens and the rest of the world drug free. Before the anti-drug prohibitionist movement, only opium had been regulated in the United States. The movement combined sincere concerns about drug addiction with the political agenda of professionals, such as licensed doctors and chemists, who aimed to monopolize the lucrative businesses of diagnosing illness and prescribing cures. In reaction to an age before Americans had systematically regulated its health care services, when careless distinctions were sometimes made between real and imagined diseases and the public was being aggressively plied with a myriad drug preparations to relieve them, the professionals founded the American Medical Association and the American Association of Chemists, which launched a political campaign to eliminate untrained and unlicensed competitors. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel exposing the unhygienic conditions of the meat-packing industries and lauded by President Theodore Roosevelt as a passionate statement against interstate commerce in mislabeled or bogus foods and drugs, was a first fruit of these efforts. The Act also responded to the indiscriminate use of cocaine and opiates in prepared foods and beverages, such as Coca-Cola and the other medicated drinks that were popular at the time.

The mighty industrialists of the day supported the movement. Previously, employers had encouraged drug use as a boost to productivity, as they had in pre-industrial economies. For example, a hallowed place for alcohol in particular was found in negotiations between employees and employers, who agreed to pay wages as well as an allotment of liquor, and either set aside hours for drinking or permitted it during work itself. Obliged to rely on an increasingly motley work force, however, which included disorderly elements among urban, Catholic, working class immigrants, African Americans from the segregated South, and immigrant Mexicans, these Protestant factory owners and capitalists used the enforcement of drug and alcohol prohibition by police to discipline and control workers. Religious factions, such as the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other organized groups of Protestant, middle class and rural outlook, joined them. They were greatly empowered by the developments in the mid-nineteenth century, such as the increasing replacement of the small workshop by factories, an attendant shift from informal work norms to the more structured shop-floor regimen, increased working class incomes, shorter work days and a more rigid separation of the workplace from leisure-time or domestic pursuits. Instead of occurring on the job, drinking was diverted to such new establishments as saloons and recreational lounges. By 1877, Louise Hayes, a Methodist, had banned serving alcoholic drinks in The White House, and cartoonists surprised President Rutherford B. Hayes as he allegedly sneaked out with cronies to drink at these “trendy” public venues.

These combined forces scored their first victory with the Harrison Act in 1914, which was the first comprehensive federal legislation to prohibit the distribution of opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine. Marijuana was added to the list in the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 through the single-handed efforts of Harry Anslinger, a discredited customs officer who revived his career with this crusade.

Their next major victory was the prohibition of alcohol by a constitutional amendment of 1919, which remained in effect until its repeal in 1933. Prohibition resulted especially from the culmination of efforts by the religious campaigners. The nation was preoccupied with war and approved of postponing pleasure for the greater, national good; it distrusted German-Americans, who were financing the alcohol lobby; and it questioned the good faith of saloonkeepers who disregarded public health concerns. But the outcomes of the legislation –crime and illegal alcohol production, distribution and use- eventually led other Americans to oppose it.

Briefly stated, subsequent drug policy has been less sweeping. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which applied principally to the pharmaceutical industry, restricted the availability of a wider range of drugs to “by prescription only” and established guidelines for the testing and manufacture of new drugs. The Humphrey-Durham and Kefauver-Harris amendments, of 1951 and 1962 respectively, strengthened them. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (The Controlled Substances Act) of 1970 divided drug into five schedules, each carrying its specific regulations and penalties for violating them. Although it was lenient towards drug users, it targeted organized-crime distributors.

Nonetheless, prohibitionists have rallied again. They have added powerful new weapons to their anti-drug arsenals. Whereas their predecessors had stopped short of actively demonizing drug users and drug distributors, preferring to regard them as unfortunates who mostly did harm to themselves, today’s “drug warriors” have succeeded in portraying them as dangerous “enemy combatants “of the state. Crime, violence, perversion and subversive activity –all have been laid at their doorstep. At this time of writing, the fourth in a series of “wars against drugs” rages unabated (see below).
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Historical References to Drugs

Writing about ‘’’recreational or non-prescription drugs’’’ or orally passing down thoughts and folklore about them are human activities almost as ancient as consuming them and has accompanied all of the milestones surveyed thus far in this article. An extant, second century B.C. Chinese pharmacopeia, for example, chronicled oral traditions concerning the medical uses of marijuana in Central Asia that had originated in Neolithic practices. At about the same time, the extensive use of marijuana in India was recorded in the Atharva Veda, a treatise on religious ritual. Religious texts, epic poetry and dramatic works were other repositories of information about these drugs. The Bible reports the fondness that Hebrews, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Ephesians had for marijuana; and centuries before heroin was synthesized, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid had lauded the superlative therapeutic values of opiates. The renowned Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Arab physicians, such as Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna, had written prescriptions for them as food and medicine: while surviving stone tablets, pottery, statuary, scrolls, drawings and paintings, mandalas, embroideries and drug paraphernalia furnished another kind of commentary.
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Herodotus, the Greek traveler credited with being “the father of history,” took the earliest step in the direction of the more scientific kind of writing that ‘’’the political economy of drugs’’’ paradigm exemplifies. He carefully observed and reported actual occasions of marijuana use among nomadic Scythians in the fifth century B.C. Ibn Khaldun, the Arabic historian and ethnographer, also took a keen interest in marijuana and hashish. Although suspicious of intoxication, Islamic societies tolerated eating and smoking them, and he documented and commented on the customs and mores of the extensive Arab demimonde that did so.
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Opiates had long been a staple of European pharmacopeias, with laudanum, a tonic prepared and vigorously advertised by the English physician Thomas Sydenham, attaining the universal popularity that would be the coca leaf’s (in Coca-Cola) two hundred years later in the United States. Then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the heyday of a consumer revolution that enormously multiplied the number of commodities persons or households would require for self-definition and status display, European novelists, memoirists and poets wrote copiously about their experimentation with hashish and such novelties as cocaine and heroin. American literati like Fitz Hugh Ludlow were soon following in the path that Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Théophile Gautier and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had blazed on the continent. They would be followed by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the end, jazz and rock ‘n roll kicked in: Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendricks, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Kurt Cobain and Mary J.Blige among very many others gave testimonies of personal and societal drug use and drug abuse in music and song.
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In the 1960’s, concerned that the counterculture had pre-empted the discourse on drugs to the detriment of labor productivity stateside, conformity by youth to middle class morals, their motivation to work and succeed and particularly the fighting morale of U.S. troops in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the federal government carved out of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a brand-new, specialized entity, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has since become the source of funding for 80% percent of drug research undertaken worldwide. The political economy of drugs paradigm was developed as a corrective to the psychopharmacological paradigm in drug research and treatment that NIDA had espoused from the start, which emphasizes the alleged chemical properties of the substances and the assumed pathological tendencies of their human users. Most of the projects NIDA funds are conducted in laboratories, which obviously do not replicate the everyday contexts of drug use, and often involve experiments on captive, laboratory animals which often have little relevance to the situations of humans. They have spawned an unfortunate and ultimately counterproductive set of concepts, operating principles and metaphors. These include: “disease,” “contagion,” “disease carrier,” “at risk, “quarantine,” “anti-dote” and “surgical removal.” They have culminated in three successive “wars on drugs,” which have made “enemy combatants” of persons who are our parents, children, neighbors, co-workers and fellow Americans, consigning them to prison under mandatory sentencing procedures and depriving them of a wide range of civil and legal entitlements in housing, banking and fiduciary services, employment, participation in government and political representation generally. These civil wars have decreased neither the availability nor the appeal of drugs.

The political economy of drugs paradigm investigates the political, economic, social and cultural conditions affecting the global supply and demand of illegal drugs and illegal drug trafficking and drug consumption at the local level in order to explain their popularity, persistence and effects. Illegal drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin have been the major ones investigated thus far. At one end, broad geopolitical factors, such as movements of capital and labor, the activities of multinational corporations and agencies, international power struggles over resources and markets, war and similar large scale occurrences are factored in; at the other, various social policies operating at street level, different grassroots law enforcement strategies, rates of incarceration, the local presence or absence of treatment and educational resources and internal developments in economic, social and cultural forces operating among users and distributors are considered. Altogether, these determinants influence the way a drug is presented and received in a population, which in turn account for its psychosocial outcomes, whether benign or the opposite.

The political economy of drugs paradigm resulted from extensive ethnographic research undertaken by anthropologists since 1976 in the areas of drug use, drug abuse, [drug production]] and drug distribution. Anthropologists consistently emphasize the broader socio-cultural and socio-political parameters that determine the phenomena under observation. Within this focus, the earliest work pioneered the investigation of drug markets, drug economies and of the informal economy generally, in which they participate. For example, using data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Trinidad in 1976, 1977 and 1978, Hamid, an anthropologist trained at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and a leading proponent of the paradigm, mapped the sectors (production, distribution, exchange and reinvestment) and social organization of a burgeoning Caribbean marijuana economy and demonstrated how Rastafarians [members of a Caribbean religio-political movement, commonly identified by their dreadlocks functioned as its “hearts and minds” and as a regional “development elite,” rather than as adherents of an obscure, unintelligible “cult.”
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This perspective thus illuminated the relationships between economy, society and culture and led to other important theoretical insights. Researching cocaine smoking (freebase and crack) during the 1980’s, Hamid discovered that, following onset, cocaine smokers in low-income, minority neighborhoods were chiefly affected, not in their familial or other roles, but as laborers. He concluded that, as generators and spenders of income, drug users and distributors formed a special type of laboring population, an essential one in the hierarchy of labor that the overall economy comprises. Comparing them with the marijuana users and distributors he had previously studied, he stipulated how their performances were linked to evolutionary processes in local, regional and global economies. Marijuana “built up” individuals and communities, or aided capital accumulation, while cocaine smoking, facilitating capital depletion, “emptied out” both. His analytical framework partially explained drug fashions (or, in this instance, how cocaine had replaced marijuana in popularity), neighborhood variations in drug use and distribution as well as differentiation by age, gender and ethnicity. It also enabled him to hypothesize that drug addiction, rather than a psychopathology or a result of irreversible pharmacological actions, had supra-individual aspects and more resembled an aberrant consumer behavior.
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Afforded the opportunity to research New York City’s cocaine smoking “epidemic” of the 1980’s in its entirety, Hamid made another signal contribution by defining the many factors, including evolving neighborhood social, economic, cultural and political contexts, drug prices, their availability, law enforcement initiatives, media coverage, and internal contradictions in the organization of users and distributors that had moved it through the six stages of a developmental cycle, from onset to decline and stabilization. The modus operandi of distributors, as well as drug use patterns and other behaviors of users (for example, family dysfunction, deficits in parenting, sex-for-drugs exchanges or prostitution, HIV seropositivity, violence and non-drug crime) were distinct in each stage. He also noted indigenous processes of learning and control in younger persons that prevented them from being recruited to the practice. He was thus the first researcher to announce the decline of cocaine smoking (or crack) in New York City in the early 1990’s.
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Treatment modalities into which these considerations are interwoven strive not only for a discontinuation of drug abuse but also a positive makeover of the whole person, beginning with the perceptual, cognitive and affective structures of consumer behavior. Principally, they have benefited from a regard for contingency. Thus, users and effects metamorphosed over the course of the cocaine-smoking outbreak, although the pharmacology of the drug and the physiology or mental health status of users remained constant. At first, the practice was an expensive luxury, and use of the drug was restricted to affluent persons who did not find it instantly addictive. Later, when it had been adopted by a less affluent and more heterogeneous population and one, moreover, that exhibited high consumption periodicities in regard to other (legal and illegal) commodities, variable effects were experienced, including compulsion and bingeing. The habit, at five years of age, of running ecstatically at very frequent intervals to the corner store to buy junk food (potato chips, candy and artificial juices at 1,500 % markups, much more than any drug ever sold!) had been turned, at 23 years of age, into the habit of running to the crack spot for another type of junk. Thus, the nature of the therapeutic intervention had to be adjusted to the particular moment in a drug-using career or a drug use outbreak. (edit) It remains for drug policy to be as flexible and adaptive as the phenomena they are meant to regulate. It is unfortunate that, so far, policymakers in the United States have not been guided by this truism and its implications.

References

Freud, Sigmund, Cocaine Papers. (R.Byck, ed). New York, (Stonehill 1890/1974) Ansley Hamid, Drugs in America: Sociology, Economics, Politics (Aspen 1998) Ansley Hamid, The Ganja Complex: Rastafari and Marijuana (Lexington Books 2002). James. William, The Varieties of Religious Experience. (Penguin/New American Library 1902/1958)

See also by Ansley Hamid: The Developmental Cycle of a Drug Epidemic: The Cocaine-Smoking Epidemic of 1981-1991.Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (special issue ed. James A. Inciardi), Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec.1992) pp. 337-349; Drugs And Patterns of Opportunity in the Inner City: the Case of Middle Age, Middle Income Cocaine Smokers. In Drugs, Crime and Social Isolation: Barriers to Urban Opportunity. Adele Harrell and George Peterson, eds. Chapter 7, pp. 209-238. (Urban Institute Press 1992); Political Economy of Crack Related Violence. Journal of Contemporary Drug Issues, Spring, 1990. pp. 31-78; and The Decline of Crack Use in New York City: Drug Policy or Natural Controls? International Journal on Drug Policy, Vol. II, No. 5, 1990, pp. 26-28