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I always find it funny how polarized the world is about drugs. Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? I can't

I always find it funny how polarized the world is about drugs. Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way. People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.

simonh 10y ago
Well, unless it's alcohol or tobacco. Or in the Muslim world just unless it's tobacco. Or Khatt in Somalia. etc. It's a mess and entirely determined by cultural history. I'm not aware of any culture that comprehensively bans all drugs, they just dodge the issue by weaseling the definition of what constitutes a drug.
- lkozma 10y ago
  Or coffee/chocolate/etc.
  - manarth 10y ago
    Coffee was banned - even labelled Satanic - a number of times [1][2]. And whilst I don't know of any earthly bans on chocolate, the Aztec god Quetzacoatl was condemned by his fellow deities for sharing chocolate - reserved for the gods - with humans. They punished him by getting him drunk. [1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/12662/5-historical-attempts-ban-coffee http://mentalfloss.com/article/12662/5-historical-attempts-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#History
segmondy 10y ago
Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural manufactured hardcore narcotics. have you seen someone on crack? PCP? meth? those drugs destroy lives
- deelowe 10y ago
  Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural forms of transportation. 160 mph on the freeway? That sort of transportation destroys lives. You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.
  - segmondy 10y ago
    I was not replying to the article, but to the comment.
    - deelowe 10y ago
      Which was summarizing the premise of the article. > People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  And humans used to chew on bark, whereas we now have aspirin in pill form. We don't have some of the ills of the past either, though new ones take its place. Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today. Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  Refined, concentrated drugs are dangerous in general -- even distilled alcohol. Look at the impact of gin on England in the 1700s, which was at least as bad as the crack and meth epidemics put together; maybe worse, since all social classes drank gin dangerously heavily, and it was always available legally and cheaply.
- erroneousfunk 10y ago
  I really only have a passing academic interest in drugs, and don't tend to take sides when it comes to legalization, but "unnatural/manufactured/hardcore" vs "natural/indigenous/mild" is a silly view of things. What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural? What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What? While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.
wslh 10y ago
> I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population... I think this control is more about fear, for better or worse a society [more] active in drugs is unpredictable.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I don't think that argument holds up to reality. In fact the saying "opioid for the masses" seems to indicate that drugs could potentially be an effective tool to control "the masses". There's a lot to criticise in the war on drugs. But I don't think it involves a conspiracy to stun some imagined society of free-thinkers. If I had to name the worst mechanism at play here, it's the tendency of people to buy into law-and-order rhetoric and the lack of empathy for anybody who is seen as (even potentially) transgress.
jlos 10y ago
Appropriate punishmments, which drugs should be illegal and under what circumstances is a totally different area of discussion but the general attitude of most societies to the recreation use of more powerful drugs is quite sensible. Drug use is also nearly universally accepted in medical circumstances so we aren't really all that polarized. >> Why is nearly every culture against it Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves. >> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s'). And most illegal drugs are demonstratively not harmless, to the point its almost axiomatic.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  I think that the issue is that there is a fundamental difference in the entire view of drugs between people in society, one that is so large that it is nearly impossible to see across. This is what he is referring to. We permit, encourage or even glorify countless destructive, risky, or dangerous forms of behavior, including various legal mind altering substances. Alcoholism is known to be a serious issue, but alcohol and the vast ways that it is treated in our culture is widely accepted and encouraged. We allow extreme sports, or even "traditional" sports like gymnastics, most of us drive every day in conditions that should be objectively terrifying, we allow recreational firearm activities in most countries, smoking is legal, etc. But when it comes to drug use we put this huge social stigma on somewhat arbitrary substances, we impose significant punishments, we potentially ruin people's lives in the legal system, and all of this is so ingrained in our culture that even considering alternative systems is so radical that it seems like a fantasy. It's bizarre that such normal behavior is so incredibly reviled, when almost all of the negative consequences of it are due to the culture and legal system surrounding it rather than any physiological facts.
- steiger 10y ago
  >>>> Why is nearly every culture against it >> Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves. Yes, but we tolerate alcohol. We tolerate getting high - but we are selective about which drugs you can get high on. If we tolerate alcohol, so why don't we tolerate cannabis, psychedelics and other "soft drugs"? It's because of misinformation, fear, taboo and stigma. >>>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless >> This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s'). But if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime. Victimless crimes do nothing to help society - in fact, it degrades society, marginalizes and criminalizes otherwise respectable citizens, and in case of drug prohibition, guarantees that drug money goes to black market, which in turn potentially increase violent, real crime.
mattnewton 10y ago
I imagine its more acceptable to prohibit or demonize affectations of a minority culture than it is to prohibit the culture itself. The original American war on drugs has testimonies to suggest it came from a desire to persecute blacks and anti-war protesters. Anecdotally, where I live the city has passed ordnances against selling or displaying wire-wrap jewelry on the streets, and I can't think of a reason to single that out except that, because the materials are cheap it is a common source of income for transient populations. You can't make them illegal directly, but you can make all their activities illegal and arrest them when they inevitably break the law.
- SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
  "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
randcraw 10y ago
I think it's because 'civilization' is fundamentally about getting everyone to agree to abide by a common code of conduct. The restricted standards of behavior that follow offer various advantages over anarchy, albeit with fewer freedoms. Drugs are essentially anarchic because they inevitably lead to less constrained behavior and thought, which are threats to those standards and the willingness of others to play by the largely arbitrary set of rules that define and sustain civilized behavior in a fundamentally uncivilized world.
theoh 10y ago
I think there's probably some original wisdom in most taboos. Drugs are a clear case of something that can seriously threaten sanity and at the same time are exploited by the unscrupulous (dealers, cult leaders, etc.) Alcohol is a drug which has been deemed acceptable by western culture, perhaps because suppressing it is impossible and it's (relatively) innocuous. But it still ruins many lives. Changing attitudes to pornography are an interesting test case for the slow rehabilitation of a taboo activity.(Whether, in future, it does become completely normalized, or alternatively is definitively identified as an activity that, in its industrial form, is harmful to producers or consumers)
pjlegato 10y ago
It's inaccurate to say that nearly every culture is against "drugs" -- nicotine and caffeine are both relatively powerful drugs, and are widely accepted by most cultures on Earth, freely sold in vending machines and at corner shops. Moreover, most cultures accept the use of (generally poorly understood) mind-altering psychiatric medications. The question is why cultures accept some drugs but not others.
jeffdavis 10y ago
Imagine you are trying to keep a city functioning well. You've never met most of the people. Then some parts of the city start falling apart, and you notice a lot of people using drugs, fighting, and not working. The correlation would be obvious to anyone. You don't need a grand conspiracy to imagine why a leader might try to stop drug use. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But it can be easily explained without ulterior motives.
- HeroOfAges 10y ago
  I think the more effective approach to preventing parts of a city from being overrun by drug use and violence, is to find out why people are turning to drug use and violence in the first place and then address those underlying issues. And yes, there are ulterior motives behind criminalizing certain activities, especially if you know the actions you take will disproportionately harm a specific group of people. edit grammar
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    I didn't say it was a good way, nor did I say there are never ulterior motives.
- matt4077 10y ago
  If you're running a city, you should be part of the community to a degree that there are no parts were you're just operating on the level of some sort of 19th century explorer living with indigenous tribes. In fact, I think your allusion to some caricature of a (probably black) inner city and its problems is part of the problem more than the solution. Unless you're talking about a mayor from the projects who outlaws coke after hearing of its rampant use among investment bankers, and their propensity to fight each other over territory. In that case, I'd love to see the movie.
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    I said clearly that I was not implying that it was right. Just that it could clearly be explained without ulterior motives, which was a direct relply to another post.
pharrington 10y ago
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? Are you sure about this? My layman's observation has been that all societies have some list of approved drugs and drugs approved for specific purposes, then demonizes the unapproved drugs and unapproved use of drugs. Your general point still stands, but we need to be careful about romanticizing groups just because we think they're "closer to the earth" or whatever.
misja111 10y ago
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? > I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way That's hardly an explanation. Then why would nearly every culture like to have an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them? These kind of cultural traditions represent the lessons learned over many generations: it's because drugs tend to cause trouble. Not for everyone, but for enough people to cancel out the benefits.
alasdair_ 10y ago
>I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way. I assume it's mostly to ensure your culture has a suitable fighting force. If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up. It's only in the last hundred years or so that most nations have made most drugs illegal (there have been many exceptions of course but I'm talking about that mass banning across almost all nations that we see today). Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the British went to war with China for the right to keep selling their citizens opium.
- VT_Drew 10y ago
  >If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up. If all the world leaders were required to take psychedelics on a quarterly basis there would likely be no need for warriors. Every war is a civil war. We are all humans.
matt4077 10y ago
i don't think there's reason to go for the conspiracy here. Firstly, the effect of drug use in indigenous cultures may be limited (strongly) by culture: smaller communities having much stronger social controls on individuals' behaviour, which may in practice result in rules for drug use (and consequences for misuse) much like our's, just not in writing. Secondly, there seems to be a mechanism by which a culture develops shared methods to handle drugs by various means. See for example the difficulty indigenous cultures have had again and again in adapting to alcohol – compared to western cultures' relative benign[0] relationship with alcohol. Even within western cultures, there are differences in adaptation, with good adaptation usually being anti correlated to level of regulation. From the jewish and southern European cultures where 8-year old get a glass of red wine with lunch to the inebriated inanity that is the UK at last call. [0]: "relative" being the operative word here – alcohol obviously is a huge burden on western societies, in direct health effects, domestic violence, traffic deaths etc.
sandworm101 10y ago
Exacty which indigenous culture is pro-drugs? Some certainly promote some very specific practices that have long been part of thier culture, but that is hardly an endorsmemt. From austrailia to canadas north, indigenous groups are being hammered by alcohol an opiod epidemics, hammered harder than the non-native populations. None of them would ever promote increased drug use.
RobertKerans 10y ago
Yes, but even indigenous tribes surround usage with rituals, it's not a free-for-all. I disagree strongly with criminalisation, but almost universally, drugs make people extremely selfish and very easily destroy the sense of responsibility needed to work within a society. You can be incredibly reductive and say it's to have a firmer control on the population, and in some ways it is, but at the same time there are perfectly sensible reasons why there is a taboo. If I've had some acid, I'm not going to look after my kids very well. If I've smoked a load, I'm going to prefer sitting on the couch rather than going and doing some work. If I've taken a very strong opiate, that will make me feel better than almost anything else I can possibly do, so why not do that instead of other things. If I take ecstasy on Friday night, I'm going to stay up all night and then come down hard over the next day and I'm going to miss that family get together. All of these things are my choice, and criminalisation [I feel] is staggeringly wasteful and counterproductive. But drugs are often [cumulatively] socially destructive. I agree with you, but a helluva lot of time it's not as clear cut as just an easy excuse to imprison people
droidist2 10y ago
> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? Countries often pressure one another to make their laws as strict as their own, to prevent people from traveling abroad to break their laws (drug tourism, sex tourism). For instance about 5 years ago in The Netherlands, under pressure from neighboring countries they officially banned foreigners from buying pot from coffee shops (although this law is often ignored or overridden by local municipalities).
mirekrusin 10y ago
Your theory breaks when you consider China's problem with opium not so long ago.

simonh 10y ago

Well, unless it's alcohol or tobacco. Or in the Muslim world just unless it's tobacco. Or Khatt in Somalia. etc. It's a mess and entirely determined by cultural history. I'm not aware of any culture that comprehensively bans all drugs, they just dodge the issue by weaseling the definition of what constitutes a drug.

lkozma 10y ago
Or coffee/chocolate/etc.
- manarth 10y ago
  Coffee was banned - even labelled Satanic - a number of times [1][2]. And whilst I don't know of any earthly bans on chocolate, the Aztec god Quetzacoatl was condemned by his fellow deities for sharing chocolate - reserved for the gods - with humans. They punished him by getting him drunk. [1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/12662/5-historical-attempts-ban-coffee http://mentalfloss.com/article/12662/5-historical-attempts-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#History

segmondy 10y ago

Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural manufactured hardcore narcotics. have you seen someone on crack? PCP? meth? those drugs destroy lives

deelowe 10y ago
Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural forms of transportation. 160 mph on the freeway? That sort of transportation destroys lives. You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.
- segmondy 10y ago
  I was not replying to the article, but to the comment.
  - deelowe 10y ago
    Which was summarizing the premise of the article. > People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
And humans used to chew on bark, whereas we now have aspirin in pill form. We don't have some of the ills of the past either, though new ones take its place. Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today. Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.
clock_tower 10y ago
Refined, concentrated drugs are dangerous in general -- even distilled alcohol. Look at the impact of gin on England in the 1700s, which was at least as bad as the crack and meth epidemics put together; maybe worse, since all social classes drank gin dangerously heavily, and it was always available legally and cheaply.
erroneousfunk 10y ago
I really only have a passing academic interest in drugs, and don't tend to take sides when it comes to legalization, but "unnatural/manufactured/hardcore" vs "natural/indigenous/mild" is a silly view of things. What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural? What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What? While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.

wslh 10y ago

> I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population... I think this control is more about fear, for better or worse a society [more] active in drugs is unpredictable.

matt4077 10y ago
I don't think that argument holds up to reality. In fact the saying "opioid for the masses" seems to indicate that drugs could potentially be an effective tool to control "the masses". There's a lot to criticise in the war on drugs. But I don't think it involves a conspiracy to stun some imagined society of free-thinkers. If I had to name the worst mechanism at play here, it's the tendency of people to buy into law-and-order rhetoric and the lack of empathy for anybody who is seen as (even potentially) transgress.

jlos 10y ago

Appropriate punishmments, which drugs should be illegal and under what circumstances is a totally different area of discussion but the general attitude of most societies to the recreation use of more powerful drugs is quite sensible. Drug use is also nearly universally accepted in medical circumstances so we aren't really all that polarized. >> Why is nearly every culture against it Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves. >> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s'). And most illegal drugs are demonstratively not harmless, to the point its almost axiomatic.

BookmarkSaver 10y ago
I think that the issue is that there is a fundamental difference in the entire view of drugs between people in society, one that is so large that it is nearly impossible to see across. This is what he is referring to. We permit, encourage or even glorify countless destructive, risky, or dangerous forms of behavior, including various legal mind altering substances. Alcoholism is known to be a serious issue, but alcohol and the vast ways that it is treated in our culture is widely accepted and encouraged. We allow extreme sports, or even "traditional" sports like gymnastics, most of us drive every day in conditions that should be objectively terrifying, we allow recreational firearm activities in most countries, smoking is legal, etc. But when it comes to drug use we put this huge social stigma on somewhat arbitrary substances, we impose significant punishments, we potentially ruin people's lives in the legal system, and all of this is so ingrained in our culture that even considering alternative systems is so radical that it seems like a fantasy. It's bizarre that such normal behavior is so incredibly reviled, when almost all of the negative consequences of it are due to the culture and legal system surrounding it rather than any physiological facts.
steiger 10y ago
>>>> Why is nearly every culture against it >> Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves. Yes, but we tolerate alcohol. We tolerate getting high - but we are selective about which drugs you can get high on. If we tolerate alcohol, so why don't we tolerate cannabis, psychedelics and other "soft drugs"? It's because of misinformation, fear, taboo and stigma. >>>> People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless >> This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60's-70s'). But if you criminalise behavior that does not really harm anyone else but yourself (at most), you're inventing a victimless crime. Victimless crimes do nothing to help society - in fact, it degrades society, marginalizes and criminalizes otherwise respectable citizens, and in case of drug prohibition, guarantees that drug money goes to black market, which in turn potentially increase violent, real crime.

mattnewton 10y ago

I imagine its more acceptable to prohibit or demonize affectations of a minority culture than it is to prohibit the culture itself. The original American war on drugs has testimonies to suggest it came from a desire to persecute blacks and anti-war protesters. Anecdotally, where I live the city has passed ordnances against selling or displaying wire-wrap jewelry on the streets, and I can't think of a reason to single that out except that, because the materials are cheap it is a common source of income for transient populations. You can't make them illegal directly, but you can make all their activities illegal and arrest them when they inevitably break the law.

SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...

randcraw 10y ago

I think it's because 'civilization' is fundamentally about getting everyone to agree to abide by a common code of conduct. The restricted standards of behavior that follow offer various advantages over anarchy, albeit with fewer freedoms. Drugs are essentially anarchic because they inevitably lead to less constrained behavior and thought, which are threats to those standards and the willingness of others to play by the largely arbitrary set of rules that define and sustain civilized behavior in a fundamentally uncivilized world.

theoh 10y ago

I think there's probably some original wisdom in most taboos. Drugs are a clear case of something that can seriously threaten sanity and at the same time are exploited by the unscrupulous (dealers, cult leaders, etc.) Alcohol is a drug which has been deemed acceptable by western culture, perhaps because suppressing it is impossible and it's (relatively) innocuous. But it still ruins many lives. Changing attitudes to pornography are an interesting test case for the slow rehabilitation of a taboo activity.(Whether, in future, it does become completely normalized, or alternatively is definitively identified as an activity that, in its industrial form, is harmful to producers or consumers)

pjlegato 10y ago

It's inaccurate to say that nearly every culture is against "drugs" -- nicotine and caffeine are both relatively powerful drugs, and are widely accepted by most cultures on Earth, freely sold in vending machines and at corner shops. Moreover, most cultures accept the use of (generally poorly understood) mind-altering psychiatric medications. The question is why cultures accept some drugs but not others.

jeffdavis 10y ago

Imagine you are trying to keep a city functioning well. You've never met most of the people. Then some parts of the city start falling apart, and you notice a lot of people using drugs, fighting, and not working. The correlation would be obvious to anyone. You don't need a grand conspiracy to imagine why a leader might try to stop drug use. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But it can be easily explained without ulterior motives.

HeroOfAges 10y ago
I think the more effective approach to preventing parts of a city from being overrun by drug use and violence, is to find out why people are turning to drug use and violence in the first place and then address those underlying issues. And yes, there are ulterior motives behind criminalizing certain activities, especially if you know the actions you take will disproportionately harm a specific group of people. edit grammar
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  I didn't say it was a good way, nor did I say there are never ulterior motives.
matt4077 10y ago
If you're running a city, you should be part of the community to a degree that there are no parts were you're just operating on the level of some sort of 19th century explorer living with indigenous tribes. In fact, I think your allusion to some caricature of a (probably black) inner city and its problems is part of the problem more than the solution. Unless you're talking about a mayor from the projects who outlaws coke after hearing of its rampant use among investment bankers, and their propensity to fight each other over territory. In that case, I'd love to see the movie.
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  I said clearly that I was not implying that it was right. Just that it could clearly be explained without ulterior motives, which was a direct relply to another post.

pharrington 10y ago

> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? Are you sure about this? My layman's observation has been that all societies have some list of approved drugs and drugs approved for specific purposes, then demonizes the unapproved drugs and unapproved use of drugs. Your general point still stands, but we need to be careful about romanticizing groups just because we think they're "closer to the earth" or whatever.

misja111 10y ago

> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? > I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way That's hardly an explanation. Then why would nearly every culture like to have an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them? These kind of cultural traditions represent the lessons learned over many generations: it's because drugs tend to cause trouble. Not for everyone, but for enough people to cancel out the benefits.

alasdair_ 10y ago

>I can't really imagine it's for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way. I assume it's mostly to ensure your culture has a suitable fighting force. If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up. It's only in the last hundred years or so that most nations have made most drugs illegal (there have been many exceptions of course but I'm talking about that mass banning across almost all nations that we see today). Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the British went to war with China for the right to keep selling their citizens opium.

VT_Drew 10y ago
>If half of the warriors are drunk or stoned, you'll lose whatever battle happens to come up. If all the world leaders were required to take psychedelics on a quarterly basis there would likely be no need for warriors. Every war is a civil war. We are all humans.

matt4077 10y ago

i don't think there's reason to go for the conspiracy here. Firstly, the effect of drug use in indigenous cultures may be limited (strongly) by culture: smaller communities having much stronger social controls on individuals' behaviour, which may in practice result in rules for drug use (and consequences for misuse) much like our's, just not in writing. Secondly, there seems to be a mechanism by which a culture develops shared methods to handle drugs by various means. See for example the difficulty indigenous cultures have had again and again in adapting to alcohol – compared to western cultures' relative benign[0] relationship with alcohol. Even within western cultures, there are differences in adaptation, with good adaptation usually being anti correlated to level of regulation. From the jewish and southern European cultures where 8-year old get a glass of red wine with lunch to the inebriated inanity that is the UK at last call. [0]: "relative" being the operative word here – alcohol obviously is a huge burden on western societies, in direct health effects, domestic violence, traffic deaths etc.

sandworm101 10y ago

Exacty which indigenous culture is pro-drugs? Some certainly promote some very specific practices that have long been part of thier culture, but that is hardly an endorsmemt. From austrailia to canadas north, indigenous groups are being hammered by alcohol an opiod epidemics, hammered harder than the non-native populations. None of them would ever promote increased drug use.

RobertKerans 10y ago

Yes, but even indigenous tribes surround usage with rituals, it's not a free-for-all. I disagree strongly with criminalisation, but almost universally, drugs make people extremely selfish and very easily destroy the sense of responsibility needed to work within a society. You can be incredibly reductive and say it's to have a firmer control on the population, and in some ways it is, but at the same time there are perfectly sensible reasons why there is a taboo. If I've had some acid, I'm not going to look after my kids very well. If I've smoked a load, I'm going to prefer sitting on the couch rather than going and doing some work. If I've taken a very strong opiate, that will make me feel better than almost anything else I can possibly do, so why not do that instead of other things. If I take ecstasy on Friday night, I'm going to stay up all night and then come down hard over the next day and I'm going to miss that family get together. All of these things are my choice, and criminalisation [I feel] is staggeringly wasteful and counterproductive. But drugs are often [cumulatively] socially destructive. I agree with you, but a helluva lot of time it's not as clear cut as just an easy excuse to imprison people

droidist2 10y ago

> Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes? Countries often pressure one another to make their laws as strict as their own, to prevent people from traveling abroad to break their laws (drug tourism, sex tourism). For instance about 5 years ago in The Netherlands, under pressure from neighboring countries they officially banned foreigners from buying pot from coffee shops (although this law is often ignored or overridden by local municipalities).

mirekrusin 10y ago

Your theory breaks when you consider China's problem with opium not so long ago.