I was wondering if there is historical precednt for the drug use epidemic we are seeing. I remember reading that in the Holland of Vermeer’s day (ca 1600’s), a large proportion of the adult male population were incapacitated by drink…and we have Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” prints of London. Could a modern society survice if everybody smoked marijuana?
As the saying goes: If you can remember the 60’s, you weren’t there.
Do you have any statistics that there is a particularly large amount of drug use these days as compared with earlier times? I’ve read, for instance, that cocaine was used more in the late nineteenth century than it is now. I would also presume that there is less drug use than, say, thirty or forty years ago.
Certainly alcohol is a destructive drug, and its popularity has risen and fallen over the past centuries. We currently lose billions of dollars of productivity and health care costs due to its effects. Opium was big in China in the 19th-early 20th century.
It’s a speculative question, but I’d have to say society would thrive and improve if everyone could smoke legally. Cannabis is minimally harmful and minimally habit forming and would tend to displace real killer habits like meth, crack, and the most harmful drug of all, alcohol. Since the only violent crime from drugs comes from its being traded between armed factions, this would disappear literally overnight if everyone could grow it in their back yards.
Opium was also more common in the nineteenth century, I believe.
Would we be required to smoke marijuana in your hypothetical society? Because, like, um, for me, you know, man, it’s kinda well, you know, um, a bit disorienting, and my, ah, hold on a minute, yeah, my funcitonality sort of decreases.
And the effects carryover into the next day or two. Even moderate alcohol use has the same effect. So I seldom drink and never smoke. If you mandated that everyone smoke marijuana, I suspect you’d find some sensitive people become functional zombies.
Cite please. In my experience, people whose addiction is to meth, crack, or alcohol (or opiates for that matter) will not be satisfied with any amount of marijuana.
Is this a General Questions thread or a Great Debates thread? Discussing what the historical rates of drug use have been is a General Questions matter. Discussing whether drug use should be legal is a Great Debates matter.
True for those already addicted, I grant you. But if cannabis were like beer, legally and safely obtained, then there would be many people who would be satisfied with that and would not be inclined to experiment further. These would of course be the people who are just looking for a good weekend buzz, admittedly they do not represent all drug use patterns but I think they are the largest.
I recall hearing on the Commentary track for *Deadwood * that one of the reasons people drank so much alcohol was it really was not a good idea to drink the water.
As others have said, China had a huge number of opium addicts about 100 years ago or so when the British kinda forced opium down their throats.
I’ve read a large portion of the Nazi’s back in the day were also fed amphetamines to keep them juiced up during the blitzkreig attacks. America also fed our pilots amphetamines as well.
Alcohol of course has been used since biblical times. There’s obvious bad side-effects from it, but there was a pretty good chance of picking up cholera/dysentary from the local drinking source, before water treatment plants were around. A fermented wine/mead with zero cholera and zero dysentary may hurt the liver a bit, but sounds much more pleasant than spending a week expelling liquids from both ends to the point of near-death.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that we’re in the middle of a drug epidemic at the moment though. Unless you’re including prescription drug abuse. Of course, those are sanctioned by the government, so those don’t count.
:rolleyes:
Don’t forget around 1900, there were a lot of little old lady drug addicts. Routine cures for every sort of ailment contained various amounts of opiates.
The Civil War produced a large number of drug addicts. I have an interesting book called Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940, by David T. Courtwright, that goes into that.
In New England in the 1803s, the only beverages available to most of the population were beer and hard cider. Water was iffy (since it could carry disease) as was milk. Even children drank hard cider, and their parents drank frost-distilled cider.
So most of the population had a buzz on all the time.
On the sub-topic of military intoxication, I’ve read that the Germans used steroids, not speed; and that Freud got hooked on cocaine while investigating it’s use by the Austro-Hungarian army. Somalia militiamen go around high on qat most of their time awake. But the standard drug for soldiers has always been alcohol, with which they’ve attempted to stay, in the words of James Jones “blind asshole drunk” as much as possible.
To the OP, When everyone ate locally-grown crops, and those crops were blighted with the fungus ergot, society-wide mania could occur. (wikipedia link)
For low-level, deliberate intoxication, Andean Indians went around all day mildly buzzed on cocoa leaves, Oceanic people on kava root (made by group-masication, after wich they all pass the bowl of kava-spit. yum!), European and North & South Americans spent a few centuries with most of the adult population having nicotine in their bloodstream.
In Yemen a significant portion of the population chews Qat on a regular basis. It’s a stimulant and an every day part of the culture and both men and women chew it. Though generally not together.
Marc
I start every day by drinking a mug of coffee. I guess significant part of population do it as well. Does that count?
At various times in history, coffee and coffee shops were regarded as bad for society. Radical philosophers, wild-eyed musicians, and dangerous political thinkers have hung out in coffee shops from the very beginning.
In the 19th century, before laws were passed to make some drugs illegal, patent medicines were sold in every general store that would be against the law now. Lydia Pinkham’s remedy was popular as a cure for “female” problems, among other things. It was mostly hashish and alcohol. Opium was in many remedies used for a wide range of maladies. Children were routinely opiated for nearly every reason (cranky little devils.) Tobacco was in some remedies, too, and it kept customers coming back for more.
After the laws, a lot of the self-medicating was, and still is, done with alcohol. Some children are still sent to bed after a nightcap of warm milk and peppermint schnapps.
Historically…college.
Yeah but I still can’t support policies that will have me working harder instead of getting drinking more often
Historian Barbara Tuchman mentions in her book The Calamitous Fourteenth Century that if records of the time are any indication, the noble class was astonishingly berefit of impulse control, foresight, and general prudence. I have wondered, given the universal consumption of large amounts of alcohol at the time, if most of society was suffering from fetal alcohol effect.
Absolutely. Contrary to popular belief, not all marijuana users are glued to their couches 24/7. A person can use marijuana and still be a productive member of society.