Certainly drugs and alcohol have had an adverse effect on society, assuming you believe that the goal of society is to be industrious and productive. If we all put down our drugs and booze and worked as hard as we could every waking hour then society would maybe meet the ideal of some people but it sure wouldn’t be my ideal. Some people think that life should be all work and no pleasure, usually for everybody else except themselves - I believe they are wrong. Other people can’t seem to stop themselves from only taking the pleasure to the point that they can’t even feed and clothe themselves - clearly they have a problem.
Most of us understand that life is a balance of work and pleasure and for the most part we can maintain that balance - that is why drugs, TV, art, books, sex and other pleasurable things haven’t destroyed society.
I’m not particularly proud of my mental function, but I’m another one who reckons that I’d rather remember the night during the morning after. By the time I had access to drugs I had already met several habitual drug users (alcoholics and potheads mostly) and decided that if they were cool I’d rather be burning. I did try tobacco (liked it, had very little money and decided I liked movies better) and I sometimes drink alcohol but for the taste and the idea is always to stop before being impaired in any way.
My favorite quote about drugs is from a singer, José María Sanz aka Loquillo: “… and then I looked at these pills our manager had given me and I thought ‘OK, wait a minute, since you know that once you’re out there you’ll love it, why do you need to stun yourself before going out? And if you didn’t love it, why the fuck do it?’ And then I tossed out the pills and we started looking for a new manager the next day.” He does drink alcohol and I know he does or did smoke pot, but each choice was conscious and limited. We choose our pleasures, and in that instance he talks about, he realized that having drugs to get rid of the dis-pleasure of stage nerves was making him lose the full blast of the pleasure of being on stage.
Sad, but true. Being the neighbor of a major power like the United States is like being in bed with an elephant. It really doesn’t matter whether or not the poor dumb beast means to hurt you. If he rolls over, you get squashed.
Is there, or has there been, a civilisation which did not regulate or control mind/mood altering substances at all?
Many people in the US think that this is true of Holland (The Netherlands?), and especially Amsterdam, but I gather it’s not really the case. Does anybody know of one? Is there, for instance, a place where one can walk in and buy Morphine off the shelf?
America, circa 1870. Huge numbers of American Civil War veterans were addicted to morphine. In fact, IIRC, heroin was originally marketed as a way to break addiction to morphine.
If you dropped a block of cocaine on a street corner and labeled it, the vast majority of people would walk right past it. 90 percent of the people have no interest in it. Some might want to sell it though.
All our vices booze ,cigarettes and drugs have a minority of the people in its control.
Morphine and heroin can cause death by respiratory depression, so yes, it probably does suppress coughs. (Current GQ discussion about this.) It seems to me it can just relax your muscles until they stop working, as opiates can also cause bad constipation.
Six billion people are far to busy finding, and trying methods to destroy themselves, and each other for any one method to be entirely responsible for the downfall of civilization. And, even with the most deadly of recreational drug, the survival rates are just too high for it to be a genocidal method. Six billion people can be wrong, a whole lot, over and over again, and still end up being nine billion people.
