Let’s Talk About Drugs
Let’s Replace Stigma and Misinformation With Knowledge and Understanding
I feel this a talk that is not being done very often and seldomly with much depth.
This is not about promoting or advocating anything, but about replacing stigma and misinformation with knowledge and understanding.
Even many well-educated and well-experienced people habitually connect “drugs” to things like hedonism, harm, abuse, addiction, and so on.And while this is not entirely wrong, the same is true about food as people are using and abusing it in similar ways.
It is only that we cannot live without food and we need it on a daily basis why we would never deny the necessity to consume food.
Yet, as food is entirely natural to us humans, so are “drugs”.
If you think this sounds unreasonable or outrageous, please bear with me and let me explain. You may be surprised how much this is true.
Some are consciously consuming and enjoying them. And for many, it’s just a necessary part of their everyday life, be it medication, anti-depressants, caffeine, sugar, or nicotine.
I have myself had very good and very bad experiences with different types of substances in different settings and I have seen others being helped or destroyed by it.
I don’t want to cast any type of judgment here, be it good or bad, rather I want to raise awareness about a complex topic that is too often reduced to prejudice and platitudes.
I mainly want to argue that the very vague, if not outright misleading, term “drugs” and the way it is used is rather obscuring than explaining in many instances.
It is not only hiding the diversity behind the concept but it is also potentially stigmatizing plants, substances, and medicines through the negative associations rallied during the “war on drugs” and the common associations with the term.
The general understanding of many people, especially the older generation, (obviously excluding those folks who were there for the 60s) was and still is mainly shaped through channels like pop culture, meaning music, movies, and series, portraying drugs either as a silly way to get high or as a “dangerous good” the mafia or some adolescent gangsters are dealing.
There is no education, no depth, just a blank canvas with the letters DRUGS on it; perfect for projecting ideas, desires or fears onto it.
In this infuriatingly vague presentation the nuance of what is addictive (and why), what is dangerous (and why), or how certain “drugs” are beneficial to some (and why), or how some are considered sacred sacraments in certain cultures (and why) , is usually not omitted entirely.
So let’s clear up that mess a little.
What does ”drug” actually mean and where does it come from?
The term “drugs” is usually used to refer to illegal substances which are associated with being addictive and harmful. For many people it could be weed, cocaine, or heroin; it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.
But every pharmacy is quite literally a drug store. As we all know, words mean things, and how we use them not only ourselves but also in the cultural debate strongly shapes our understanding of what they refer to.
Our modern word for pharmacy derives from the Greek term pharmakon, which mainly refers to drugs as a means of medicine. Most ancient and Indigenous cultures had this understanding. This includes basic knowledge that plants or substances can heal as well as harm.
Paracelsus, often considered the father of modern pharmacology, is famous for saying that “the dose makes the poison.”
The right dosage at the right moment with competent supervision is decisive. In any hospital today it’s the same and if we are sick, we go to a literal drug store for help.
This reflects the two ways drugs can ultimately affect us, they can heal or they can harm.
There is another one, recreational use, in which the experience itself and the associated pleasure or fun are the focus.
So, abuse (in the context of addiction), healing and medicine (in the context of pharmaceuticals or psychedelic therapy for example), or recreation are three very different categories of use.
What do a cucumber, a cashew, a fish, a turkey, a mushroom and fermented cowmilk have in common? Basically, not much, but they are all food for us, they fulfill a certain function in our bodily system, supplying us with nutrients.
Drugs are far more diverse as they can fulfill a million different functions in our brain as well as our body, many of which we still don’t fully understand. And there is no singular way of application either, you can eat, drink, smoke, or ingest them in a myriad other ways.
Some drugs are much milder than alcohol or caffeine, some much stronger, some are medicine, some are antibiotics, some make you awake, some make you fall asleep, some are mind-expanding, and some are mind-focusing.
The most used recreational drugs are sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine and they are all legal. And many if not most people are addicted to one of them. Yet, we don’t commonly refer to them as drugs.
As you see, talking about drugs is far more general than talking about “food”.
But what do they have in common?
They change our biochemistry in some way. Often they additionally change how we feel.
On Biochemistry
Everything that changes our biochemistry is a drug in the wider sense.
Coffee and aspirin are drugs; the same is true for green and even black tea if you look closely. We all know how the English are getting their daily fix of afternoon tea. Trainspotting lite.
Cacao has slightly similar, even though milder effects than caffeine… and we all know that chocolate is a drug anyways.
Talking about addiction and chocolate, I’d argue that sugar is a pretty dangerous and damaging drug.
It’s legal, very widespread, and most people in modern societies are addicted to it.
When you think about it, most seniors take a variety of pills every day.
They are the real addicts, aren’t they?
And what is with the antibiotics we are feeding our animals?
If we eat meat then, are we eating drugs too?
My point here is:
We are literally a walking, talking biochemistry lab, and most things we ingest change our biochemistry.
So, let’s say that there has to be a substantial (perceivable) change in either how we feel, or how our body/brain functions (think about pharmaceutics).
I’d personally draw a provisional line at tea… black tea being not strong enough to count as a “drug”, yet green tea could already be seen as one (having a perceivable effect on most people if they don’t drink caffeine every day).
But I think it becomes clear how arbitrary things may get quite soon when taking a closer look.
Dangerous and addictive? Probably not true for tea, but what about coffee? Some will argue that this is true indeed, yet many consume it daily. It simply reveals how fast the lines become blurry. Photo by Alisher Sharip on Unsplash.
What is a drug to some is either a medicine or a sacrament to others
We should remember that many drugs are neither harmful, illegal, nor addictive and the concept of legality is dependent on culture and history.
This does not mean that addiction, harm, and abuse are not serious problems that should be addressed and combated actively. And some “drugs”, (e.g. heroin, meth, phentanyl), are more dangerous than others, there’s no doubt about that too.
But many drugs, even if they may also be potentially harmful or addictive, may also be very beneficial in the right context, e.g. when used for medical or mind-expanding purposes.
Both these use cases, recreation, and healing, are part of our human nature and culture and have been abundant throughout history.
So much so, that there is a compelling line of scientific evidence that most of the earliest cave paintings were made under the influence of mind-altering agents.
There is also serious discussion about whether the first humans started settling and cultivating crops to bake bread or brew beer.
Furthermore, many Indigenous cultures today still use certain plants as sacraments (Ayahuasca, Iboga, San Pedro, Mescaline are but a few examples). And modern religious groups of all confessions (Ligare, Shefa, Santo Daime, or no confession at all, like the tons of LSD and mushroom users, or DMT smokers) continue the same thing in the West. They use psychedelic or entheogenic (“god-revealing”) sacraments to heal and connect with the sacred within and around them.
(I’ll explore the entheogenic use in more depth in further articles)
It seems we have been using and abusing plants and artificial agents for millennia and there seems to be something very natural in the desire to alter one’s state of feeling and thinking.
Adding to that, great potential for healing, insight and self-exploration may be enabled through the right use of certain agents.
(I’ll explore the difference between synthetic and plant-based agents in the next installment of this series.)
Even vegetables are psychedelic nowadays. Photo by Laura Adai on Unsplash.
Conclusion
So, what should we do about the “issue with drugs”?
I’m talking about the misinformation and bias of course.
This is my personal view and opinion.
We should be aware that the term drugs is often obscuring rather than revealing anything. It is incredibly vague and loaded with cultural bias. (I’ll explore this element further in the next part of this series.)
So collectively we need to be aware of these biases and the misinformation that was sometimes deliberately used to discredit certain groups of people or types of use.
We should be more aware of the huge differences between all the compounds and plants we lump together under the term “drug”.
For example, Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former advisor, admitted that the war on drugs began to continue legal prosecution and discrimination against African American communities and leftist movements and suppress the opposition’s vote.
We should be aware that many cultures have found very healthy and mature ways of dealing with all kinds of substances they had available. It is our immature modern way of numbing ourselves to escape reality that makes our use so problematic.
Eventually, it all comes down to what you use, what the intention is, and in what context (ritual, party, self-exploration, medicine, etc.).
On the individual level, the only real solution seems to raise our awareness on the subject. We need more education and knowledge, as well as informed discussion on the subject.
We should also try to be more specific about what we mean and be aware when we use the term as a blank canvas for the projection of fears and biases.
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