Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution that's Changing How the World gets High
Mike Power
Portobello Books
2013
ISBN 978-1-84627-459-6
Almost all societies throughout history have used intoxicants, and almost all modern states have evolved complex systems to control them. Intoxication and Society aims to illustrate the wide spectrum of disciplines that are required to construct such systems and the networks of expertise, professional or otherwise, involved in their formation. Its 15 chapters, extending from social history to neuroscience, legal studies and public health, combine to present a powerful case for a multidisciplinary approach that can not only encompass all these fields but examine the interplay and tensions between them.
As Craig Reinarman argues eloquently in his chapter, the primary controls on intoxication are social. Building on the work of Alfred Lindesmith and Howard Becker, he shows that the experience of intoxication is socially constructed and mediated, and that its risks are ultimately contained (though not eliminated) by “cultural domestication”: their integration into society in manageable forms. Examining contrasting pairs of examples – wine in the Mediterranean vs gin in eighteenth century Britain, coca-chewing in the Andes vs crack in inner cities, cannabis in the Netherlands vs marijuana in the USA – he teases out the factors, from chemical potency and method of administration to social context and the effects of criminalization, that make some drugs in some societies more or less problematic than others.
In modern times, medico-scientific ideas have been overlaid on this cultural framework with various results. Cathy Shrank traces the role of drunkenness in the dialogue between “reason” and “the passions” back to the Renaissance, and David Clemis shows how, in the late eighteenth century, some physicians began to conceive of intoxication as a disturbance of the nervous system and to argue that for certain people overindulgence was a medical problem. This idea was developed during the nineteenth century into the disease model of addiction, which was intended to free its subjects from moral and religious stigma but also had the effect of pathologizing them and restricting their rights. Karen Ersche, Ciaran Regan and Darin Weinberg all examine, from different angles, the biological basis of addiction and its impact on wider ideas of personal agency and responsibility.
These questions are ultimately resolved by a further framework of expertise: the law, where long-standing concepts such as compos mentis and mens rea have been obliged to respond to competing theories of addiction. Should the crimes of the addict be seen as involuntary? As Alan Bogg and Jonathan Herring demonstrate, modern case law has tended to limit the power of such arguments from diminished responsibility, and to hold addicts and the intoxicated responsible for their actions. In addition to criminal law, the statutory regulation of alcohol in particular has shaped the relation between state and society. James Brown argues that the “blizzard of lawmaking” that aimed to control taverns in Tudor and Stuart England by licensing played a crucial role in the formation of the modern state; James Kneale and Shaun French examine how the nineteenth century insurance business and its actuarial tables began the process of quantifying the risks of alcohol consumption.
The rise of the medical paradigm in the twentieth century, and its gradual resolution into an overarching model of public health, is traced by Virginia Berridge, who concludes that by the 1990s psychopharmacology had unified the fields of narcotic addiction, alcohol treatment and tobacco controls: “the brain of the compulsive cocaine user did not look that different to the brain of individuals addicted to nicotine”. As David Nutt and others have since observed, this leaves the criminalization of some drugs and not others without a clear scientific basis. But, as Mike Power's eye-opening Drugs 2.0 makes alarmingly clear, the drug laws are also propelling us into a world where our newly-acquired public health expertise is rendered irrelevant.
Power's vivid reportage exposes a vast and chaotically evolving marketplace that has thus far been invisible to most official statistics, and which offers a serious challenge to the narrative that drug use is falling or being brought under control. He reveals that the internet and the global demand for illegal drugs have combined, in a few short years, to produce a situation that has already become incomprehensible to legal specialists, toxicologists and public health professionals, let alone police, journalists, politicians and consumers. Since around 2008, mass penetration of broadband, smartphones and online shopping has allowed previously niche markets for “research chemicals” to explode overnight into global demand for novel substances. The emergence of mephedrone in 2009 was the first example; since then, new quasi-legal stimulants, cannabinoids, psychedelics and opiates have been appearing regularly, with countless more waiting in the wings. Many of these substances are far more dangerous than those they aim to replace, particularly the synthetic cannabinoids which are active at tiny doses: sellers, seeking to stay within the law by advertising them as “plant food” or “not for human consumption”, are unable to provide dosage information. Toxic, life-threatening and even fatal overdoses have become a regular occurrence, with the picture changing too rapidly for basic health information, let alone Craig Reinarman's gradual process of “cultural domestication”, to mediate its often serious risks.
The trigger for mass market mephedrone was, in Power's account, a temporary shortage of MDMA precursors which led to an international summit of criminal syndicates: should they increase wholesale prices or adulterate their product with cheaper alternatives? They chose the latter course, substituting MDMA with piperazine and other adulterants. Consumers, unimpressed with the inferior wares and with credit cards at the ready, flocked to try the brand-new alternative: manufactured in Chinese labs, promoted by viral marketing and offered up on internet searches by the automatic algorithms of Google AdWords. This was a sequence of events with major public health ramifications, but it was determined by an unknown (perhaps Russian and Israeli) network of gangsters, on the basis of profit alone. Power resists any simplistic solutions but observes that this scenario will repeat itself “for many years to come – for as long, in fact, as drugs are illegal”.
