Читать книгу Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure - Paul Martin - Страница 7
FOUR Drugs
ОглавлениеIt is a custom with some people to blame, without limit, those who indulge in nervous stimulants of a nature differing from their own, while serving the same purpose.
MORDECAI CUBITT COOKE,
The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860)
We all use psychoactive drugs, by which I mean chemicals that alter the functioning of the brain by acting on its internal communication mechanisms. Among the more familiar examples are caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, but the term also encompasses illegal recreational drugs like cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine. We take these substances because they make us feel better – or, at least, different. They are capable of delivering intense pleasure and causing great harm. The paradox of drug use was encapsulated by Louis Lewin, a pioneering German pharmacologist who wrote in the 1920s that they ‘lead us on the one hand into the darkest depths of human passion, ending in mental instability, physical misery and degeneration, and on the other to hours of ecstasy and happiness or a tranquil and meditative state of mind’.
Why do we do it? The brain systems that underlie pleasure, desire and reward evolved hundreds of million years ago and are found, in at least some basic form, in all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes. A long time ago, we humans discovered how to manipulate these brain systems artificially with drugs. We use psychoactive drugs because they produce pleasure, or because they alleviate unpleasant feelings of anxiety and stress, or both. We always have and we always will.
Getting on for half of all young British adults admit to having used an illegal drug during their lifetime, and one in six say they have used a Class A drug such as cocaine or heroin.1 The most popular illegal drug is cannabis, which has been tried by 40 per cent of young British adults. Next in popularity comes amyl nitrite, used at least once by 12 per cent of young adults, followed by amphetamines (11 per cent), cocaine powder (11 per cent), ecstasy (10 per cent) and magic mushrooms (8 per cent), with heroin trailing at 0.5 per cent.2 The consumption of drugs is relatively common among school-age children: almost half of all fifteen-year-olds in England say they have taken an illicit drug at least once, and one in twelve claims to use them at least once a month. Comparable patterns are seen in other countries, although the UK appears towards the top end of most international league tables of drug use.
Illegal recreational drugs are cheaper now than they ever have been and most of them are getting cheaper, which is further evidence that efforts to curb their use by suppressing the supply have not succeeded. A line of cocaine or an ecstasy tablet now costs little more than a cappuccino. And, of course, the use of legal drugs is vastly greater. Nine out of ten adults have used alcohol at some time, one in four is a smoker and virtually everyone consumes caffeine every day.
You, dear reader, will have had your own experiences with recreational drugs – certainly with caffeine, probably with alcohol and conceivably with one or two more besides. Or perhaps not. Each drug is different and each individual responds differently to them. The subjective experience depends on the social situation in which the drug is taken, the expectations of the user, their past experience with that drug, and so on. The effects may be blissful, they may be indifferent or they may be dreadful.
The sensations generated by a recreational drug have two main components: the immediate effect (the ‘rush’) and the feeling of pleasure or euphoria that develops more slowly, perhaps over a period of hours (the ‘high’). The faster a drug hits the brain, the bigger the rush. The quickest way of getting a drug into the brain is to inject it, smoke it or snort it. Drugs taken by these rapid-uptake routes, such as heroin, cocaine and nicotine, tend to be more addictive than if they are absorbed more gradually.
Over the centuries, articulate drug-users have recorded their experiences for posterity, offering those who have never been there a vicarious sense of how it feels.3 Heroin is said to produce an orgasmic rush of pleasure followed by a warm afterglow. Those who have taken it intravenously often describe the sensation using terms like pleasure, excitement, warmth and relaxation. One former addict wrote of how his whole body quivered with pleasure and ‘tiny needles’ danced on his skin. Another felt so good she had to share the experience by talking as she had never talked before. For the rock musician David Crosby, heroin felt like a big, warm blanket. Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of children’s favourites Treasure Island and Kidnapped, recalled the first of his many encounters with opium in these glowing terms:
A day of extraordinary happiness; and when I went to bed there was something almost terrifying in the pleasures that besieged me in the darkness. Wonderful tremors filled me; my head swam in the most delirious but enjoyable manner; and the bed softly oscillated with me, like a boat in a very gentle ripple.
Cannabis, the most widely consumed illegal drug, leaves most users with a calming, relaxing sense of unwinding. Cocaine produces a very different reaction, which is often described as a sharp lift followed rapidly by a strong desire for more. The writer Stuart Walton has described how the first snort delivers a ‘cosy low-voltage buzz of electricity’, but the pleasure is fleeting, making cocaine the perfect self-marketing product.
The psychoactive drug experience can also be ghastly. William S. Burroughs, in his heavily autobiographical novel Junky, paints a revolting picture of trying peyote, the hallucinogenic Mexican cactus. He swallows the lump of peyote with great difficulty, washing it down with tea and gagging on it several times. Ten minutes later he begins to feel sick. Convulsive spasms rack his body but he is unable to vomit. Finally, the drug comes back up, ‘solid like a ball of hair’, clogging his throat. It is, writes Burroughs, as horrible a sensation as he ever stood still for. His face swells up and he is unable to sleep.
One state that no recreational drug is capable of producing by itself is happiness, as distinct from pleasure. We will return to the relationship between pleasure and happiness in chapter 8.
Recent history: the last few thousand years
Most of what we know about humanity’s consumption of recreational drugs is confined to the relatively recent past, spanning a mere few thousand years of history. Opium was used by people living in southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) more than five thousand years ago. The language of that region, Sumerian, denoted the opium poppy as ‘the plant of joy’. Opium was even more familiar to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who took it orally and rectally as a sedative and to alleviate pain. The Greeks were aware of opium’s potential to create addiction, and in the fifth century BC the great physician Hippocrates was criticised for giving too much of it to his patients. Homer’s Odyssey, written in the seventh or eighth century BC, refers to a potion called nepenthe (literally, ‘one that chases away sorrow’) which Helen of Troy used to banish grief. Historians believe that nepenthe was probably made by dissolving opium in alcohol.
Imperial Rome was a hotbed of opium consumption. The emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who ruled during the second century AD, was a regular user. According to the physician Galen, the emperor habitually started his day with a portion of opium the size of a bean, dissolved in warm wine. A census carried out in the city of Rome in AD 312 catalogued 793 separate retail outlets from which opium could be bought. Between them, these opium shops generated 15 per cent of all tax revenues – one of countless examples of the age-old relationship between recreational drugs and lucrative taxation.
Cannabis, or hemp, was cultivated in China six thousand years ago and was being consumed in Egypt and Greece more than three thousand years ago. The women of Thebes in ancient Egypt were famous for making a hemp-based potion which rivalled nepenthe in its ability to banish sorrow. Cannabis may also have been the pharmacological secret behind the Oracle of Delphi, which was probably established in the eighth century BC. The priestess who presided over the Oracle would sit over a hole in the ground, from which wafted the miraculous fumes that enabled her to deliver her prophecies. Some historians believe that these inspirational fumes were generated by burning a narcotic herb, probably hemp. In the fifth century BC the historian Herodotus recorded the recreational use of cannabis by the Scythian people, who lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea:
There is a plant growing in their country called cannabis, which closely resembles flax.… The Scythians take cannabis seeds, crawl in under the felt blankets, and throw the seeds on to the glowing stones. The seeds then emit dense smoke and fumes, much more than any vapour-bath in Greece. The Scythians shriek with delight at the fumes.
Cannabis was used by the Romans, both recreationally and as a medicine. Galen describes how it was customary in the Roman world to give hemp seed to guests at banquets, to promote ‘hilarity and enjoyment’.
The use of cannabis in Britain is of more recent vintage. Even so, it can be traced back several centuries. Hemp was listed in The English Physitian, a medical text written in 1652 by the botanist and physician Nicholas Culpeper, where it appears among a dizzying array of exotically-named plants including Clowns Woundwort, Stinking Gladwin, Rupture-wort, Spleen-wort, Melancholy-thistle, Bastard Rhubarb, Blites, Loosestrife and (my favourite) Arsesmart. Hemp was widely used as a remedy for aches and pains. In his 1653 tome The Complete Herbal, Culpeper wrote:
The seed of Hemp consumes wind, and by too much use thereof disperses it so much that it dries up the natural seed for procreation; yet, being boiled in milk and taken, helps such as have a hot dry cough.… The emulsion or decoction of the seed eases the cholic, and allays the troublesome humours in the bowels, and stays bleeding at the mouth, nose or other places … It is held very good to kill the worms in men or beasts; and the juice dropped into the ears kills worms in them; and draws forth earwigs, or other living creatures gotten into them.
As far as I know, there have been no recent criminal prosecutions in Britain for using cannabis to dislodge unwelcome earwigs from ears.
Cannabis was probably being used as a recreational drug when Shakespeare was writing, and he may have made cryptic references to it in his work. In Sonnet 76 he refers to ‘a noted weed’ and ‘compounds strange’ in the context of aiding his own creativity:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
Some Shakespearian scholars suspect this to be a veiled reference to cannabis. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientists discovered possible chemical residues of cannabis in the remnants of seventeenth-century clay pipes that were recovered from the site of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. There were also firm traces of nicotine and cocaine. Whilst this discovery does not prove that Shakespeare himself took these drugs, it does at least confirm that they were being used in England at that time. European settlers took the practice of using cannabis with them to America, where George Washington later grew it for his own medicinal use. Cannabis was widely used in Victorian England for medicinal purposes. Queen Victoria herself took tincture of cannabis to relieve her royal period pains.
The nineteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion in the variety of psychoactive drugs available and in the social attitudes towards them. The international opium trade was hugely profitable and imperial Britain was at the heart of it. Britain fought two naval wars with China to defend its economic interests by enforcing the lucrative trade in exporting its Indian-produced opium to that country. When the Chinese tried to stop Britain from trafficking the opium, the British enforced it through military might, fighting and winning the First Opium War of 1839–42 and the Second Opium War of 1856–58. The second war resulted in the complete legalisation of the opium trade. By then, British opium exports to China were worth more than China earned from exporting tea and silk.
The use of opium in China at this time was widespread. The Chinese emperor himself is said to have used the drug and many Chinese government officials were regular opium-smokers. According to contemporary accounts, the proportion of people who smoked opium in certain parts of the country ranged between a quarter and half the population. An Englishman who had worked in China for many years during this period commented that when it came to the morality of selling and consuming opium, he could see little difference from alcohol. Both drugs were harmful if taken to excess, but they did little damage if used moderately. The only difference he had noticed was that the opium-smoker ‘was not so violent, so maudlin or so disgusting as the drunkard’.
Morphine was first produced in 1805, when a German chemist extracted it from opium. Commercial production began in the 1820s. The drug is named after the Roman god Morpheus, who was the god of dreams. Morphine was originally taken by mouth. However, the development of the hypodermic syringe fostered a fashion for injecting it, which produced a bigger rush. The American Civil War, in which intravenous morphine was widely used as a battlefield analgesic, created large numbers of morphine addicts. The stable of opiate drugs further expanded in 1898, when the German pharmaceutical company Bayer synthesised diacetylmorphine, a derivative of morphine. They named it heroin, after the Latin for hero, because of its potent psychological effects. Heroin was initially hailed as a wonder drug which offered the therapeutic power of morphine without the risk of addiction. This claim was later dropped when experience revealed that heroin was anything but non-addictive.
Cocaine became popular after yet another German chemist perfected a method for isolating it from coca leaves in 1859. The ready availability of cheap cocaine in the late nineteenth century triggered a global surge in its recreational use.
Sigmund Freud has the dubious honour of being a pioneering and enthusiastic advocate of cocaine. In 1884 Freud published a notorious paper entitled ‘Über coca’ (‘On Coca’), in which he claimed that cocaine could alleviate or cure a wide range of disorders including indigestion, nervous debility, wasting, alcoholism, morphine addiction and impotence. He confidently asserted that the drug’s therapeutic benefits far outweighed any possible risks from excessive use. Freud practised what he preached, taking large quantities of cocaine himself and prescribing it to many of his patients and friends. One of them was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud attempted to cure with cocaine. Unfortunately, Freud succeeded only in transforming his hapless friend into a cocaine addict and, subsequently, a corpse.
Before long, Freud was being accused of unleashing a new and dreadful type of addiction. When another of his patients died from an overdose of cocaine, Freud eased off administering the drug intravenously, although he continued to give it orally. In a paper published in 1887, he insisted that cocaine addiction was not an inherent property of the drug itself, but rather of the individual who took it. One of the few medical applications for which cocaine could be used safely was as a local anaesthetic. However, Freud failed to recognise the clinical significance of this at the time, leaving one of his Viennese rivals to take the credit and win international fame. Despite clear evidence that cocaine did not cure addiction, but was itself highly addictive, Freud continued to take the drug for relief from his migraines and a painful nasal condition. In letters to friends, he wrote of how applying cocaine to his left nostril had helped him ‘to an amazing extent’ and of his need for ‘a lot of cocaine’. Some uncharitable sceptics have suggested that Freud’s now largely discredited theories about the nature of the human mind might have been inspired by his consumption of this psychoactive drug.
A largely forgotten feature of the nineteenth-century drug scene was the widespread use of medical anaesthetics for recreational purposes. One of the many discoveries made by the great English scientist Sir Humphry Davy was nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. Davy pioneered its use as an anaesthetic. He also liked to entertain himself and his friends by getting high on it. In 1800, he described how inhaling the gas produced a feeling of detachment that lifted him from his earthly cares and caused him to pass, ‘through voluptuous transitions’, into sensations that were completely new to him. Davy’s friends even contemplated setting up a ‘nitrous oxide tavern’, in which punters could inhale the gas as an alternative to getting drunk on alcohol. Some London theatres offered patrons a blast of nitrous oxide to put them in the mood before a show. Much the same happened with chloroform, which was being used for purely recreational purposes barely a year after it had first been employed as a medical anaesthetic.
Ether was another anaesthetic that enjoyed a vogue as a recreational drug. During the second half of the nineteenth century it became especially popular in Ireland, after Catholic temperance campaigners decreed that it was an acceptable alternative to alcohol – ‘a liquor on which a man might get drunk with a clear conscience’, as one priest put it. Up until 1890, when ether was classified as a poison, the Irish were drinking more than 17,000 gallons of the stuff each year. The occultist Aleister Crowley (of whom more later) liked to drink a morning ‘bracer’ consisting of half a pint of ether, brandy, kirsch, absinthe and Tabasco sauce.
When swallowed, ether has an intoxicating effect comparable to that of alcohol. The intoxication is short-lived, however. It disappears within half an hour or so, leaving the drinker sober. Some ether-drinkers regarded this as an advantage. Others did not. Drinking ether could also be hazardous. The boiling point of ether is lower than body temperature, so it vaporises on contact with the inside of the mouth. Drinking it therefore tends to generate highly flammable belches and farts. In an age when drinkers were surrounded by naked flames, this could prove life-threatening. According to an account from Russia, where ether drinking was popular, one such explosion killed six people. The social attractiveness of ether-drinkers was further diminished by the drug’s side-effect of generating rivers of saliva. This led some users to inhale its vapours in preference to drinking it.
Many more new drugs appeared on the scene in the twentieth century, including LSD and a host of other hallucinogens. LSD, otherwise known as lysergic acid diethylamide, was first made in 1938 by a Swiss chemist who was searching for new medicines. Its brain-popping psychedelic effects only became apparent a few years later. During the 1950s and 1960s, extensive research was conducted into the possible therapeutic uses of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Psychiatrists prescribed LSD to tens of thousands of patients to help them overcome a range of mental health problems. One of these patients was the Hollywood star Cary Grant, who later said that LSD had helped him deal with the trauma of his marriage break-up. Evidence from several hundred medical studies published during this period suggests that, for some patients at least, hallucinogenic drugs could assist in the treatment of some forms of addiction, psychosomatic illness, anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the pioneers in this field was the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who coined the term psychedelic (as in ‘consciousness-expanding’). Osmond thought that powerful hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD might enable addicts to view their situation in a totally new way, creating a strong motivation to transform their behaviour and quit their drug or alcohol habit. In the 1950s, Osmond and colleagues had some success in using single doses of LSD to treat alcoholics. In one of their studies, two-thirds of the alcoholic patients stopped drinking for at least eighteen months following a single dose of LSD – an outcome that compared favourably with more conventional treatments for alcoholism.
LSD became illegal in the late 1960s. Before long, research into its potential therapeutic applications ground to a halt, as scientists found it increasingly difficult to obtain permission or funding to work on the drug. Pharmaceutical companies were not attracted by such research, because LSD and other hallucinogens were unprotected by patents. Moreover, the drugs were administered only once or a few times, not taken daily over long periods, which meant they had limited potential to make money.
More recently, research into the therapeutic potential of hallucinogenic drugs has been showing some signs of revival. One of the few studies to be published since the 1960s looked at the use of hallucinogens for treating cluster headaches. Individuals with this debilitating condition suffer from strings of excruciatingly painful headaches, driving some of them to commit suicide. Anecdotal evidence suggested that some sufferers obtained relief, lasting up to several months, from a single small dose of LSD or psilocybin. The doses were insufficient to cause full-blown hallucinations. When researchers from Harvard Medical School interviewed a large sample of people who had sought relief in this way, the results were startling: 85 per cent of those who had taken psilocybin reported that it stopped their headache attacks and 80 per cent of LSD-users found that the remission periods between attacks became longer. LSD and psilocybin appeared to be more effective at staving off further attacks than conventional migraine medicines.
A unique historical perspective on humanity’s use of recreational drugs can be found in The Seven Sisters of Sleep, a remarkable book written in 1860 by an English scientist named Mordecai Cubitt Cooke. Lewis Carroll is thought to have used it as a source for the psychedelic episodes in Alice in Wonderland.
Cooke presents a scholarly survey of the seven principal narcotics of the world. These were, in descending order of popularity at the time, tobacco, opium, cannabis, betel nut, coca, thorn apple and fly agaric. (Note the absence of alcohol.) According to the best information then available, the estimated numbers of people around the world using these drugs ranged from 400 million for opium to fewer than 10 million for fly agaric. We will take a separate look at tobacco – arguably the most rubbish drug of all – in chapter 11. Meanwhile, here are some of Cooke’s observations, starting with fly agaric.
The fly agaric toadstool, Amanita muscaria, was the recreational drug of choice for the nineteenth-century inhabitants of Siberia and Kamchatka. In those icy wastelands there was no prospect of cultivating poppies, tobacco, coca or any of the other conventional sources of chemical pleasure. Consequently, wrote Cooke, ‘the poor native would have been compelled to have glided into his grave without a glimpse of Paradise beforehand, if nature had not promptly supplied an indigenous narcotic in the form of an unpretending-looking fungus or toadstool.’
Elsewhere in the world, the fly agaric toadstool was – and still is – regarded as highly poisonous. Its name reflects its use as a fly poison. However, by dint of drying the fungi and saturating them with salt, before cooking them, the people of Siberia and Kamchatka could eat them with impunity and enjoy the mind-bending effects. They would roll up the toadstool and swallow it like a big pill. A single gulp would provide a ‘cheap and remarkably pleasant’ day’s worth of intoxication. Fly agaric was to the Siberians what opium and cannabis were to pleasure-seekers in sunnier climes. The fungus has another useful property that made it even more attractive to its cash-strapped users. Its psychoactive ingredients survive being excreted from the body and can be recycled by drinking the consumer’s urine. How the Siberian fun-seekers discovered this useful recycling procedure is unknown. Anyway, they made good use of this boon, as Cooke relates:
A man having been intoxicated on one day, and slept himself sober by the next, will, by drinking this liquor, to the extent of about a cupful, become as intoxicated thereby as he was before. Confirmed drunkards in Siberia preserve their excretionary fluid as a precious liquor, to be used in case a scarcity of the fungus should occur. This intoxicating property may be again communicated to every person who partakes of the disgusting draught, and thus, also, with the third, and fourth, and even the fifth distillation. By this means, with a few boluses to commence with, a party may shut themselves in their room, and indulge in a week’s debauch at a very economical rate.
The leading recreational drug in much of the rest of the world at this time was opium. The poppy from which opium is extracted was a major crop in India, Persia, Egypt and Asia Minor. Opium was produced throughout the Islamic nation of Persia. The finest-quality Persian opium was said to come from Isfahan and Shiraz, which was also famous for its wine. Opium was consumed in many different ways, according to local customs. In India, it was dissolved in water or rolled into pills. The Sikhs were forbidden by their religion to smoke tobacco. They found a ready substitute in opium, which was consumed throughout the Punjab. In China, opium was eaten or smoked, while in Java and Sumatra it was mixed with sugar and the ripe fruit of the plantain.
In Britain, where an estimated 35 tons of opium were consumed in 1858, the drug was easily obtained from local pharmacists in the form of pills, or dissolved in alcohol to form tinctures or cordials. The many opium-based products included laudanum, which was about one-twelfth opium by weight, Scottish paregoric elixir, English paregoric elixir (which was a quarter the strength of the Scottish version), Black Drop and Battley’s Sedative Liquor. These products were bought for ‘medicinal purposes’ but were consumed mostly for their pleasing psychoactive effects. They were also widely used for keeping infants and young children quiet.
Opium wrecked many people’s lives. However, some individuals took it for years with apparent impunity. Cooke cites several such cases, including an old lady in Leith who died at the age of eighty having taken half an ounce (14 grams) of laudanum every day for nearly forty years. An ‘eminent literary character’ who died in his sixties had regularly consumed large amounts of laudanum since the age of fifteen; his daily allowance had been more than a litre of liquid comprising three parts laudanum to one part alcohol.
The Fen country of eastern England was a veritable hotspot of opium abuse. Cooke discovered from official documents that in the Cambridgeshire market town of Wisbech more opium was sold and consumed per head of population than in any other part of Britain. The Fenlanders’ taste for opium is depicted in Alton Locke, an 1849 novel by Charles Kingsley. In it, a yeoman tells the hero that any locals who do not drink spirits take their pennyworth of ‘elevation’ instead – especially the women. ‘Elevation’ is opium. The yeoman explains that if you go into the druggist’s shop in Cambridge on market day you will see dozens of little boxes lined up on the counter. Every passing Fenland wife will call in to collect one of these boxes, which contains her week’s supply of opium. The drug makes the women ‘cruel thin’, says the yeoman, but it keeps them quiet and cures their ague.
Cannabis was used recreationally in many parts of the world during the nineteenth century, including Muslim countries. It was smoked, dissolved in drinks or eaten in combination with other substances. Hashish, the term then used in the Middle East for any cannabis-derived drug, was consumed throughout Syria and in parts of Turkey.4 Cooke describes an unusual method used by the Bechuana people of southern Africa for smoking theirs. They would make two small holes in the ground, about a foot apart, place a stick between these holes and mould clay over it, then withdraw the stick to leave a channel connecting the two holes. The cannabis was placed in one hole and lit. Smokers would then take it in turn to lie with their face on the ground, inhaling deeply from the other hole. Cannabis was similarly popular in the USA, where it was often combined with betel nut to form a lump, or ‘quid’, for chewing, in the same manner as tobacco. In India, cannabis resin was collected by men wearing leather aprons. They would run through the hemp fields, brushing violently against the plants. The resin would stick to the leather, from where it was later scraped. It was said that in Nepal the collectors dispensed with the leather gear and ran naked through the cannabis plants, collecting the resin on their skin.
The two other great narcotics of the nineteenth century were the betel (or areca) nut and coca.5 The betel nut contains a mild stimulant and chewing it produces a feeling of well-being. It was the principal recreational drug in Southeast Asia. For the people of Malaya, Cooke tells us, betel was as important as meat and drink, while in the Philippines it was used as a form of currency. Habitual betel-chewing left the mouth and lips stained a deep red colour and turned the teeth black. In Siam, young women were considered more beautiful if their teeth were especially black and their gums especially red. Many Muslims chewed betel nut continuously, except during the fast of Ramadan. In old age, when their lack of teeth made it impossible for them to chew, they would take the drug in the form of a paste that dissolved easily in the mouth.
Coca, from which cocaine is extracted, was the principal narcotic in South America. It was consumed by mixing dried coca leaves with lime and chewing them. As native coca-users had discovered, the alkalinity of the lime helps to release the small amounts of cocaine in the leaves. Chewing coca leaves in this way provides the chewer with a modest and inherently limited dose of cocaine – in stark contrast to pure cocaine, which is one of the most highly addictive of all recreational drugs.
In addition to providing pleasure, coca had the big practical attraction of alleviating pain, hunger, thirst, cold and fatigue. Coca enabled its users to climb the steep passes of the Andes while carrying heavy loads. According to a South American legend, the children of the sun presented humans with the coca leaf ‘to satisfy the hungry, provide the weary and fainting with new vigour, and cause the unhappy to forget their miseries’. Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian scientist who explored the Andes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was struck by the amazing powers of endurance his native guides derived from chewing coca.
Coca famously formed part of the original recipe for Coca-Cola. The world’s best-known soft drink was patented in 1886 by George Pemberton, an American pharmacist. Pemberton wanted to create a beverage that was stimulating and energising. The growing power of the temperance movement deflected him away from using alcohol as the active ingredient. He decided instead to base his drink around cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine-rich extracts of cola nut – hence Coca-Cola.6 One of the early marketing campaigns for Coca-Cola advertised it as a cure for ‘slowness of thought’. Nowadays, of course, Coca-Cola and many other carbonated soft drinks use caffeine rather than cocaine to deliver the slight buzz and thereby hook the user. We shall take a closer look at caffeine in chapter 11.
At the end of his global tour of recreational drugs, Mordecai Cooke concluded that an appetite for chemically induced pleasure was a universal characteristic of humans. This appetite could be satisfied in many different ways, ranging from the poisonous toadstools of arctic Siberia to the coca leaves of the Andes, but the underlying motivation was the same. Cooke was in no doubt that if the British had not become so used to their tobacco and gin, they would be using some other drug instead. He therefore felt it was narrow-minded and hypocritical of them to condemn the Chinese for indulging in opium, or the Hindus and Arabs for using cannabis.
Humanity’s relationship with recreational drugs started long before the brief span of recent history that we have just skated over. People were inhaling, drinking and chewing mind-altering substances long before they invented how to write about them. Archaeological evidence suggests that betel nuts were being chewed in Asia nine thousand years ago, tobacco was being used in South America eight thousand years ago and the inhabitants of modern-day Ecuador were taking coca at least five thousand years ago. Opium consumption in Spain has been traced back to around 4200 BC.
Alcohol has an impressively long pedigree. A tavern is mentioned in the world’s oldest recorded story. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than three thousand years ago, contains references to a tavern presided over by a wise old goddess. The story also features a prostitute, reminding us that commercial sex is indeed the oldest profession. The Egyptians were drinking wine and beer six thousand years ago, and there is evidence that wine was being made in the region of modern-day Armenia eight thousand years ago, long before the wheel was invented. Some historians contend that opium has been around even longer than alcohol. Either way, alcohol has been the most pervasive recreational drug, possibly because it can be made from such a wide variety of naturally occurring ingredients.
We humans have probably been using recreational drugs for almost as long as our species has lived on the planet. And the simple reason is that they make us feel better. Early humans used recreational drugs because they produced pleasure and eased pain. But might there be some additional factors in play, over and above pleasure and the alleviation of pain, which reinforced this ancient relationship?
According to one theory, the near-universal consumption of alcohol in northern Europe over the past few thousand years owes something to the scarcity of clean drinking water until relatively recently in history. Most urban-dwellers have had ready access to supplies of clean drinking water only since the nineteenth century. Before then, water was often filthy, sewage-polluted stuff. Alcoholic beverages were usually safer to drink. On top of that, they offered pleasurable intoxication and were a useful source of calories and nutrients. It is no wonder, then, that men, women and children drank alcohol morning, noon and night. Many of the people who built European civilisation were permanently tipsy. The advent of public supplies of clean drinking water in the nineteenth century removed this rationale and coincided with a moral backlash against alcohol. In the Orient, the problem of dirty drinking water had an alternative solution in the form of tea and other herbal infusions. Boiling rather than fermentation rendered their water safe to drink.
Alcohol may not be the only recreational drug that offers potential benefits in addition to pleasure. According to a theory proposed by the anthropologists Roger Sullivan and Edward Hagen, we are naturally predisposed to take psychoactive drugs because doing so helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce in a harsh world. Stimulants such as nicotine, coca and betel nut helped early humans to endure pain, discomfort and hunger, as they still do in some parts of the world. Sullivan and Hagen further argued that drugs were valuable sources of scarce nutrients. Coca leaves, for example, are rich in vitamins and minerals; chewing them may have made a real difference to people living permanently on the edge of malnutrition. A hundred grams of coca leaves can supply the daily recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of calcium, iron, phosphorus, riboflavin, vitamin A and vitamin E, as well as significant quantities of protein and carbohydrate. That said, there seems little prospect of coca becoming the new health snack.
Whatever practical benefits alcohol, coca and other drugs might bring, their big attraction is, and always has been, their psychoactive effects. Self-evidently, we humans enjoy getting out of it from time to time, with the help of whatever psychoactive substance is to hand. That substance might be opium, coca, or hallucinogenic toadstools. If you lived in northern Europe, it was usually alcohol. In his history of wine, Hugh Johnson acknowledges that ‘it was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.’ The nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was of a similar opinion:
All men, even those it is customary to call savages, have been so tormented by this craving for strong drinks, that they have always managed to obtain them, however limited the extent of their knowledge. They have turned the milk of their domestic animals sour, or extracted juice from various fruits and roots which they suspected of containing the elements of fermentation; and wherever human society has existed, we find that men were provided with strong liquors, which they used at their feasts, sacrifices, marriages, or funerals, in short on all occasions of merry-making or solemnity.
The particular connection between intoxication and public festivities to which Brillat-Savarin alludes has equally deep roots. For thousands of years, people have used alcohol and other intoxicating drugs for religious or ritualistic reasons and to help them celebrate.
The ancient relationship between ritual and drugs is exemplified by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These culturally important ceremonies were held in Greece for almost two thousand years, from around 1500 BC until AD 400. Thousands of people attended the periodic celebrations at a temple in Eleusis, west of Athens, in which the participants drank from a sacramental cup holding a drink called kykeon. Contemporary accounts make it clear that kykeon contained a hallucinogenic substance, which historians and scientists have concluded was probably ergot.7 Whatever the active ingredients were, the resulting intoxication was a crucial part of the ceremony. Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato and several Roman emperors were among those who took part in what Homer described as a blissful experience.
Intoxication was such a central element in life that most ancient civilisations had their own gods of intoxication. The Egyptians had Hathor the wine god, who took the form of a bull. The ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, had Dionysus the god of drunkenness and celebration. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, the rites of Dionysus were the most widely practised of all religious ceremonies. The celebrations lasted for days and involved drinking large amounts of wine. The Romans enthusiastically embraced the cult of Dionysus, whom they also referred to as Bacchus. The rites known as Bacchanalia became so scandalous that in 186 BC the Senate banned them. They continued nonetheless. It is very hard to prevent people from seeking pleasure.
What these ceremonies and religious rituals had in common, aside from great fun, was an underlying belief that drug-induced intoxication was a mystical state which enabled humans to experience a glimpse of the divine and commune with the gods. Drunkenness and other forms of intoxication were regarded as a form of ecstasy, in which the soul became partly separated from the body. This belief in the spiritual and mystical aspects of intoxication fell away with the emergence of Christianity and Islam, which taught that intoxication was inimical to true spirituality and must therefore be shunned.8 Drunkenness came to be viewed not as a god-given state, but as a shameful surrender to animal instincts. We shall return in chapter 13 to the uneasy relationship between the world’s main monotheistic religions and the pursuit of pleasure.
Despite the hardening of religious disapproval, drunken rituals continued to play a significant part in communal life in many parts of the world. In medieval England, villages held festivals in which revellers were expected to drink themselves into oblivion for days at a time. Judging by any English town centre on a Friday or Saturday night, not much has changed. Alcohol-induced oblivion has clearly retained its mass appeal. For many present-day drinkers, the prime objective of a good night out is still to get completely smashed (or annihilated, arseholed, bladdered, blitzed, blootered, bombed, bowsered, canned, guttered, hammered, lashed, legless, mullahed, obliterated, paralytic, pie-eyed, pissed, plastered, rat-arsed, scuttered, shit-faced, slaughtered, sloshed, sozzled, stewed, stinking, thrashed, trolleyed or wrecked, to use just some of the synonyms). The fact that the English language has well over a hundred different words to convey the concept of ‘drunk’ says something about our deep attachment to this state.9
Not all cultures regard alcohol as primarily a tool for getting steaming drunk. In many parts of Europe the predominant drinking culture is one of extracting maximum pleasure from that warm, buzzy state that lies roughly midway between stone-cold sober and out of your skull. For instance, several million people congregate each year at the Munich Oktoberfest, the world’s most popular annual festival, where they consume many millions of litres of foaming beer and countless kilometres of sausage. Drunkenness certainly does occur, but getting drunk is not the main reason why most people go there. The aim of most Oktoberfest revellers is to achieve a state of Gemütlichkeit, for which the nearest English translation is something like ‘a state of feeling snug, cosy and pleasant’. The legendary Soho drinker Jeffrey Bernard wrote that he had never really enjoyed being drunk; it was the process of getting there that appealed to him – particularly the halfway stage, which in his case was invariably short-lived. Other languages have words to signify this pleasant intermediate state. In Danish it is hygge; in Spanish it is la chispa. But English-speakers have little in their vocabulary to cover the extensive territory between the two extremes of sober and legless.
We like alcohol and other recreational drugs because they make us feel nice. But we are also drawn to them because they make us feel different. The kick of intoxication is not only about feeling good: it can also be about taking a holiday from normality and temporarily seeing life from an altered perspective. As Louis Lewin put it, ‘A man must sometimes take a rest from his memory.’
Recreational drugs have long been used for stimulating creativity. The nineteenth century witnessed a vogue for experimenting with psychoactive drugs as tools for exploring the inner workings of the mind and unleashing its creative potential. Among the many intellectuals to pursue this approach was Charles Baudelaire, who was inspired by the drug-fuelled works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey to write Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises). In it, Baudelaire relates how he and his friends used opium and hashish to help them break into unexplored realms of the human imagination and view the world in novel ways. Their goal was nothing less than to ‘conquer Paradise at a stroke’. Baudelaire died in 1867, ruined by his drug use and addicted to opium. The artistic tradition of using drugs to aid creativity continued in the next century. Among the best-known products are Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception and its sequel Heaven and Hell. They were woven from Huxley’s own experiences in the 1950s with mescaline, a hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus.10
Alcohol is also capable of stimulating creativity, up to a point. The ranks of creative writers and poets have famously been stuffed with boozers too numerous to mention. However, one piece of research suggests that alcohol may in fact be more effective at enhancing the creativity of individuals who are normally uncreative. Researchers found that a moderately large dose of alcohol improved the verbal creativity of men and women who were not very creative when sober, but tended to impair the performance of those who did well when sober. One way in which alcohol clearly does assist creativity is by reducing social inhibitions and releasing the shackles of conventionality. As William James observed, ‘Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the greatest votary of the Yes function in man.’
Humanity’s longstanding attraction to drunkenness and other altered states of consciousness has led some scientists to conclude that it is deeply ingrained in our biological makeup. Indeed, the American psycho-pharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has argued that the desire for intoxication is one of four basic drives governing human behaviour – the others being hunger, thirst and sex.11 Siegel’s research on how drugs affect humans and other animals convinced him that an ‘intoxication drive’ is a primary motivational force. The function of this drive, he believes, is to help maintain mental health through self-medication. According to Siegel, intoxicating drugs are a form of medicine: when we are stressed, anxious or in pain, we seek out drugs that give us some relief; and when we are tired or depressed, we seek out stimulants to lift our mood.
Other animals do the same, if given the opportunity. Historical descriptions of opium dens refer to mice, rats and birds sniffing the intoxicating smoke and nibbling leftover scraps of opium. Louis Lewin observed that ‘cats, dogs and monkeys inhale the smoke which their master expels from his opium-pipe, and it is said that monkeys consume the opium which oozes from the bamboo pipe’. The French writer and opium addict Jean Cocteau similarly described how flies, lizards, mice, cockroaches and spiders would gather round the opium-smoker, forming a ‘circle in ecstasy’.
Properly conducted scientific experiments have confirmed that many species of mammals, fish and reptiles will learn to seek out and consume psychoactive drugs. When monkeys, apes, rats, cats or dogs are given free rein to self-administer drugs under laboratory conditions, they generally prefer the same drugs as humans, including alcohol, nicotine, opium, cannabis, cocaine, ether and nitrous oxide. Like humans, they will voluntarily dose themselves with recreational intoxicants, while showing little interest in psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants. And, just like us, they will work very hard to obtain the most pleasurable and addictive recreational drugs, especially cocaine. In laboratory experiments, some monkeys have willingly pressed a lever more than 12,000 times to obtain a single injection of cocaine.
Children also display a natural propensity to experiment with altered states of consciousness. They normally achieve this without the aid of recreational drugs, using age-old techniques such as hyperventilation or spinning around to induce dizziness. Children as young as three or four will spontaneously discover the pleasures of twirling themselves into a giddy daze or hyperventilating until they almost faint. However, children soon turn into adolescents, who tend to prefer their intoxication in a chemical form such as alcohol. More than half of all 11–15-year-olds in England have drunk alcohol and more than one in five have used it within the past week.12
Children’s experimentation with making themselves feel different, whether by hyperventilating or spinning around, may be a reflection of their deeper propensity to play. We are all born with an instinct to play, so that we can learn about the world around us and how to deal with it. Play behaviour is a fundamental characteristic of young humans and young animals of other species. Play is a form of safe simulation, in which the young individual can explore the world and develop their physical and mental capabilities, whilst remaining insulated from the risks that would arise from ‘serious’ versions of the same behaviour. For example, young animals play at fighting each other, or catching prey, during a stage in their development when real fighting or real hunting would be dangerous. By playing in this way, they acquire crucial physical and social skills they will need in later life. We humans play mentally as well as physically. Our attraction to temporarily altered states of consciousness might in part be a consequence of our playfulness.
Recreational drugs provide pleasure and relief from displeasure. They also cause vast amounts of harm and suffering to individual users and society as a whole. In the UK alone, the estimated economic costs of recreational drug use are as much as £16 billion a year in terms of health care, social costs and crime.
Addictive drugs such as heroin, nicotine and alcohol debilitate and kill people in large numbers, whether from chronic illness, overdoses or accidents. In the year 2005, for example, there were just over 1,000 deaths in England and Wales involving heroin, morphine or cocaine. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more. In the UK, where the alcohol-related death rate has more than doubled since the early 1990s, well over 8,000 deaths a year are directly related to alcohol consumption.13 This figure does not include the many deaths caused by alcohol-fuelled accidents, violence or vehicle crashes, neither does it include deaths from the numerous diseases for which alcohol is known to heighten the risk, such as many forms of cancer. According to some estimates, the total number of deaths to which alcohol contributes in some way may be as high as 40,000 a year in England and Wales alone. The corresponding figure for tobacco is almost three times higher, at around 114,000 deaths a year.
Legal recreational drugs – specifically, tobacco and alcohol – cause immense damage to national health, far outstripping the effects of their less widely-used illegal counterparts. An estimated 1.5 million people in the UK are addicted to alcohol. According to government estimates, up to 17 million working days are lost each year in the UK as a result of alcohol, and its misuse costs the economy around £6.4 billion a year in lost productivity. The picture is not dissimilar in the USA, where approximately a fifth of adults abuse alcohol at some point in their life. Worldwide, alcohol is estimated to be responsible for about 4 per cent of the global disease burden.
Most victims of alcohol abuse die from liver disease, heart disease, accidents or acute alcohol poisoning. Most of those with alcohol-induced liver disease are social drinkers, not alcoholics. They may not even think of themselves as having a drink problem. In England, the number of cases of alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver almost tripled over the period between 1996–7 and 2005–6. Doctors are now encountering patients in their twenties with end-stage cirrhosis of the liver, a condition that usually develops only after years of hard drinking. Alcohol heightens the risk of many forms of cancer, including cancers of the mouth, liver and oesophagus. It may also increase the risk of breast cancer in women with a family history of the disease. Research has found that the sisters and daughters of women with breast cancer are themselves at greater risk of developing breast cancer if they drink alcohol daily.
In the UK, as elsewhere, thousands of people die every year in road traffic accidents where alcohol has been a contributory or causal factor. Thousands more die or are seriously injured in alcohol-fuelled violence and domestic accidents. Alcohol is involved in more than half of all visits to hospital accident and emergency departments and orthopaedic admissions, and is a factor in about a third of all arrests made in urban police stations. In larger doses, it is capable of killing directly. On average, one person dies each day in England from acute alcohol poisoning. The typical victim is a young person who has been celebrating with friends. Alcohol kills by suppressing the brain circuits that control breathing and the cough reflex; the victims of alcohol poisoning often die from lack of oxygen or because they inhale vomit into their lungs, causing respiratory failure.
Sexual crime is another, often underestimated, risk from alcohol. Every year, women and men are raped while incapacitated by alcohol. They often believe their drink must have been spiked with a date-rape drug such as Rohypnol, although the evidence suggests that this may be less common than often assumed. A 2006 study by the UK Association of Chief Police Officers found that only one in ten cases of alleged sexual assault was suspected of being drug-assisted. None of these cases involved Rohypnol and only a few involved another date-rape drug (GHB), whereas almost all of the date-rape victims said they had been drinking, some of them heavily. The most common method of spiking drinks is with more alcohol. It is likely that some of the rape victims who thought they had been drugged had in fact been very drunk.
As to tobacco – well, I won’t bore you by rehearsing all the baleful statistics about the toll of death and disease for which it is responsible, though I will mention an authoritative analysis which calculated that a regular smoker will reduce their life expectancy by an average of ten years. This startling statistic reinforces the point that smoking is the most dangerous thing that most people will ever do in their lives. It remains the biggest single cause of preventable death on the planet. Between them, alcohol and tobacco – those legal recreational drugs we can buy in the high street – account for approximately 90 per cent of all drug-related deaths in the UK. They are also among the leading contributors to disease and premature death worldwide.
Cannabis, the most popular of the illegal recreational drugs, used to enjoy a reputation for being relatively safe. But that reputation has been eroded in recent years, as a growing body of evidence has linked it with a range of medical risks. The most serious concerns have arisen from research indicating that cannabis can increase the severity of existing psychotic disorders and induce psychotic symptoms or even full-blown psychosis.14 Some individuals appear to be much more vulnerable to these effects than others. Scientists remain uncertain as to why some people are particularly susceptible in this way, although the explanation is likely to involve some form of interaction between genetic and environmental factors.
Overall, the emerging evidence suggests that cannabis may be a contributory factor in about 10 per cent of psychosis cases. One analysis published in 2007 concluded that frequent use could double the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses. That said, psychotic illnesses remain relatively uncommon, in comparison with many other diseases, and most people who use cannabis do not develop them. Cannabis may also heighten the risk of depression and anxiety disorders in vulnerable individuals. One study found that non-depressed people who used cannabis were four times more likely than non-users to become depressed in later years. The use of cannabis preceded the onset of depression, implying that the correlation was not simply the result of already-depressed people turning to cannabis for relief. Even allowing for this and other evidence, there is little doubt that cannabis is still substantially less harmful than, say, cocaine or alcohol. Nonetheless, it is harmful, and probably more so than many of its users once believed.
All recreational drugs are harmful and some are clearly much more harmful than others. So how should we go about judging the many different drugs in terms of the harm they cause? It all depends, of course, on how you define harm. Should harm be assessed only according to what the drug does to the individual who uses it, or should we also take account of its wider effects on the user’s family, community and society at large? What about drug-related crime, which has as much to do with legislation and social policy as it does with the pharmacological effects of drugs? Collecting high-quality data is another problem. Folklore, prejudice and untested assumptions are readily available when it comes to debating drugs, whereas verifiable scientific evidence is often in short supply. To make matters worse, scientific and medical journals have a slight bias towards publishing studies that find positive evidence of harm rather than those that have drawn a blank. The shortage of solid evidence means that much of the expensive effort to combat drug misuse, whether through law enforcement, treatment or education, may not always be targeted optimally at the drugs that cause the most harm.
Fortunately, progress is being made on this front and we do now have ways of making more rational judgements about the relative harmfulness of drugs. A significant advance came in 2006, when the UK Parliament’s House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology published an authoritative analysis of how different recreational drugs compare in terms of the harm they cause. The report presented a systematic, evidence-based assessment of twenty commonly used drugs, comparing the physical and social harm they cause and their potential to cause addiction. The work was led by Professor David Nutt of Bristol University and Professor Colin Blakemore of the UK Medical Research Council and its findings were published in 2007 in the leading medical journal The Lancet.
The assessments were made by two panels of independent experts from a range of disciplines, including psychiatrists, chemists, pharmacologists, lawyers and police officers. They drew on the best available scientific and medical evidence. Their analysis took account of three main dimensions, or aspects, of harm: namely, the physical harm caused to the individual user; the broader harm caused to society, including the user’s family and community; and the tendency of the drug to create dependence. Each of these three main dimensions was in turn broken down into a number of sub-dimensions. For example, physical harm was assessed in terms of the drug’s acute effects, its chronic effects and its scope for intravenous use. Some drugs cause mainly acute harm: for instance, cocaine can cause heart attacks and heroin can suppress breathing. Other drugs, notably nicotine, cause most of their harm chronically, through long-term use. Drugs that are taken intravenously tend to be more harmful for several reasons: they produce a bigger ‘rush’, making them more addictive; the user is more likely to overdose; and shared needles spread life-threatening disease such as hepatitis and HIV.
Each of the twenty drugs was assessed on these various dimensions by the experts, who then debated and revised their judgements according to what is known as an expert delphic procedure. The two groups independently arrived at similar scores, adding to confidence about their validity.15 The average of all the scores was then used as an overall index of harm for each drug. The resulting rank ordering, in descending order of overall harmfulness, was as follows:
1 Heroin
2 Cocaine
3 Barbiturates
4 Street methadone
5 Alcohol
6 Ketamine
7 Benzodiazepines
8 Amphetamine
9 Tobacco
10 Buprenorphine
11 Cannabis
12 Solvents
13 4-MTA
14 LSD
15 Methylphenidate (Ritalin)
16 Anabolic steroids
17 GHB
18 Ecstasy
19 Alkyl nitrites
20 Khat
One striking feature of this list is how poorly it correlates with the current legal classification of the same drugs. In fact, statistically speaking, there was no significant correlation at all between the rank ordering according to harmfulness and the classification according to current UK legislation (the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971).
In the UK, illegal drugs are divided into three classes (A, B and C) according to the severity of the penalties incurred for possession or dealing. The highest category, Class A, includes heroin and cocaine, which were also judged by the experts to be the most harmful drugs. However, Class A also includes LSD and ecstasy, which were judged to be among the least harmful. In the UK, you can be sent to prison for up to seven years for possessing a Class A drug and imprisoned for life if convicted of supplying it.
Alcohol and tobacco, which are legal and unclassified, were assessed to be more harmful than several illegal drugs including cannabis, LSD and ecstasy. If recreational drugs were reclassified according to this evidence-based index of harm, then alcohol would be a Class A drug and tobacco would be Class B. I should stress that I am not trying to imply that making alcohol and tobacco illegal would be either desirable or feasible. The point is simply that the current legal framework has little solid basis in scientific evidence or rational analysis. When measured in terms of the harm they cause, there is currently no clear distinction between legal and illegal drugs.
For its part, the UK parliamentary committee concluded that there are serious inconsistencies in the legal system for classifying drugs and in the processes by which governments tackle drug use. The committee found no convincing evidence to support the belief that legal penalties deter people from using recreational drugs. It called for a more objective and evidence-based approach which takes better account of the actual harm caused by drugs and places less emphasis on ‘knee-jerk responses to media storms’.
Similar conclusions were reached by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, following their own two-year study. Their report, which was published in 2007, concluded that ‘the harmless use of illegal drugs is possible, indeed common’. The Commission found that UK drugs laws were driven more by ‘moral panic’ than rational debate. It proposed scrapping the current classification scheme and replacing it with a framework based on harm. The underlying aim should be to regulate the use of drugs in order to prevent harm, rather than trying to prohibit them altogether. The Commission’s chair, Professor Anthony King, called for ‘less foaming at the mouth and more thinking’. I’ll drink to that.
