As a preteen in the 1960s, I was regularly subjected to public service announcements on television that sought to instill in me a horror of cigarette smoking. In one such ad, young people mingled and chatted carelessly as the narrator calmly enumerated the long-term dangers of the cigarettes that the kids were smoking, including cancer and lung disease. After 20 seconds' worth of ironic contrast between the merry background music and the frightening facts, the music faded and the narrator asked... "Then why are these people laughing?" In another ad, a toddler attempted to help his father perform chores around the house as the narrator approvingly intoned the phrase: "Like father, like son." The duo then hiked into the woods and sat down with their backs against a tree, at which point dad fished out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and lighted up as his son looked on admiringly. The announcer repeats the adage, this time in the form of a question: "Like father, like son?"
I saw such advertisements on a daily basis as a kid without ever stopping to question the propriety of such a media blitz. My government was apparently in charge of keeping me safe, I reasoned, and my job was to take their advice insofar as grownups surely knew what was best for me. Of course, my own particular father smoked like a chimney and I never felt called upon to emulate him in that particular, but I was sure that Madison Avenue knew what it was doing. I was onboard with the general message, that was what mattered. Had I been cross-examined by a modern-day Socrates as to my precise position on cigarette smoking, I probably would have responded with an irritating mix of magnanimity and condescension along the following lines: "People should not necessarily be physically stopped from smoking, but we should hound them to the world's end with scientific facts ad nauseam until they do the right thing at long last and finally quit!"
This, in fact, sounds like the conditions of the uneasy truce that the tobacco industry has been attempting to keep with litigious prohibitionists over the last few decades: cigarettes may still be sold around the world (up to and including the 5 trillion cigarettes that sold worldwide in 2019), but these sales must be accompanied by an ever-increasing number of health warnings in an ever-increasing font size, not only on cigarette packages and cartons, but on billboards, placards and other signage located in and around the many convenience and food stores where the, ahem, "cancer sticks" are still peddled. Clearly a war is going on behind the scenes here. Behind the headlines of billion-dollar settlements, there is a war going on between prohibitionists and Libertarians, each asserting, in my view, unnecessarily extreme positions about health, rights and responsibilities. The prohibitionists insist that we should be cracking down on tobacco like we already crack down on other drugs; the Libertarians insist that people have a right to use a deadly product as long as they do not hurt other people. The prohibitionists insist that they ARE hurting other people, and so forth and so on.
Today I would like to question the grounds upon which this debate about tobacco is taking place. Like almost every other debate on important social and psychosocial issues in America, the participants in this debate are reckoning without drug prohibition. They fail to realize that the subject of drug prohibition is hugely relevant to the debate about cigarettes. But in order to see how this is so, we first have to ask a question that neither the prohibitionists nor the Libertarians are in the habit of asking: namely, "Why do people smoke cigarettes in the first place?" At this point, I have to ask the biochemical determinists in the room to put their hands down for I wish to answer this question from the standpoint of common sense, as unfashionable as that approach may be in the field of behavioral medicine these days. Why do people enjoy puffing on cigarettes, class? Answer: Because they wish to get what we derisively refer to today as a "high." They want to get what they consider to be an inspirational "kick" from inhaling tobacco. Yes, friends, that's right: cigarettes are drugs, just like cocaine and opium. And smokers actually like the way that this particular drug makes them feel. (Isn't it refreshing to be so honest?!)
Once we acknowledge this simple but eternally ignored fact, that people actually ENJOY smoking cigarettes, a question naturally occurs to any health-conscious mind in a freedom-loving world:
Is there a way that cigarette smokers could get that feeling of a "lift," or of mood elevation, without smoking cigarettes?
The answer is a resounding yes -- but only if we reckon WITH drug prohibition, only if we admit that drug prohibition exists, only if we take into consideration the fact that the U.S. has outlawed almost every psychoactive substance that could provide the lift that cigarette smokers desire. Of course, the identity of the drug or drugs that could most effectively take the mood-lifting place of nicotine for any given smoker will vary. But one of the first obvious candidates for many would be opium, a drug which it will be remembered was smoked peaceably at home in America until 1914, when the drug was outlawed because of anti-Chinese sentiment, especially the fear that opium-crazed Chinese-Americans would take advantage of poor defenseless white women. But don't take my word for it. Consider this quote concerning opium from Dr Philip Ayres, the Colonial Surgeon of Hong Kong, who is remembered to this day for having coordinated an heroic fight against the bubonic plague during his 24-year assignment in the "Fragrant Harbor."
Nine out of twelve men smoke a certain number of pipes a day, just as a tobacco smoker would, or as a wine or beer drinker might drink his two or three glasses a day, without desiring more. I think the excessive opium smoker is in a greater minority than the excessive spirit drinker or tobacco smoker."
Dr Philip Burnard Chenery Ayres, the Colonial Surgeon of Hong Kong
If we really want to follow the science, this is the kind of science we should be following: the common-sense observations of a man in a position to know what he is talking about.
But American historians have rewritten history to turn opium into an evil drug, one that the Brits were supposedly pushing on the Chinese, thereby bringing about wars. The assumption here is that the Mandarin leaders of the time were health-conscious friends of the people.
Yet as William H. Brereton reported in his 1882 lectures:
There is little sympathy between the supreme Government and the great body of the people. The Emperor, his family, and immediate suite, are all Tartars, quite another race from the Chinese, differing totally in customs, manners, dress, and social habits.1
Brereton later elaborated as follows:
There never was anything more fallacious or more distinctly untrue than that the Chinese Government is, or ever was, anxious to put a stop to the trade upon moral grounds. The sole object of the Government of China in objecting to the importation of Indian opium into the country... was to protect the native drug, to prevent bullion from leaving the country, and generally to exclude foreign goods.2
Forgive this seemingly lopsided focus on one specific drug, namely opium, but I can justify this favoritism for at least two good reasons: First, I wish to push back against the attempts of modern historians to distort the facts about opium in order to flatter the drug-hating sensibilities of the west. One example of this trend is the tellingly titled book by John Halpern published in 2019: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world."3 The very title displays the childish attitude of westerners, by implying that a flower can poison the world. It is socially influenced policies and attitudes that poison the world, not inanimate nature. Second, the outlawing of opium has done untold harm by shunting would-be users off onto far more potent opiates whose quality and quantity -- and indeed very identity -- cannot be ascertained, thereby leading to hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths of American young people.4 And we owe it to the memory of these dead to point out loudly and clearly that they were not killed by opiates -- they were killed by criminally negligent social policies and attitudes. In other words, "Prohibitionists, j'accuse!"
I haven't forgot about the cigarette bit, but...
Finally: A quick word about the misleadingly named "Opium Wars" and the idea that Britain was "pushing" poison on the Chinese. If we want evidence of a country flooding its neighbors with unhealthy product, we need look no further than the United States itself selling cigarettes worldwide -- or selling alcohol worldwide, for that matter, even to countries whose religious norm is abstinence. But then we mustn't hold our breaths waiting for someone to publish a book entitled: "Wine: how a grape shaped and poisoned the world," which is just another sign of the presumption-laden hypocrisy of modern authors in the age of drug prohibition.
NOW, ABOUT THOSE CIGARETTES
The take-home message is this: that a theoretically endless number of substances could take the place of cigarettes (or even render their use undesirable) for a given individual -- once we begin looking at both natural and nature-inspired psychoactive substances as potential opportunities rather than as threats. For that to happen, we need to reboot our approach to drugs by sitting down calmly in front of the vast potential pharmacopoeia of what indigenous people might call "teacher medicines" and ask ourselves exactly how they might help specific individuals in practical ways -- not by pushing about molecules in a way that flatters biochemical theories, but by demonstrably motivating individuals to engage in healthy (or at least healthier) behavior in the real world. And, let's face it, almost any psychoactive replacement that does not bring about immediate death would be preferable to tobacco, a substance associated with the death of almost half a million Americans every single year. 5
This does not mean however that John Halpern should rush out and write a book entitled "Tobacco: How a plant has shaped and poisoned the world." Sure, we know that tobacco is associated with death and addiction in America, but those results are only extrapolated at our peril (or rather at the peril of non-westerners). Indigenous cultures have used tobacco for ceremonial, divinatory and therapeutic purposes for ages6. Nor have these cultures added dependence-causing ingredients to their tobacco, as is customary in the American cigarette industry.7 Native cultures also tend to believe that one's attitude towards a natural substance influences one's psychological and physical experience of that substance, for better or for worse. Westerners, on the other hand, assume that human beings are more or less interchangeable machines on the biochemical level, all susceptible in the same general way to the same general sets of poisons and panaceas.
I will say little here about the legal products that have been created by entrepreneurs to help smokers quit. I will simply observe that the inadequacy of such approaches can be seen by anybody who enters their local food store. Despite being ostracized and pestered, almost 29 million Americans are still willing to pay astronomical prices for their drug of choice, namely cigarettes8. Instead of thinking of ever new ways to punish and pester this demographic, we should be thinking of win-win solutions that give them what they want while allowing them to get their customary psycho-physical perks in a far less risky way. And there are drugs that can do just that, once we stop pretending that cigarettes are not a drug in the same way as coffee is a drug, as alcohol is a drug, as antidepressants are drugs, and as opium is a drug. In other words, Americans need to grow up. They need to decide to start using drugs as wisely as possible for human benefit, rather than saying "drugs kill," in sympathy with the caveman of yore who was thinking along the same superstitious lines when he decided that "fire bad."
If we really want Americans to give up cigarettes, we need to end the drug prohibition which outlaws all the plausible psychoactive alternatives to cigarettes. Cigarette smoking might not end entirely under such a plan, but regular use would thenceforth be limited to eccentrics -- unless we think that education has no effect on users -- in which case, why are the CDC and the 50 states spending around one billion dollars a year on anti-smoking advertisements?9
Of course, we could always just sit back and wait for human nature to change, for people to stop wishing to improve the way that they feel in life... or we could wait until the world is so full of anti-drug police that no one can place a cigarette between their lips without being nabbed by security forces and taken to a reeducation camp.
Or we could try something really unusual for us. We could resolve to stop demonizing drugs a priori and start using them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
AFTERWORD
A final note about opium: this is a fraught topic because everything one reads on the subject is potentially biased because of the ambiguous employment of subjective terminology (or subjectively employed terminology) like "dependence" and "addiction" and "problem." I found, for instance, an academic paper insisting that Iran had a problem with opium prior to the effective outlawing of that drug by the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Pahlavi in 1955 10. The question, of course, is "for whom was opium a problem back in 1955"? And in what way was dependency a problem? And in what way was this dependency more problematic than, say, a lifetime dependency on modern "meds"? One soon sees that it was not the users who were reporting problems with opium. The problems were being discovered by people with interests other than the health of the population in mind, including 1) doctors who needed patients, and 2) politicians who needed to feel that they controlled the population and that people were not living their own lives in blithe indifference to commands from above. I need hardly add that after Iran cracked down on the supposed opium epidemic, they soon discovered that they had an epidemic of cigarette smoking. Drug policy -- inspired by us geniuses in the United States -- thus tossed Iranians from the frying pan into the fire.
No drug is dangerous in itself. It is policies and attitudes and laws that weaponize drugs.
If Americans have a problem with opium, it is certainly not because they dislike the idea of chemical dependency. The modern psychiatric paradigm is all about placing human beings on dependence-causing "meds." There is plenty of evidence, moreover, that opium (at least when smoked) is far easier to kick than antidepressants after lengthy use.11 Why then am I supposed to have a problem if I smoke a few opium pipes nightly, while I am thought to have no problem -- and indeed to be a health-conscious citizen -- if I take my meds every morning? The more one looks into these matters, the clearer it becomes that one needs to follow the money, however difficult that task may become when analyzing the drug policies of a country in light of geopolitical pressures introduced from abroad.
Are opium and cocaine a problem? If I were a doctor, the use of opium and cocaine in the United States would be a huge problem, indeed -- because such drug use would be keeping me from making a living!
Finally...
In the 2015 action thriller "No Escape," Owen Wilson played an American father who was attempting to help his family escape from a fictional Middle Eastern country (that was clearly supposed to be Iran) after a fit of apparently brainless anti-Americanism had seized the people. The family was surrounded on all sides by rabidly angry citizens while being chased by jeeps that were attempting to run them over (the family, I mean, not the citizens). Fortunately, a fellow westerner, played by Pierce Brosnan, showed up just in time to spirit the family away to the one safe place in town. And what was that one safe place in town? It was the local opium den, of course, the one place where people were ready to live and let live -- the one place where nobody was in a hurry to kill anybody, no, not even if they came from Britain or, worse yet, America!
It's ironic that the US insisted that the Shah outlaw opium in 1955, and now 71 years later, Americans are complaining that the Iranians are such hotheads as a people, so ready to be stirred up and offended.
The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
Judging from research articles, they do not even teach the many obvious benefits of drugs in med school.
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
If our loved ones should experience severe depression and visit an emergency room for treatment, they will be started on a regime of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs. They will not be given any drugs that elate and inspire.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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