by Sebastian Scheerer (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Drug use holds a prominent place in the history of social conflict, because it lends itself as an easily identifiable symbol for otherwise invisible characteristics (or characteristics the allusion to which would be regarded as improper and therefore would become self-defeating). Therefore, drug policy has frequently been a weapon in social conflict rather than an unbiased response to objective difficulties. Some examples may help clarify this point. I will discuss in brief the ideological debate on coffee, alcohol and cannabis respectively and then turn to some contemporary issues, around the so-called hard drugs.
Coffee is a young drug. The practice of roasting the beans did not start until around the thirteenth century. The drink then became popular with dervishes and spread to Mecca and Medina, before it reached all parts of the Islamic world by the end of the fifteenth century. But since it was quite closely linked to the religious Sufi order. the 'innocent' drug coffee often had to share the SuEis' fate.
Like many medieval Christian orders the Sufis often took a very critical stance towards the dominant political and religious structures. Some of them wanted to abolish private property and preached social justice. As mysticists they attacked dogmatic Islam for its hypocrisy, and some spoke favourably (and made use) of hashish, opium, and even wine as a means of reaching higher levels of spirituality. When coffee became known in the Islamic world they were its first promoters, thus producing an association between their politically and religiously dissident views and coffee consumption.
In 1511, coffee houses in Mecca were shut down. Coffee drinking Sufis were chased away and coffee stocks were burned. Twenty years later, leading Muslims in Cairo charged coffee houses with encouraging political arguments and revolt, immorality and vice. Still later, the orthodox clergy of Istanbul started a campaign against coffee houses there. Under the rule of Murad 111 (1574-1595), coffee was prohibited. When times became more turbulent under Murad IV (1623-1640), coffee houses were being torn down and coffee drinkers suffered severe penalties, sometimes even death. The most savage persecution must have been in 1656 when 'Ottoman grand Vizir Koprili suppressed the coffee houses for political reasons, and prohibited coffee. For a first violation the punishment was cudgelling. For a second, the offender was put into a leather bag, which was sewn up and thrown into the Bosphorus' (Roden, 1981, p. 21; cf. Maritsch and Uhl. 1989, p. 163).
In seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, coffee was being ascribed a number of characteristics which modern science later did not confirm. Public perception of coffee in these tirhes therefore evidently sensed some properties of the drug which did not exist, but which had been projected into it. In England, coffee was regarded as being a substance that reduced sexual energies to the point of impotence. The well-known Women's petition against coffee of 1674 was quite explicit in this respect, but it is not hard to make out the socio-political impulse behind this petition. English coffee houses at that time did not allow women to enter, and it was certainly this exclusion as well as the growing patriarchalization of society as a whole which the authors of the petition were revolting against: 'Coffee as a sober drink and coffee as a means of diminishing the sexual impulses - it is not hard to see the ideological forces at work here. Soberness and abstinence are the battle cries of any puritan-ascetic movement' (Schivelbusch, 1980, p. 50).
On the other hand, not all effects of coffee are mere (placebo) attributions. It does accelerate perception and psychic activity, and it really can keep people awake. It was the drug that led away from the 'natural' rhythm of everyday life which had reigned for centuries, and it did 'fit' better to the lifestyle that was increasingly being required: that of the writing man who sits at his desk and who is expected to function like a clockwork.
Before coffee arrived, the most popular liquid nutrition in Europe had been beer. While beer was associated with body fluids, the formation of a belly and with both good humour and phlegm, public opinion of the day saw coffee as a drug that was likely to dry out the phlegm, and it was certainly right in as far as coffee was a low-calorie drink that did not create anything like a beer belly. So where does ideology come in? As Schivelbusch explained (1980, p. 59), the different medical opinions about coffee reflected the ideological conflict between conservatives and progressives of the day: 'Those authors of the seventeenth century who believed the only true body to be the "juicy" and fat one, and who were appalled by any sign of "drying out", must be called conservative in as far as for them the only true nutrition was the medieval one'. The image of the dry- which in those days like today was being associated with abstention, nervousness, and the like - is appalling to the conservative mind. But the 'dry' is the modern principle. Dryness and soberness are synonyms. Still today, only alcohol is colloquially being referred to as being 'wet', not the hot drinks like tea or coffee. 'Dry is the manly, the patriarchal, the ascetic, anti-erotic principle, in distinction to the sensuous-feminine. Coffee in that sense was the great dryer at the threshold to modernity.'
Nationwide alcohol prohibition in the USA lasted from 1919 to 1933. The prota'gonists of.prohibition were Protestant churches, most notably Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. Speaking in terms of social and ideological characteristics these churches assembled mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) with a background of traditional rural lifestyles. True as it is that (as Levine (1982, pp. 245-248) pointed out) it was big business' support of the Anti-Saloon-League that finally secured the political victory of prohibitionism in 1919, we cannot overlook the fact that the necessary groundwork had been laid by a traditional middle class whose 'search for order' was becoming increasingly desperate at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Traditional images of order had it that American life was primarily that of the small business (the shop-owner and his employees) and of the farming community (with large families and spiritual guidance by paternalistically moralizing churches). At the outset of the twentieth century this was no longer true. Rural life was being encroached upon by the big cities, small middle class business by incredibly powerful trusts, the farmers noticed that their well-being depended less upon their own work than upon the banks' benevolence, and the old puritan temperance ideology was being threatened by the existence of an ever larger industrial working class that was Catholic rather than Protestant (Irish and Italian immigration) and seemed to be living by different values and norms altogether (Sinclair, 1962; Gusfield, 1963).
Prohibition was a symbolic use of politics (cf. Edelman, 1976) by a declining cultural elite who wanted to once more reaffirm the authoritative nature of its values, norms, and way of life over thechallenging groups' mores which were perceived as an ever growing threat to morality, as the WASPs defined it. This it was in terms of cultural conflict.
In terms of social class, prohibition has also been interpreted as a ,ymbolic attack on the working class. There already had been an old fear of the saloon as an immoral place, but now the saloons were as regarded as un-American and uncivilized. Saloons were a political evil as well as a moral one, they were the place where unions would organize, where the big city party machines would start working and where communists and anarchists would find their fanatic followers. The annihilation of the saloons was increasingly being seen as a prerequisite for making America governable in the twentieth century (Levine, 1982).
These examples illustrate that conflicts over drug policy do not only result from differing evaluations of scientific evidence concerning the dangers of the substances and the probable effectiveness of control measures. Indeed, the very formation of scientific knowledge seems to depend on the deeper structures of social position and ideological persuasion. Conflicts over drug policy are social and ideological conflicts, in which the drugs in question serve as symbols for rather than a cause of the conflict.
The conflict over alcohol and saloons in the USA was a conflict between social groups, moral values, and political ideologies. The attempt to stigmatize alcohol and saloons was a vehicle to stigmatize working class Catholics and their way of life. The prohibition conflict was really not only a conflict over a drug, but about social relations, cultural hegemony, and political domination. Drug policy conflicts can therefore be seen as culture conflicts in which drugs function as 'summary symbols' (Gusfield, 1963). Summary symbols reduce the complexity of social differences and can be easily communicated by mass media to a large public which is quite distant from the centres of political decision making, and which would even be disinterested in party politics (unless a specific issue strikes a chord).
Using the same conceptual tool we can now try to identify the social meaning of contemporary 'moral' or 'symbolic' crusades against drugs (cf. Gusfield, 1963). Cannabis was the drug most closely associated with the youth culture that emerged in the nineteen sixties. As with alcohol though the conflict was hidden behind a veil of pharmacological, psychological, and criminological arguments. Instead of claiming the right to enjoy the drug of their choice the challengers of cannabis prohibition had to advance evidence for the substance's harmlessness - and instead of saying outright that they wished to eradicate the whole youth culture, the guardians of the nineteen fifties 'psychology of scarcity' had to produce evidence that cannabis would cause an amotivational syndrome, or aggressiveness, and impotence.
To cannabis users the drug was a summary symbol for their protest against the established order. This established order was hegemonic, placid and family-centred. The families of the fifties hunkered down, saved money, lived conservatively, and did not see racial segregation as a problem. The dominant culture was white, Protestant and male, it was centred on material goods, work, and obedience. Cannabis symbolized civil disobedience and pacifism, indulgence in music and leisure, scepticism of paid labour and puritan ethics, emphasis on love, peace, and happiness. And it blurred the gender differences (creating the long hair scandals). As Klein said in Newsweek (June 8th, 1992, p. 21): 'The revolt against the 50's was cultural, generational, and it was easy to dance to'. And the cannabis leaf was one of its symbols that summarized all this. There were many facets to this revolt. One was the questioning of a concept of reason that limited itself to abstract thinking and a mere technical rationality.
In a history-of-mentalities-approach the eighteenth century victory of both coffee and tobacco over the medieval drug habits is today being interpreted as foreboding the ascension of bourgeois rationality and calculation over the culture of mysticism and indulgence. More than anything else, coffee and tobacco were the drugs of bourgeois hegemony. As it seems the cannabis subculture expressed a threat to this 300 year old hegemony including its emphasis on technical rationality and the strict division between mind and body, sentiments and rationality.
The spreading of cannabis use might symbolize a 'new age' in which our concepts of mind and the body, of concrete and abstract and all the other binary systems that used to order our mental maps are due for revision. As Schivelbusch said: 'In the same way in which the coffee and tobacco prohibitions of the seventeenth century were retreat battles of medieval Weltanschauung (which justly sensed the bourgeois- modern dynamics in the new leisure drugs) today's still valid prohibitions of mind expanding drugs lend themselves to an interpretation as retreat battles of bourgeois rationality and self discipline' ( 1980, p. 238).
Political scientists like Inglehart direct our attention to still another dimension of conflict, when they distinguish generations and social groups according to value preferences. According to Inglehart the youth revolt in Europe could be interpreted as a challenge of the dominant 'acquisitive' by a 'post-bourgeois' or 'aesthetic values' culture. The emergence of this new culture can be traced back to interrelated economic and educational processes. In a time of scarcity of resources people tend to give highest priority and esteem to basic material goods and to 'post-bourgeois' values such as solidarity, development of talents, esteem for arts and sports as well as leisure, etcetera. But the relation between socio-economic environment and value preferences is not synchronized, since people tend to stick to the preferences they adopted during their childhood years.
Any person raised in an environment of scarcity is likely to adopt 'acquisitive' value preferences and to stick with them even if in later times he comes to live in a different environment. On the other hand someone brought up in a socio-economic environment of affluence is likely to develop 'post-bourgeois' values and even to stick to them in times of scarcity. Inglehart's thesis explains why the sixties were a unique moment. For the older generation there was a psychology of scarcity in the midst of an economy of abundance, while the younger generation had internalized abundance, had developed post-bourgeois value preferences and wanted to live according to them.
The cannabis crusade is still lingering on, but hallucinogenic drugs have become a battlefield of minor importance compared to heroin, cocaine and MDMA (Ecstasy/XTC). What is the social and ideological conflict hehind these contemporary crusades?
As Leary says in NZZ Folio (Drogenkonsum, 1992): 'The world has changed since the sixties, and even more so have the drugs'. The 'liberal' drugs of the Left, mind-expanding drugs like marijuana and LSD, almost disappeared, but with the 'hardliners' Reagan and Bush arrived the 'hard' drugs - heroin, cocaine, and crack.
This view is characteristic of a drug guru of the sixties who has grown old. To him nothing can match the good old days of the soft drugs. Ever since the sixties things have gone from bad to worse. From non-addictive to addictive, form soft to hard, form groovy to ghastly. His interpretation of the ideologies confronting each other in conflicts over drug policy will receive a warm welcome at the headquarters of those who are waging the war on drugs (especially since it makes us forget that in the good old days before the hardliners Reagan and Bush took office there were people like Richard Milhouse - Watergate - Nixon and Lyndon B. - Vietnam - Johnson in the White House).
The Left interprets the drug problem as a problem generated by capitalism. Drug users are seen as victims of ruthless exploitation, and the war on drugs is mainly being criticized for the half-heartedness of its efforts. The USA, CIA and DEA are being accused of secretly helping Asian heroin dealers with their business, directing drugs into the black ghettos of US cities in order to accomplish both counter-insurgency and genocide, and of somehow collaborating with South American kings of cocaine (all kinds of fliers of left-wing groups). In short: the drug problem is one of the necessarily terrible results of the capitalist system, and the political system both combats drug use in order to save the gproductive potential of the work force and tacitly tolerates the drugs where they help prevent insurgency, be it in Latin America or in the black ghettos at home.
Since socialists have to analyze and overthrow the capitalist system they cannot indulge in mind-altering experiences, but have to stay sober and rational, i.e. critical of all drugs and their mind-altering potentials. Parry (1990, p. 176) reports that socialists are so adamant in their views on drugs that they even strictly opposed the now famous Liverpool harm reduction program in which Dr. John Marks prescribes drugs like heroin and cocaine to patients who are dependent on them. According to Parry, 'whenever visitors come to study our programs they are usually shocked by the bitter opposition from our "radical" socialist City Council! A strange, puritanical streak runs through the Trotskyist activists who control the Council's "Drug Strategy". The "War On Drugs" rhetoric is exploited in a cynical attempt to undermine the Health Authority's Harm Reduction Strategy.'
Summing it up one can probably say that the left does not come up with an interpretation of the ideological meaning of the war on drugs since it plays an active - if minor - part in it itself. Instead of offering help it is in need of help. Why is it that the left identifies with the aggressor, why is it that the left cultivates a secret pact with the bourgeois society, its norms and values? The answer to these questions is the answer to the dilemmas and defeat of the socialist movement (for > tentative hypothesis cf. Marzahn, 1982, pp. 38-41).
Some analyses are correct, but incomplete. In the Christian Science Monitor (Sept. 21, 1989) we could read that '(...) the secret of the drug problem is that it isn't most fundamentally a drug problem. It's a values problem.' This is certainly true, however we must question the continuation to associate drug use simply with the lack of values instead of relating it to a conflict of old and new values ('failure of self-worth, respect for others, sense of purpose, and meaningfulness of life'). When sociologists analyzed the alcohol prohibition conflict they looked at the puritan culture and the mediterranean culture, at rural and urban ways of life in order to detect why 'alcohol' was being focused by moral crusades (which then, evidently, turned the spotlight on the drunkards). In the same way we should look at the culture which abhors the recreational use of cannabis, heroin, cocaine or XTC user - and at the social groups which belong to these recreational drug use life styles.
Criminologist Johns goes a step in the direction when she states and illustrates that: 'First, the focus on the dangers or illegal drugs diverts attention from the dangers of legal drugs (...). Second, the War on Drugs has been highly successful in diverting public attention away from fundamental social problems that plague society (...). Third, the War on Drugs, by focusing primarily on lower class and minority drug use and trafficking, has helped to legitimate the virtual abandonment of minority and marginalized segments of the population and to bolster the notion that these social groups constitute an enemy class deserving marginality and impoverishment. Fourth, the War on Drugs has been used to legitimate a massive expansion of domestic state power and control' (Johns, 1991, pp. 147-148).
If this had been the final analysis of the alcohol prohibition we would not know that in the early years of our century, the US government was not only diverting attention from other domestic trouble, but also engaging in a cultural and ideological battle that spelled rural versus urban, Protestant versus Catholic, and middle class versus working class. So what is the social and ideological basis of the contemporary war on drugs? Who are the warriors and who are the legalizers in terms of what they represent socially, culturally, ideologically?
Some anti-prohibitionists are liberals. The best-known is Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, leading representative of the monetarist school in economics. His stance on legalization is pure liberalism (cf. Friedman and Friedman, 1985; Drogenkonsum, 1992). In his view, the two camps that are opposing each other today are the same as in the times of alcohol prohibition: the socialists are waging the war against drugs while the liberal anti-prohibitionists are defending the right of the individual to mahe his own choice and the freedom of market economy which, they trust, will finally bring everything to a good end.
Of course, most European governments as well as both big US parties are all socialist from this perspective. Otherwise they would not engage in paternalist legislation that presupposes the incompetence of the adult population to make their own choices, and thereby creates a typical planned-economy-mess which it in turn tries to clean up by a strategy of more-of-the-same until it enters the stage of war.
But is it really that? Prohibitionist socialists versus anti-prohibitionist liberals? Is the war on drugs simply a symbol for the eternal recurrence of 'equality versus freedom', 'planned economy versus free market'? Again, this crude frame of reference would have served for the analysis of alcohol prohibition, but it would never have revealed the specific cultural conflicts which Gusfield and Sinclair brought to light.
So far our review of interpretations of the war on drugs has not revealed anything as convincing as the classical analyses of the social and ideological relevance of alcohol prohibition. In my concluding remarks I want to draw upon general sociological and politicological publications and see if there is any similarity to be found with the front lines of the war on drugs.
Inglehart's theory holds true for the sixties, and is may be fruitful for the analysis of contemporary moral crusades as well. Of course the establishment is not made up of people who were living values of scarcity in a time of abundance, but rather of the baby boom generations, i.e. people who were socialized into the values of abundance while the times evolved towards scarcity. Another change that may have taken place on the part of the defenders of prohibition is that they are willingly engaging in a world market economy that brings products from all over the world to both the US and Western Europe, including an incredible diversity of foodstuffs that diversified the metropolitan cuisines to an extent beyond imagination even some two or three decades ago. The defenders of the status quo enjoy Mexican Nachos and Japanese Sashimi, they like Peking Duck and New Zealand Kiwi, they enjoy Italian Pizza an Greek Gyros as well as the Turkish Kebab, but they cannot stand the idea of a similar diversity in recreational drugs. They cannot imagine the monotony of Marlboro' and Budweiser being broken by a joint of marijuana or a line of cocaine, by the calming inhalation of opium or the stimulation of crack.
Maybe the only difference between the two parties of the war on drugs is this: the warriors lack the imagination that the changing customs regarding food are bound to reach the area of recreational drugs as well. In other words, achieving a completely inter-related world economy means just that 'you cannot have the cake and not eat it'. So the legalizers would just be the group that is more open-minded, that adapts faster to the changing market economy, and that more honestly sticks to the recreational values it grasped while young and prosperous.
The old dichotomy of left and right, of capitalism versus communism, has gone. If this is not to be the end of history we shall shortly need new challenges, new dichotomies, new battles. Alain Touraine predicts that new dichotomy will be Pluralism versus Fundamentalism, Open Societies versus Closed Societies. Similarly, Ralf Dahrendorf (1992) predicts a conflict between 'social enclosure' and those advocating a 'cosmopolitan civil society'. To him, the modern social conflict is not anymore between capitalists and workers, but highly fragmented, more like the Hobbesian State of Nature.
There is anomie. There are no-go-areas in the middle civilized countries. There are symbolically liberated areas in which infractions of norms exist with impunity. Bureaucracy encroaches upon the last liberties of the individual. Industrial countries show a tendency towards protectionism. The majority class, the end moraine of the social democratic century in Dahrendorf's concept, is isolating itself from the lower classes and wants to leave them to their fate. The 80% majority class reactivated the idea of the homogeneous nation state, nationalism and fundamentalism, and propagates a social conscience that is fundamentally exclusive, preparing the ground for a new phase of violence in politics both internal and external.
Dahrendorf propagates de-bureaucratization, a revival of authority and education, and the opening of the nation state in direction of a heterogeneous nation state. Heterogeneity, civil society, cosmopolitan world society. Could the war on drugs be the cultural arena for this conflict? Will political scientists one day say that the drug issue was the issue chosen by the nationalists/fundamentalists/enclosure/revival group to combat ideologically those who were for migration, pluralism, and heterogeneity?
There are other alternatives. There are those who say that imperialism of the nineteenth century is returning (and the war on drugs could fulfil the role of the missionary societies then). Others say that the idea and possibility of the (integral) state as we have become used to is on its way out, and that the 'catalytic state' will look much more like sixteenth century embryonic states than like anything else. Instead of growing together in one 'world state', the trend is reversing, towards the 'clever complicators' and a plurality of small power centres as well as a new definition of the relation between state and society.
In this scenario the war on drugs could either be interpreted as an attempt of a frail and incompetent nation state to use the symbolic field of action for a proof of power (while in reality the state cannot even guarantee the most basic welfare and security anymore) - or it could be an attempt of the declining nation state to stem the tide of decentralization, diversity, and the fragmentation of power centres. In all these cases the present war on drugs would have to be seen as a rear-guard action of either fundamentalists or imperialists in the face of migratory, fragmenting, and pluralizing tendencies that forebode a new diversity
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