From Amazonian tree-bark resins toasted on the embers of campfires to betel quids offered to kings on solid-gold salvers, drugs present themselves in almost every imaginable form. The intoxications they offer are equally diverse, from mild stimulation to life-threatening ordeal; and their social roles span a range from natural sacrament to luxury merchandise. But there is an alternative form of drug culture that has, over the last century, come to prominence across the modern world: one that defines itself not by its use of drugs, but by its prohibition of them.
In most cultures throughout history, only a small number of drugs were in common use. The remainder were not explicitly forbidden; there was no need, since they lacked the cultural framework to make them desirable. Official drug prohibitions are the exception rather than the rule, but they are not an exclusively modern phenomenon. The most familiar historical example, perhaps, is the prohibition of alcohol across much of the Islamic world.
Alcohol intoxication was a conspicuous motif in the Roman culture of luxury. In this mural from the House of the Chaste Lovers in Pompeii, two prostitutes ply the victor of a drinking competition with more wine from a drinking-horn, while his defeated rival lies insensible beside him.
Like the drug prohibitions of the twentieth century, this proscription of alcohol was one manifestation among many of a dramatic social rupture. The culture that rose to power with Islam defined itself in opposition to the region’s previous rulers, the city-dwelling merchants of the Mediterranean coast. The conquerors were nomadic traders who brought with them a desert culture that stressed the virtues of dignity and selfcontrol, and expressed them through fTugal and ascetic habits. They saw the urban merchants as a decadent and corrupt elite, whose vices were exemplified by the wine on which they squandered their wealth in boorish intoxication. With the ascendancy of Islam, the luxuries of the city were replaced by the austerity of the camel train, the villa by the desert tent, the stuffed divan by the simple cushion on the ground. The prohibition of alcohol evolved from individual acts of religious observance to edicts against public drunkenness, and finally to a universal taboo; in the process, it confirmed the new cultural hegemony.
In most Islamic cultures alcohol is forbidden and its role in hospitality, sociability and relaxation is filled by a spectrum of milder intoxicants. In a nineteenth-century coffee house in Cairo (above), tobacco is smoked with water in hookah or shisha pipes; in present-day Amman, Jordan, a coffee or tea in a sidewalk cafe is accompanied by either shisha or cigarettes. (Wellcome Library, London)
As with all drug prohibitions, however, it was technically not a prohibition but a substitution. The vacuum created by alcohol was filled, over time, with a broad spectrum of stimulants and narcotics. A small, strong cup of coffee or tea - astringent and parsimonious of resources - took the role of wine as a marker of hospitality. Other stimulants, including kola nut in the Sudan and khat across east Africa and western Arabia, became integral to social exchange and leisure. Coffee emerged to rival tea; tobacco became (and remains) ubiquitous; in many regions, cannabis remained (and remains) tolerated. Widespread abstention from alcohol had practical benefits: the negative effects of alcohol on the health of both the individual and wider society were certainly greater than those of the substances that replaced it. But its prohibition had a wider symbolic function: by uniting converts to the new religion, it acted as a social glue in a similar way to drugs themselves.
The prohibition of drugs in the twentieth century had its roots in a similar reaction against cultural decadence. A hundred years ago, many of today’s illicit drugs were available in any high-street chemist. Cocaine was aggressively marketed in pills, lozenges and energy drinks, or supplied pure in solution with hypodermic needles. Cannabis was a common ingredient in tinctures and patent medicines. Bayer’s new cough suppressant, marketed under the brand name Heroin, was prominent among the point-of-sale displays at chemists’ counters. Yet the most problematic drug, as it had been for the early followers of Islam, was alcohol. Intoxication in its traditional forms had been a constant thread through Western life since antiquity; but modern chemistry and commerce had combined to offer unbridled access to alcohol and other drugs in ever more potent forms, in ways that many believed were incompatible with the civilized society of the future.
By the end of the nineteenth century, even children’s medication was laced with powerful drugs: the main active ingredient in Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral was morphine. (Wellcome Library, London)
Cocaine was available over the counter in dozens of patent preparations such as coca wines. (Wellcome Library, London)
This conflict between civilization and desire was explored at the time by the German sociologist Max Weber, whose classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism first appeared in essay form in 1904. The modern West, he argued, was driven by an ethic that valorized the creation of wealth but was uncomfortable with spending it. Money was to be invested sensibly or spent modestly, rather than squandered on impulse; the ability to defer gratification was essential to social functioning, and held destructive passions in check. It was a culture, therefore, intensely concerned with the policing and management of pleasure. Alcohol, and intoxication in general, was a clear and present danger: an offence against the sovereign spirit of reason and an invitation to disorder and selfdestructiveness. Yet the Protestant ethic was also producing what Weber called a ‘disenchantment of the world’: a society in harness to the demands of mass production, creating lives leached of pleasure and mystery, deprived of the possibility of escape or transcendence. These social contradictions were projected onto dangerous objects of consumption, such as drugs and alcohol, creating taboos around their use.
World History
