Opiates of the People and the Corporations

 “Quick Fixes – Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21^st Century Binge” by Benjamin Fong, 2023

This book surveys various addictive drugs, legal and illegal, from caffeine to fentanyl, and their working relationship with capitalism. Fong sees illegal drugs and the gangs that sell them as still following standard capitalist business models. Fong is a prof at Arizona State U who got his Ph.D in religion at Columbia, has written for Jacobin, and runs the “Center for Work and Democracy” so you can guess his orientation.  Fong does a mini-history of each drug from its popular ‘medicinal’ uses in the U.S. in the 1800s – like opium, cocaine and cannabis - to demonization and the drug war of the 1920s, then to resurrection as ‘medicines’ or legality at various points in time.  One thing is clear – each has played a role in how capital functions – as a profit center, a club against dark-skinned, ‘foreign’ people or radicals, a secret government funding source and especial as methods of social pacification, escape and work speed-up. They have been used to medicalize social issues and problems. Here are glimpses into his chapters.

CAFFEINE

As I write this I’m sipping some coffee, and you might be too.  Let’s start there.  Coffee, and the stimulant caffeine, is the drug delivery vehicle capitalism runs on. The cheap coffee in every factory or warehouse vending machine or the free coffee in white collar office ‘kitchens’ attest to this.  The Stanley© thermos for truckers and construction workers is their portable cousin. In England tea took over as the stimulant of choice.  All the while coffee plantations decimate jungles and forests.  It was at one time cartelized as a defense against Castroism and communism, and price supports were instituted until 1989, when coffee prices collapsed for 5 years.

At one time in the late 1800s coffee-houses were sites of conviviality and subversion; now they are arid places where people tap on keyboards, ‘alone together.’  This corresponds to the drop in social connections brought about by hyper-capitalism.  The same thing happened with alcohol and ‘the bar’ where you face the booze bottles and the bartender, not other people.  You, too, can be just like Charles Bukowski at the 'bar.' 

NICOTINE

The tobacco companies, which later bought major processed food companies, hid the dangers of smoking for years.  Their lies, power and delaying tactics have later proved fruitful to oil and gas, pesticide, chemical and yes, processed food, corporations.  They made science into “fair game in the battle of public relations.” Cigarettes were once marketed as liberating for females by Edward Bernays.  They were sexy, thinning, healthful and calming.  They certainly do that until you need another cig.  They were sold as a cheap diversion.  Now they are marketed across poor countries and sales are booming.  In the U.S. cigarettes are now seen as ‘down-market,’ as class marks every kind of drug as licit or illicit.  Why do you need to stay calm under capitalism? Of course you do!  Yet Fong claims smoking kills more people in the U.S. than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.  Of most humor, the tobacco companies accused worldwide efforts against cigarettes as Western ‘cultural imperialism.’  You see, lungs are ‘cultural’ – at least according to Judith Butler and the Marlboro Man.

ALCOHOL

Fong notes the huge omnipresence of beer, wine and alcohol in U.S. and U.K. societies in the 1700s-1800s.  Like Engels, he notes its role in sociability and also oblivion after the harsh conditions of early work.  The English ‘pub’lic house was its pinnacle. Alcoholic drinks appeared at breakfast and substituted for unpotable water.  It was part of a ‘gift economy’ for its role in social rituals, including church.  But in the 1900s the Temperance movement understood that drunks didn’t make very good workers in an industrial society, so they pushed prohibition.  Prohibition was a form of labor discipline and was accompanied by racialized attacks on other drugs used by workers. The national KKK endorsed, which made it official. The middle class avoided being targeted, and low-end saloons and taverns took the brunt. Yet highly alcoholic ‘patent medicines’ were exempt – I guess for 'wellness' reasons.  It was a first act in the War On Drugs.

After Repeal alcohol, like coffee, became part of consumptionism.  Your brand marked your cultural status.  AA made the personal responsibility for being a drunk clear – it had nothing to do with the pressures of home or society, and let the producers off the hook.  It was your problem exclusively.  MADD was even financially supported by liquor companies for the same reason. 

OPIATE ‘PAIN KILLERS’

Opium morphed into morphine, which then led to heroin, which became 50 times stronger with fentanyl.  And yet in the 1800s opium derivatives were available in hundreds of products in the U.S. without a prescription.  This happened at the same time the British forced the Chinese into being an opium ‘paradise’ through two colonial wars.  Only later in the 1900s did the anti-drug crusade demonize these drugs as ‘Chinese.’ In fact the term ‘hip’ is derived from the posture of opium addicts lying on their sides, on their hips, puffing on pipes.

Thomas de Quincy, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, made opium an esoteric way to happiness for those with psychic ailments.  The CIA made opiates common currency in Thailand, Central America, Marseilles and Afghanistan.  Henry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, had 1 in 5 of his agents both regulate and deal heroin.  This was the agency that hounded Billie Holiday to death and pushed 'Reefer Madness.' When Big Pharma took over opiates, Anslinger protected their legal monopoly. Later Joe Biden played a key role in civil forfeiture laws, allowing police to seize any assets on probable drug causes, a nice funding source for law enforcement. Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers round out this tale of corporate drug dealing. 

AMPHETAMINES

The Nazi’s doped their Blitzkrieg soldiers with amphetamines.  The U.S. military still uses vast amounts of  ‘energy tablets’ to keep soldiers up for long stretches, raising their attention level and maxing out their energy. This is the U.S. version of the Viking ‘berserkers.’  This medicating of U.S. troops has happened since World War 2. According to Fong, the U.S. military stacks their aide stations with a cornucopia of other drugs, including Viagra.  But these drugs are also useful in a hyper-active 24/7, on-call, over-time, double jobs, double-shift, unpredictable schedule, short sleep, work life.  They make you ‘thin, smart and peppy’ to use Fong’s phrase.  Meth on the other hand is reserved for working-class rural white people down on their luck.  There are now 6,000 amphetamine products on the market.  In 2008 37 million U.S. citizens used amphetamine-like drugs just to keep up with the crushing speed of capitalism.

PSYCHOTROPIC ‘BRAIN’ DRUGS

Fong notes that medications for diagnoses like neurasthenia, anxiety and later depression used to be understood as responding to the conditions of society.  Now they are meant to address something wrong in the brain.  So the theory moved to the right, away of social and real causes understood up to the 1970s, to individual biological brain problems a pill could cure. Sedation was the answer! The bible of the medical industry, the DSMMD, explicitly began linking each diagnoses to a chemical solution, though many medical professionals have now rejected its validity.  Nevertheless this was a huge boon to the medicalization of every human emotion, and Big Pharma profited from this.  Even grief after a death was described as something that needed to be ‘cured’ with medication.  No longer would we have to worry about what effect poverty or long hours or the high speed of life entails.  Take a pill!  This method has slopped over into the vitamin wellness industry and Big Pharma's other cures, like heart disease, diabetes, stroke, overweight and the rest.

PSYCHEDELICS

Fong’s focus is on LSD, but also psilocybin, peyote and MDMA.  He starts with the familiar story of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program of LSD and mental torture, which the CIA cleverly blamed on China.  His rehash of the 1960s is a Time-Life view focusing on Timothy Leary, dropping-out, the Yippies and “New” Leftists like the Weathermen. He quotes upper-class dolts like Joan Didion and centrist liberals like Scott Gitlin to make his points.  What he misses is that most ‘new’ Leftists became ‘old’ Leftists.  He does note that psychedelics work as pacification, inwardness and escapism, sort of like Soma from Huxley’s Brave New World.  They divert people from engagement in social struggle, though humans naturally need a break. Now they are used by a corporate elite ‘micro-dosing’ as a way to generate new ideas for capitalist functioning.  One day he predicts they may be prescribed for depression and anxiety, much like psychotropics Valium and Prozac, so they have immense profit potential.   

ZOMBIE DRUGS

PCP and Ketamine make their users passive and zombified, like too much alcohol makes people fall asleep.  Useful in any pacification program.  Is this what Pink Floyd was talking about in the song Comfortably Numb?  No.  But I do think this is what the Ramones were talking about... I Wanna Be Sedated!

COCAINE & MARIJUANA

Powder cocaine is the drug of irrational overconfidence according to Fong, a perfect fit in a hyper-competitive work world like Wall Street, but also a great party escape.  Crack on the other hand was class-targeted, a poor-person’s escape, and even Daniel Moynihan pointed out that blaming crack took the politicians and capitalists off the hook. Marijuana and hemp on the other hand is relatively benign and useful, yet they have been banned since the 1930s until recently.  The former is still nationally a ‘Schedule 1’ drug.  Its current partial legalization wasn’t possible until medicalization preceded it according to Fong, something that benefitted the drug companies.  Now it is benefitting state coffers and private entrepreneurs.  Yet in his distain for Boomer hippies, Fong ignores the role of marijuana arrests in the incarceration state. 

So that’s bits of the book.  I’m not sure you’ll learn anything unless you are pretty unfamiliar with drugs in the U.S. Fong says that with the decay of neo-liberalism as a dominant capitalist ideology, something else is taking its place.  The punitive solution has not worked, certainly.  “Drug policy is not about drugs” – it’s about society, so a ‘drug policy’ misses what is really at issue. He thinks improvements “in jobs and healthcare” will mitigate the need to take drugs or to demonize them. He opposes blanket and simple legalization as libertarianism, as it allows profiteering and addiction to continue.  He sees most of these drugs as being pleasurable but also having negative personal effects.  

Drugs will continue to mask capital as the stress, poverty, long hours, loneliness and exploitation continue. Drinking and cigarettes are both related to the stress put on the working-class. Then he agrees that decriminalization should proceed, with addiction counseling, safety, knowledge, de-stigmatization and the like. So he ends by recommending a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare For All as associates to decriminalization. How these forms of semi-transitional socialization will come about is left unsaid by Fong.  This is always the weak part of all these kinds of books.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Drugs,” “Alcohol” or “An Insider’s Look at Big Pharma,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “We Own This City,” “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “American Made” (Spinelli); “The Long, Strange Trip,” “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety” (Kuhn); “The Outlaws,” “Yesterday’s Man,” “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Painkiller,” “The Truth About Drug Companies,” “Hollywood” (Bukowski), “Bar None Rescue.”    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / December 12, 2024