Drugs, culture and meaning

I've been seeing quite a bit about the US opioid drug problem lately:   a recent Foreign Correspondent episode, mainly based in San Francisco, I think - showed the level of homelessness and filth in that city caused by the epidemic;  a bit of a Louis Theroux show from 2017 on Huntington, Virginia (called "Dark States - Heroin Town"), where he was talking to some high guy living in a tent by a river; a post at Reddit with a photo showing one young guy injecting another in an alley behind someone's suburban house (with commenters quickly guessing - correctly - that it would be in Ohio.  Some other commenter said he lived in San Francisco and would be lucky to only see 4 people a day shooting up.)

I have always trouble getting my head around how people get into addiction of this kind.  Sure, there has been a large element of "accidental" addiction via the over prescription of opioids in the US, but how people with no medical need for an opioid choose to try such a notoriously addictive drug and risk addiction - and not recognise the warning signs of a serious addiction problem early in its use - seems to cry out for an explanation even while another part of my brain says "no, you will never be satisfied that anything about this makes sense."

There is the strong temptation to look at meta social/culture explanations, and the best recent example of the genre is Andrew Sullivan's lengthy piece in New Yorker Magazine that's a year old now.   I've only just read it in full, though.

It's a good very piece, I think, giving a lot of background history both of the recent American experience, and some of the history of opiate use in both England and the US as well.

And he does indeed go all meta-cultural and meta-economic at the end:

It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.

This was always a worry about the American experiment in capitalist liberal democracy. The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone. The American project always left an empty center of collective meaning, but for a long time Americans filled it with their own extraordinary work ethic, an unprecedented web of associations and clubs and communal or ethnic ties far surpassing Europe’s, and such a plethora of religious options that almost no one was left without a purpose or some kind of easily available meaning to their lives. Tocqueville marveled at this American exceptionalism as the key to democratic success, but he worried that it might not endure forever.

And it hasn’t. What has happened in the past few decades is an accelerated waning of all these traditional American supports for a meaningful, collective life, and their replacement with various forms of cheap distraction. Addiction — to work, to food, to phones, to TV, to video games, to porn, to news, and to drugs — is all around us. The core habit of bourgeois life — deferred gratification — has lost its grip on the American soul. We seek the instant, easy highs, and it’s hard not to see this as the broader context for the opioid wave. This was not originally a conscious choice for most of those caught up in it: Most were introduced to the poppy’s joys by their own family members and friends, the last link in a chain that included the medical establishment and began with the pharmaceutical companies. It may be best to think of this wave therefore not as a function of miserable people turning to drugs en masse but of people who didn’t realize how miserable they were until they found out what life without misery could be. To return to their previous lives became unthinkable. For so many, it still is.

If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people.

That sounds pretty convincing - but it also sets up a sort of hopelessness towards the issue if no one knows how you go about recovering the type of communitarian values, support and sense of meaning the loss of which this theory argues is the reason why so many turn to drugs. 

I also tend a bit towards scepticism when thinking about how addiction to alcohol, if not opiates, has been a serious problem in the past in societies where, on the face of it, adherence to religious practice was still important.

I have to think about this some more.  And read some more.

Update:  Good grief, Sigmund.   From this rather interesting article "Historical and cultural aspects of man's relationship with addictive drugs", I get this quote:

Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Kraepelin, laid the ground for the psychological approach to addiction. Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess in 1897: “...it has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ”primal“ addiction and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc - come into existence.”²⁰