Drugs of capitalism

Industrial societies created their own drugs 

Danilo Anton

Industrial societies introduced substantial changes in the habits of the population. With regard to pre-existing rural societies, the new towns meant a sharp decline in the quality of life. Thousands of workers and their families were forced to live in unsanitary barracks. The tasks were repetitive and exhausting. The workers were working 14 or 15 hours a day, msny of them very young, returning at night to overcrowding in their homes.

Industrial work was unsustainable for the workers, but also very demanding for managers and entrepreneurs. It was a new social operational tempo that was not governed, unlike what happened in the past, by the natural cycles, but by the ability to produce more in less time to satisfy markets and increase profits.

In the agricultural society productive and social activities were linked to nature cycle: planting in Spring, harvesting in Summer, storing in autumn, marketing in Winter.

This cycles ended when the industrial society was imposed. The rural population was forced to move to cities losing the natural references of their traditional cultures.

The uprooted peasants, depending on productive and social activities disengaged from nature, gradually degraded the remnants of ancient communal societies that still existed in many corners of the countryside.

While some of these elements of solidarity and cooperation survived in the industrial cities, new conditions were creating other forms of relationship that weakened the old ties.

The hard life, leaving no rest, led many individuals to take refuge in the new concoctions that industrial society itself had developed to facilitate their operation.  Among artificial products which spread rapidly, probably due to its low price, the most important ones were liquors and other spirits.

The imperialist industrial process facilitated access to these new alcoholic beverages. 

Portuguese and Spanish first, then the French, English and Dutch had established numerous sugar cane plantations in colonial land with slave labor. An important part of cane production was used for the preparation of distilled spirits, which were then transported to European cities. As a result, one of the first impacts that had industrial development in the working class was the massive spread of alcoholism.

In addition to alcoholic drinks, industrial tobacco was also promoted and sold.  Soon the whole society, rich and poor, were smoking tobacco indiscriminately. Thousands of tons of tobacco, either in the form of cigarettes or, from the mid-nineteenth century, cigarettes. These last ones were small cylinders of finely cut tobacco leaves rolled in thin paper. Both were smoked with increasing frequency.

At the same time, the English imperial power began to promote the dissemination of other stimulant products: Asian tea, coffee from Africa and the Middle East and Mexican chocolate. All these products are rich in cafein, which is a stimulant alkaloid with relatively innocuous health effects in the short term. 

In the long run, however, this alkaloid consumption leads to hyperactivity manifested in nervous and circulatory disorders.

Gradually, the inhabitants of industrial cities grew accustomed to a relatively high daily dose of caffeine that facilitated the necessary competitive environment in the new industrial societies.

Another dietetic process developed in this period was the gradual increase in the consumption of refined sugar, which was (and still is) often combined with tea, coffee and chocolate, multiplying the stimulating effect.

By the late nineteenth century they were incorporated new products brought from America or imported from the new Asian or African colonies, including the West African kola, the Andean coca and the opium from poppy plantations in British India². 

These additions continued growing and increasingly accelerated in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.

In the second half of the nineteenth century imperial armies in the war fronts started injecting morphine and later heroin in wounded soldiers to ease the pain of the wounds. These two substances were derivatives from opium and poppy plants. At that time consumption of hashish (cannabis paste) was extended. The consumption of hashish was previously restricted to the Middle East and then expanded to Europe. Cocaine spread in the mid-twentieth century and in the 1970's a synthetic drug, LSD, became also of common useL This substance active ingredient relates to the active ingredients of Mexican ololiuhqui and European ergot, and other artificial compounds with similar properties.

The use of these substances changed qualitatively when the ban was introduced. The repression led to the emergence of clandestine consumption of these products, often adulterated with various spurious elements. 

In some cases, the use was promoted by the state intelligence agencies themselves. The result of this process was the outbreak of severe acute social problems that were rapidly spreading globally.

In response to the problem they promoted, governments embarked on an even stronger crackdown. The downward spiral of the ban had begun to spin faster and faster.

Increasing repression implied higher return for traffickers. There was a prospect of winning plenty of money to people who were ready to take incresed risks. This situation reinforced the criminal networks that had been generated. 

These increased criminal activities, justified the expansion of repressive apparatus, reducing the availability of the banned substances. For that reason, their prices increased steadily. In turn, this price increase made profitable the risks entailed due to activities of production, trafficking and consumption of illegal substances.

The genie was out of the bottle.

From: "Peoples, Drugs and Serpents", Danilo Anton, Piriguazu Ediciones