The war of capitalism against itself

The fight against drugs is a war of capitalism against itself. It is a curious war that aims to eradicate the full neoliberal manifestation of commodity fetishism. 
It is a war against one of the most coveted and effective forms of accumulation of capital, which nevertheless generously irrigate the financial system, in Puritan minds produces a spirit of crusade that would envy those pious inquisitors who in the fifteenth century drafted, with the grace of details, the Malleus Maleficarum.
Within a few years, when the mood has subsided and the provenance of the accumulated capital has been forgotten, the war against drugs will be remembered as one of the most stupid of humanity, just as we remember today the religious wars of past centuries. 
The comparison goes beyond being a simple metaphor. To speak of drugs is to enter into a thorny theological issue, inheritance of the battle Yahweh fought against Baal for endowing the Hebrew tribes with their own territory.
The God of the desert declared war on the Canaanite cults that resorted to drunkenness to communicate with their gods, becoming Baal-Zebuth in a diabolical force-Beelzebub-which is identified since then with the orgies of the coven. The fight against the prophets -nebiim- of Baal was assumed by Elijah to love a holy war. Being reluctant to use euphoria, Elias calls for abstinence and foresight, criticizing the people for walking indecisively between two cults. After challenging the prophets of Baal to invoke their sons through the religious gymnastics of collective ecstasy, Elijah shows them that Yahweh is more powerful. The repugnance caused to the prophets of Yahweh by the Canaanite ecstasy becomes explicit in the words of Isaiah: "Prophets and priests stagger stunned by the wine ... because all the tables are full and there is no free space in them" - Is 28.7-. Heirs of this feeling of aversion, the Fathers of the Church opposed the use of SPA ', identifying the cultic drunkenness with concupiscence and sin. Unlike the officiating of Elyosis and other ecstatic cults that existed in the Mediterranean basin until late antiquity, Hebrew rabbis and Christian priests exhibit a professional sobriety that excludes any hallucinatory trance. Catholic dogma replaces the experience intoxicated by a profession of faith.
An objective definition of the word drug is impossible, since it is not a concept but a slogan whose social value is given by its capacity to embody and canonize evil. As it is impossible to speak of the prayers without invoking their destructive power, we will alternatively use the term psychoactive substance to refer to the chemical mediators between the brain and culture, consume to modify our perception of the world. A similar process was experienced in the Persian tradition with the condemnation of the soma of Zoroaster (McKENNA, T .. The delicacy of -the gods, Barcelona, ​​Paidós, 131). Escohotado speaks of an "entheogenic promise betrayed" (Escohotado, A., History of drugs, Madrid, Editorial Alliance, 1989, T. I, p 235).
However, many centuries will pass before the moral prohibition takes the form of a world war to modify the wishes of citizens and ensure that sobriety is imposed jealously in both the public and private spheres. For notwithstanding the religious restrictions that Judeo-Christianity imposes on the use of SPA since its inception, only in the 20th century will the Puritan crusade of the nascent American empire succeed in making moral interdiction a legal interdiction. driven by a brotherhood of abstainers who resort to political power to impose a holy war on society. It ends with a long tradition of tolerance against the consumption of SPA that was maintained until the end of the nineteenth century, a time of transition to the modern industrial society in which the self-regulated use of opium derivatives begins to be displaced by mass consumerism. From Galen the Europeans used opium generously, following the Roman tradition that left the consumption of the psychoactive to the free choice of the individual. Used as a remedy for lung and intestinal diseases, to calm anxiety, the symptoms of gout, toothaches or discomfort of piles, its effects were interpreted in the framework of a battle between the substance and the body of the patient. user, who should be careful with the dose he took to avoid annoying rebound symptoms. But leaving the medical uses in the background, appeared at the dawn of modernity a group of habitual consumers who claimed the benefits that accompany the chemical modification introducing themselves
Translated from "La fruta prohibida" by Luis Carlos Restrepo