Dear readers! Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your patience with me these last few weeks as I put the finishing touches on the book and work up the nerve to print it. The piece below continues where “The Politics of Getting High” left off, outlines the scope of the book, and explains why I wrote it.
Enjoy?
Part 1 examines how people in power use drugs on themselves; i.e. which drugs they use, how, under what conditions, and so forth. Part 2 examines how people in power use drugs on others; i.e. how do people in power control the distribution of and social meanings attached to drugs. Both parts are arranged chronologically and begin with the earliest point of documented evidence that I could find in each case. But there is another, larger task at hand here. For this basic history which I will outline points to even bigger questions about the underlying relationships between people, power, and drug use.
Arguably, what emerges from this history is the notion that the very act of drug use itself embodies and signifies various sociopolitical tensions, which change with time and across populations. Put simply, drugs offer a potent expression of social and political struggle. Sorting out the multiplicity of meanings attached to various drugs and social struggles is a humbling task. This book is my modest attempt to contribute to that process.
The material that became this book was originally conceived as the final chapter for my last book, Drugism. But as I wrote it, I realized I could not tell the full story (or rather, stories) in one chapter. Soon enough I decided to spin it off into its own book, which became High and Mighty.
When I began to research these themes, I expected to find that drug use would be closely associated with liberation and democratic impulses. The history of drugs, I thought, would be the history of people celebrating their livelihood and empowering themselves through healing, recreation, and expansion of consciousness (or what have you). But as I learned more and more, I gradually realized that such an impression was incomplete, and perhaps just a bit misguided.
While it is certainly possible that the history of drug use can be analyzed through a fundamentally liberal democratic lens, I have found that such a framework is not, in fact, always the most accurate or meaningful one. This is not because of any issues with drugs or with democratic liberalism per se, but rather owes to the fact that this history points to themes which go beyond one particular political style or another. Feudalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, communism, and anarchism have all in turn found potent expressions in the material history of drug use, and it is this interplay between political philosophies attached to drug use which I hope to draw attention to with this work, among other things. The teachings from Plato and Aristotle explained above are just the tip of the iceberg that is this story.
First, let me back up a bit and explain how I got here.