This piece picks up where “How I Got Here” left off. Below, we’ll explore:
-Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the rapid growth of the drug industry
-How the Opium Wars became the basis for Marxist thought on drugs
-Marx + Engels on psychedelic ego death in The German Ideology
The history of drug use is, in large part, the history of class struggle, to borrow a phrase from Marx. We already saw what Plato and Aristotle thought about this, although I’ll elaborate more on their philosophies of drug use later. Plenty of other well-known philosophers have wrestled with various issues related to drugs, and more specifically, how drug use affects or is affected by social and political power.
Søren Kierkegaard offered some pertinent insight in The Concept of Anxiety (which has also been translated as The Concept of Dread), originally published in 1844. He wrote about the drug industry which was then already in the process of allying with the medical field and how this, in turn, shaped public understandings of not only drug use but also personal psychology.
“The pharmacist and the doctor now got together,” Kierkegaard wrote. Inner turmoil was recast in the popular imagination; no longer a sin, but a psychological disorder to be addressed “with powder and with pills.”1 To expedite the process, patients are “isolated,” or alienated from each other.
The same year that Kierkegaard published these thoughts, Karl Marx elaborated on the subject of alienation—specifically, its economic (and political) implications—in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. According to Marx, alienation is an inbuilt feature of modern capitalism. And although, to my knowledge, he did not specifically link alienation with drug use, he did have a good deal to say about the opium trade. He also pointed to not only the opium trade, but also that of salt, tea, and betel as premier examples of capitalism.2
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