| ABOUT US | ARCHIVES | LINKS | RSS | MONDAYS | |

3quarksdaily

An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature

« hoffman in darfur | Main | The Origins of 20th-Century Progress »

March 30, 2007

America's Love Affair with Drugs

From Powell Books:Book

The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture by Richard J. Degrandpre: Anyone who has ever quit smoking soon discovers that gaining weight is often an unavoidable part of the deal. In 2001, the United States seemed to experience this realization on a collective level, as the Surgeon General, who many Americans had last encountered in a warning on their last pack of Marlboros, foretold a different sort of public health crisis: a national obesity epidemic.

It hardly seemed fair. Cigarettes, after all, had recently been exposed as delivery devices for a highly addictive and unnatural blackguard of a drug: nicotine. And while certain parties began to point fingers at trans fats or carbs, there was simply no nefarious substance to blame for obesity. It really was just too much of a good thing, food.

But perhaps we had set ourselves up for this frustration. Perhaps our obsessive pursuit of criminal chemicals -- not just nicotine, but its nastier cousins meth and crack -- had blinded us to more fundamental problems weighing down our society. This is the thesis advanced by Richard DeGrandpre in his book The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture. In particular, DeGrandpre argues that Americans have an almost religious faith in the chemical essence of "demon drugs" (as well as "angels" like Ritalin and Prozac) while completely ignoring the social circumstances in which these avatars intersect with flesh.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 03:50 PM | Permalink

Comments

And I just started on Havidol!
http://www.havidol.com

Posted by: beajerry | Mar 30, 2007 5:25:03 PM

Well, it's a lot easier to pass a law against drugs than to help make a world where drug abuse won't make sense. My hat's off to any street people who can make it through the day without drug abuse.

Ronald Siegel, in his book Intoxication, I believe makes another reference to yet another version of the animal-allowed-unlimited-cocaine experiments also referenced in the full review. If I recall correctly, Siegel reports that mice with nothing else to do eventually kept pressing the Coca Lever (in spite of the two tradesmarks infringed in that term) as much as possible...but mice with plenty of food and companionship areas within which to run (and play and fight and mate) took a hit of cocaine every now and then, but hardly had it dominate their lives.

I'm not in the business of selling Doctor Braggart's Political Panancea Efficaceous in Every Case, or Marxism or theocracy or laissez-faire capitalism, but I think we're doing something wrong.

Posted by: Dabney Braggart | Mar 31, 2007 7:11:58 PM

The drug war is a failure. It criminalizes people who are in pain-people who are emotionlly and physically healthy don't become addicts. The drug laws make vast wealth available to ruthless gangsters.The profit motive is more addictive than any substance.

Posted by: Sam | Apr 1, 2007 1:14:07 AM

Food and Drug Administration warned doctors that antidepressants might increase the risk of suicide in children and adolescents.

Posted by: Art | Oct 5, 2007 12:29:33 PM

The Drug War is a success: none of the other upper-middle-class white people I know will even profess an _interest_ in pot, much less anything officially harder. We are the people about whom politicians care, and we're not doing drugs not prescribed by our doctors or boss. (I've just stolen the only funny thing Jello Biafra ever said.)

Poor, and black and brown people? Who cares what they do, fundamentally?; we don't mind if some of them do drugs as long as we've got the right to put the most entrepreneurial and energetic of those bucks in jail, or have them kill each other off in the street.

Posted by: Dabney Braggart | Dec 25, 2007 11:12:35 AM

Post a comment






Subscribe to this blog's feed

Help 3 Quarks Daily

Bookmark This Page

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

3QD ADVERTISING



Compare prices

  • Canada (French)
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • South Africa
  • Brazil
  • Please Visit Wikio

  • Wikio
  • Wikio Shopping
  • LCD Monitor
  • LCD TV
  • Recent Comments

    Danny Bloom on Words of Warming

    Carlos on The Danger of Stress

    Elatia Harris on Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply

    Felix E F Larocca MD on The Danger of Stress

    Felix E F Larocca MD on Steve Fuller's Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution

    David Sucher on Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply

    Elatia Harris on Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply

    bill on Tuesday Poem

    Elatia Harris on the spy cook

    reader on humans helping computers

    GHills on Words of Warming

    John Ballard on The Danger of Stress

    Wade Nichols on the spy cook

    Jonathan on Steve Fuller's Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution

    David Sucher on Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply

    scripto on Steve Fuller's Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution

    Richard on Tricky Dick's Legacy: A Review of Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland"

    Wade Nichols on Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?

    missvolare on Words of Warming

    Richard Phillipps on Steve Fuller's Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution

    PD Smith on Steve Fuller's Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution

    Jon on Can science survive George Bush?

    David Sucher on Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply

    MattInOz on Words of Warming

    Felix E F Larocca MD on zizek on haiti

    Acclaim For 3QD


    Best Non-European Weblog Winner


    Best Group Blog and Blog Most Deserving of Wider Attention Finalist


    Wikio - Top Blogs

    "I couldn't tear myself away from 3 Quarks Daily, to the point of neglecting my work. Congratulations on this superb site."—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University.

    "I have placed 3 Quarks Daily at the head of my list of web bookmarks."—Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

    "Just wanted you to know I’m one of many who reads and enjoys 3 Quarks....almost daily."—David Byrne, musician, former lead-singer of the Talking Heads, artist, intellectual.

    Subscribe to this blog's feed