the culture of entertainment

I’ve recently been reading Forces of Habit by David Courtwright, a fascinating history of drug use in the modern world. The book has not only helped me to understand the genesis of today’s terrible drug problems, it has also given me some new insight into the character of contemporary entertainment culture. Here are some highlights:

You may be surprised to learn that in the early years of the drug trade—the 16th through the 19th centuries—psychoactive substances were often not only tolerated but promoted by Western powers such as the United States and Great Britain. In fact, the latter nation fought two wars in China during the 19th century in order to prevent China from enforcing its own laws against opium trade and use. Why? Because—to put the matter in the starkest terms—Great Britain made a lot of money from the opium trade.

Profit—and taxing that profit—was not the only reason the colonial powers encouraged the use of drugs. Many people found it easier to tolerate monotonous and physically demanding labor if they were taking, say, opium. So those who oversaw labor in activities such as laying railroad track allowed or even encouraged opium use. In fact, workers were sometimes partially paid in opium, a practice that more or less ensured that laborers remained trapped in their positions.

Thus today’s networks and institutions for the production and distribution of drugs are built upon the foundations laid by the government policies of earlier centuries. It has proved very difficult to dismantle the capacity for production and consumption of drugs that was built over several centuries. This raises the question of why Western powers changed course and began, about a century ago, to enact laws restricting and prohibiting the production and consumption of psychoactive substances.

There were a number of reasons for this reversal, but probably the most powerful of them were again economic. As the nature of work shifted from agricultural production and construction to manufacturing and white-collar work in bureaucracies, the usefulness of drugs for labor control diminished. You don’t want the worker who is operating machinery–or your accountant–to be taking opium. Even more basic was the fact that the new economy that was taking shape in the early 20th century offered consumers a wide range of stimulating pleasures that were enjoyable but not nearly as potentially dangerous as drugs. There was much more money to be made by providing such products as movies, music, and consumer goods than by providing drugs. And in fact, drugs get in the way of the consumer economy. People who are high much of the time are neither dependable workers nor dependable consumers, despite the fact that some drugs may give them the munchies.

What this means, if you think about it, is that our entertainment-based economy competes with drugs because the two forms of pleasure are in some ways similar. Courtwright quotes a passage from the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton (page 110): “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

Merton wrote that in 1948, and the situation he describes is to say the least much more extreme today. Little wonder, when people are brought up this way, that some proportion of them reject the path of entertainment and follow instead the more potent, and less challenging, path of stimulating themselves with chemicals.

Photo available on Flickr from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

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