Stoned in the USA

On September 30, 2008 the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer aired an essay by Richard Rodriguez titled “Mexico’s Violent Drug War Wreaks Havoc on Innocent Lives,” in which Rodriguez characterized the relationship between foreign trafficking and the U.S. drug market as “Third-world despair meets post-modern despair.” The essay did not, however, mention that the illicit drug consumption fueling the Mexican cartels has significantly decreased in recent years. In fact, the most recent social science data suggest a different characterization of the current drug culture: first-world despair meets post-modern pharma.

Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) show that in 2007 Americans twelve years and older used half as many illicit drugs as they did in 1979 (down from 14% to 7%). However, the data also show that between 2004 and 2007 past-month non-medical use of prescription drugs went up 13%, and pain-reliever abuse went up from 19% to 25%. This trend is not fueled by Mexican drug cartels but by the pharmaceutical industry, and it shows that the drug culture has changed significantly.

Allow me to step back to 1969. I was a kid living in the semi-rural area north of San Francisco, Marin County, which was at that time a Mecca for the “tune in and drop out” generation. The hippies, who sought a natural, communal, spiritual way of life, largely regarded drugs as a form of spiritual discovery. I remember my mother lying on the couch muttering to herself after taking mescaline, while on the stereo Jimmy Hendrix asked, “Are you experienced?” Even at the age of five I knew that “experienced,” in this sense, meant a drug-induced experience—an ironic play on professional experience—and that my mom was having such an experience.

Fast-forward to 2009, I’m a professional in my mid-forties, commuting to my office job, riding a bus that passes through the poorest areas of otherwise affluent Alexandria, Virginia and stops near a methadone clinic. On the facing seat is a man my age, with a sickly pallor under wood-colored flesh that is so fatigued it hangs on his bones. He whimpers and mutters to himself. He’s having an experience, but one very different from my mother’s. There’s no cultural demonstration, political statement or spiritual exploration involved; he’s a guy who lives in a suburb, apparently shops at Ross, likely works retail, and happens to be so high on the painkiller methadone that his inner state has obscured his surrounds. Furthermore, his “experience” is not only culturally and politically isolated, mattering to no one but himself, but perfectly legal.

Drug trends reflect cultural trends. The drug culture of the 1960s was part of a counterculture that also involved rock music and sexual liberation. Getting high had significance as a revolt against repressive norms and the status quo. By the 1970s, as the counterculture became pop culture, the nature of drug use became “recreational,” which is to say, a way to have fun. By the 1980s, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll had lost their spirit of revolt. I remember an anti-drug billboard in the mid-1980s that depicted a young professional, suited-up, swinging a briefcase and smiling elatedly, over which were the words, “The average cocaine addict.” This, ironically, indicated that drug abuse was common among self-advancing, self-interested, self-promoting and socially respectable professionals. Today, drug use is even further removed from psychosocial relevance; it’s simply a way to self-medicate. In other words, the motive is mostly a personal longing to be happier or, at least, less depressed and anxious—a motive legally justified as “medical.”

As it turns out, these legally sanctioned medications have proven to be no less dangerous than their illicit, recreational counterparts. The CDC’s National Vital Statistics data reveal that, despite a significant decline in illicit drug use, the number of overdoses in the U.S. between 1999 and 2007 doubled, putting fatal overdose second only to auto accidents as the leading cause of accidental death. Most of these overdoses were not due to illicit drug use but to prescription drug use among white, middle-class, non-urban women between the ages of 15 and 24 years. The National Center for Health Statistics reports a 467% increase between 1999 and 2005 in methadone-poisoning deaths. This correlates to a tremendous increase in methadone availability in tablet form through pharmacies. The CDC’s 2005 data reveal that antidepressants and painkillers are the most prescribed drugs in the nation.

Such legal medication generally does not serve the interests of recreation, curiosity or fun but delivers people from pain, loneliness and depression. Thus it would appear that post-modern drug use has turned away from third-world despair and embraced first-world medicine. This is not the culture of Scarface but of Brave New World—a brave new world much lonelier than Huxley’s. Soma, which possessed “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects,” was a social drug: “How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!” Our industrial narcotics numb social sensitivity. They are prescribed to individuals in the strictest confidence by medical professionals and taken in isolation—an isolation increasingly prevalent in a world ostensibly more connected by technology.

Much has already been made of the 2006 data from the General Social Survey (GSS) showing that, compared to 1985, Americans have half as many people in their lives with whom they can discuss important personal matters and that 25% of Americans have no one at all in whom they can confide. If the average American, thanks to technological connectivity, is estimated to have more so-called friends than ever before, those friendships must be relatively superficial. I mean, one in four people out there, however technologically distracted, is personally isolated. Babbling on cell phones, plugged into IPods, idling in traffic, gazing at the pixels, medicated on antidepressants, they’re more like extras in a Sci-Fi dystopia than the cast of Drugstore Cowboy. The fear, loneliness, anger and anxiety against which increasing numbers of Americans drug themselves are not only symptoms of the loss of meaningful connections with others, they are the cause of that loss. In other words, industrially engineered drugs cause the very pain they are prescribed to kill and promise to contract, not expand, minds.

-Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2009, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

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