Missions Resources - Bibliography
Matters of Substance: Drugs - and Why Everyone's a User
Authors: Griffith Edwards
ISBN: 031233883x
Publisher: Penguin
Number of pages: 314
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
Reviewed by Paul Grant
The next time you’re visiting the small city of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, seat of the sprawling Oglala Lakota reservation, take highway 407 south out of
town. The Nebraska state line – and the reservation boundary – is only two miles away. The boundary is invisible. It’s a legal reality and little more, slicing through open fields.
Just across the state line lies the imaginary hamlet of Whiteclay. Just like the state line, Whiteclay is a town only on paper. On the ground, it is a little piece of hell on earth.
Whiteclay is a collection of liquor stores and nothing else, save a soup kitchen operated by a Pine Ridge ministry. Alcohol sales are banned on the reservation, but not in Nebraska. People don’t live here. They come here to buy and drink beer, and for a limited few, who live miles to the south, to sell it. Most of the clientele are raging alcoholics. Whiteclay is a surreal place, a place with alcohol on the mind. It is the epicenter of a local epidemic.
Matters of Substance is a fascinating book about drug epidemics. Written by a leading British addiction scientist, it is look at mind-altering drugs that should redefine the entire political and social debate. Griffith Edwards’ purpose here is both global and intimate in scope. He wants to know why the same drug can have widely different impacts, depending on the country and user.
Opiates, for instance, are a class of painkillers. They are some of the cleanest and best narcotics known to medicine, with potential for dependency but far less toxic than alcohol or tobacco. But in a different context, an opium derivative called heroin is an outrageous drug, capable of destroying lives like no other. How can one drug be a boon for surgery and a reaper of death? Griffith finds a plausible answer by viewing drugs in ecological terms – like a virus passing through a population.
One device he uses, and which makes this book so much stronger than other books on drugs, is a longitudinal perspective. By looking at Opium, for instance, across centuries and across cultures, he is able to learn much more than by spending time in an inner-city clinic.
Opium has been used for centuries, but really took off with the dual developments of global trade (which allowed concentrated marketing efforts in new countries) and new technologies for delivery (first the pipe, then the syringe).
Britain and China fought two wars over smoked opium. Epidemic levels of addiction were turning up in China, who began to restrict the imports. Britain’s navy forced China to keep her ports open to opium from India. A century later, very high numbers of American soldiers got addicted to opium smoking while stationed in Vietnam. Incredibly, for such an addictive drug, almost none of these addicts transferred his addiction back to civilian life. Why? An ecological perspective provides a bit of an answer.
First, opium was rarely smoked in America – it was injected as heroin. Second, soldiers lived in an artificial world (barracks in a faraway country in a war zone) with little corollary to life back home. Quitting was for most soldiers as easy as stepping off the plane.
Alcohol is not. Nearly omnipresent in the contemporary West, Alcohol is one of the two most important licit mind-altering drugs on the market today, along with tobacco. Unlike tobacco, which is primarily consumed as cigarettes, alcohol is not a significant political topic at this moment in most of North America.
But it destroys lives nonetheless, at all socio-economic classes and in all states and provinces. Forget the ugly stereotypes about alcohol and First Nations: what we see in Whiteclay, Nebraska is a prototype of drug epidemics anywhere and everywhere. Edwards notes common factors behind most drug epidemics, including abundant, cheap and high quality supply, government tolerance, and social fractures.
Those three alone are sufficient to explode the calcified political debates about criminalization and legalization of drugs. Edwards argues convincingly against one-size-fits-all drugs policies, but cautions strongly against any kind of legalization tied to tax revenue. Governments quickly become as dependent on drug money as addicts are dependent on drugs.
Looking at the case of alcohol prohibition in the United States, he has to tease out the inconvenient truth from the mythical status prohibition hold in our received memory. From a legalization perspective, prohibition is not nearly as strong an exhibit as we might think. During the 1920s, alcohol consumption did indeed decline. Popular images of speakeasies and bootleggers were the exception, more than the rule. Furthermore, and this is significant, prohibition was not repealed because of failure, but because President Roosevelt wanted tax revenue to fund New Deal.
Matters of Substance is the most insightful book I’ve ever read on drugs. Edwards never inflames, and never understates. He looks far and wide at many cultures and countries, and never lets popular myths or received attitudes dictate his opinions. On cannabis, for instance, he stands resolutely against the libertarian stream and points out hypocrisy on the left between nicotine and cannabis attitudes. With cocaine, on the other hand, he lays much of the blame for the epidemic of the 1980s on the medical community, who over-prescribed the drug in powder form in the 50s, creating an environment ready for a designer drug.
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