The Straight Dope

'THE PURSUIT OF OBLIVION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF NARCOTICS' BY RICHARD
DAVENPORT-HINES

THE PURSUIT OF OBLIVION A Global History of Narcotics By Richard
Davenport-Hines Norton. 576 pp. $29.95

In this stern and sustained history of certain mind-altering drugs,
Richard Davenport-Hines marks off for us a historical moment when the
concept of "addiction" seems to have coalesced.

The "desire for pharmaceutical improvement of the human experience,"
he writes, "occurred at a time of great changes in the mentalities of
educated western Europeans. . . . Human character did not suddenly
become depraved; but . . . there arose a new mentality that was to
have increasing influence over human attitudes toward hallucinatory,
stimulating, narcotic and inebriating substances." The date he
proposes for this important shift is the first quarter of the 17th
century. Soon after (though he does not refer to it) the new,
exciting, exotic hot beverage substances - coffee, tea and chocolate -
swept Europe and began to become the favorites of the proletarian poor.

Davenport-Hines divides "drugs" into five categories, but his work
here is principally concerned not with hallucinogens or inebriants or
hypnotics but with the group called narcotics, including opium and
heroin. (He also treats cocaine, which is not a narcotic but a
stimulant.) Because the use of drugs is so widespread today, what
complex modern societies choose to do about the negative consequences
of their availability is of immense economic and political importance.
Davenport-Hines has robust opinions about what should be done, and the
history of U.S. drug policy bulks large in his analysis.

This is partly because the United States is powerful, rich and hence
internationally persuasive; but it is also because the United States
is resolutely puritanical.

Through time, the U.S. government has consistently chosen prohibition
over regulation. The Harrison Act of 1914, which installed drug
prohibition here, "provided the model," Davenport-Hines asserts, "for
drug prohibition legislation throughout the Western World." In 1920,
Britain followed suit, after hardly any debate, with the Dangerous
Drugs Act. Davenport-Hines cites a lone dissenter, a Scottish
physician named Walter Elliot. Elliot raged against American
prohibitionists, those "barbarians of the West," as he called them:
"In their treatment of people who disagree with their social theories,
there are none more violent or more ill-judged than the people of the
United States." One might leap to the conclusion from this that
Davenport-Hines is on some sort of anti-American kick. That would be a
grave misreading of his book.

This copiously documented study of drugs and addiction is first-rate
scholarship and, considering its heft and detail, good if not easy
reading besides. The author has looked seriously at several major
drugs, at much of their history, and at some controversies marking the
evolution of the prohibition and regulation of their use. He has also
studied the lives of a great many addicts - artists, doctors and even
ungifted mortals - and provides some intriguing, often tragic,
accounts of their misfortunes. As a result of his research, he takes a
militant stand against prohibition or suppression and in favor of a
careful blend of regulation and treatment. Meanwhile, he provides a
very full account of the odd commercial successes of particular
substances, even in the face of the most draconian measures to ban
them.

To some extent, this book is a testament to frustration, as well as to
the quaint pleasures that pigheaded governments afford those officials
chosen to carry out their policies.

Among policymakers, there seems to be some synaptic or logical
obstacle to understanding at work: Somehow, attacks on the supplies of
drugs never seem to reduce demand.

For Davenport-Hines, drug use is not exceptional but thoroughly normal
human behavior.

His discussion of individual (and group) cases of addiction (as, for
instance at one time, among physicians) makes clear its terrible
consequences. He does not argue (how could he?) that all drug use is
free of pathology.

But the worldwide consumption of caffeine and alcohol, for example,
provides powerful evidence for the author's claim that drug use should
not be approached primarily as an antihuman or abnormal deviance, so
much as rather ordinary human behavior.

Beyond this, Davenport-Hines deals with the uncomfortable matter of
what prohibition always seems to bring in its wake: higher prices and
higher illegal profits.

The basic relationship seems to be quite simple.

Outlaw any desired substance, and its price - transformed into its
illegal price - rises. With any luck on the part of the sellers, the
profit margin rises, too. Make it legal again, and its price falls.

This unfortunate truth, which appears to be controverted in no
important drug-related instance, is crucial to the author's case.

This comes through most clearly in his concluding chapters, on recent
British and U.S. drug policies, drug wars, drug czars and drug use.
Much of this deals with particular figures.

Among them, for example, is William Bennett, the famous American
moralist and drug czar. In several pages, the author shows how
Bennett's failed war on drugs could be spun into a smashing success.

In his report on that success, Bennett drew no distinctions among
different sorts of drug users, and nowhere defined what a "drug" was.
This makes more enjoyable Davenport-Hines's failure to mention how
valiantly Bennett struggled to give up chain-smoking (for reasons of
propriety) before the first President Bush made him the drug czar.

But make no mistake, dear reader; Clinton and Gore on drugs fare no
better here than their opposite numbers.

Davenport-Hines's insistence on the cultural reasons why Americans
want to prohibit those drugs from which they make no money is an
important addition to now-familiar arguments.

Surely the value differences between Americans and, say, Frenchmen or
even Englishmen must be taken into account in any estimate of their
different approaches to human behavior.

Could it be that the Iranians have no monopoly on moral ayatollahism?

This book promises to make few people happy, and a good many sore. But
it is a powerful indictment of mostly failed policy.

At the very least it is an excellent additional reason why that policy
must one day be seriously debated - and the sooner the better.