Food/Drug
Social discrimination is still rampant in modern food/drug discourse
The following is an excerpt from p. 4-6 of the Introduction, “What is Drugism?” from my book, Drugism (2022):
[Note: this excerpt picks up where “What are drugs?” left off.]
Plenty of people have realized that sugar qualifies as a drug. Among them was William Dufty, who, half a century ago, wrote a treatise on the substance entitled Sugar Blues. In it, he correctly observed that “what you put in your face has something to do with what goes on in your head, whether it’s smoking grass, tripping on LSD, or eating rice.”1 Dufty was aware not only that sugar is a drug, but that, more broadly speaking, the things we consider food are psychoactive.
Dufty’s point gains further relevance when one realizes just how many psychoactive substances permeate people’s typical diets. For example, some of the psychoactive effects of cannabis come from myrcene, a compound that occurs naturally in bud and contributes sedative and analgesic effects to the high. Myrcene is also found in common spices like basil and rosemary, and in mangoes.2
Or, consider that potatoes contain trace amounts of nicotine, commonly rated as one of the most habit-forming drugs in existence. So do peppers. Some may argue that such amounts could never possibly be psychoactive. However, researchers have shown that peppers contain enough nicotine to significantly reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease, which suggests that it is present in sufficient quantities to register at least some sort of effects in the brain.3
Similarly, lemons and oranges contain trace amounts of DMT.4 And turmeric, the common spice, contains the compound curcumin which is a monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor.*5 Does this mean that turmeric-and-lemon tea qualifies as ayahuasca† in microdose form? Ultimately, the answer is no, although for cultural reasons rather than pharmacological ones. This is because drugs tend to be defined culturally, not pharmacologically.
Or, as psychopharmacologist Richard DeGrandpre insists, “drugs are socially defined commodities.”6 Drug historian Łucasz Kamieński explains that the very concept of a “drug” is itself sociopolitical—“it is continually being historically, socially, and politically constructed, reconstructed, and reinterpreted.”7 Returning once again to DeGrandpre, we find that “drugs do not become ‘drugs’ until they enter the ecological mix of environment, behavior, and brain.” As a result, he explains, any given substance’s status as a drug is “always contingent and dynamic, never absolute.”8 Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz similarly insisted that whether or not a substance is considered a drug is “a matter or moral attitude and political strategy.”9
In simpler terms, what separates drugs from other things is somewhat arbitrary, and is determined primarily by social and political factors which change with time. Whether or not particular substances are defined as drugs changes across cultures and over generations. So much for Merriam-Webster.
Even when a substance’s identity as a drug is established, the nature of that status can change in significant ways. For example, the social meanings attached to any given drug, the ways in which it is taken, and the effects associated with the drug all change over time and across populations.10
As psychiatrist Thomas Szasz elucidated, “our ideas about [drugs] have only the most tenuous connection with [their] pharmacological properties.”11 According to Szasz, drug effects are determined as much by users’ expectations as they are by pharmacology.12 He was just one of many scholars to hold this view. For example, Howard Becker, writing in 1967, argued that drug effects are influenced by “ideas and beliefs about that drug.” Anyone who claims they feel specific effects from a given drug is ultimately constrained by social expectations and scientific consensus, as Becker noted a few years later.13
Some take the notion a step further. For example, Paul Rock, a sociologist who taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, suggested in Drugs and Politics that “drug-use works on consciousness in ways that can never be definitely described.”14 Rock insisted that the essence of the drug experience lies beyond the confines of language altogether. As a result, it cannot be accurately described in terms of effects. Any attempt to do so, for Rock, is a purely social process.
The arbitrary tendency to assume that drugs produce specific effects has been given many names, all of which, unfortunately, are rather awkward. Hamilton Morris and others have deemed the phenomenon “pharmacological determinism.”15 While this is a great name in the sense that it clearly delineates what the phenomenon is, it is also eleven syllables. Although personally I love big words, I cannot imagine the term “pharmacological determinism” entering into the popular lexicon. But it is an important concept that is worth discussing, even among laypeople who do not obsessively study drug use.
Historian and harm reductionist Caroline Jean Acker wrote of “pharmacological reductionism” and the need to avoid it in her 2002 masterpiece, Creating the American Junkie.16 DeGrandpre, managing to whittle it down to eight syllables, proposed the term “pharmacologicalism” in The Cult of Pharmacology in 2006.17 This term is also rational, but also clunky. Research scientist and professor Carl Hart similarly writes about “drug exceptionalism” and “drug elitism.”18
In drugism, we finally have a term that can be used to succinctly refer to the phenomenon. In this sense, when someone assigns certain effects to a given drug, they display their drugism toward that substance—their judgment of it. Like many isms, however, drugism has multiple meanings. It is to this word and these meanings that we now turn.
