The following is an excerpt from p. 1 of "Introduction: What is Drugism?" from my book, Drugism (2022):
A quick exercise: guess the drug. It was discovered long ago, and has been used for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. In ancient times, it was used in religious rituals and as medicine. It then passed through a period of repression, when its use was persecuted. After massive numbers of people discovered its medicinal properties, it became more widely known and used. Its use spread beyond medicine, into recreation and pleasure. Now there are businesses making millions, maybe billions, in profit from this drug. What drug is it? Care to guess?
Most likely, whatever drug came to mind for you is correct. Cannabis? Yes. Opioids? Yes. Tobacco? Yes. Psilocybin mushrooms? Yes. Hmmm...what about coffee? Yes. Even sugar? Yes.
This loose narrative, it turns out, applies to many popular drugs. The first substance to undergo this trajectory was salt. Since then, nearly every popular drug in history has followed roughly the same path. Whichever drug you guessed reveals something about your innate drugism, or your subconscious discrimination towards various drugs and the people who use them. Drugism is something which nobody has yet escaped from, as far as I can tell. Yet that does not mean that freedom from it is not something worth pursuing.
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