For Our Social Causes Friday Discussions: "Forces of Habit Drugs and the making of the Modern World" Pgs 59-66 Puzzlement of Distribution Chapter 3 Part 1
3 Major Talking Points: 1 The Future of Regional Plants 2 Environmental Consequences 3 Geographic Continuum Drug Use
Segment One: Recap from Chapter 3 Part 1- European Distribution Engine, Undesirable Cosmetic effect, Logistical Drawbacks, Morale Around Hallucinogens, Coping With Life and Contaminated Bread and "Hellish Life: "Plainly put, these were people who could use a drink or smoke."
The Future of Regional Plant Use -Countless reasons to explain why a substance became a global commodity while others did not. Either timing, luck, politics, elite preference, cultural bias, even marital alliances, etc.
-If a psychoactive plant is not a world commodity yet, does not mean it never will be. Betel and Kava still expanding and growing in popularity.
-Mormons brought Polynesians bringing their culture of Kava drinking - Utah prosecuted first Kava DUI case -Growth of roads in Papua New Guinea helped to spread and increase the popularity of Kava Bars.
-Herbal Supplement industry another entry point- ex Pg 60 "Psychoactive substances such as St. John's Wort and ephedra have become popular in North American and European markets. "Drawing on German clinical research, marketers have pitched Kava and other 'natural' remedies as safe and effective alternatives to drugs like Valium."-Pg 60 -Kava Extract available through mail, "Poised to be the next hottest, garlic, ginkgo or ginseng," -One Marketing Vice President claims.
Segment Two: Environmental Consequences- The cost or damage of drugs usually measured by personal disaster such as poor health, morbidity, or car accidents, etc - Most serious and long last effects are Environmental
-Pg 61: "Psychoactive Revolution accelerated the degradation of regional environments and the fortunes of human communities dependent on them through deforestation, soil exhaustion, and erosion, chemical runoff, and weed and pest infestation."
-Expansion of coca production destroyed millions of acres of primitive forest like Brazilian Coffee Expansion of the 19th Century
-Many forests rise from "wet deserts," land with thin soil base which wears out after infusion with ash when farmers burn forests for coca. - Producers move to cleared lands, depleted soil, minus forest covering, erodes with rainfall resulting in flooding, causing mudslides burying villages - Stash and Burn cultivation of opium in Southeast Asia and Guatemala, and with Cannabis in Columbia, similar problems.
-Processing illicit drugs at site of production results in waste of chemicals such as: gasoline, sulfuric acid, ammonia, sodium and potassium carbonate often dumped in ground or streams damaging aquatic life. -Waste from morphine extraction, same problem
-Adding ecological insult to environmental injury, cocaine smugglers also traffic endangered jungle species, exporting them dead or alive.
-Drug prohibition problem not in extraction but in lack of safeguards and supervision with waste management - Licit Drugs crops also still damaging -Pg 62: "Tobacco quickly depletes soil of potash, calcium, and nitrogen"
-Changes in cultivation techniques - South and Central American coffee beans grown in shade a greener alternative . 1960's new species Cafe caturra, rapid growth in sun but required more fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.
-Spread of "hitchhikers" such as Argentine Ant, aggressive agricultural pest that arrived in coffee bean shipments found in CA up to New Orleans in 1891
-Another danger: replacing food production for cultivation of drug crops. - Chinese were very sensitive to these effects.
-Pg 64: "Critics accused British-American Tobacco for foistering Bright Tobacco cultivation on hungry peasantry. Company officials themselves professed concern about abandonment of soybeans, grain, and other food crops."
-Deforestation - pollution - blight still a problem but the psychoactive revolution made issue worse.
-Botanist plants that offer human pleasure quickly dispersed over staple foods, plus draining soil producing coca opium, cannabis, offered little no nutrition
-A.H. Grimshaw 19th Century physician and opponent to tobacco identified issues of valuable family farmland:"Breadstuffs, wool, hemp, flax," ruined due to cultivation of tobacco. -Pg 64
-Morbid Detail: A demographer might argue that with half-billion people less due to lower mortality rate, that this helped ease environmental pressure due to "relentless" population expansion - Edward O. Wilson's "raging monster upon the land." -Pg 64
Segment Three: Geographic Continuum of Drug Use - Pg 65: "The wider the use, the more extensive the Environmental consequences." - Notion of continuum implies that a drug can move and the infrequency of movement back toward isolation of local use indicates "transcultural biological foundations of drug reinforcement. It also indicates how entrenched psychoactive commerce has become despite international efforts to control or prohibit it." -Pg 65
-"Drug control, to borrow a Cold War analogy, is more about containing use than rolling it back." -Pg 65
-Synthetics in competition with natural production: Mescaline Vs MDMA (Ecstasy) Nutmeg Vs MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine) Qat Vs amphetamines. -Plant drugs competing with Chemicals [that appear] superior due to: compactness, potency, cost, taste or lack of, etc.
-Last Reason Why Some Plant Drugs Remain Regional and not Global Cash Crops: Missed Historical Window of 15th Century through 19th Century
-Primary source over last 100 years of psychoactive novelty is synthetic drugs of big pharma - Pg 66: "Psychiatry's biological turn and rise of 'cosmetic' psychopharmacology, 'the prescription of profitable new drugs to fine-tune mood and improve performance, assure the continued introduction of 'clean' synthetic alternatives to natural drugs." Eventually those also finding their way to the drug underworld.
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