Built on the buzz

Drugs like alcohol and tobacco created the modern world, argues one historian, but caffeine still rules it.

By Maria Russo

May 3, 2001 | "Nature is parsimonious with pleasure," writes historian David Courtwright in "Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World." Or, as we used to say in high school, "life sucks, and then you die." But human ingenuity has stepped in to lessen the miseries and add to the delights of earthly existence. Courtwright calls it "the psychoactive revolution": Compared with 500 years ago, people across the planet now have easy access to a, well, mind-blowing variety of consciousness-altering substances. The menu of options differs from culture to culture -- one man's vodka martini is another's kava brew -- but the drive to take a temporary vacation from our normal waking state has made some drugs into perhaps the only truly global commodities. Virtually every language on earth has words for coffee, tea, cacao and cola, the plants that produce caffeine. The 5.5 trillion cigarettes smoked each year in the 1990s represent a pack per week for every living man, woman and child.

Alcohol joins caffeine and tobacco to round out what Courtwright calls the "big three" of currently legal psychoactive drugs. As he sees it, modern civilization is practically unthinkable without this trio. But why have they fared so well while equally intoxicating substances -- like, say, marijuana -- are banned and stigmatized, and others -- like kava, khat and betel -- are popular only in distinct geographic areas? And why is tobacco currently falling in popularity, while alcohol and caffeine are holding their grip on us? These questions are only partly answered in Courtwright's otherwise excellent book, but that's not really his fault. Drugs are as deceptive and multifaceted as the human beings whose metabolisms they mess with; a history of drugs may be possible, but an analysis of their role in culture is bound to be incomplete and provisional. There are simply too many ways to tell the story.

Still, Courtwright's historical investigation is solid and fascinating: Once the big three caught on among European elites, they became crucial components in the ocean-crossing commerce and empire building that shaped modern economies. Tobacco, coffee, tea and spirits were lucrative; users quickly grew dependent on them, guaranteeing a steady demand for commodities that could be heavily taxed. These drugs have also always been an ideal way to control and pacify laborers, providing them with temporary relief from the fatigue and boredom of agricultural and, later, industrial life. Some of these workers -- such as those Eastern European peasants paid in vodka for the potatoes and grain they delivered to distilleries or West Indian distillery workers paid in rum -- found themselves caught in devastating economic traps.

As habits, the big three also work with and reinforce one another nicely. Had too much to drink last night? You'll be especially eager for that morning cup of coffee to clear your head. If you smoke, you'll need to pour another cup, since smokers metabolize caffeine more quickly than nonsmokers and must drink more coffee or tea to get the same buzz. Feeling too wired now? Time for a cocktail!

Over time, as you ingest more of these substances, your body's tolerance for each of them increases, so you need more and more to get the same result. These endless cycles, "Forces of Habit" suggests, not only tap into a vulnerability in the human psyche -- we're hard-wired to seek to mitigate pain and increase pleasure -- but are also the essential building blocks of capitalism:

The peculiar, vomitorious genius of modern capitalism is its ability to betray our senses with one class of products or services and then sell us another to cope with the damage so that we can go back to consuming more of what caused the problem in the first place.

The economic impact of legal drugs extends from barley farmers to bartenders to the social workers who run drug rehab clinics to the lawyers who defend drunken drivers to, Courtwright playfully acknowledges, the scholars who study the history of drugs.

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