Just say no to drugs (as a word).

This piece is partly a response to a book by Peter Hitchens titled The War We Never Fought. It sounds to me like possibly the worst book to be written about drugs and drug use conceivable. What it might usefully do however is bring together all our logical inconsistencies around the word drugs into one volume. It's prompted me to write why I think the word "drugs" itself starts us off on the wrong thinking track.

All substances affect our body. There is no meaningful category of substances called drugs in contrast to other substances that are not drugs. A drug is a substance which enters your body and which affects your mind and mood (a quality called psychoactive). In institutional settings people have been known to get “high” from drinking too much water. The increase in water affects their electrolyte balance and gives them a dizzy, out of sorts, experience that I imagine would liven up life a little on a hospital ward. Similarly anyone who has ever looked after a child knows any dehydration equals complete rattiness and at those times a drink of water is a powerful mood lifter. Hence even water is a drug.

Kids on drugs!

It is therefore better to think of substances as just more or less psychoactive with the understanding that how psychoactive a substance is depends on the state of a person taking it. Water is pretty psychoactive if a person is dehydrated or alternatively if a person has drunk gallons of the stuff already. Outside of those circumstances though, water is hardly psychoactive at all.

To use another example I knew a truck driver who took amphetamines. He reported just as powerful an awakening effect from magnesium (a mineral) one time but said taking it again had no effect. That makes sense because he was probably seriously low on magnesium when he first took it. His first state meant the magnesium had a strong psychoactive quality. After that however his body couldn’t use any more, so additional doses had very little effect.

All substances may be drugs, however all drugs are not the same. Magnesium is completely different to Methamphetamine. Cannabis is different to alcohol. Heroin is different to cocaine. All of these are different to water which is different to sugar and so on. This is because each of these substances has a different effect on the body. This may seem like a very obvious point but it amazes me how easily it is forgotten.

When people used the word “drugs” they may or may not be including coffee, cigarettes or alcohol. They are almost definitely not including water and magnesium. However they often are grouping together such diverse substances as MDMA (Ecstacy) or L.S.D. with Heroin and Coccaine. Sometimes they are also including petrol sniffing. That’s such a broad category that it makes discussing them fairly meaningless. Is it hard to stop a pattern of using drugs? Often if you mean Heroin but not if you mean L.S.D. Can drug use trigger a panic attack? Yes if you mean L.S.D. but not if you mean Heroin. Do people recover from the harms of using drugs? That depends on the harms and the substance and even the person. Alcohol damage to the brain is irreversible (though people can adapt) however damage to the liver can be repaired unless liver disease (Cirrhosis) has set in.

When I was working as a drug and alcohol counselor in Canada I heard another worker talk about the hypocrisy of parents freaking out if their child used crack cocaine when they would be okay with their kids using cannabis. That’s not hypocritical at all because crack cocaine is a different substance to cannabis. The two have massively different effects on the body and mind. They have different patterns of addiction and withdrawal. They belong in different subcultures of use. They have different costs; legal, and just plain financial. That’s not to say you can’t argue a parent should have the same attitude to both crack cocaine and cannabis use. You could still argue that a broad blanket policy is best – though I would disagree with you. It’s merely to say that a different attitude to the different substances is not hypocrisy. Insisting that a singular view of all “drugs” (whether affirming their use or condemning it) is the only integritous position to take is like teaching colour blindness as the right way to see colour.

That’s also a shout out to all those stoners who say that having a pipe every night is no different to having a glass of wine over dinner. They mean by that to say that if the latter is permissible (even recommended if you trust the wine industry) then cannabis use should be too. Maybe they’re right that the two substances should be treated the same, or maybe we should even encourage cannabis use over alcohol, however those arguments need to be actually made on basis of the merits and harms of their use. The fact that both substances get called drugs is not sufficient to tell us whether this is true. It is a completely useless indication of what those substances are doing. Meanwhile the “drug” that is the carbohydrates in the chip portion of the actual dinner is being overlooked entirely.

Substances also affect different people differently. Even when we are talking about a single substance it needs to be understood as different when it enters Jim compared to Jenny. That’s because it’s our own chemical factory in our brain that’s required to get us high (or low) in response to the substance. Notice for example cannabis doesn’t get your ashtray stoned as an ashtray has no brain chemistry to interact with. (South Parks Towlie is also not a real life possibility.)  The effect of the drug is really “of us” rather than the drug.

This is the same principle in operation with the varying psychoactive nature of water. It only improves your mood if you are dehydrated. However people are not just different in terms of fluid states (such as when dehydrated or not). People are also different in more fixed ways. Jim might always get sleepy on dope whereas Jenny might commonly get agitated. It therefore makes no sense to talk of who uses what substances at dinner time as if one was the same thing as another. It would be worse for some people to have a pipe and worse for others to have a glass of wine.

So if we want to define drugs meaningfully we have to recognize that;

1. Drugs are substances which affect the mind and mood of those who take them.
2. But all substances can affect our mind and mood.
3. But every different substance affects our mind and mood differently.
4. And the whole range of effects depend on us.

That leaves the word “drugs” as pretty much meaningless which is exactly why I prefer to talk about substances, as in substance use, substance abuse and so on. In particular I like to talk specifically about the affects which are at the root of our concerns over certain substances, namely addiction or dependence or tolerance, harms including the risk of overdose, intoxication and come-down or recovery, and so on.

We’re not completely in the dark about all of these concerns. Human physiology is both diverse and relatively the same. With some clarity about what we are talking about we can proceed with careful science, around specific substances and the range of responses they provoke with people depending on their prior state. We’re aided by our increasing understanding of how the brain works and the key role of certain connections and chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine.

In an ideal world I would like us to talk even more holistically about what affects our moods as well. Music, exercise, our environment, our body temperature, the company of friends are all influences on our mind and mood. In fact remembering that it’s our own bodies and brains that really produces a drugs effects should lead us to think of all inputs that affect what we produce in response as at least drug-like. Heroin only has any effect on us because of its effect on dopamine. Dopamine is therefore the real drug and laughter can give us doses of it as well.

Ultimately the question of our attitude to drugs is not a meaningful question. We should be asking instead “what is our attitude to our mind and mood?” How do we want to shape it, support it, agitate it, relax it and suffer it? A small part of that answer will be what usually gets called “drugs”, a larger part will be all substances (from chilli sauce to icecream) and the whole of it will be our life.

Truisms and Tropes: Taking shortcuts safely.

We all operate with certain tropes guiding us. By trope I mean a rhetorical device or cliché that we assume to be in operation in stories we encounter. Imagine a scary movie in which a young man decides to take a short cut that passes through a restricted area. A friend of mine’s short film brilliantly used this beginning to create dread. In any horror movie we know the young man has determined his fate the moment he takes the short cut. In a horror movie, you should always go the long way.

For some people such a distrust of short cuts is something for the off screen world as well. For them it may be a basic truism that well beaten paths are well beaten for some reason; people generally make sensible choices. Another truism may be that we often think we are original when we aren’t. Combine these and you have the belief that any short cut you imagine you discover has probably become the non-standard path via a process of people choosing not to use it for good reason. Such truisms are the building blocks of tropes we assume to be in place; take the short cut and expect the negative consequences.

In philosophical arguments we are often chastised for holding to truisms and tropes by other people who hold to different ones. That’s understandable. Our tropes close our minds to other arguments. They really are prejudices. They pre-judge story endings basically. Likewise we have little time for the tropes of other people that we don’t share. We rarely investigate and attack specific tropes though. Instead we just call each other close minded and accuse each other of having forgone conclusions. Perhaps because we are barely conscious of our own prejudices we insist on a position of complete open mindedness in others.

Truisms and tropes are increasingly helpful.

I don’t think it’s ideal however to operate without tropes. Honestly life is full of some pretty obvious clichés; The magic wristband that will prevent cancer, the mining magnate who only has the best interest of the nation at heart, the faith healer who needs you to make a faith commitment (by cheque or credit card). Why wouldn’t you want to avoid trusting some of these? We don’t need to do that by investigating the facts of each individual case. We can do that much faster by establishing truisms that build up tropes. We can presume to know how the story would end if we were to sign over our savings to the faith healer for example.

Furthermore facts are cheap. Did you know that 86% of people who never brush their teeth still don’t experience tooth decay? I don’t. I just made that up. How did I do that? I typed it on a page. Notice that no internet cop came and arrested me. As astonishing as it may sound whole books of facts have been made up. The internet has just made this easier. In popular fields like parenting or pet care there is page after page of absolute fiction calling itself expert advice. Why? Because there can be and giving advice is fun.

The internet has made it easier to check facts too. Enough checking and you can build a consensus of what people have typed. A consensus of people is still not a measure of much though. Many people think they’re too fat. Are they? Researching on-line can feel like chopping through a jungle of anxiety and aggrandizement, honest speculation and pure spin, accidental biases and unintelligible acid ramblings.

In such an environment truisms and tropes are time savers and sometimes even life savers. With a truism such as “people always think they know better than mother nature” we get a nice little restraining influence on something like a plan to convert deserts into fertile land. With a truism like “an idea that’s been rejected by scientific bodies is probably not true” we can filter out the voices of self-made authorities on climate change. Combine these truisms and we know not to invest in cloud-busting crystals to fight drought.

It seems to me that a relationship exists between the complexity and variety of questions we try to answer and the need for tropes and truisms. We could choose to disclaim an opinion on matters beyond a few. On those few topics we could investigate carefully and test our hypotheses. In my experience such a life feels a little irresponsible when our world is as interconnected (by trade, environmental effects and media) as it is. However if we want to have an opinion on a range of matters from global warming to the politics of Burma then we are obliged by time to use some sort of prejudice like tropes.

Relationships won’t do it anymore.

Our prejudices have traditionally taken the form of relationships. We develop a trust with a particular newspaper or columnist or set of encyclopedias. Equally we can remember who has led us wrong. However three things limit this strategies effectiveness. Firstly organizations with which we have a bad relationship simply change or conceal their name. Also organizations with which we have a good relationship are hijacked by other interests.  Relationships with people may have more stability but as any victim of abuse can attest – people can conceal true agendas while they build trust. Basically this is the inherent unreliability of authority. Just think of Jonestown.

Secondly the blistering speed with which we encounter new technologies and ideas makes it impossible for people and organizations to slowly build trust in their field.  Even in a basic area such as nutrition which we could imagine hasn’t changed since Adam’s proverbial childhood there are such shifting economies of food that the advice of one era is hard to use in the next. Is organic really necessary when it costs so much more? That depends on how conventional produce is produced. They are not using what they used a decade ago.

Thirdly in as much as you rely on a relationship of trust you fail to develop truisms and tropes of your own. Then when your authority is not available or you encounter a problem that hasn’t been exactly covered for you it is much harder to figure out your response. Basically relying on a trustworthy relationship isn’t really thinking for yourself and so is far less adaptable or tailored to your life. That’s an even greater problem when there is difference between your life and that of your trusted relationship i.e. your favourite writer has been dead fifty years or lives in another country. Once again we face such a dizzying array of changing concerns that those differences between us and our authorities are typical.

 Know your tropes.

Certainly tropes are useful, expedient and even necessary in our world. However they are still essentially an aspect of our mind’s closure. We ponder and ponder and ponder until… insert trope, we estimate how the story ends. Therefore we should use tropes carefully. We need to be able to expose and investigate a trope’s usefulness or they wont be life saving but life-endangering.

We can be unaware of our own tropes. Our tropes seldom get questioned if everyone around us shares them. That after all is what common sense is. Similarly we shouldn’t expect other people to be able to articulate what their tropes are. Many people group with like-minded people exactly so that they can share a common sense which they may not be able to articulate.

When we can’t name our tropes however then they can be implanted from anywhere. A trope that taking the shortcut will have ill effect can be built from the truisms I mentioned earlier but it can just as easily come from watching too many horror movies.  In which case we believe we know how a story ends even when we can’t say why.

Why we adopt tropes in fiction for example, where we have no experiential basis for them, is psychological wish-fulfillment. That’s what many stories, particularly horror movies, tap into for our entertainment. It’s why they’re fun. An example would be that people who take the long road rather than a short cut shall be rewarded for their effort. That’s an understandable wish if we, or a character we connect with, has made the costly decision to go the long way. However it’s not borne of anything about short cuts. There are no truisms about how shortcuts and long ways originate underlying it. Our trope in this case is borne entirely of our deep need to justify our choices to ourself. We are avoiding the negative opinion-state of going the long way for no reason but not actually responding to reality.

When we are willing to adopt tropes that are psychological wish fulfillments then we are absolutely ripe for advertising of the worst kind. We can be sold not only products but ideas. Consider the central trope of many action movies which holds that victory goes to whoever steps up the quickest and backs down last. Young men who absorb this trope are tragedies waiting to happen. Furthermore if we really let our minds go and indulge in tropes based on psychological wish fulfillment then we never learn even when reality contradicts us. That’s one way of understanding repeat violent offenders. (It’s also why many citizens of the U.S.A. would support invading Iran next regardless of actual   results in Afghanistan and Iraq).

If we are to use tropes usefully then we need to build them from explicit truisms which are themselves based on our response to reality. That response to reality doesn’t have to be direct experience. Who wants to directly experience being the victim in a horror movie? Not I.  However a response to reality is at least an opinion about how things actually are rather than how they should be.

As a final example of a trope consider the current fascination for positive thinking. Our belief that a negative attitude will lead to bad outcomes can be heavily influenced by psychological wish fulfillment. People with negative attitudes annoy us and distress us and as an inducement to be positive (and please us) we want other people to suffer for their negativity. Further we put effort into being positive and pleasing which we want to be rewarded for. However when it comes to things like whether your car breaks down pessimism can have no effect. In fact if optimism about outcomes led you to delay a car service then a positive attitude hasn’t helped at all.

On the other hand it is a truism that people are willing to give more aid to a cause they think is already likely to succeed. This truism is borne out by observations of panhandlers. The "better" dressed who describe themselves as just needing help in this moment earn much more than those who appear chronically poor. Positive thinking therefore can encourage ourselves and any other people whom we convince to give more attention and effort to a problem we have. That attention and effort helps us. This supports the trope that winners are grinners with observations from reality.

There is an important difference between the two ways of using tropes just mentioned. If our trope that winners are grinners is based on psychological wish fulfillment then we have no direction when to apply it. No particular truisms have to be in place. We will even blame whatever negativity we failed to excise from our hearts for a broken down car. On the other hand if we based our trope on what we think “is” instead of what we think “should be” then we are able to amend it with additional truisms and even discard it all together if it ceases to be useful.