Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge
By Benjamin Yen Yi Fong
London: Verso, 2023
264pp
In the opening page of his 2023 book, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, author Benjamin Fong writes that the United States is "a uniquely drugged society ... During the twenty-first century, every metric of American drug consumption has gone through the roof. The opioid crisis is the most familiar part of this trend, but marijuana, antidepressant, antipsychotic, amphetamine and benzodiazepine use have all shot up as well".
Some drugs are legal and sold by pharmaceutical companies. Others are illegal. The "war on drugs" contributes to the US's huge prison population.
But the distinction between legal and illegal drugs has changed over time. Drugs which were formerly legal have become illegal, and vice versa.
Fong examines the history of drug use and laws relating to drugs in the US. He looks in detail at nine kinds of drugs, and how policies towards them have changed over time.
Opium was widely used in the 19th century as a component of "patent medicines", including in some of the most popular children's brands, such as "Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup" and "Street's Infant Quietness".
But laws passed in 1909 and 1914 restricted the sale of all opium and coca-derived products, except by prescription and under tight regulation.
Alcohol was banned in 1920, then legalised in 1933. During the period of prohibition, alcohol was widely produced and distributed illegally. Similarly, the banning of other drugs has created huge illegal markets.
Anti-drug laws are often enforced in a racially selective manner, with minorities being disproportionately targeted by police.
Fong relates these policy shifts to the changing requirements of the capitalist system. For example, moves to ban alcohol and other drugs in the early twentieth century were in part motivated by the increased use of complex machinery: "An intoxicated workforce in an increasingly mechanized world was simply unacceptable to a modern, capitalist sensibility."
Fong relates drug abuse to economic exploitation and social oppression. On the one hand, the stresses imposed on individuals by oppressive working conditions, poverty, unemployment and racism cause many people to take drugs to escape. On the other hand, employers have at times encouraged the use of certain drugs to stimulate workers to be more alert and efficient (amphetamines for example).
Drugs are increasingly promoted as solutions to psychological problems such as anxiety and depression. Depression is said to be caused by a "chemical brain imbalance", which drugs such as Prozac are meant to cure. Fong argues that this theory lacks evidence and obscures "the social causes of contemporary sadness".
Fong writes that neither repressive policies ("drug warriorism") nor "liberal drug reformism" can solve the problems associated with drug use: "Broader social reform, specifically around jobs and healthcare, is the only way to mitigate the compulsions both to take and to demonize drugs ... The 'problem' of drugs in the abstract cannot be dealt with through drug policy alone".
Fong argues that prohibition doesn't work and that the war on drugs has been a "resounding failure" with "pernicious consequences — hyper-incarceration, thuggish police, crime, government distrust, drug-related harms, and so on".
He adds that "...you can't intimidate addicts out of their addiction. The best way to deal with addicts, and with the issue of crime that addicts commit to maintain their addiction, is through treatment, community support groups, and maintenance prescriptions".
But Fong also argues that liberal drug reformism is no solution either: "[I]t's the legal drugs — cigarettes and alcohol, in particular — that are most hazardous to Americans. Letting profit-hungry corporations sell psycho-active drugs virtually assures abuses detrimental to public health".
Fong asks: "What is so horrible about our social reality that we can only bear it with the aid of chemical enhancements and escapes?" and argues that "...The problems related to drugs in America, both the excess of their use and the prohibitions against them, are a function of the more fundamental problem of social and economic inequality and alienation ... Real solutions to the 'drug problem', in other words, necessarily take up issues that aren't about drugs".
Two such issues are jobs and healthcare: "There are two particular improvements that would radically transform American drug consumption, and those are good jobs and universal health care. Research regularly demonstrates the importance of the routine provided by stable employment for avoiding drug abuse...
"Improvements in America's disastrous healthcare system would also greatly reduce the country's drug abuse, which is often a form of self-medication, a simple alternative to actual care".
He concludes that "Human beings will always take drugs, and they'll always rail against their dangers. But the compulsions both to use drugs and to vilify them will ease in a society with more material security, care, and political possibility, for the simple reason that these are three conditions of human freedom".