Drugs Du Jour

This essay starts off from the premise that the drugs used by each generation are an indicator of its needs and desires. That they indicate, if you want to put it this way, what’s “wrong” with the people from a certain decade.

In the first part of the article, the author tells about Aldous Huxley’s change of heart when it came to drugs: he thought drugs are a means of political control and despised people using the early 20th century’s drugs du jour, only to try LSD in the 1950s and become infatuated with it, calling it medicine. He even introduced Timothy Leary to LSD. So the author asks himself: “Why are drugs universally despised at one time, then embraced at another?”

To answer that, he takes the reader through a review of different eras and the drugs that accompanied them. Cocaine, for instance, was highly popular at the turn of the 19th century because it represented “resistance to Victorian norms, the abandonment of rigorous civility in favour of an emergent 'anything goes' social libertarianism in the era of the Jugendstil, and the rise of social-democratic politics”. When cocaine made its comeback in the late 1980s, it stood for “the opposite social tendency: iron conformism to the dictates of finance capital and stock-trading, which underscored the resurgence of entrepreneurial selfishness in the Reagan and Thatcher period”.

After going over the 1950s era when housewives became addicted to barbiturates and later discovered LSD, we get to the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) craze in the 2000s. In those years there was a spike in ADHD diagnoses and Ritalin and Adderall prescription. “Instead of people finding drugs to answer their cultural questions, cultural problems are manufactured to sell pre-existing drugs.”

Finally, the article deals with the drugs used nowadays, the problems they want to solve, and how taking drugs is changing the notion of “self”. To give you a hint, people have a tendency towards productivity-enhancing drugs.