Drugs & the modern zeitgeist

The Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Times syndicated an interesting, if not particularly revelatory, opinion piece about how "drugs define the zeitgeist" of a period in history. It's more interesting for the anecdotes it provides than the conclusion it reaches. For instance, coffee had such a revolutionary influence that it was considered seditious in some places to drink it, which of course connects it by way of a stretched analogy to the counterculture of the '60s:

Voltaire, a Procope regular, reportedly downed 50 to 70 demi-tasses a day - to which is largely attributed the wit and brevity of Candide. Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were also regulars, as were Robespierre, Danton and Marat.

But not for the taste. According to Bennett Weinberg and Bonnie Bealer's excellent history, "the heavily reboiled sediment-ridden coffee of the day … was consumed exclusively for its pharmacological benefits". This deliberate experimentation with "a new and powerful drug unlike anything their countrymen had ever seen" links these Enlightenment genii with the serious hallucinogenic experimenters of the 20th century, writer Aldous Huxley and Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary.

Whether the hunger-suppressing hashish that Picasso and Braque guzzled in their garret days helped generate cubism is still moot. But, as coffee had fuelled the Enlightenment, the '60s peacenik revolution was powered by LSD. LSD, for Leary, was a "sacrament", equivalent of the host in Catholic ritual, it offered escape from ego and "confrontation with God." The link between biochemistry and God is itself fascinating, but every drug has its day. What the '60s floated inside acid's gossamer bubble sank, soon enough, beneath the dead weight of heroin.

Where I run into trouble with the piece is its conclusion about what drug defines our current times:

Cocaine is our dinner-party drug du jour. Not the biggest, even of the illegals. (Marijuana is.) But it's unquestionably our drug of money and influence, preferred poison of Richard Florida's "creative class". The British spend $5 billion a year on it; with Ireland's new wealth, cocaine busts ballooned 750 per cent in four years. Charlie is back, big time.

Cocaine is the drug of ego. All shiny surface and hollow euphoria, it's the drug of stockbrokers and estate agents. Of puppet governments and corporate warmongers. Of thin girls with expensive teeth and cheap souls, of sharp subprime boys whipping fast financial horses. Where acid dissolves ego, cocaine is powdered narcissism. The Age of Aquarius is dead. All hail the Age of Celebrity. Do what? Invest, obviously, in coca futures.

Trotting out all those tired caricatures of cocaine users hardly serves to convince me that cocaine defines our entire zeitgeist, but maybe that's just because I know cocaine users who aren't stockbrokers and warmongers, and moreover, I just lean toward the notion that the one drug that ties more of our culture together than any other is alcohol anyway. If I had to rule that one out, I'd look toward prescription opioids before I'd look toward cocaine, at least in America. But mostly I see a splintering in today's age, rather than some single unifying substance ("to rule them all!") defining much of anything anymore. When it comes to drugs, the counterculture's been consumed, prescription diversion is typically easier than finding a coke dealer, and kids are growing up on speed - who needs cocaine?

Although, to be clear, I'm not saying cocaine isn't fun.

What do you think, folks? Cocaine, alcohol, speed, jenkem... are we really so easily defined by our appetite for a drug of choice?