Who Really Rules The World

Drugs Rule
Drugs rule the world because they have been imbibed since the dawn of humanity. They have heightened the consciousness and numbed the pain of just about every civilisation that ever existed.

The pacifying properties of tinctures of opium drove the British Industrial Revolution by soothing the workers. In the 20th century the populace took to nicotine as the comforter for life’s ills.

Today, individual pharmaceutical companies throughout the world announce annual profits equivalent to the GNP of small nations.

The scale of the black economy involved in drug transactions is literally astronomical. You can buy whole countries for the money this trade generates.

One of the side effects of the human condition is pain, and wherever there is pain there will always be drugs. This is why drugs rule the world whether you like it or not.

Yoshi Tanaka argues how drugs rule the world. He has experimented commercially with just about every sort of drug known to humanity. He likes his work. He also maintains his right to remain silent until his lawyer gets here.

Prehistoric High
Since the dawn of time, humanity has felt driven to alter its consciousness in some pretty extreme ways. How else do you explain the fact that, in evolutionary terms, the development of our minds has far outstripped that of our bodies? It’s not called ‘higher intelligence’ for nothing, you know.

Let's face it, once our ancient forebears had satisfied their need for food, shelter and made their small contribution to the continuation of the species, there wasn’t a lot left for them to do on this planet except get high and expand their minds.

‘Primitive man,’ wrote the novelist and intellectual Aldous Huxley in 1931, ‘explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, hallucinogen or stupefacient undiscovered.’ How else were they to reach up and touch the distant stars, boldly confront the vastness of Creation or, perhaps, one day even sit face to face with the Creator?

Physicians in Ancient Egypt treated their patients with opium, its use later spreading throughout the Greek and Roman Empires. ‘Helen’s nepenthe’, the drug that brought oblivion from grief, according to Homer, is also thought to have come from Egypt. The Rites of Eleusis, the oldest religion in the West, centred around the hallucinogenic properties of ‘kykeon’, a mysterious substance symbolically linked to the opium poppy.

The ancient Aztecs had peyote and ololiuqui, a seed containing a natural form of LSD. The Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri. The natives of the Upper Amazon used yagé, a vine said to have telepathic properties. In Persia, the militant Ismaili sect of Hashishim propagated their faith by violent means under the leadership of legendary ‘Old Man of the Mountains’, Hasan-e Sabbah. The modern term ‘assassin’ is derived from the sect’s name, which means ‘users of hashish’ in Arabic.

Shamans throughout Eurasia and beyond used hallucinogenic mushrooms and fungi to transport themselves into spiritual frenzies. While the witches of Europe concocted similarly heady brews out of belladonna, thorn apple, henbane and bufotenine, derived from the sweat glands of toads. So much for eye of newt and toe of frog.

Opiates and Industry
New World go-getters George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both cultivated a relative of the cannabis plant, as did many farmers in the US's early history. Hemp was used in medicinal preparations for bronchial conditions, migraines, menstrual cramps and for treating glaucoma. The plant’s fibres could also be used to manufacture high quality canvas, rope and paper. The revolution that started with the dumping of tea in Boston Harbour also involved a Declaration of Independence written on Dutch hemp.

It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, however, that drugs really started to take control. Thanks to the widespread use of laudanum, a tincture of opium in alcohol, there were few members of society in the 18th and 19th centuries who could claim they hadn’t tasted opiates in one form or another. Used as an early painkiller and pacifier, these tinctures were very popular for calming painful stomach conditions, curing toothache and quietening fractious children.

The greatest demand for opium, however, was in the cotton-spinning districts of northern England. In Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Qunicey records how in Lancashire ‘on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewn with pills of one, two or three grains in preparation for the known demand of the evening.’ Could everybody really have had toothache?

Well, perhaps so in the 19th century. But one medical investigator of the period, a certain A Calkin, was moved to remark that ‘There was not a village in all that region round but could show at least one shop and its counter loaded with the little laudanum vials even to the hundreds, for the accommodation of customers retiring from the workshops on Saturday night.’

As an antidote to the backbreaking toil and mind-numbing tedium of the mills, laudanum was a cheap alternative to beer and gin. It also did the job it was supposed to. It deadened pain. According to Calkin, many of the great industrial towns, including Sheffield, Birmingham and Nottingham, not to mention the working populations of Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, were renowned for their number of opium users.

Big Business
As the pressures of modern living increased, the social exploitation of drugs was stepped up. Opium was refined into morphine and heroin; mescaline was synthesized from the psychotropic element in peyote; and for a short time early in his career, Sigmund Freud's researches into cocaine turned from the scientific to the purely recreational.

It was only after the Second World War, however, that drugs and industry really came together. In 1952, Seconal, the first of a new range of barbiturates, came onto the market. In 1954, the first tranquillizer, Thorazine, went on sale. Then came Miltown, followed by Stelazine, Mellaril, Valium, Librium, Elavil and Tofranil.

As a result, annual sales of tranquillisers dramatically rose from $2.2 million in 1955 to $150 million in 1956. Today, individual pharmaceutical companies throughout the world announce annual profits equivalent to the GNP of small nations.

The drug with the greatest promise, however, turned out to be the most difficult to handle. First launched onto the market by the Swiss company Sandoz back in 1948 under the brand name Delysid, lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, eventually became the stuff of nightmares.

Before turning into the psychedelic drug of choice for disaffected 1960s youth and consequently becoming illegal, LSD started out as a plaything for the great and the good. Patriarchal founder of Time Life Inc, Henry Luce, enjoyed the drug while playing golf. Hollywood movie star Cary Grant publicly praised its enlightening effects. Vice president of the Morgan Guarantee Bank, Gordon Wasson, dedicated his not inconsiderable resources to the study of psychedelic mushrooms, otherwise known as ‘God’s flesh’. While Aldous Huxley saw LSD as the starting point for a whole new spiritual renaissance.

Less benignly, both the CIA and the Chemical Weapons Division of the US Army were interested in using such drugs as weapons, frequently testing them on people without their knowledge or consent. Major General William Creasey went so far as to lobby the US Senate, proposing that hallucinogenic gases be tested in crowded American subways. ‘I do not contend that driving people crazy, even for a few hours, is a pleasant prospect,’ he argued, ‘but warfare is never pleasant.’

Too uncontrollable to be a weapon, too weird to be therapeutic, LSD was outlawed in 1966 and subsequently consigned to the underground drugs lab of history.

Black Economy
In his book A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx put forward a series of arguments in favour of treating the criminal as a productive member of society. ‘Crime takes off the labour market a portion of the excess population, diminishes competition among workers … while the war against crime absorbs another part of the same population.’ In a similar fashion, the drug dealer and the drug user help suck up excess wealth, keep our massive legal, medical and penal systems in work and maintain increasingly rigid social divisions. To put it another way, if cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you’ve got too much money, then crack is just His little way of letting you know you’re in the wrong neighbourhood.

In the meantime, the drug cartels of Central America keep the world markets flooded with cocaine, while organized gangs from Afghanistan and the Far East step up the traffic in heroin. The scale of the black economy involved in these transactions is literally astronomical. You can buy whole countries for the money this trade generates.

The traffic in drugs is used to finance terrorism and regime change. It helps to uphold corrupt governments, destroy people’s lives and allows criminal organizations to hold entire populations to ransom.

Meanwhile, those farmers in the developing world foolish enough to dedicate their meagre resources to the growing of food protest outside the latest G8 summit meeting. They object to the way in which the international market is weighted against them by subsidies and tariffs. The G8 countries can’t effectively regulate an illegal trade, thus making the cultivation of coca and opium an extremely attractive option that beats slowly starving to death on a subsistence income. Yes, there is a price to pay for all that cheap food you consume everyday – you are starving some and sending others begging to the drug cartels for ready cash.

Health Warning
Before their cosy domestication in our kitchens and cafés, tea and coffee were both used exclusively to keep the mind alert and focussed for prayer or meditation. At the opposite end of the experiential scale, alcohol clouded the mind while arousing the passions, letting loose the unflinching warrior within to confront the hostile world outside: a disturbing primal scene re-enacted almost nightly on our city streets, especially at the weekends.

Today, 80% of all violent crime is alcohol-related. So just because such intoxicants have lost their inherent mystery over the years, it doesn’t make them less of a dangerous drug. At the same time, many of those substances that we do treat as dangerous or antisocial are historically embedded deep within our earliest culture. How else could the tobacco industry get away with unthinkable profits and enormous political sway by selling something that is so harmful it kills an estimated 4.9 million people annually?

Buying illegal drugs effectively means putting your trust in some guy who thinks owning a gold-plated AK47 is the height of social sophistication and who doesn’t even know you exist: so just imagine how much he cares about your welfare. But is buying cigarettes really that different?

Some drugs will kill you, some will permanently mess with your head, and the ones that don’t do either still have the power to turn you into one of the most boring, untrustworthy and just plain annoying people on the entire planet.

So let’s get one thing straight: to argue that drugs rule the world is not the same as saying they ought to be decriminalized. Nor is it an attempt to present drugs in some less demonised form. The exercise of true power rarely has anything to do with established concepts of either legality or fluffiness. Drugs are mad, bad and dangerous to know, but they are also inevitable.

That’s why we don’t think twice about the multi-billion dollar industry that exists as a result of our insatiable appetite for altered consciousness. Drugs are to humans what fish are to chips. And that's why they rule the world.