Enjoying drugs

On Channel 4 news yesterday evening there was a report on the government's proposed smoking ban in public places, after which some dimwit professor of health (or somesuch) from a C-list university was dragged on as a pundit. I can't remember his name, which is a shame because he showed an awful ignorance of why people smoke, in a typically arrogant middle-class moralist way. At one point, after saying that a complete ban would be a help to folk who want to stop smoking, he said something like:

"There are two types of smoker [1]: those who want to stop smoking now, and those who want to stop smoking at some point in the future."

In fact, prof, there's a third type (at least): those who enjoy smoking. How do I know? Because I'm one of them. I smoke, on average 4 fags a day, because I bloody well enjoy it. If I stop enjoying it then I'll quit - simple. And I know I'm not alone - in my local a couple of months ago I heard a young woman saying much the same thing to her disbelieving mates, that she only smoked 4 or 5 a day, and didn't smoke out of habit but because she got a kick from it.

There's a patrician, bourgeois arrogance exhibited by the chattering classes that assumes that people naturally want to give up things that are bad for them, drugs in particular. It rather ignores the blindingly obvious point that people take drugs because they get off on them, and this applies to legal and illegal drugs. There was a recent special issue of New Scientist which looked at the history of human drug-taking through the millennia, and this is now a special report on their website, introduced as follows:

"People have been using substances to lift their spirits for millennia. Techniques for fermenting beer and related tipples are known from Egypt and Sumeria 4000 years ago, and they soon spread across the inhabited world. Coca leaves (the source of cocaine), tobacco, and caffeine were also popular with ancient cultures.
Humans may even have an evolutionary pre-disposition to seek out narcotics, even though they can be addictive and damaging. Some people may have genes which make them more genetically prone to drug addiction than others. Even some animals - jaguars, lemurs and bees, for example - have a habit of getting high."

Humans in all societies have an innate tendency to take psychoactive substances, ranging from mild drugs like caffeine to full-blown hallucinogens like psylocybin (magic mushrooms) [2]. Even when it's plain that the drugs are injurious to health we still take them. Sometimes, of course, the drugs become physically addictive, after which we take them to feed the addiction, but the reason we take them in the first place is because we enjoy them.

This is a common factor in modern and past human society, and any moralising pundits, profs or no, who deny it are sticking their heads in the sand, just like the supremely irritating arrogant New Celibacy types who say that all we need to do to rid the world of STDs, abortions, and other sexual 'evils' is to "just say no". Worse than irritating, these moralists are often in positions of power, particularly in the current US militarist theocracy and in our happy-clappy NuLabor regime, and so this blinding ignorance informs government policy, so we all suffer.

[1] I hate people who say "there are two types of people". In my view, there are also two types of people in the world: those who say that there are two types of people in the world, and those who don't.

[2] There was a special report in yesterday's Grauniad detailing the major drug addiction problem in Iran, and this is hardly surprising - denied by Islam the solace of alcohol, Iranians are turning to stronger drugs to get out of their heads.