Kicks, Drugs, and Politics*

We have grown accustomed to drug abuse as endemic in lower-class poverty and ghetto areas. We are now alarmed to see it spread into new populations and to find the cultivation of drug roles in class, status, and age positions in which they formerly had no place.

Drugs have traditionally been an escape route of the despairing and beaten declassed people of the ghetto. In India and Pakistan, for instance, where the use of Cannabis (marijuana) in variant forms for intoxicating and euphoric purposes has been institutionalized, their use has declined in the middle and upper classes and is presently for the most part confined to the lower class. The Pakistani students in my classes inform me that the middle and upper classes now reject these drugs. They consider their use declassing.

The use of the drugs is culturally patterned. In the Hindu religion drugs have a sacred function and are controlled and limited by elaborate traditions. The Muslims in their religious practices avoid drugs since they are forbidden to approach God while intoxicated. There are medicinal and quasimedicinal uses for the drugs based upon tradition and folklore,1 but with urbanization and increasing education the medicinal use is declining in these countries. Even their euphoric and intoxicant uses are structured by cultural patterns, as is alcohol in this country. Their low cost and easy availability in the natural state facilitate their adoption by the lower classes who habitually take a few whiffs after the day's work is done, as we might have a beer or a brandy.

In the same way that the exhausted and hungry peasants and laborers in the high Andes chew coco leaves, in Pakistan and India