Ladies and gentlemen, the great question of our times: is doing mind-altering drugs a consumerist act?
Many people within and without drug-consuming subcultures identify the experiences of taking various drugs with mystical or religious significances. Critics deride these claims, saying that these experiences are merely chemical-incited delusions or that the iconography and rhetoric of the drug-using counterculture are merely other expressions of acceptance-seeking, self-branding conformity. Interestingly, we have the term “drug users” but not the term “drug consumers”. Perhaps this is reflective of a true difference between drugging oneself and other forms of consumption, or perhaps it is a linguistic dinosaur waiting for society to replace it.
Let’s look first at some of the popular legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. There is little doubt that using these is an act of consumption. Cigarettes were once most obvious example of the increasing ubiquity of advertising and marketing, while alcoholic beverages are today one of the most brand-dependent industries. The consumption of fine wines and champagne and expensive spirits is one of the best-known delineators of refinement and social standing, while the consumption of cheap liquors and mass-produced beers is quite the opposite.
Perhaps it from the stigma of criminality that an illegal drug is “used”, or worse “abused”, but not “consumed”. Consumption is at the heart of our society, and we cannot allow actions we condemn to be legitimated by lexical proximity to our heart!
Illegal drugs are inherently different from legal drugs in that they cannot be branded. While a merchant of such drugs may seek to raise the reputation of his product, excessive indentifying features and widespread renown would be severe liabilities. As one bag of marijuana, cocaine, or whatever is generally indistinguishable from like bags of similar product, there is no social cachet in the display of its pedigree other than endless and dubious claims about the pharmaceutical efficacy, or “quality” of the product. We could speculate against Baudrillard and say that drugs are special because they have use-value and exchange-value but no sign-value!
Of course, once one begins to discuss the particularities of various drugs, it becomes clear that a sign-value does exist, not in the way that a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt displays the appearance of wealth with a little logo, but in the way that playing polo itself demonstrates economic and cultural capital. Wall Street bankers don’t smoke crack, but are stereotyped as the likely users of pure cocaine. There is a classist hierarchy of drugs, with some such as cocaine associated with wealth and extravagance, while others such as crack and crystal meth are representative of poverty and ignorance. The poor fall into a greater cycle of addiction, poverty, prison, and death while the rich may consume incredible quantities of drugs and boast of it due to there expense. Eventually, the rich may go to rehab and begin to consume the “drug-free life” of health foods and spiritual centers.
It is now clear that using drugs can be a consumerist act. But can they ever not be? Maybe. We could certainly tell a person just off of an acid trip that the experience they just spent hours narrating was in no way a transcendental experience but merely a consumption of a physiological state of being and its associated culture and lifestyle. But, if we deny the nonconsumerism of such acts, if even biochemistry becomes subject to this social critique, what remains that is not a consumptive act?
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