Drugs are such a good case study to illustrate the concept of morality and its flaws. But before I share my thoughts, I have to admit that, although I'm fascinated with drugs from a theoretical perspective, my practical experience with them is very limited. And you can rest assured that it's neither for lack of opportunity, nor fear. It's just that the more I learn about them, the less I want to do them. Nevertheless, I'm not judging anyone who takes drugs, no matter which ones or how much. The reason for that is what this post is about.
First of all, we need to look at what drugs are and why people want to take them. There is a huge variety of drugs available, but the most common (and most dangerous) one is those that produce a "high", a chemical stimulation of the brain's reward system. For simplicity, I'll focus on that type for the rest of this post, as it's most suitable to illustrate my point. Just be aware that when I write "drugs" in this post, I don't mean every substance that could be considered a drug, just those that people take to get high.
So, why do people want to get high? Well, that's an easy question that becomes tricky the more you think about it. A high is literally a hack of your brain's reward system, which is the part of you that tells you if you want something, so, in a sense, you want it "by definition". Depending on the drug, it may be difficult or even impossible for you to not want it anymore after you had it even once. So the tricky question boils down to: why do people want it for the first time? Sadly, the most common answer for that is: a lack of understanding combined with curiosity. But from a philosophical perspective, that's a lame answer. The true question is: what reason could a perfectly rational individual with perfect knowledge about drugs have to take them for the first time? Naturally, I'm not the first to ask that question as it has been discussed a lot in the context of hedonism. If you believe that pleasure is the ultimate purpose of your life, taking drugs might not seem like such a silly idea anymore. Sure, there's negative consequences, but maybe those don't outweigh the positive ones.
But what are those negative consequences? I don't think I have to tell you, since there's already so many information campaigns out there that almost seem desperate to convince you that drugs are really bad. Everyone, especially those who take drugs, know that these campaigns are not lying about the adverse effects of drugs. They can destroy not only your body, but also your social standing, your relationships and, if too many people take them, society. That's because our species relies on cooperation and our brains evolved to reward us not only for things that serve us but also those that serve others. A high, which is in some instances the biggest reward you can get, only serves the person experiencing it and only while they are experiencing it. Hence, it becomes easy to see why some people might think that we'd be better off if nobody ever took drugs.
So, let's imagine for a moment that you are one of these people. You are now faced with a problem: many people still want to take drugs because it feels amazing. Those people may be young or simply less mentally capable, so they might not be able to comprehend your arguments about society being built on cooperation. You need to exert power over them somehow. If you run a state, you could use prohibition and physical force, but that's terribly ineffective since people are creative and find ways to work around your restrictions or even fight back. If you are an educator, you could run one of the aforementioned information campaigns, but that's also not very effective, since people might simply not care about the consequences as they might not be as fond of society as you are. However, if you are a hierophant, you wield the most effective way to keep people away from drugs. If they trust you enough to believe that taking drugs is immoral, they'll simply not do it. They'll resist the temptation and they'll stay away from those who want to tempt them. It works beautifully to keep your believers safe.
Trouble is, it only "works" on your believers. And the fact that it seems to work so beautifully is exaggerated by the group of people it works on being defined in a dynamic manner. Everyone is free to choose their beliefs as they see fit, so if they rid themselves of your moral standards and start taking drugs, they're not a believer anymore and seize to be your problem. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is the only effect at play. A strong community, a convincing mythos that supports a firm belief or even punishment for misconduct can significantly increase the stakes for people to leave your belief system. But the more extreme you make your religion, the less people will be susceptible to it.
Sure, you can't save everyone, but there's an even more important downside of the moralistic approach. What about those who have already taken their first dose? Those who are physically unable to decide that they don't want to take drugs? The very nature of morality is to punish immoral behavior, yet the very nature of drugs is to reward taking them. The users of drugs find themselves in a situation where they are rewarded for behavior they find immoral, so their brains suddenly observe a close connection between breaking moral codes and high levels of reward. What you did when you dragged morality into this is that you implicated all of morality in what to the drug user's brains must seem like a huge conspiracy. You have provided a "proof" that immoral behavior is not necessarily bad. It's like destroying a fundamental conjecture they previously thought to be true.
This leads me to an interesting hypothesis. And I have to add that I have absolutely no evidence to back this up. It's really only a hypothesis, don't take this as fact! But wouldn't that mean that people who thought that taking drugs was immoral but then started taking them for whatever reason are more likely to act against other moral beliefs of theirs than other drug users who did not have that connection between drugs and morality? It's probably very difficult to validate this hypothesis experimentally and I'm in no position to do this. But if you're a behavioral psychologist or a sociologist, you can have that one for free.
In any case, I don't think it's a good idea to judge people for taking drugs. It's a personal decision that people should be able make freely with full knowledge of the implications. I haven't even talked about all the negative practical implications of making drugs a taboo topic, such as black markets, cartels, misinformation, etc. It's a complex topic and I can't cover it all here, but I think it's really fascinating. In my view, the best thing we could do to combat the negative effects of drugs is to just normalize them. Talk about them as if it was just a regular topic. If everyone really understood, not just knew about, what drugs are and what they do, I feel like way less people would consider taking their first dose.
So if you are as fascinated with drugs as I am and are unsure if you should take them, nourish that curiosity with theoretical knowledge at first. I'm not advising you against it, just that it's a big and irreversible decision, so you should make it as informed as possible. By all means, read about different kinds of drugs, their effects, how they work and how people describe that it feels to take them. Maybe you can even witness in person how other people take them. Interact with those people while they are on the effects of the drug. If you do this, choose reasonable people who will not pressure you into participating. As long as you're not taking them, drugs are nothing to be afraid of. Knowledge about them cannot hurt you and it is a really fascinating topic.
And if you are anything like me, you will probably discover that you don't want to take them and that's fine. Or you might discover that actually you do want to take them and that's also fine. The only thing I think you should avoid at all cost is that at some point in your life you'll say: "Man, if I had known that I would have never started taking drugs." Never take drugs out of an impulse or because of peer pressure. I know Chicken is setting a really bad example in this comic.
Oh, and if you know other people who take drugs, be compassionate! They're still people after all.
