Drugs make for easy symbols. Breaking Bad, the mid-aughts prestige TV hit about methamphetamine, is not really about methamphetamine, but about the sin of pride—the meth is a pretext. Pick up a book about the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma, and prescription opioids become, in the hands of so many middling journalists, a symbol for the evils of capitalism.
It is so easy, in fact, to make drugs into a symbol that some people go one step further. Their view is that drugs are not really “about” drugs, but that their characteristics are epiphenomenal to the particular social context in which they are consumed. Their cultural and political significance becomes our primary interest, their psychoactive effects and addicting properties an afterthought.
In Quick Fixes, academic Benjamin Y. Fong offers an example par excellence of this approach. Quick Fixes is billed as a history of drugs, but it is more a mishmash of drug-related tidbits, linked by the conceit that drugs are not really “about” drugs. “Drug policy is not about drugs,” Fong asserts, which is to say that “when people aim to control or regulate drugs, they are actually aiming to control or regulate other things about society.” And as the book reveals, once you take this leap—once you try to ignore that drugs are the problem—you are free to make all sorts of odd arguments.
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