How To Consider Drugs as Institutions
MDMA, University Formation, New and Newer Institutionalism
We do not often consider drugs as institutions, but by the time you finish reading this essay you will have considered them as institutions. Douglas North, a founder of the so-called “New Institutionalism” describes institutions this way:
Institutions are the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactions. In consequence they structure incentives in human exchange, whether political, social, or economy. Institutional change shapes the way societies evolve through time and is the key to understanding historical change. (Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, 3)
Drugs do not immediately seem to be “rules of a game of a society.” or “humanly devised constraints.” Drugs seem to be, instead, specific “substances” and specific effects. Cannabis “is” a drug and makes you high. MDMA is a drug and makes you roll. LSD is a drug and it make you trip.
Imagine this new pill
Imagine there was a drug that let you forget what you knew about drugs for about six hours. Not about any particular experience, but rather, the mere concept. Cannabis is a thing you smoke, MDMA is a substance that exists. All cultural knowledge about them evaporates. On the morning before you take this drug, you spend hours reading through Douglass North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. You have primed yourself to see drugs as institution.
It takes only a few minutes for this pill to start working. Drugs? What are drugs? You don’t know what drugs are, but you do have the Internet, and the Artificial Intelligence gets a list of drugs that goes like this:
Alcohol. Tobacco. cannabis. methamphetamines (e.g. MDMA) and other stimulants such as cocaine. new psychoactive substances – synthetic drugs. opioids, including heroin.
You happen to have smoked cannabis before. And you also happen to have been thinking about institutions a lot, so you realize that drugs are institutions. After all, what is the smoking of dried cannabis leaves but “a humanly devised constraint that shape[s] human interactions.” The smoking of the cannabis, this “drug” institution creates a certain, very definable set of behavior patterns.
You look back over the list and you see that all of the other “drugs” are clearly institutions. They are not just delimited experiences. They are spatial. The institution of MDMA has, like a university, a close connection with a certain kind of space.
One can, of course, take MDMA and go to the library, but the typical use-case, the institutional default, is to take MDMA and dance to music. You can ‘waste’ MDMA by taking it and going to the ‘wrong’ kind of place, after all.
Likewise, it is possible to imagine a university that exists only in chatrooms, in reality, universities are closely associated with prestige property in historical alpha cities. This has to do with the institutional history of universities, which began as a social body with specially designated rights around 1200 years ago in so-called Christendom. Another institution, the madrasa, came from the so-called Muslim lands, and then transmitted itself into the University: this is why there are “colleges” inside of universities.
The contemporary university fused with another institution, the modern nation state, and became the research university. Did it happen somewhere before the formation of the University of Berlin in 1809? Likewise, we can question at which point the institution MDMA fused with the institution of “techno” and where and why it happened.
Now that we sense how to see drugs as institutions, let’s apply the concept to eight others: Cocaine, Gin, Ketamine, Fentanyl
Cocaine
The white powder snorting into your nose is the second to last node in an elaborate global supply chain. The institution of cocaine begins with farmland in specific parts of South America — not just everywhere grows coca. You need security, and protection from farm to the first lab, and then transport in the face of heavy interdiction campaigns. This smuggling then involves submarines, single engine plane island hopping followed by railway and truck distribution. Somewhere along the way there’s a secondary lab process to make the cut.
The very last node in the supply chain is the rush of energy you experience after the cocaine starts to work. In this rush of energy you think about how cocaine reveals the central paradox of American society: a widely available product with an elaborate global supply chain chain that is also…..illegal. What else is like this? Jails are like this, the movement of migrant labor is like this.
Adderall
Pharmaceutical cocaine exists, of course, but “cocaine” as an institution is primarily sold by criminal firms. Adderral, by contrast, begins as a pharmaceutical product. It’s a genericized brand name for a mixture of four metham
Meth
Well it's a physically commanding drug. Takes over your whole physicality and mentality for a very long period of time. You take it and you're giving over to a hostile takeover by another you Until you either reup the dose or flame out and crash