Certain drugs banned in an anarchist/communist society?

Well it's hard to imagine that a heroin dealer would be supported by the community for their "services," so I don't think any "banning" will be necessary. Drugs, including hard drugs, will probably still be around, but in the absence of a ridiculously profitable drug trade, consumption will drop accordingly. I doubt any junkies will want to share their supply with anyone given that they would have no incentive to do so, but in any case I would like to think that in a free society, such people will be properly treated in a medical environment, not just let to their own devices.
Obviously education about drug-use will be treated seriously and not as a way to scare young people into staying straight.

A French militant who was active in 1968 once told me that one of the first things workers need to do when stuff starts to happen is to kill the heroin dealers.

Well that's a bit much. Who's next? the pimps? the arms dealers and other "bad people"? It's not like the dealers are even the ones making the real money. Drug dealing becomes truly profitable when it's done on a large scale, usually by governments that pretend to be fighting a "war on drugs."

Yes, but if there was no actual dealing for a profit (or simply to afford the next hit), the number of people getting hooked on hard shit would drop to near irrelevance imo.

Well you can't really control what people do in their kitchens, and I reckon that as an anarchist you wouldn't want to anyway.
If some people are found pushing this stuff in schoolyards, I imagine they will be dealt with properly, in accordance to community rules. The thing is, in this scenario, if you get rid of the dealer (not through summary execution but rather through community pressure and education, I would hope), you get rid of the source, whereas in capitalism, putting the dealer behind bars accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Yes, it may be exaggerated, but I don't think it has anything to do with dealers being "bad people". The person who told me that lost many of his comrades to heroin in the 1970s. As far as I know, the experience was quite similar in Italy (even though the armed groups there were actually involved in eradicating dealers). I remember that in some punk documentary I saw, a member of the Slits said that by the end of the seventies, English towns and cities were suddenly flooded with heroin and from then on, the whole "movement" became more and more pacified. I'm hardly a fan of conspiracy theories but this seems to be no coincidence - and if heroin is indeed used as a measure by the state, the workers have to counter that.

"Is there bacon?"

~J.

Jura - crack and black ghettos in America cities is probably a better example of this. There's an excellent article in an old Direct Action (bet I never thought i'd hear myself say that ) which I bought before I was in SF that gives a pretty categorical lowdown of the process by which certain substances were banned and others not.

Like Vlad says, the worst case scenario in Ally's OP (that of Cd Juarez, Mexico) is intricately linked to production/consumption rhythms under capitalism. The creation of crack (which is just watered down cocaine) was directly linked to cocaine being out of reach of the poorest, most vulnerable sectors. Let's hope that in free social relations, people would start to manufacture better, less harmful, less addictive substances. How would our inner cities look different if people were eating mushrooms instead of smoking crack? The punk shows round here would be a lot less violent, that's for sure.

Linked to this, we have to think about why hard drugs are popular in deprived areas and how that's related to alienation, disenfranchisement etc.

Also, in a world without money or profit, it would be pointless to "push" drugs to anyone, because you won't benefit from it!

Yeah and let's also include the increasing intensity and duration of work that are required to reproduce labor-power these days.

I'm thinking specifically of meth/speed/coke here. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the people who get hooked on these drugs began using in order to deal with long, arduous work hours. In the US, at least, a stereotype of a speed-user is the long distance truck driver, who must drive 10 or 15 hours a day to have the hope of making a decent wage. I worked in the restaurant/bar industry for years and at least 50% of my coworkers frequently used coke to deal with double shifts, late hours and the speed required for service.

If we eliminated arduous 40-80 hour work weeks I'm certain abuse of these drugs would drop precipitously. Eliminating the stresses/alienations of life under capitalism would go a long way towards decreasing all drug use.

This is not quite right. "Speed Labs" don't manufacture amphetamines from scratch like people grow tomatoes. What they do is extract/convert methedrin from the Pseudoephedrine found in nasal decongestants. Pseudoephedrine is produced in factories in India and China. However, pseudoephedrine is also being phase out and so speed labs as such are expected to vanish.

I'm not sure how this relates to the form of any future non-capitalist society...

Dupe... (some weird error)...

Social conservatism as a response to your youthful flirtation with flawed subcultures is more the business of your shrink than fellow Libcom posters.

If we're gonna force this debate into the rather flimsy ground of anecdotes, I can think of plenty of people fucked up on booze and chemicals, which I know you're fond of and seem to advocate for everyone.

My comment was rather tongue in cheek though (hence the wink comrade)...I don't really think mushrooms are the solution to anything. In fact, even a good mushroom trip is essentially 4 hours of giggling. Might make less people shoot each other but probably more would fall in canals.

I think the comments stating that drug use will decrease are completely wrong. Recreational drug use will increase dramatically in an Anarchist community.

Why wouldn't it?

No laws + more free time = more drug use.

Sure, there will be addicts, problem users etc. but these people will receive the help they need. Use of today's “legal” drugs may very well decrease as other currently “illegal” substances become freely available.

Recreational drug use is a completely normal and natural thing no matter how much you frown upon it. It's a personal choice not a moral one.

Given that Alzo never fuckign met you when you were a dickhead crusty (and you were) his assumptions about your previous drug use or not seem a bit daft.

That said, I would be quite happy for everyone who does drugs to have massive overdoses and die post-revolution.

Come on if you have kids then you drinking too much or using drugs isn't just a ''personal choice'' is it.

First of all, being a junkie is rarely a freely-chosen "recreation." It is a serious condition, and although it is possible to live with it for an extended period, it is definitely not "completely normal and natural." Pot and the occasional "party drug" are not the issue here.
Second of all, in a world where governments, the biggest producers and dealers of hard drugs by far atm, have been abolished, obtaining such substances will depend entirely on how easy they are to prepare. As someone noted above, some drugs are easier to make than others. Any idiot can grow pot, some people can apparently easily make crystal meth, and so on. It's fine by me, if people want to indulge in this sort of stuff. The point is, there will be no incentive for people to push drugs on anyone, especially youths, because there wont' be a profit to be made from it. Drug sharing will simply be something based on interest in drugs, not a business. Of course, heavy use of hard drugs will probably continue to be a taboo even in the most libertarian society, and some people may decide democratically that they don't want these substances advertised in their communities, while nonetheless tolerating their use by those who have truly made the choice to produce and use them for their own enjoyment.
In any case, it is extremely naive to think that most drug addictions today (including alcoholism) are caused simply by a freely chosen lifestyle that is completely harmless and "natural."

Who knows what "completely normal and natural" is. Humans were hunter-gathers for hundreds of millions of years and have been civilized/agricultural/capitalist for a much shorted time period. A lot of present day hunter-gather tribes spend their days smashed on hallucinogens. I won't predict drug use levels under communism. Lots? None? There are lots of options. But the question won't be answered by "what is natural". I suspect that resemblance to present day subcultures will be small but I'm not hung up on that question.

Meth is huge here with scumbag petit-bourgeois contractors and the labour they employ doing small scale construction and drywalling and working piles of unpaid overtime.

Right now, that is a very abstract position to hold.

Allybaba: "... Crystal meth is very easy to manufacture in your kitchen. I mean its easier to make than other drugs. You can produce it yourself, like tomatoes in your garden." It may be easy to make, but only once you have the precursor ingredients. Gov'ts in the US have tried to control public access to those ingredients, including pseudoephedrine, with some (but how much?) success.

Red: "'Speed Labs' don't manufacture amphetamines from scratch like people grow tomatoes. What they do is extract/convert methedrin from the Pseudoephedrine found in nasal decongestants. Pseudoephedrine is produced in factories in India and China. However, pseudoephedrine is also being phase out and so speed labs as such are expected to vanish."

In fact, speed (crystal meth) labs don't manufacture amphetamines at all. Crystal Meth is a form of methamphetamine, which is distinct from, and far more powerful than, amphetamines ("speed", "uppers", "roofies"). I rather doubt that pseudoephedrine will be entirely eliminated throughout the world, as it is very effective in non-drowsy cold medications. Maybe it will be phased out in the US, though. In any case, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for all speed labs in the US to vanish.

Arbitrary argues that recreational drug use will increase dramatically in a post-capitalist society. If "recreational" includes psychedelic drugs, e.g. LSD, peyote, mescalin and magic mushrooms, then I would agree. But this is entirely distinct from hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, including crack/base, crystal meth, speed, not to mention all the legal ones, Oxycontin, codeine, valium and other barbiturates). It was use of these latter that I think people were suggesting would dramatically decrease in a post-capitalist society. I agree with that.

Btw, Caiman del barrio, crack is not "watered down" cocaine. Quite the opposite, it is purified cocaine, i.e. coke base, stripped of all its "buffer". It isn't really cheaper, either, just that you can get high on a smaller amount, so you can buy a $10 pack instead of regular coke at, say, $50. The crackhead has to buy more stuff more frequently than the regular cokehead.

I think Wheeler is deranged if he seriously thinks MDMA is preferable to magic (i.e. psilocybin) mushrooms. The latter can in no way be called "a horrible drug". If people he knew became suicidal or schizophrenic on 'shrooms, then they were likely already headed that way (i.e. underlying issues) or else they were very seriously misusing the 'shrooms. MDMA contains amphetamine (it is what the "A" stands for), and many users have died from using it. Just because someone commits suicide while on 'shrooms doesn't mean the 'shrooms made them do it. The person makes the decision to take their own life, or, tragically, makes a serious error in judgement and does something that leads to their death. Obviously it is ill-advised to try to do something dangerous when one is hallucinating heavily.

lolz at everyone drug-geeking it up.

I don't see how cocaine and heroin would be available in europe without the profit motive. You can't grow coca or opium in an economically viable way in our climates and noones going to bother importing it just to get whatever crap junkies could steal and trade.

Proper harm-prevention education would solve the problems associated with everything else, except for a minority of mentally ill people that are going to harm themselves anyway.

Depends on which drugs and in what way, surely? I know a few parents who'll go every now and then, get wasted on the substance of their choosing and then function perfectly well as parents the rest of the time, no different to parents who'll do the same with alcohol.

I don't see the point of threads like this. We'll cross this bridge when we come to it ffs.

~J.

What are you saying here? Are you referring specifically to the UK? Coca's pretty damn cheap to grow in the Andes, and opium don't cost much to produce in Afghanistan.

To be fair, I've only skimread this thread, largely in an attempt to avoid the frankly nauseating, puritanical ressentiment trash that I knew to expect from certain regulars, but is anyone actually arguing this? What's being said that coke, heroin, meth etc are products of capitalism, tailored to market needs as much as your overpriced clothes are.

Oh OK, so we should ban alcohol and cigarrettes as well then?

To be fair Weeler, even your caricatured, semi-trolling self knows what's wrong this statement. Quite clearly, and despite whatever anecdotal "evidence" you might reply with, mental health issues are largely exarcebated by drug use rather than caused by them. A post-rev society would hopefully be focusing on confronting the root causes of self-medication with powerful substances.