Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers

Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers
by Thomas Stephen Szasz

Szasz presents his theories on the development of a 'Therapeutic State' in modern America and the world in general, which is religious in nature but praises health as opposed to virtue and is institutionalized in the form of the psychiatric and health industries. He explains the war on drugs as a form of ritual scapegoating of the type that has been performed in all religions at all times, similar to witch hunts. He also shows how language itself has been used and distorted in order to prevent questioning of the war on drugs or their illegality and the immorality of their use.

He also advances his ideas on the war on drugs as really a war to replace the use of foreign or untraditional drugs with our own culture's favorite drugs, alcohol and tobacco. The argument he makes is quite convincing.

On a broader level, he discusses the struggle between users and the forces which desire to prevent them from using as a struggle for personal liberty and responsibility in an age that prefers to emphasize the individual's helplessness before his own urges, and therefore the duty of the state to protect him from himself, as it were, by controlling his behavior and even his passions. Once again, he shows how language has been used to reinforce the idea of the individual as incapable of self-control, by relabeling temptations as drives, instincts, urges, etc. and other alterations.

He also provides an extensive history of drug use and the attempts to control such use, extending from the first evidences of such use in human history to, in my edition, 1984 (the book having originally been published in 1973). This includes information on the history of tobacco regulation that I found surprising and is certainly little known, namely that smoking tobacco was once punishable by death or gruesome death in countries such as Russia, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire.

The book is well-written and well-researched, the writing clear and intelligent and the ideas well elucidated. It was an enlightening read and caused me to regard drugs and drug laws in a new light. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in drugs, language as a shaper of culture, or the role of psychiatry and medicine in our society.