It is interesting to observe that there is a direct correlation between the problems that shake society and the economics of capitalism. Lurking In the background, compounding the ills of any serious problem is capitalism, itself. A good Illustration of this point is to be found in the drug problem.
The existence of drug addiction, to a noticeable degree, is not new. One novel aspect, however, is the fact that It has spread beyond the ghetto areas into the better neighborhoods and it is becoming prevalent among school children of teen and even pre-teen age. Another new fact is the widening adulteration of drugs to the point at which researchers are not certain whether the harmful effects are the result of the drugs or of the adulterants. Adulteration, of course, is directly connected with the drive for profits. To the degree one cuts down the percentage of actual drug — the expensive element — and adds other ingredients, to that extent one increases one's margin of profits which should be the goal of every aspiring capitalist. So what if the adulterants might be more dangerous, even, than the drug? That's not the concern of the entrepreneur and shouldn't be. under the jungle-type economics of capitalism
But an even more insidious—if such is possible—connection between drug addiction and capitalism is the fact that the addiction leads Inescapably to other crimes for the workers who are hooked. Unless one is wealthy, the kind of money needed to maintain a drug habit must come from shop-lifting, picking pockets, burglary, or what have you. As one N.Y. judge once was quoted: “In all my years on the bench I never had a wealthy addict before me." So it would seem that there might be benefit derived from research into the effects of drug addiction among members of the capitalist class, those who can afford to take their pot. their cocaine, their opium neat rather than contaminated by adulterants. Not that knowledge gained from such testing would make a noticeable difference in the quality of the drugs marketed. The drive for profits would remain paramount and just as there are high grade cigars and alcoholic beverages for those who can afford them, with cheap rot-gut for the poor, there will continue to be high quality drugs for the rich junkies and Junk for the poor ones.
There are those who argue that the problem of drug addiction would be solved were the traffic to become legal and controlled by the government. We would be free, they believe, from the nefarious practices of the underworld that now controls it. The drugs would be. at least, readily and legally available and their ingredients subject to government supervision. And we wonder at the seeming naivete of those who offer this argument. In the face of government-regulated patent medicines and prescription drugs (only about 20% of which totally live up to their claimed effectiveness, according to the Food and Drug Administration); government-regulated rot-gut-type liquor and wines; even government-regulated, but inferior, grades of food; we still get the argument from those who would save us from the evils of drugs while retaining the economic system that makes them an evil: let the government control drugs, they tell us, and all will be well.
The point is, to socialists, that the reasons for the desire to use drugs should be better researched. We maintain that there is something real rotten in the state of capitalism when millions of men, women, and children seek escape, or release, from their problems through the use of opiates. The question is by no means one of how to provide only high quality and safe drugs for all. The task is to organize for the abolition of an economic society that encourages—either directly or indirectly — the use of drugs. We urge you to investigate socialism.
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