Critical Pharmacological Theory

Suppose I put forward the following theory of history: human history (or American history, if I want to be specific) is chiefly about a struggle among the providers of various competing psychoactive ("addictive") substances.

People who drink a lot of coffee and smoke a lot of tobacco have for a long time believed that they are doing it right and anybody else is doing mind-chemistry wrong. THAT is the key point.

Let us call this Critical Pharmacology Theory. Considering contemporary politics, one thing I would be certain to be asked, were I to find any broad audience for this, would be: is this compatible with or at odds with Critical Race Theory.

Leave aside the hookum about CRT as it is supposedly being taught in elementary school, or found in the works of Toni Morrison. It isn't, and it can't be.

CRT used properly refers to a belief expounded upon by, say Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado. It is, so to speak, part of an intra-left debate. It followed upon and was created largely to oppose "Critical Theory" -- with no intermediate word. Critical theory is a more traditional Marxist view that laws are devised to assist the owners of the means of production in the control they must exercise over those who work for the wages they then use to buy the stuff that the means of production creates. CT without the R was expounded by, for example, Morton Horwitz and Jack Balkin.

So, CRT is the view that law, and other institutions -- indeed, in the end, everything that is usually called "history," is enmeshed in one gigantic story, the development of a distinctive white race and its self-election to a position of supremacy over other races. One has to surround almost every word there with quotation marks, because CRT also holds that the words that have to be used to state that position are a product of the narrative itself, not a neutral comment on the narrative.

So CRT holds that all of history is the story of the "development" of a distinctive "white" "race" and its self-elevation to a position of "supremacy" over other "races."

Both CT and CRT began as legal theories. CT was a development from a meta-narrative, whereas in the case of CRT the meta-narrative is implied.

This is where my proposal of CPT enters the picture. Is a narrative of the development of modes of mood control less appealing on its face than a meta-narrative about race, or about the means of production?

"Ah," you might say, "CPT reduces to one or the other of the two earlier theories. You either look at mood-altering substances as something that is produced, and concern yourself with the means of production, or you look at them as something that is racially charged (who did the work in the fields for centuries to pick the tobacco leaves? who profited from it?) -- you fall back upon CT or CRT either way."

Well, no. Maybe I don't. Maybe the dependence goes the other way. An advocate of CPT could say that the American colonies were largely settled in the first place so that they could provide the mother country with tobacco and sugar. Both can well be characterized as pharmacological. The importance of cotton was, then, epiphenomenal. The move toward slavery was made with some hesitancy as other labor systems -- notably indentured servitude -- proved awkward for the task. So it was the pharmacological demand that drove the development of the racial dynamic.

Much closer to our own time, cocaine use is punished in the U.S. with a degree of severity far below that of the use of crack. This is widely read as a racial artefact. Indeed, IIRC it was one of the motivating considerations in the development of CRT.

But could not CPT explain it better? The coffee-and-cigarette crowd could moonlight as cocaine sniffers. It is impossible to moonlight on crack. It quickly becomes all-absorbing. The pharmacological facts may lie beneath the racial divide, and make it what it is.

You now reply, "Are you serious? Are you putting forward CPT as, say, a research program?"

Well, no. In accord with the spirit of the 21st century academy, I am ironic. I put CPT forward only to suggest that it is no worse than the other two. A key philosophical question is: what empirical observation could show any one of these to be true and the others to be false?

The fellow pictured above is Morton Horwitz. {If you weren't paying attention and are now asking 'Morton who?' -- go back and re--read. Thanks.)

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