Dear Editor
Dear Editor Drugs I find a great deal of agonized soul-searching--particularly in the United States--about the drug explosion, its causes and consequences. What unites almost all the participants...
...Boston, Mass...
...The earliest known alcoholic beverages are thousands of years old...
...India is a poor nation and suffers from overdevelopment of diminishing resources...
...Comparisons between small African states, which the author knows well, and the Indian nation, which he does not know well, arc inept, especially since no comparable population data is presented...
...India's emigration policies ought not be criticized without reference to the more significant (for Indian would-be migrants) nationalist-racialist immigration policies of black Africa and white Britain, America and Australia...
...I submit that it was Kwitny who was confined--confined to an alien language and alien concepts...
...Our American drug legislation--whether right or wrong--reflects this 19th-century temperance movement, with its self-help, liberal ideology...
...By the early 20th century the movement had succeeded in outlawing liquor in the United States and, indeed, almost all intoxicating drugs except the caffeine group, amphetamines and barbiturates...
...Quoting Communist or capitalist, he only cites English-knowing Indians--the rest are dismissed as being "confined" to Hindi or another Indian language...
...Finally, Kwitny's points of valid criticism arc obliterated by his conjuring up a specter of a Communist China-India axis making claims upon the West--especially when he suggests, in the old spirit of "the yellow peril...
...almost everyone must have been, by modern standards, an alcholic...
...In particular, the name of Sir Thomas Russell--known in the Middle East as Russell Pasha--was twice mangled in a way that was discourteous to him and suggested that I was ignorant of both British and Egyptian usage I should be grateful if you would print this note in order to set the record straight...
...But far from being new...
...In fact, the whole drug phenomenon was not considered at all remarkable until the 19th century, when the needs of the factory system and urbanization made chronically antisocial behavior much less tolerable...
...an imported British model and an American-style faith in the absolute good achieved by unending expansion of higher education...
...Seattle...
...And in the decades following the Civil War in our own country it was estimated that about 2 per cent of the population had become addicted to the morphine and morphine-base cough syrups...
...Then the temperance movement, once among the most vital forces of Western European and American society, began its work...
...Wash...
...Frank F. Conlon Assistant Professor of History University of Washington Ambush Somebody seems to have ambushed my drug piece ("Drug Traffic in the Middle East...
...In overreacting to the banalities of a usis brochure, he repeats inaccurate cliches that date from Katherine Mayo's Mother India...
...A more hedonistic attitude toward drugs, toward sex, and toward life in general now prevails...
...What unites almost all the participants in this rite is the belief that the drug phenomenon is modern, something that must be explained by the uniquely horrible conditions of contemporary life...
...Can Kwitny cite any war begun by any nation where this was not the case...
...in the 18th century, for instance, the age of cheap gin...
...Drugs--artificial intoxication--have been a part of almost every organized society...
...David Wenton India Jonathan Kwitny's "The Myth of Indian Progress" (NL, September 21) is guilty of propagating its own myths...
...that this will come in "a war in which consideration for human lives would be almost nil...
...Too many Indians have accepted the idea of a degree as the path to the exalted status of intellectual--just like those West Africans who, we are told, see a Peugeot or Volkswagen as their "birthright...
...Madrid Ray Alan...
...Excessive drug use was once much more common than it is today...
...Indian education is in crisis...
...He was thus subject to easy errors, such as the extraordinary notion that Indians brush their teeth with excretia...
...But to suggest an easy "solution" of producing more consumer goods is questionable...
...The 20th century has seen the progressive disintegration of this movement and its ideals...
...September 7) on its way to the pi inters...
...I am dismayed that The New Leader, usually a source of sensitive and intelligent reporting, would publish the superficial impressions of a super-Americanist who judges progress by the prevalence of toilet paper and automobiles...
...NL, September 7) with his suggestion that drugs are pushed purely and simply because of the profit involved...
...But even this quite correct observation does not explain why a market for narcotics continues to exist...
...who sees continued economic dependence on the export of raw commodities as a good thing...
...Kwitny misses the roots of the crisis...
...Ray Alan manages to avoid much of this ("Drug Traffic in the Middle East...
...the opiates and cannabis derivatives cannot have been much behind...
...Kwitny's views seem to reflect a too brief, too marginal acquaintance with India...
...and who poses the old Cold War issue of "keeping India from going Communist...
...this is in fact the traditional perspective of most of mankind...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 20
