Home | Community | Message Board

Sporeworks
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Myyco.com Isolated Cubensis Liquid Culture For Sale   MagicBag.co Certified Organic All-In-One Grow Bags by Magic Bag

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND]
    #8694975 - 07/28/08 10:16 PM (15 years, 7 months ago)

History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem
July 29, 2008 - Irish Times

Illicit substances have been in demand here for at least 350 years; no legal measures have ever made a difference.

EVERY TIME gardaĆ­ make a big drug seizure - and there have been plenty of them recently - they must have mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is another victory in the "war on drugs". Good police work seems to be getting results. On the other hand, though, everyone - especially gardaĆ­ - knows that however many battles are won, the war was lost a long time ago. The reality is that the amount of seizures is largely a function of the amount of drugs being imported; that when one gang is broken, there will always be another hungrier, more vicious one ready to step into the breach; and that for all the millions spent here and the trillions spent worldwide, illegal drugs are cheaper and more ubiquitous than they have ever been.

The real issue is, of course, demand. If people want mind-altering substances, there will be big money in supplying them. We lose sight of this reality because we have a distorted narrative in our heads. The story we assume to be true is that, while Irish people always drank alcohol and took enthusiastically to tobacco, illegal drugs are essentially a recent phenomenon. They came in during and after the 1960s, along with all the other moral and social laxities of that decade. They are an outside influence, a downside to the modernity that we adopted. They cling, therefore, to the surface of Irish culture and can, with enough persistence, be scraped off.

It is weird that we should think this, because there are few western European societies in which the consumption of illegal, mind-altering substances was so open, and so socially acceptable for so long. I doubt that there are many readers who haven't drunk, or been present when others drank, the primary Irish illegal drug of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is called poteen. How odd that we forget about it, and forget, too, that 400 years of law enforcement failed to stop people making and drinking it.

Poteen became prominent in Irish society after 1661, when excise duty on Irish whiskey was re-introduced. As duty went up and the price of "parliament whiskey" rose, the native Irish responded by making their own alcohol. Originally, this was generally decent malt whiskey. But as time went on, poteen developed in a way that we are familiar with from cocaine or heroin. With a thriving, unregulated trade in which price was the key factor, poteen makers turned to whatever was available - molasses, sugar, treacle, potatoes, rhubarb. The more unscrupulous of them added bite to an adulterated product with meths or paint stripper.

The stuff became dangerous, unreliable and of often poor quality. The authorities came down heavy, sending armed soldiers against the distillers. Illegal distillers were shot, imprisoned, transported. None of it made a blind bit of difference.

Neither did the threats of the IRA in the early 1920s or the creation of a native government. The "war on poteen", as we might call it, continued in the 1930s, during which there were 500 stills detected every year by the Garda. But it was social change - emigration, relative prosperity, urbanisation - and cheaper official whiskey, that eventually killed the poteen trade. It was not law enforcement.

Poteen, it might be objected, is unusual, because it represented a displacement of an existing demand. How, then, could one explain the huge demand for another mind-altering substance: ether?

In his classic historical essay, Ether Drinking in Ulster, KH Connell disclosed the extraordinary story of the widespread and open consumption of this hallucinogenic industrial solvent, especially in the North. In the 1890s, it was estimated that 50,000 people in counties Derry and Tyrone were "etheromaniacs". The burning, unstable liquid, which turns to gas at body temperature, was not pleasant to drink (it made the uninitiated violently ill) but its effects seem to have been rather like those of LSD: "You always heard music and you'd be cocking your ears at it . . . Others would see men climbing up the walls and going through the roof . . ." Again, like today's illegal drugs, ether was widely consumed even though it harmed people's health, led to deaths by accidental overdoses, and encouraged some addicts to steal in order to supply their habit. And again, law enforcement was relatively ineffective. Ether-drinking died out largely because of social change and the availability of alternative intoxicants.

The point of this brief history lesson is simply this: there has been a demand for illegal and unapproved mind-altering substances for at least the last 350 years in Ireland. That demand has been channelled into different substances - poteen, ether, hash, LSD, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy - but there is no great evidence that it is actually higher now, as a proportion of the population, than it was a century ago.

Law enforcement (even when it was much harsher than it is now) and church sanction (even when the churches were far more powerful than they are now) had little success in combating this trade, so long as the demand made it a lucrative one. Why do we imagine that things are any different now?

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinedanlennon3
LivingIsEasyWithEyesClosed.....
Male User Gallery


Registered: 10/29/02
Posts: 19,246
Loc: usa Flag
Last seen: 1 year, 2 months
Re: History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND] [Re: veggie]
    #8695386 - 07/28/08 11:47 PM (15 years, 7 months ago)

interesting read


--------------------
"Psychedelics should be used not to escape reality, but to embrace it"


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineExplosiveMango
HallucinogenusDigitallus
Male User Gallery

Registered: 07/12/05
Posts: 3,222
Last seen: 14 years, 4 months
Re: History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND] [Re: veggie]
    #8695412 - 07/28/08 11:56 PM (15 years, 7 months ago)

Denial?


--------------------
Know your self.
Know your substance.
Know your source.

The most distorted perspective possible is the perspective that yours is not distorted.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleEgo Death
Justadropofwaterinanendlesssea
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/27/03
Posts: 10,447
Loc: The War Machine
Re: History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND] [Re: veggie]
    #8696162 - 07/29/08 06:55 AM (15 years, 7 months ago)

Well written at least the Irish are not bullshitting like the US

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinesomeone not me
lives in a van down by the river
Male

Registered: 10/27/07
Posts: 48
Loc: Zone 8
Last seen: 13 years, 2 months
Re: History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND] [Re: Ego Death]
    #8696252 - 07/29/08 07:36 AM (15 years, 7 months ago)

Good article.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineN2loma
Foaming Pipe Snake
Male User Gallery


Registered: 05/17/08
Posts: 925
Last seen: 14 years, 5 months
Re: History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem [IRELAND] [Re: veggie]
    #8697265 - 07/29/08 12:31 PM (15 years, 7 months ago)

Good read! Sounds like the Irish could have benefited from good shrooms centuries ago!


--------------------
"So can you tell me what exactly does freedom mean/
If I'm not free to be as twisted as I wanna be" -Divide by Disturbed

Good Guitars Don't Cry

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Myyco.com Isolated Cubensis Liquid Culture For Sale   MagicBag.co Certified Organic All-In-One Grow Bags by Magic Bag


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* No Kidding: In Iowa, They're Taxing Illegal Drugs motamanM 2,288 3 06/04/03 12:45 PM
by
* Illegal pills flood Central Florida motamanM 5,554 10 08/06/03 11:21 PM
by MsPacMan
* Drug War Addiction motamanM 2,998 1 05/12/03 11:03 AM
by Anonymous
* Prescription overdoses killed more Floridians than illegal d motamanM 1,613 2 06/10/03 03:11 PM
by matts
* Largest LSD Lab Seizure in DEA History
( 1 2 all )
Lana 17,119 22 07/18/03 10:28 PM
by Mitchnast
* GRAND JURY SUGGESTS DISTRIBUTION OF DRUGS TO FIGHT EVILS OF motamanM 1,944 1 05/08/03 05:25 PM
by Seuss
* Weiland Busted for Drugs motamanM 2,657 1 05/20/03 12:44 PM
by Learyfan
* Police spend drug cash motamanM 3,746 2 05/05/03 11:54 PM
by z@z.com

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
1,342 topic views. 0 members, 7 guests and 4 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.022 seconds spending 0.006 seconds on 14 queries.