Why are most pleasurable drugs illegal? Daedalus suspects the puritan conscience at work. It holds that pleasure is sinful, and should be followed by pain: indeed ideally it should be preceded and accompanied by it, too. Thus traditional Western morality tolerates sexual pleasure, as long as it is soured with guilt and followed by pregnancy; alcohol is accepted because the subsequent hangover squares the account. But amphetamines, marijuana and the hard drugs dodge this dismal retribution. Hence their illegality — which also provides the hard drugs with their own punishment, withdrawal symptoms if the user's costly illegal supply dries up. Daedalus is now inventing a drug matched to the puritan conscience. His vision is that of an alcohol which gives you the hangover first.
Puritans, advocating hard work and self-sacrifice for a distant and uncertain reward, should welcome the new product. Pleasure-seekers could only enjoy it by developing socially useful traits such as foresight and persistence. Its chemistry, however, could be tricky. Daedalus recalled that the ‘congeners’ in alcoholic drinks, alleged to be responsible for the hangover, are often esters of some kind. So a suitable complex ester of ethyl alcohol might be arranged to hydrolyse very slowly in the digestive tract, releasing alcohol into the body after an initial hangover had begun to fade. Various opiate molecules might similarly be bound in unpleasant form, to be gradually released in belated recompense for the initial misery they inflict. But he then mused that the tricyclic and SSRI antidepressants also take a long time to start cheering the patient up. Their initial effects can be encouragingly distressing.
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