Tools: a clarification

There seems to be a misunderstanding here.  Drugs are tools, technologies of the self, material objects that allow individuals to work on their bodies and minds in certain ways.  Of course, they haven’t always been seen in this way, and they certainly haven’t always been available to the degree or in the same way as they are today.  Today, drugs are everywhere and individuals are at the same time encouraged to use them and taught to fear them.

But to say that drugs are tools is not to claim that they’re just like hammers, ladders, crock pots, rakes, combine harvesters, toothbrushes, keyboards, paper, or ankle braces.  Drugs are not necessarily benign.  In fact, they are usually quite dangerous and many drugs just seem to demand that we use them irresponsibly.  Of course, hammers, ladders, crockpots, and toothbrushes have their own dangers, but for the purposes of most situations they are relatively harmless.

It will not do to think of drugs as tools in the sense of benign, stationary-until-picked-up, unproblematic devices for getting done what we want to get done.  When I say that drugs are tools, I do not always have in mind forks or ballpoint pens or barbecues, but rather something far more nefarious and uncertain.

To see drugs as tools is not to make them easier to deal with, not to somehow justify their (unexamined) use.  Bombs are tools, too.