SUGAR AS ADDICTION

Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 11:26pm

Is it stretching a point to discuss sugar in a history of human drug use? It is not. Sugar abuse is the world's least discussed and most widespread addiction. And it is one of the hardest of all habits to kick. Sugar addicts may be maintenance users or they may be binge eaters. The depths of serious sugar addiction are exemplified by bulimics who may binge on sugar-saturated food and then induce vomiting or use a laxative purge to enable them to eat more sugar. Imagine if a similar practice were associated with heroin addiction how much more odious and insidious the use of heroin would then seem! As with all stimulants, ingestion of sugar is followed by a brief euphoric "rush," which is itself followed by depression and guilt. Sugar addiction rarely occurs alone as a syndrome; mixed addictions-for example, sugar and caffeine-are more common.

There are other destructive patterns of drug use that accompany sugar abuse. Some addicts use diet pills to help them control their soaring body weight, and then tranquilizers to mitigate the jitteriness caused by the diet pills. Sugar abuse is often involved in the development of serious alcohol abuse; an absolute correlation has been shown between high sugar consumption and high alcohol intake outside meals. After alcohol and tobacco, sugar is the most damaging addictive substance consumed by human beings. Its uncontrolled use can be a major chemical dependence.

In describing sugar addicts, Janice K. Phelps has said:

The people we are describing are addictive people who are indeed addicted to one of the most powerful substances to be found anywhere-the refined sugars. Their addiction to sugar is a real, harmful, highly damaging health problem, just as debilitating as addiction to any other substance. Like any addiction, when their chemical isn't supplied, they suffer identifiable withdrawal symptoms; like any addiction, the process of feeding their physiological hunger with a chemical is destructive to the body; and like any addiction, the point may be reached when supplying the chemical becomes as painful as withdrawing from it. The cycle of chemical dependence becomes both entrenched and intolerable.'

SUGAR AND SLAVERY

The distortion and dehumanizing of human institutions and human lives caused by crack cocaine today is nothing compared with what the European desire for sugar did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One may argue that something approaching slave labor is typical of the early stages with cocaine production but the difference is that it is not slavery sanctioned by mendacious popes and openly pursued by corrupt but legitimate governments. A further difference must be noted: brutal as it is, the modern drug trade is not involved in anything resembling the wholesale kidnapping, transporting, and mass murder of huge populations as was done to further the process of sugar production.

True, the roots of slavery in Europe reach far back. During the golden age of Periclean Athens fully two-thirds of the city's residents were slaves; in Italy at the time of Julius Caesar, perhaps one-half of the population were slaves. Under the Roman Imperium slavery became increasingly insupportable: slaves had no civil rights and in court disputes their testimony was acceptable only if it had been obtained by torture. If a slaveholder were to die suddenly or under suspicious circumstances, then all of his slaves, without regard to guilt or innocence, were quickly put to death. It is fair to say that the reliance of the Imperium on the institution of slavery must mitigate any admiration that we might feel for the "grandeur that was Rome." In truth, the grandeur of Rome was the grandeur of a pig sty masquerading as a military brothel.

Slavery diminished with the dissolution of the empire, as all social institutions dissolved into the chaos of the early Dark Ages. Feudalism replaced slavery with serfdom. Serfdom was somewhat better than slavery: a serf could at least maintain a home, marry, till the land, and participate in communal life. Most important, perhaps, a serf could not be separated from or transported off the land. When the land was sold the serf nearly always went with it.

In 1432 Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, who was more manager and entrepreneur than explorer, established the first commercial cane sugar plantation in Madeira. Plantings of sugar were made in the other eastern Atlantic holdings of Portugal more than sixty years before there was contact with the New World. More than a thousand men-including debtors, convicts, and unconverted Jews-were taken from Europe to work in the sugar operations. Their condition was one of quasi-servitude-somewhat akin to the penal colonists and indentured servants who populated Australia and some Middle Atlantic American colonies. Sugarcane was the first crop to be introduced into commercial cultivation in the New World. It is reliably estimated that by 1530, less than forty years after the initial European contact, there were more than a dozen sugar plantations operating in the West Indies. In his book Seeds of Change, Henry Hobhouse writes of the beginning of African enslavement.

In 1443 one of Prince Henry's returning captains brought news of a capture at sea of a crew of black Arabs and Moslems:

These men, who were of mixed Arab-Negro parentage and Moslems, claimed that they were of a proud race and unfit to be bondsmen. They argued forcefully that there were in the hinterland of Africa many heathen blacks, the children of Ham, who made excellent slaves, and who they could enslave in exchange for their freedom. Thus began the modern slave trade-not the transatlantic trade, which was yet to come, but its precursor, the trade between Africa and southern Europe.

Hobhouse goes on to describe sugar slavery in the New World: Sugar slavery was of quite a different order. It was the first time since the Roman latifundia that mass slavery had been used to grow a crop for trade (not subsistence) in a big way. It was also the first time in history that one race had been uniquely selected for a servile role. Spain and Portugal voluntarily abjured the enslavement of East Indian, Chinese, Japanese or European slaves to work in the Americas.'

The slave trade was itself a kind of addiction. The early importation of African slave labor into the New World was for one purpose only, to support an agricultural economy based on sugar.

The craze for sugar was so overwhelming that a thousand years of Christian ethical conditioning meant nothing. An outbreak of human cruelty and bestiality of incredible proportions was blandly accepted by the institutions of polite society.

Let us be absolutely clear, sugar is entirely unnecessary to the human diet; before the arrival of industrial cane and beet sugar humanity managed well enough without refined sugar, which is nearly pure sucrose. Sugar contributes nothing that cannot be gotten from some other, easily available source. It is a "kick," nothing more. Yet for this kick the dominator culture of Europe was willing to betray the ideals of the Enlightenment by its collusion with slave traders. In 1800 virtually every ton of sugar imported into England had been produced with slave labor.

The ability of the ego-dominator culture to suppress these realities is astonishing. If it seems that too much ire is vented on the sugar habit, it is because in many ways the addiction to sugar seems a distillation of all the wrongheaded attitudes that attend our thinking about drugs.

SUGAR AND THE DOMINATOR STYLE

When temporal distance from the original partnership paradise increases, when the connection with the vegetable/feminine matrix of planetary life slips far into the past, then the hold of cultural neurosis increases and manifestations of unchecked ego and dominator theories of social organization proliferate. Slavery, almost unknown during the medieval period, when the notion of private property restricted ownership of anything to a privileged few, returned with a vengeance to fill the need for manpower in the labor intensive colonial cultivation of sugar.

Thomas Hobbes's vision of human society as the inevitable subjugation of the weak by the strong and Jeremy Bentham's notion of the ultimate economic basis of all social worth signal that values that seek to nurture the earth and to participate with it in a life of natural emotive balance have been forsaken for the rapacious self-centeredness of Faustian science. The soul of the planet, shrunken by Christian monotheism to the dimensions of a human being, is finally denied any existence at all by the heirs of Cartesian rationalism.

The stage is then set for the evolution of a human self-image that is entirely dis-ensouled, adrift in a dead universe devoid of meaning and without moral compass. Organic nature is seen as war, meaning becomes "contextual," and the cosmos is rendered meaningless. This process of deepening cultural psychosis (an obsession with ego, money, and the sugar/alcohol drug complex) reaches its culmination in the mid-twentieth century with Sartre's appalling assertion that "nature is mute."

Nature is not mute, but modern man is deaf-made deaf because he is unwilling to hear the message of caring, balance, and cooperation that is nature's message. In our state of denial we must proclaim nature mute-how else to avoid facing the awful crimes we have committed for centuries against nature and each other. The Nazis said that Jews were not true human beings and that their mass murder was thus not of any consequence. Some industrialists and politicians use a similar dis-ensouling argument to excuse the destruction of the planet, the maternal matrix necessary to all life.

Only a terminal addiction to the ego and styles of brutal domination could give rise to a mass mental environment in which such statements could appear plausible, let alone true. Sugar stands at a watershed in such matters, for sugar and the caffeine drugs that spread with it reinforce and support industrial civilization's unreflecting emphasis on efficiency at the price of Archaic human values.