Candy's dandy, but pot's scary

A basic anthropological insight about drugs and alcohol is that the effect of a drug is a result not just of biology, but also of culture. The classic argument on this is “Drunken Comportment,” a 1969 book in which Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton said that the effects of alcohol depended on local expectations. They wrote that when Americans drank, they fought, argued and were much more relaxed about sex.

When American undergraduates get drunk, they throw sofas out of the frat house and wake up next to people they didn’t think they knew. That’s because we Americans think that alcohol is disinhibiting and that we can’t really control what we do.

That’s not necessarily the case in other cultures. Mr. MacAndrew and Mr. Edgerton gave example after example of people in other cultures who drank plenty of strong alcohol but didn’t behave as Americans did when drunk. In these societies drunks became silent, “thick-lipped,” or they grew talkative, but not violent. In some settings, the anthropologists were able to demonstrate that when drunk, people became violent in culturally rulebound ways.