Way way back in the day, when I was working on my Anthro Thesis, one of the related things I spent a fair bit of time on was research on various cultural response patterns to intoxicants (mostly alcohol, because it is pretty universal). It was striking, how our futile and counter productive attempts to handle the damage drugs do to our society, to how First Nations (Native Americans/Aboriginals/Indians) have responded to their scourge of alcoholism.

I found that there is a very clear pattern, repeated again and again in history and across cultures. A society comes into contact with an intoxicant. The intoxicant does considerable social damage. The society responds by trying to ban it. This fails (always). Eventually, the culture essentially en-cysts it: it drops the ban, but surrounds consumption of the intoxicant with ritual and ceremony and religious and/or social significance. At a minimum, the intoxicant becomes a social norm, but one surrounded with rituals and mythic understandings and a ton of rules. And this adaptive strategy largely works and reduces harm.

To be sure, the rules and rituals can be pretty trivial, but you find, for example, that there are rules in pretty much every alcohol consuming society, around how to consume it: when, where, why, with whom, what kind, etc. And how to behave when you are intoxicated (this was the interesting part for me, but not relevant here). In our (Western/European/White) case, we have the sun over the yardarm, the TGIF thing, and so on. Really, I'm not sure that there is all that much difference between what is going on at a frat-house kegger and Native American peyote ceremony; there is a huge shared mythic understanding and patently false mythologies around both rituals, that can serve to limit ongoing usage and social damage.

Obviously, we should de-criminalize. And will, I think, inevitably & ultimately, legalize. But what we need to get started on is not only putting in place much more in the way of treatment services, but more importantly, some cultural harm reduction strategies. Look at the amazing progress we have made on tobacco consumption for example. (I remember once meeting with a Native Elder, and she told me: "You [Europeans] have given us your sacred thing, alcohol [to her mind, wine, as consumed in the Eucharist] and it is killing us, and we have given you ours, tobacco, and it is killing you." Pretty wise.)

The other thing to remember is to look at who are the intoxicant "abusers." If you have a culture with a lot of social problems, intoxicants act as a catalyst for all the underlying social ills. It is not an accident that drugs and drink do such terrible damage to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Though generally, they are not the biggest consumers.

There is a simple logical self-evident fact that all the drug warriors need to consider: the crack world is not one of welfare mothers' children selling it to each other. They don't have the cash. For there to be so much money in it, they are mostly selling it to "successful" middle class people with the disposable income to occasionally afford it. ie, mostly white, gainfully employed people are by far and away the biggest crack consumers. Without that section of society buying, there would be no billions to be made.

But that is part of the whole game of substance abuse: it is all about lies. The point isn't to remove the lies, just encourage the useful ones (cigarettes cause impotence) and denigrate the harmful ones (smoking is sexy).

The key lesson of the repeal of Prohibition is actually not widely known. Pre-prohibition, the government got a significant chunk of its revenue from liquor taxes. The economic growth of the 20s made it possible to forgo this; and prohibition was sold on the basis that it would actually save government money, in that there would be less drunken violence and thus fewer people in jail, and indeed more sober people working more productively.

When that didn't pan out, and when the Depression made a huge dent in government revenue, and when repeal would mean a significant new revenue stream for the government, well, on that basis, the legislators caved. It wasn't anything to do with whether or not it worked (actually, all the evidence suggests that Prohibition actually did succeed in greatly reducing alcohol intake), it wasn't anything to do with morality or liberty, it was mostly a matter of desperately needed money.

Any of this sound familiar?

Speaking personally, I like a woman with more meat on her bones. Not only is there more to devour, additional fat adds more smokey flavor when you BBQ her. Yum yum. It's pretty simple, men are programmed to attempt to seduce more edible women when times are tough. It makes a lot of sense, really.

We are all like totally programmed instinctive insects after all, aren't we?

A small, non-random highly skewed sample, dubious methodology, ambiguous results, all the rest of it, used as a foundation for a castle of theorizing! Lotsa math! Big words! Confirms stereotypical ideas! What's not for an Evolutionary Psychologist to love?

Incidentally, Mikes Pace, "neotony" is a rather old, yet still somewhat controversial evolutionary theory. It refers to the retention of child-like features into adulthood in homo sap's evolution-- small noses, smaller frames, less hair, etc. The idea being that such markers would trigger the protracted parent care a human infant needs. Or that it is the side-effect of delayed development. Or that it is an adaptive strategy by dependent women to evoke male protective/supportive instincts that also spilled over onto males. Or something-- it is one of those phenomena that can be used to support pretty much any of your pet theories.