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Thank you.

The thing about drugs needs to be really expanded on other similar things - tobacco, alcohol, gambling etc. Sure all those are as old as humanity in this or that form, but you can notice in history, wherever those become a systemic problem, there’s always a ruling class organising, promoting and profiting from those.

As a Pole, great example of this is alcohol. Up till maybe XVII-XVIII century it wasn’t even a problem for most society, because only richer people were able to afford strong alcohol like wine*, peasants and burghers drank beer that had more common with the ancient beer than modern one - that it was very weak but also dense and caloric. Then, during the XVII-XVIII centuries, in the age where nobility was experimenting with myriad ways of exploiting peasants, propination privilege was born. Nobles were forcing peasants to trade only with them, and that include beer, so of course peasants get forbidden for making their own beer, but had to buy from the noble, so quality dropped like stone (there are sources saying it was so disgusting people were afraid to drink it) and price increased, also it was sold obligatory, every peasant had to buy. Then the vodka made from grains appeared and it allowed for even more profits, also nobles started to pay peasants** in vodka. This of course caused immediate epidemic of alcoholism that got way worse when cities get under similar boot, and it was so bad in XIX century that it got enshrined in culture. (all this was very similar in Russia)

This is very important point, because it explains how hard is to get rid of it. Every Polish state, from II RP, through PRL to current Poland tries to do something with it, and, as many opinions here would tell, failed, but it’s only when having binary look at this. You can’t just eradicate plague so entrenched, but even the mere act of state stopping promoting alcohol did a lot to contain the issue. Though you can argue, and you would be right, that all three of those states did promote alcohol by owning or allowing for selling, advertising etc. But then you could notice that after 100 years the issue is much less severe than it was in 1918. There was also some half measures, both in form of antialcohol educational and administrative campaigns in PRL, which did had their effects or even partial prohibition efforts. Last one is pretty interesting, it was prohibition fo selling alcohol before 1PM, which seems superficial but it greatly reduced the most dangerous (and common then) aspect of alcoholism, people getting drunk in work. And this also after a time got into culture and regulations so now drinking in work is very rare (even though the partial prohibition was abolished long ago, arguing that it fulfilled its role).

The similar is with drugs and gambling, there was not much problem with those in socialism, even though PRL did the usual forms of state gambling like lotteries, because there was not much supply, not much promotion and not even much demand. All three increased with liberalisation and increased cultural penetration from the west, to explode when the socialism was destroyed. You probably did saw the horror reports from Russian transformation, Polish was not as horrible but still bad, and it was absolutely clear that all those drugs that suddenly flooded our streets weren’t just conjured from thin air. No, all of this is part of the class war.

*Yes it might sound weird right now, but wine was considered strong alcohol for most of history (and it was usually even weaker than most modern wines) - for example ancient Greeks watered it down so much that getting drunk took them hours of pretty fast drinking, and Gauls shocked entire Mediterranean world by drinking unwatered wine (and they soon learned to water it down so medieval and later French were also often watering it heavily). Of course stronger alcohols like brandy was known, but it was expensive and rare. Vodka appeared on a noticeable scale around XVII century (and it was expensive and real shit, it was falsified with everything from pepper through gunpowder to sulphuric acid). Only mass and incredibly cheap destilation methods invented during the industrial revolution cause strong alcohols to spread like crazy.

**For their grain usually, not for labour, at this point serfdom was so far going that a peasant family was obligated to unpaid work even 32 workdays per week. Even totally landless and destitute peasants were obligated to work 4-5 days per week.

Finally, i’m currently reading excellent book about serfdom and generally condition of peasants in Poland, i might write a short review after i finish.

Yes it did. Increase was involved with growing liberalisation of USSR and allowing more and more culture from the west. This do happen when you have imperialist powers and capitalist class using and promoting drugs against working class. You can compare to what happened in all socialist states after system change. Better would be looking at modern China and hundreds of millions of opium addicts in it. Wait, there aren’t hundreds of millions opium addicts there now, i wonder what happened after 1949, surely Mao just didn’t forbid them their fun?

Yeah, just it felt like deja vu listening to it. It’s like they used a time machine to read this thread before recording their intro.

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