Nature's Evil

People consume salt up to the point of satiety. The body knows what level of salt it needs; too little or too much causes discomfort. For every population, there is a point of equilibrium which defines the optimal price of such a resource. The per capita consumption of this kind of resource is stable, and consumption increases only with the growth of the population. This is where economics, focused on the balance between demand and supply, comes into operation. But there are other sorts of resources, such as sugar. An individual or a country can consume them in unlimited quantities: the more such products are available to consumers, the more they want them. The growth in supply stimulates a still greater demand. I would call this kind of commodity ‘addictive’ or ‘narcotic’. In such cases it is not demand that dictates supply but the other way round: production stimulates consumption . Satiety, or equilibrium between demand and supply, simply doesn’t arise, or is always deferred to the future; what does arise is an increasing dependence, an unquenchable and unquenched need, an addiction. Examples are sugar, and the alcohol produced from it, but also spices, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate and opium. All these substances create in the consumer a narcotic dependency, which may be severe or mild and, correspondingly, inflicts more or less harm on the consumer. When economists describe the link between production and consumption, they talk about the elasticity of supply : if production of a commodity grows quickly in response to a rise in demand, then this production is elastic. In the opposite case, when consumption grows, quickly or slowly, in response to a rise in supply, we see a demand which is, to various extents, addictive and toxic; I propose to talk in these cases about toxicity of demand. From pepper to tea to sugar to tobacco to opium, and later to petroleum, different substances exhibit different levels of toxicity. Importantly, the very concept of consumption in its economic meaning originates from the debates about the taxation of ‘intoxicants’; before these mid-seventeenth-century English debates, consumption meant a wasting disease. 1 ‘Intoxicants’ were wine, tobacco and coffee; sugar did not figure in these debates – clearly, it was in a special category, together with tea and chocolate. Following the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, I call these consumables, from sugar all the way to opium, soft drugs.

Throughout the long age of empires, Europeans enjoyed these dried remains of several exotic plants from the two Indias. Gradually, soft drugs became an everyday habit for every civilised person – moreover, a habit that became the very essence of his or her civilised behaviour. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these addictive substances, from tea to opium, made up the biggest group of commodities in international trade. There is a biological component in this addiction, but it is also shaped by traditions, fashions, prices, political contexts and much else. For example, tobacco is addictive in any form – whether chewed, taken as snuff, or smoked; legal or smuggled; consumed alone or in cigar lounges. The habit is conditioned and contagious – it spreads from one person to another in the manner of an infection. If a certain form of tobacco is cheap, or if it is well advertised, it spreads faster. Taxes and high prices reduce the toxicity of a product; fashion or advertising can have the opposite effect. Administrative measures – e.g. criminalisation – have lesser impacts. The habit spreads among a population as a result of imitation and because of the social character of consumption. Addiction is individual but also societal: the consumption of such a commodity may grow even if individual doses stabilise.

Capital grows endlessly; this is essential for capitalism. Its most rapid growth occurs not when consumption leads production but, conversely, when supply boosts demand. Addictive substances are invariably connected to energy. This is the energy that sugar gives to the body and petrol gives to a driver, the energy that is expended in work, procreation and recreation, the energy that is stored in the form of fat. Concentration encourages a monopolistic development and arbitrary pricing, and addiction guarantees the unlimited growth of trade. Even technical progress does not change the pattern of addiction. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons formulated a startling paradox. An increase in the efficiency of a certain resource does not reduce its consumption but, on the contrary, increases it. Precisely because efficiency produces cheaper products, they become available to more customers, demand for them grows, and more raw material is expended in making them. Collective addiction grows into fetishism – an extreme case of a mono-resource dependency. Changing fashions bring variety to this fetish and boost its consumption.