From: rstump@itchy.geog.albany.edu (Roger Stump)
Subject: Re: On Drugs, Bebop and The Wire
Organization: Syracuse University
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 92 17:05:36 GMT

Richard Shapiro writes:

> Certainly it's crucial to distinguish biology from sociology. This is
> exactly why an article on the sociology of, say, smoking can't be
> regarded as irresponsible or dangerous just because it considers
> social issues rather than the medical ones. In considering why group X
> tends to smoke while group Y doesn't, it simply isn't relevant to
> focus on lung cancer -- that's not a helpful explanation of the
> behavior. Yet this is just the argument being made against the drug
> articles in The Wire.

To paraphrase your argument from the next paragraph, I'm not sure it
is so easy to separate social issues from medical ones.  In comparing
differences in smoking rates between groups X and Y, it certainly WOULD
be important to examine group differences in attitudes about or knowledge
of the medical effects of smoking.  A key question would be why members of
group Y smoke more than the average, despite all that is known about
the ill effects of smoking.  Taking the argument back to the original
issue, why have so many jazz musicians used narcotics despite what they
know about the ill effects of doing so?  I agree that this question 
will be more effectively addressed as a cultural or social issue, 
rather than a moral one, but the medical aspects of the issue can't 
be completely ignored.

> But also, it's not as easy as you imply to separate physical effects
> from moral ones.  I chose smoking very deliberately, because it
> doesn't have the same moral force as narcotics use although it's
> unquestionably more dangerous in terms of its physical effects
		^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I'm certainly not convinced of this; I'm not sure you can really compare
the two in this way.  In any case, if I were forced to choose one or the
other, and I were concerned with my life expectancy, I would rather be
addicted to tobacco than to crack or heroin.

> (smoking is in the process of becoming a general moral issue but it
> isn't there yet). Cigarette abuse is certainly more widespread than
> drug abuse among jazz musicians and other artists; and it may well
> have led to more deaths in those communities.  But we never hear about
> the scourge of cigarettes in the jazz community. It's not the biology
> after all -- "scourge" is a moral term, which is why it's applied only
> to an issue regarded as a moral one.

I think that we don't hear about the scourge of cigarettes in the jazz
community because the jazz community is not especially distinctive in
terms of its consumption of cigarettes.  As you have pointed out elsewhere,
though, there has been a strong connection between the drug subculture
and the jazz subculture.  Abuse of narcotics has been one of the things
that HAS set the jazz community off from the mainstream of society.  And
I think that one can see it as a scourge without framing the issue in
moralistic terms.  Narcotics have had a more direct, negative effect on
the jazz community than on society at large, and in that sense represent
a "scourge" characteristic of that subculture.
 
> If The Wire ran an article explaining why artists and musicians are
> more likely than computer scientists to smoke, and if that article
> didn't mention cancer, would people have been outraged in the same way
> as they were by the drug articles? Somehow I don't think so...

Again, I would certainly want to know why jazz musicians are less
concerned than computer scientists about the medical effects of smoking.
Knowing that would tell us a good deal about important cultural differences
between the two groups.
-- 
Roger Stump  (rstump@itchy.geog.albany.edu)
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote