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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but ask myself whether we should be wondering why Americans can't make it without drug-modified behavior, or whether this is better or worse than alternatives such as cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, etc.

Humans in societies have been chemically altering their moods since we discovered mood-altering chemicals. Stress occurs inside and outside civilized workforces, and people take measures to mitigate stress. The real question is: what are the side-effects and how do we mitigate them?

(Not to imply that we shouldn't also look into options for de-stressing the American worker, since benefit there can scale significantly. But we do ourselves a disservice by imagining we're the first generation to have an entire culture habitually consuming a physiology-tweaking chemical cocktail)

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Personally, I think the root of society's issues with drugs is rooted in moral judgment. It's our nature to be compelled to engage in certain activities (reproduction, sleep, obtain food) yet collectively rules and standards have been created to select which ones are okay, casually speaking.

It's not so much as "why can't Americans go without" as much as it is a "why can't Americans admit Prohibition doesn't work" type of question to me. The latter is a lot easier to fix than the former, I think.

It is possible to be against prohibition as well as drug abuse ...

Anecdotally I think Europeans are more likely to self medicate with alcohol and cigarettes rather than prescription pills which are more common in the USA.

In my experience the culture around having a few drinks after work and even having the occasional cigarette is far more relaxed in the European countries I've been to than just about anywhere in the USA.

But as I've said, I have zero evidence that any of this is even true - just my observations however well travelled I am.

In any of the companies I've worked with or visited in my times in the US (SF, specifically), lunchtime drinking was pretty common, and practically unheard of in my European experience.

Like yourself, I wouldn't want to extrapolate a broader trend from that, just providing a counter-anecdote.

Think on smoking we've probably had a similar experience though. I don't think I even know an American that smokes (cigarettes), let alone seen it at a workplace. In Europe, it'd be weird if there weren't a couple of people in any office that didn't have an obvious habit.

> I have zero evidence that any of this is even true - just my observations

Observations are evidence. You meant that you had no non-anecdotal evidence.

Many Americans are highway-bound and that has a large impact on American culture.

>I can't help but ask myself whether we should be wondering why Americans can't make it without drug-modified behavior...

Can't or don't want to? Drugs can make things easier, at least in the short run, and the stigma against pill popping is pretty much gone.

True. And if that's the case, it becomes a bit like wondering why people wear more clothing to keep warm rather than just trusting their bodies' natural defense against the elements---given that their ancestors clearly got by for thousands of years with just their skin and a maybe few scraps of cloth or animal hide if the going got REALLY tough, who needs down-lined jackets?

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