Modern Vice

On drugs, alcohol, gambling, porn, and the crisis of masculinity

In today’s episode of Rufo & Lomez, we’ll be talking about vices: drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, and everything else you can think of. We’re going to discuss both the personal level—how should individuals approach the various vices and temptations—and the social level. Are there policy remedies for these questions? Are there social remedies? Are there healthy models and archetypes available to us? Because right now, it seems like America is awash in chaos. We’re going to sort through all of that, and we’re going to give you the right path coming up next.

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The following is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. Sign up now for premium access.

Rufo: We’re entering the long holiday season, which seems to be a time of good tidings and religious rituals, but also a time when people’s vices creep into their daily lives. So we’re going to do a special episode focused on this topic of vices. I’m particularly curious because I have ambivalence about vices, public policy, prohibition, and libertarianism. There’s a huge debate about this, but why don’t we break it down personally first? Tell me how you think about vices. What are your current vices, and do you have any plans for future vices?

Lomez: We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Okay, so we both grew up in California during a time that was sort of this high watermark for American cultural life, and it was incredibly affluent. It still felt more or less safe, although I guess if you look at the numbers, California had gone through this period of crime. But if you were in a suburban area in California, things were pretty good. Life was pretty good, maybe about as good as it gets. However, looking back on my childhood, and I was by no means an innocent who was just observing from afar, there was a great deal of what I would call cultural libertarianism or even libertinism. It was normal for high school kids to drink a lot, get high, do drugs, and be promiscuous—all the rest of it. This was reinforced through all of our cultural cues, the movies we’d watch, and I’m sure, Chris, you were the same. You would be in your suburban home listening to gangster rap music, and it was this weird kind of cultural norm now that I look back on it. And I think—

Rufo: I didn’t listen to gangster rap. No.

Lomez: You didn’t? Wow.

Rufo: No.

Lomez: Okay. That’s shocking.

Rufo: But I know what you mean. Yeah.

Lomez: Oh, okay. Maybe we’ll get into that. But now that I look back, I see how most of my friends and I made it out of this because we had this incredible cultural foundation that could protect us from the harms that might come from this sort of lifestyle. You could make mistakes, do stupid things, and get away with it and come out the other side. So the question I’m asking, and I think is one that I want to pose to you, and I’m sort of agnostic about, is whether that cultural infrastructure that a middle-class, upwardly mobile kid like yourself or I might’ve had in the nineties or the early two thousands, has that been degraded?

And do the ways that people think about drug use, promiscuity, pornography, and digital addiction—something new that didn’t exist back then—indicate we are facing the end of this period of excess? Or are we past the point where we can successfully integrate all of these kinds of maladaptive behaviors into our lives? Do we need to pursue a new kind of cultural norm that might reflect an attitude toward these indulgences similar to what may have existed in the mid-century? Okay, this is an open question. This is the question I think I want to use this hour to try to get to the bottom of.

Rufo: These are great questions, and I think we’ll untangle them as we go. But I think your instinct of starting by rooting our conversation in our upbringing in the past is really important. I grew up in Sacramento, not too far down the highway from you in the East Bay. It was a really interesting moment because two things were happening simultaneously. A friend of mine growing up had a father who led the campaign to ban smoking in California. You remember this, right? You remember going to Denny’s, or whatever, and the waitress would ask you smoking or non-smoking, and then suddenly that disappeared. It was a big moment. There was this Puritan, health-oriented spirit of doing good and keeping people healthy, which included shunning cigarette smokers.

You had to be 50 feet away from the building. You couldn’t smoke in restaurants. You couldn’t smoke even in bars. And look, I think that was great. I totally support that. Anytime I go to Nashville, and you go out to the bar with your friends and smell like smoke afterwards, I think it’s gross. I’m not a fan, although whatever, not a huge deal. But I actually think that was a good instinct. At the same time, what you noticed is also true: there was widespread drug and alcohol use. I think about high school, and you remember it, and you’re just like, “Wow, that’s actually shocking. I can’t believe that we got away with this. I can’t believe some of my classmates got away with this.” I remember kids getting alcohol poisoning in class and then getting carted away by the ambulance as part of a seemingly normal high school experience.