When And Becomes Or: Motivational Salience, Drug Policy, and the Institutional Simplification of Social Conflict

Introduction

This literature review argues that drug-related motivation is not adequately explained by substances alone. Rather, motives surrounding drug use emerge when biological drives toward consciousness alteration intersect with social institutions that simplify complex conflicts into binary choices. This process may be described as and-to-or motivation: a movement from complex, simultaneous social meanings—the “and”—toward simplified, oppositional choices—the “or.” In this framework, drugs operate not only as psychoactive substances but also as symbolic objects through which institutions, industries, and publics organize conflict, assign deviance, and produce social order.

The sociology of drug use has often examined why individuals use drugs, how drug behavior is justified, and how deviance is socially constructed. Sykes and Matza’s (1957) techniques of neutralization, Scott and Lyman’s (1968) theory of accounts, and Stokes and Hewitt’s (1976) aligning actions all suggest that motives are not merely internal psychological causes. Motives are also socially available explanations that individuals and institutions use to make conduct intelligible. Similarly, Schütz (1960, 1967) distinguished between “because motives” and “in-order-to motives,” emphasizing that human action is interpreted through both prior conditions and anticipated outcomes. Mills (1940) further argued that motives become salient when conduct is questioned, frustrated, or placed under social scrutiny. Together, these perspectives suggest that motivation is most visible at moments of conflict.

Drug policy provides a useful site for examining this process because drugs have historically been treated as both material substances and symbolic threats. Mosher and Akins (2021) and Weil (1986) describe the human pursuit of consciousness alteration as widespread, suggesting that drug use is one expression of a broader human tendency to seek changes in perception, affect, and experience. However, drugs are only one vehicle of consciousness alteration. Social institutions, public relations, industrial systems, scientific practices, and political movements also alter consciousness by shaping attention, desire, identity, and moral judgment.

This review uses early twentieth-century cigarette use as an illustrative case. During this period, cigarettes were framed in competing ways: as threats to industrial efficiency and morality, and as symbols of rebellion, gender equality, and freedom. Henry Ford’s anti-cigarette discourse constructed smoking as a danger to productivity and character, whereas Edward Bernays’s public relations work helped associate women’s public smoking with liberation. These competing interpretations demonstrate how cigarettes became a symbolic biasing agent through which broader conflicts over mobility, efficiency, gender, morality, and social control were condensed into simplified choices.

Analysis

The concept of and-to-or motivation begins with the relationship between biological attention and social meaning. Habituation research suggests that repeated stimuli become less salient over time, while novel stimuli attract attention and produce renewed responsiveness (Groves & Thompson, 1970; Thompson & Spencer, 1966). This does not mean that drug policy can be reduced to biology. Rather, biological responsiveness to novelty helps explain why consciousness alteration becomes socially meaningful. Human beings seek shifts in perception and experience, but societies organize those shifts through moral categories, institutional rules, and symbolic associations.

Merton’s (1938) strain theory is useful here because it explains deviant behavior as an adaptation to tensions between culturally valued goals and socially available means. Innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion are not merely individual choices; they are responses to structured contradictions. Within the context of drug use, substances can become attached to these adaptations. A drug may be interpreted as a retreat from social responsibility, an innovation in pleasure or productivity, a ritualized habit, or a symbol of rebellion. The meaning of the drug depends on the social field in which it appears.

Cigarettes in the early twentieth century illustrate this symbolic flexibility. In industrial contexts, cigarette use was often framed as deviant because it appeared to threaten efficiency, discipline, and moral order. Ford’s The Case Against the Little White Slaver presented cigarettes as harmful not only to health but also to productivity, masculine development, and industrial reliability (Ford, 1914). In this framing, the smoker was not merely a person engaging in a habit. The smoker became a type: inefficient, morally suspect, undisciplined, and potentially unfit for industrial labor.

This industrial framing reflects an appeal to loyalty. Scott and Lyman (1968) described accounts as explanations that repair breaches in social expectation. Ford’s anti-cigarette discourse can be read as an institutional account that justified exclusion by appealing to the interests of labor, capital, and the public. The cigarette was treated as a convenient cause of inefficiency, allowing industrial actors to locate social disorder in the body and habits of the worker rather than in broader conflicts produced by industrial capitalism. In this sense, the cigarette became an “or”: one could be efficient or cigarette-addicted, disciplined or deviant, Americanized or suspect.

The Ford case also shows how mobility and efficiency were connected to social control. The automobile industry expanded physical mobility, but it also demanded disciplined workers capable of conforming to assembly-line production. Ford’s broader employment practices, including moral evaluation and expectations tied to the “American way,” indicate that industrial efficiency was not only technical but cultural (Worstall, 2012). Workers were evaluated not only by output but also by whether their lives appeared to support an idealized moral order. Cigarette use became one symbolic marker through which that order could be enforced.

At the same time, cigarettes were being given a very different public meaning. Bernays’s 1929 “Torches of Freedom” campaign associated women’s public smoking with gender equality and emancipation (Bernays, 1965). In this framing, the cigarette was not a sign of inefficiency or moral weakness. It was a symbol of rebellion against gendered restrictions. Bernays’s campaign used the visibility of women smoking in public to transform a stigmatized act into an image of freedom. The same object that industrial moralists treated as deviant became, in another setting, a sign of liberation.

Brandt (2007) argued that the tobacco industry’s power depended partly on its ability to shape public perception while obscuring its commercial interests. Ewen (1996) similarly described public relations as a practice concerned with producing credible versions of reality. Bernays’s campaign demonstrates this process. Public relations did not simply advertise cigarettes; it reorganized the meaning of smoking by linking it to women’s suffrage, autonomy, and modernity. However, the historical significance and causal impact of the campaign should be treated carefully. Murphree (2015) noted that the “Torches of Freedom” story has been mythologized and requires critical interpretation. Even so, the episode remains useful because it shows how industry can transform a drug-related behavior into a symbolic solution to social conflict.

The conflict between Ford’s anti-cigarette discourse and Bernays’s pro-smoking symbolism reveals the core of and-to-or motivation. Cigarettes were simultaneously associated with deviance and freedom, inefficiency and autonomy, moral decline and political rebellion. This simultaneity—the “and”—is socially and cognitively costly because it requires people to hold contradictory meanings at once. Institutions reduce that complexity by forcing a simplified “or.” Ford’s discourse asked the public to choose efficiency over smoking. Bernays’s campaign asked women to choose liberation through smoking. Both strategies simplified conflict by turning a complex social object into a binary symbol.

Attribution theory helps explain why this simplification is persuasive. The fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to overemphasize dispositional explanations for behavior while underestimating situational causes (Jones & Harris, 1967; Ross, 1977). In the context of cigarette use, institutions could interpret smoking as evidence of individual weakness, immorality, or rebellion while ignoring the broader social conditions that gave smoking its meaning. Epstein and Teraspulsky (1986) further showed that perceptions of behavioral consistency across situations can be distorted. Thus, the smoker could be misread as consistently deviant across contexts, even when the meaning of smoking shifted depending on gender, class, workplace, and political setting.

Theories of social learning and differential association also clarify how drug meanings circulate. Sutherland and Cressy (1977) argued that deviant behavior is learned through social interaction. Bandura (1973, 1977) emphasized modeling, imitation, and reinforcement. Skinner’s (1953) work on operant conditioning further demonstrates how behavior is shaped through consequences. Cigarette use was not simply an individual act of consumption; it was learned, modeled, rewarded, stigmatized, and reinterpreted through social environments. Anti-smoking employers, tobacco advertisers, suffrage symbolism, and peer behavior all participated in shaping what smoking meant and how individuals understood their own motives.

This analysis suggests that motivation is not located solely inside the individual. Campbell (1996) warned against treating motives as simple internal causes of action. Motives are also interpretive resources that explain action after it becomes socially relevant. Mills (1940) made a similar point: motives become especially important when conduct is questioned. Cigarette use became motivationally salient because it was questioned by employers, moral reformers, advertisers, women’s rights advocates, and public health authorities. The question “Why smoke?” therefore cannot be separated from the question “Who benefits from this explanation of smoking?”

Discussion

The early twentieth-century cigarette case illustrates how drug-related motives are formed at the intersection of biology, social conflict, and institutional interest. Humans may have a general tendency to seek consciousness alteration, but that tendency does not determine the social meaning of any particular drug. Institutions transform substances into symbols. Industry, public relations, law, science, and social movements organize those symbols into narratives that simplify conflict. Through this process, “and” becomes “or.”

The and-to-or framework helps explain why drug policy often appears to be about substances while functioning as a broader regulation of people, identities, and social conflicts. In Ford’s anti-cigarette discourse, smoking was not merely a health concern. It became a marker of worker discipline, productivity, and moral fitness. In Bernays’s campaign, smoking was not merely a commercial product. It became a public sign of gendered freedom. In both cases, the cigarette was used to resolve or redirect social tension. The substance became a vehicle through which institutions organized loyalty, deviance, rebellion, and conformity.

This framework also clarifies the relationship between drug use and social power. Durkheim (1964) described social facts as external forces that shape individual behavior. Drug meanings can operate as social facts because they constrain how individuals understand themselves and others. A person who smokes, abstains, or condemns smoking does so within a field of meanings already shaped by institutions. These meanings may be experienced as personal motives, but they are also socially produced.

The metaphor of “humanity as drug” extends this argument. Drugs alter consciousness, but so do institutions. Science can be understood as a consciousness-altering practice because it sustains complexity, uncertainty, and multiple possibilities—the “and.” Industry can also be understood as consciousness-altering because it operationalizes simplified decisions, routines, and outputs—the “or.” Science keeps alternatives open; industry converts alternatives into production. Both can be used productively, and both can be abused. The problem is not consciousness alteration itself but the unequal power to define which forms of alteration are legitimate, profitable, deviant, or prohibited.

Cowan’s (1986) critique of prohibition is relevant because drug control often operates through selective enforcement against forms of deviance associated with marginalized groups. If law enforcement functions as discrimination against deviance, then drug policy must be examined not only for its stated goals but also for its social effects. Who is labeled deviant? Whose motives are treated as pathological? Whose institutional interests are hidden behind appeals to public health, morality, efficiency, or freedom? These questions are central to understanding drug policy as a social process rather than merely a legal or medical one.

The literature reviewed here suggests that drug-related motivation should be understood as a layered phenomenon. At one level, biological drives may orient humans toward novelty and consciousness alteration. At another level, individuals learn drug meanings through association, modeling, reinforcement, and available vocabularies of motive. At a broader level, institutions transform drugs into symbols that organize social conflict. The and-to-or concept names the moment when this complexity is reduced into a simplified choice: productive or deviant, moral or immoral, free or controlled, modern or backward, citizen or outsider.

This review is limited by its reliance on cigarette use as a single illustrative case. The argument would be strengthened by comparing other substances, such as alcohol, cannabis, opioids, or stimulants, and by examining how different groups experience the same drug symbols differently across race, gender, class, and historical period. Future research could also examine how contemporary industries, including pharmaceutical, technology, wellness, and media industries, produce new forms of consciousness alteration while framing some practices as productive and others as deviant.

In conclusion, the thesis advanced here is that motives surrounding drug use are produced through the interaction of biological drives, symbolic meanings, and institutional power. Cigarettes in the early twentieth century became a site where industrial efficiency, gender rebellion, moral judgment, and commercial interest converged. The resulting conflict was simplified through competing institutional narratives that turned complex “and” relations into simplified “or” choices. Understanding drug use and drug policy therefore requires attention not only to substances but also to the social systems that define, moralize, market, and regulate consciousness alteration.

Coda

The argument advanced here should not be reduced to a familiar account of polarization. Polarization suggests that social life hardens into opposing camps, that people choose one side or another, and that public conflict becomes organized around antagonistic identities. The and-to-or framework is related to that process, but it is not identical to it. Polarization describes a social outcome. And-to-or motivation describes a prior movement: the conversion of complexity into a form that can be acted upon.

There is an irony in the metaphor. In ordinary speech, “and” often feels more complex than “or” because it asks consciousness to hold multiple realities together. A person, group, or institution must recognize productivity and discipline, freedom and manipulation, science and industry, care and control. Yet in the logic of gates, the relation is less obvious. An AND gate is severe but simple, yet more complex at a hardware level: it opens only when its conditions are jointly met. OR gates are permissive and less complex at hardware level; they open through multiple possible routes. The social world reverses this intuition. Human beings often experience the “and” as burdensome because it requires the maintenance of co-present truths, while the “or” feels relieving because it permits action through exclusion.

That reversal is the point. The danger is not simply that societies become polarized. The deeper danger is that institutions learn to make “or” feel like clarity, morality, efficiency, freedom, or science, while making “and” feel like confusion, weakness, deviance, or delay. In drug policy, this means that substances become screens onto which societies project conflicts they do not wish to hold in their full complexity. The cigarette is harmful and symbolic, commercial and political, chosen and conditioned, liberating and exploitative. To preserve the “and” is not indecision. It is a refusal to let institutions metabolize contradiction too quickly.

The most important lesson, then, is not that humanity should abandon judgment. Judgment is necessary. Policy requires decisions, and decisions require thresholds. The lesson is that the quality of judgment depends on how long a society can remain honest about the “and” before it authorizes the “or.” When the “or” arrives too soon, it becomes prohibition, stigma, propaganda, or exclusion. When the “and” is held long enough, it can become science, democracy, and care.

The thesis of this review therefore ends where it began: with motivation. Human beings alter consciousness not only through drugs but through the social arrangements that teach them what to notice, what to fear, what to desire, and what to simplify. The poignant risk is that humanity itself becomes the drug it cannot regulate: intoxicating in its certainty, addictive in its exclusions, and most dangerous when it mistakes relief from complexity for truth.

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Appendix I: Change Modification Log

02 MAY 26 - Refactored for improved thesis visibility (i.e., and-or transition) and readability. Prior draft was more research memo + writeup than finished.