Sunday Times 2
From arrack to algorithms: Sri Lanka’s long history of addictions
View(s):By Dr Ruben Thurairajah
There is always a beginning. In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, the story of addiction did not arrive all at once. It came in waves, each one promising pleasure, relief, or sophistication. Each wave left behind wrecks of dependence, disease, and control. And each wave was later met with government regulation when the damage became too obvious to ignore.
The first wave: Alcohol
Alcohol distillation was not native to the island. Our ancestors knew toddy from palm trees, a cloudy drink that fermented quickly and was consumed quickly. It was fresh and seasonal. The Portuguese, and later the Dutch, brought with them the method of distillation. Arrack was born: a clear, strong spirit, far removed from the gentle toddy.
Social media addiction depends on the computer algorithm. Pic courtesy uk-rehab.com
The colonial rulers taxed it. They built a system around it, just as they did with tea and coffee. What had been a local custom became an industry, a trade, and for many, a ruin. Villages that once knew intoxication only on festive days began to see daily drunkenness. Alcohol entered ritual, social life, and politics. It made men reckless. It filled government treasuries.
Later, a new prestige was attached to alcohol. Imported bottles of whisky from Scotland were displayed at Colombo dinner tables as symbols of colonial refinement. But this refinement was an illusion. The liver, the brain, and the heart – none of them could tell the difference between a 20-year-old single malt whisky and a cheap bottle of Gal Arrack. The damage to health was the same. Addiction, however, was democratic: it destroyed rich and poor alike.
The second wave: Tobacco
Tobacco arrived on the island like a fashionable guest from the wider world. It came through trade, as part of the colonial exchange, that vast reshuffling of crops after the Portuguese and Spanish crossed into the Americas. By the 17th century, smoking had become common in Colombo and Jaffna. Tobacco needed no distillation. It could be rolled, lit, and inhaled.
The rituals grew around it: the beedi rolled in Jaffna homes, the pipe smoked by elders in the South, and the neat packet of 12 sticks sold at the junction shop. Tobacco made its way into the hands of labourers on the estate and into the mouths of men in white suits who debated politics in tea shops. Like alcohol, it was taxed. Like alcohol, it enriched governments. But its damage was slower, quieter, cancerous; lungs blackened, throats scarred, hearts weakened. It was an addiction that did not announce itself with stumbling steps but with coughing and an early grave.
The third wave: Sugar
The sweet tooth is older than the island itself. But refined sugar, crystallised and white, was another colonial gift. It travelled with European empires, first as a luxury, then as a cheap necessity. Tea with sugar became the national drink. Snacks morphed into dripping sticky sweets and colourful sodas in glass bottles at the corner shop: the diet shifted.
This was not intoxication in the ordinary sense. It was a slow seduction of the tongue and the brain. Sugar promised energy, comfort, and even love. Parents offered it to children as a reward. Shopkeepers displayed it as rainbow-coloured sweets to be bought for a single rupee coin. But sugar too was addictive. It altered appetites. It led to new diseases: diabetes, obesity, and heart attacks. Today, Sri Lanka has one of the highest diabetes rates in South Asia.
Like alcohol and tobacco, sugar was legal, taxed, and sold openly. Only much later did governments begin to speak of “limits”, of sugar taxes on soft drinks, and of campaigns urging less sugar in tea. By then, the damage had spread across generations.
The fourth wave:
Social media
And now we arrive at the newest addiction: social media. It did not come in barrels or packets but on the silent waves of the internet. It is consumed not with the hand or the mouth but with the eye and the thumb.
Unlike alcohol, tobacco, or sugar, this addiction does not depend on a substance. It depends on the computer algorithm. The algorithm is a machine of persuasion. It learns the user’s habits, fears, and desires. It shows more of what keeps the eyes open, the fingers scrolling. It offers the pleasure of connection and the pain of missing out.
Children take to it as easily as they once took to sweets. Schoolboys in Jaffna scroll through TikTok in the classroom; young women in Galle watch YouTube through the night; office clerks in Colombo steal hours on Facebook when the boss is not looking. The attention span shortens. The mind becomes restless. Already there are signs: anxiety, sleeplessness, and shallow concentration.
And like the earlier addictions, this one enriches its creators. It is the tax of time rather than money. Every scroll, every click, is converted into data, and data into wealth. The plantation model has been repeated, this time with human attention as the crop.
The law and the pattern
In every case, the pattern has been the same. A new habit arrives. It spreads quickly, promising pleasure or progress. Only later does society recognise the cost. And then, after much delay, laws appear.
Alcohol became restricted by age. Tobacco too was pushed behind warning labels and banned from sale to minors. Sugar is beginning to face similar restrictions.
The same will happen with social media. Already, some countries are considering bans for children. Others are demanding that algorithms be made transparent or altered to protect young minds. It is only a matter of time before Sri Lanka too must face this question.
The argument is not about prohibition. None of these addictions was ever truly banned. The point was always control: who can consume, how much, and under what conditions. It will be the same with social media.
The deeper lesson
What unites these four waves—alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and social media—is not merely their addictive quality. It is the way they entered society: from outside, through trade, through empire, through modern technology. They were not demanded by the people. They were introduced, encouraged, and then normalised.
Addiction, in this sense, is not only a personal weakness. It is a social and political event. It is about power, profit, and control. The drunkard in the village tavern, the smoker outside Fort railway station, the diabetic waiting in a government clinic, the child scrolling through midnight hours: all of them are part of a larger story. A story of how outside forces shape local lives and how regulation always lags behind invention.
The cycle will repeat. New addictions will come, dressed in new promises. Some will be chemical, others digital. Each will test the capacity of Sri Lanka to protect its people without isolating itself from the world.
Conclusion
The country has already lived through three centuries of addiction: the burning drink, the smoke that makes one to cough, the sweetness that destroys. Now comes the glow of the screen, the endless scroll. The past suggests the future. At first, there is freedom, even celebration. Then comes dependence. Then comes law.
In time, social media too will be placed behind an age barrier, its algorithms tamed, its access rationed. Until then, Sri Lanka lives in the unregulated moment, repeating a pattern as old as the first sip of distilled arrack.
The lesson of history is clear: if we wait too long, the law will come only after the damage is already done.