by Richard Farr
This is the final part of My Drug Problem, a no doubt annoyingly elliptical three-part essay on psychedelics. Part One, A Mere Analogy, is here; Part Two, The Woman in the Cave, is here.
Interest in psychedelics has gone so mainstream that it’s embarrassing not to be able to do the usual thing, and share with you my experience of effing the eff out of the ineffable while sitting in a pool of my own ayahuasca-scented vomit in a hut in the Peruvian Amazon.
So far however, despite a strong, longstanding, and multiply motivated interest, my own psyche has never once had the opportunity to be rendered more delos by any of these substances. That’s partly because there seems to be no way for me, like most ordinary people, to get hold of them legally or illegally in a tolerably safe form. It’s partly, also, because the avenues that are slowly opening up are expensive, impractical, and/or radically inconsistent with the way that I (or most reasonable people, I will suggest) would choose to introduce ourselves to them.
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We use the words drug, experiment, recreation and therapeutic in at least two distinct senses each.
Drugs are the blessings of medicine that free us from the clutches of disease. Ordinary but amazing Ibuprofen (C13H18O2), stalwart bug-killer amoxicillin (C16H19N3O5S), and so on. Drugs, on the other hand, are serpents in the tree, evil substances full of temptation and danger to the foolhardy; key vectors for the spread of many ills including both dependence and sanctimonious do-goodery. Heroin (C21H23NO5), methamphetamine (C10H15N), and so on. Wonders and terrors. Alpha and Omega. God and the Devil.
(Complicating things rudely: God can be dangerous and the Devil isn’t always. Morphine is about as addictive as heroin; many or most psychedelics are not. And “good” drugs can do the Devil’s work with special alacrity when they slip beneath the notice of our moral guardians. The Oxycontin catastrophe should remind us of the pirate’s response to Alexander. ‘Who the hell are you, to accuse me of being a pitiless, profiteering, murderous thug?’)
Experiments, those noble attempts to sieve nuggets of truth from the stream of nature, are among the most intellectually prestigious of activities. (See Daniel 1:12 for possibly the earliest recorded example.) But experimenting — with drugs, as with radical political ideas and outré lifestyle choices — is the province of foolish people who lack the maturity and self-discipline of their more conservative peers. Reason and unreason. Self-discipline and libertinism. Right thinking and not enough thinking.
(Complicating things rudely again: experiments are hard to get right even in the lab, and some kinds of evidence can be sought only in the messy environment of a lived life. Also, the intelligent conservative must be forever haunted by the thought that the experimenting they abjured was an essential adjunct of the clear thinking they claimed to admire.)
Recreation is the word we use to describe a round of golf after a long week at the office. Or more generally: any temporary relief from the real grind of living. In the clubhouse afterwards we might say that the round was therapeutic — but we might also understand this as a dark joke, because a therapy is supposed to cure us of something and golf has cured us of nothing. In its more literal and original sense, re-creation is genuinely therapeutic: not a temporary escape but a permanent arrival; the discovery, or rediscovery, of our logos or meaning.
(Complicating, yet again: this fuller meaning of therapeutic has itself been fully colonized by medicine and psychiatry, so that we too quickly take it to describe only, and always, a substance or other intervention marshaled against a named illness by a professional healer of the soma or psyche. The idea that therapy might not be merely medical but be a process central to the lives of all people, healthy and otherwise — the province of philosophy, prayer, poetry, friendship, solitary walks, surfing, reading Epictetus and, in my native country anyway, answering the ancient mystic call to “sit down here and have a nice cup of tea” — is thus constantly in danger of being lost.)
Given the right cherry-picking among these uses, you can see why someone experimenting recreationally with drugs (in the absence of any therapeutic need), is a poster-child for fecklessness and poor judgment. This makes it easy to deny, or not see, that such a person might be performing legitimate experimental research, by the only means available, into the possibilities and limits of re-creation.
That may help explain a phenomenon I notice in recent commentary. We have endured decades in which official hysteria about psychedelics has rivaled the Salem witch trials in the sheer perfection of its irrationality. As we emerge, though, a strong desire remains even among some of the best-known promoters of psychedelics to wax cold and cautious; to tell minatory tales about the dangers; to expound enthusiastically on the transformative excellence of their own pharmacological adventures and then opine that any “merely recreational” use must yet be constrained, studied, approved one-day-perhaps and then only while sedulously controlled and watched over.
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In the late 1960s various governments (and the UN) ended the modern psychedelic era virtually mid-swallow. In the US it was Prohibition all over again, but more effective than the epic fail of 1919 because it’s much harder to make entheo-shine than moonshine in that old tin bathtub in your basement. Predictably, people with the know-how do make illegal psychedelics, and run vast criminal empires from the profits. That’s one reason the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration needs an annual budget that in a different world might fund fifteen National Endowments for the Arts.
In this environment psychiatrists and activists have had to pluck gently at the lowest fruit, which for the most part has meant advocating humbly for the right to at least research potential therapeutic uses (in that narrower sense). The process has been going on for decades; MAPS — the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies — was founded nearly forty years ago.
These efforts should be better known and more widely celebrated for their role in the fact that a real legal thaw — a few first trickles across the hard blue glacial ice — is visible at last in some jurisdictions. But I worry. As with the history of psychiatry generally, making something acceptable as a medicine goes hand in hand with medicalization of the very idea of what’s at stake, and from that flows a reflex to control. See under Childbirth, Aging, Dementia, Depression; also read Foucault, who despite his tendency to epistemological hysteria had some real insights about medicine and power relationships. We need to hang onto the idea that the aim of research into psychedelics should be neither to control people’s options nor to control knowledge; that it should be the dissemination of knowledge so that adults can make their own decisions, in the light rather than the dark, about what, when, how and with whom.
On that matter of whom: some kind of hand-holding may be a good idea even for small doses, and complete non-supervision may be foolhardy for a full-dose trip, especially with a molecule that has a history of making people think they can succeed where Icarus failed. But it doesn’t follow that people should be prevented from making their own choices about at least some of these risks. (The use of motorcycles is regulated, not prohibited.) And it doesn’t follow that the market in guidance should automatically be dominated by one professional guild.
Therapists like to repeat the claim that people taking psychedelics for “genuinely therapeutic” purposes, such as relief from PTSD, have much better outcomes if this is done under a therapist’s supervision. I’ve not been able to form a clear impression of how solid or how cherry-picked that evidence really is. (The cynic in me is reminded of Wendell Berry saying somewhere that no agricultural economist has yet calculated that there are too many agricultural economists.) But let’s grant that it’s true. Still, while we’re in the mood for experimentation and evidence and all that jazz, should we not also test the hypothesis that only trained therapists can effectively provide this benefit? Don’t we want to know whether these same sufferers would have done worse (or better!) if instead of drug + therapy they had received drug + meditation class, or drug + paid vacation somewhere nice (which let’s face it would probably have been cheaper), or drug + time with a trusted friend / complete stranger / chatbot / golden retriever? And don’t we need to know, also, whether other people, lacking a diagnosed need, would have got more (or less!) out of the experience if they had received the drug + any of the above?
Let me confess my own prejudice: I’ve not had a brilliant time with therapists. I always felt they were pelting me with slogans. I always felt that their training had caused them to overrate their capacity to understand who I was, what motivated me, or what would help. I always gave up after a few visits.
I have read more than one promoter of the psychedelic virtues insisting that therapeutic guidance is essential, in multiple sessions both before and after a single trip. (Sayonara right there to the 95% who might have been able to afford and benefit from the drug but had no practical means of obtaining the whole package.) Some of these writers then go out of their way to insist on the importance of a calming room, a bed, and above all the right choice of eyeshades and music. Call me weird, call me an outlier, but to me the idea that you would do this indoors is odd and the idea that you would do it while listening to music under an eyeshade is almost but not quite funny: it’s a model as appropriate and congenial to me as the suggestion that the ideal “setting” is trapped underground in the hands of a dental surgeon. There has to be another way.
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The psychedelic molecules are a fascinating crew, all strangely alike for personalities so reportedly different. LSD (C20H25N3O). Ergotamine (C33H35N5O5). Ibogaine (C20H27ClN20). Mescaline (C11H17NO3 — one of the main active ingredients in peyote and ayahuasca). MDMA (C11H15NO2). Ketamine (C13H16ClNO). Dimethyltryptamine (C12H16N2). Muscimol (C4H6N2O2 — the main active ingredient in fly agaric.) Psilocybin (C12H17N2O4P). A multitude of potentially interesting but unnamed and little-studied cousins — two cheers for C11H17BrNO2! There are many different reasons for wanting to genuinely experiment with these guys. My own list includes:
(1) I’m plain curious about what it would be like to visit Finland, Bhutan, and Tasmania; in exactly that way, I’m curious about what it would be like to visit each of the major psychedelics.
(2) I sometimes need the lift that coffee never provides.
(3) It’s intriguing that some psychedelics engender mystical, religious or supernatural experiences. Does my lifelong tendency towards atheism (and skepticism about the supernatural generally) make it less likely that I am capable of any “entheogenic” experience? Or more likely that I will come back from such an experience with my underlying beliefs transmogrified?
(4) As intimated in part two of this series, philosophy has left me almost equally skeptical about the pursuit of self-understanding through reason alone. I’d like to do a better job of honoring what I take to be the core Socratic insight — that much of our knowledge may be illusory, and that one function of clever reasoning about knowledge may be to protect us from noticing the fact.
(5) I have a terrible “episodic” memory. Would stuff come back? If it did, would I believe it?
(6) I long for a better understanding of time, or our perception of its passing. Some philosophers don’t think the present is metaphysically real; most physicists agree with Einstein that the whole clock’s a con. Users of psilocybin and fly agaric sometimes speak of a revelation that, on the contrary, the present is the only thing that’s real. Suppose I were to experience this liquid eternal now. Would I come back with a different sense of my day, my life, or my time remaining? And would this require me to believe — or would it survive my no longer believing — what I seemed to believe while I was experiencing it? (William James notes that these psychedelic mental revelations are not like dreams; belief in their essential veracity tends to persist. I don’t know and can’t quite picture what that would be like.)
(7) The reported ‘ego dissolving’ quality of some psychedelics fascinates me, though not for the reason you might assume. I have a semi-professional interest in the exotic thesis that the self is an illusion. David Hume picked up the idea from a second-hand encounter with Buddhism during his years in France; many other philosophers, psychologists, mindfulness evangelists and others seem drawn in by the gravitational pull of its hipness. I respect Hume immensely — genius aside, he was witty, cheerful, a brilliant stylist, and a good friend to many who never took himself seriously; any one of those virtues would make him a needle in philosophy’s haystack — but I’ve always found his radical empiricism about the self baldly unpersuasive. Are there really only ‘impressions’? Is the idea that there is an organizer of our impressions, above and beyond the impressions themselves, an illusion? Then how and where and for whom is the illusion taking place? If you listen to Hume carefully in the relevant passages you can hear him talking too loud; he wants to believe in this new Eastern philosophical toy, because it’s adorable, but he can’t quite persuade even himself. However, I don’t disagree lightly with le bon David, as his French colleagues liked to call him. (Such a finely judged plaisanterie, to line up your pet Scottish atheist next to le bon Dieu.) Anyway the thought lingers: maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if only I altered my mind I’d change my mind.
(8) I have a bit of a personal stake in the reported effect of psychedelics on the creative imagination. When my last novel was published I was eager to get on with the next project, which was nothing more than a fierce itch and a fistful of notes. “It’ll take a year,” I said to myself. “OK Richard, be realistic: two.” That was in 2017. So I’m fascinated by the idea that micro-dosing (or midi-dosing, or tripping) might have relevance to the mysteries of procrastination, doubt, and block.
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Unfortunately for me, the evidence so far is that I’m an especially poor candidate for mind modification through chemistry:
Caffeine (C8H10N4O2): Every morning I make a separate mug of decaf for my wife; if she drinks mine by mistake she ends up attached to the ceiling by her fingernails. Me? I can drink a pint of the hard stuff at 3:00 PM, even drink so much that my heart starts to tap-dance, without achieving any meaningful change in my alertness.
Alcohol (ethanol — CH3CH2OH): I’m fond of a good Martini and associate drinking with mild relaxation. If a doctor ordered me to quit cold turkey on the morrow, breaking the habit would be annoying, not agonizing. I have been truly drunk two or three times, in my salad days when others were claiming to enjoy it and I was green in judgment. It’s my good fortune no doubt that that altered state was little more than the altered physical state of incapacitating nausea.
Cannabis — I’ll get back to that.
Cocaine (C17H21NO4): Any consumer of American popular culture in the 1980s could be forgiven for feeling like a nobody if they’d never scraped up a little berm of white powder on the surface of a mirror and then snorted it through a $20 bill. In London it was a £20 note, complete with Shakespeare on one side and Mrs. Windsor on the other: close enough. I was excited and a little nervous but only the wisdom of hindsight screams “Powdered melamine? Rat poison? Fentanyl? Don’t be a ****ing idiot.” Someone had put Talking Heads on the futuristic-looking Bang and Olufsen. (The vinyl: Remain in Light. The track: Once in a Lifetime. Quoth David Byrne: “And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here?”) I remember my face looking up at me from the mirror on the table. Snort. Wait. Ponder. Wait. Absolutely nothing. Total zero. Either I’m immune or it was chalk.
I’ve also taken my share of antidepressants, including Citalopram (C20H21FN2O) and Wellbutrin (C13H19Cl2NO). The simple, easily digestible story we’ve been spoon-fed for decades is that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and antidepressants correct the balance. So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, this is about as well-rooted in science as the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle. (Or Rorschach testing. Or refrigerator mother theory. Or the id. Or insulin overdose therapy. Or the idea that you “have” depression if you check five out of nine boxes. Or … stop me now before I read the entire DSM into the record.) Nevertheless, antidepressants work wonders, or work a bit, for many people. Not so much for others, and not for me: I needed to be sharpened, not blunted.
But perhaps psychedelics would be different? Almost every report of almost every user suggests it! Where then to begin?
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Imagine you’ve never eaten anything but mashed potato. On discovering belatedly that there’s a world of foods and cuisines out there, you are eager to explore. Naturally you have no idea what you (or your body) will like.
The rational thing in these circumstances is not to listen to one chef go on for hours about the virtues of their favorite food, and then bet all your resources on being taken by them to a blisteringly spicy multi-day Kolhapuri wedding feast — followed by another full day set aside to discuss your indigestion. The rational thing is to talk as much as possible to many different foodies and then sample a very little of this, a little more of that, a light meal of the other. One food will be too peppery, in a heretofore unexperienced sense; another will make you thirsty and irritable; a third will seem wonderful, like eating sunshine. You keep a diary no doubt, noting the effects on your moods, sleep, dreams, and other appetites. These discoveries make you (a) go back to potatoes, (b) enroll in a Tokyo cooking school, (c) start farming ghost peppers, (d) who knows?
I said I’d come back to cannabis — tetrahydrocannabinol (C21H30O2) plus a jungle of other molecules. I grew up in sheltered circumstances (elderly parents, deep rural England), but by the age of 16 I was going to the kind of party at which you could augment the bad beer, black light and Black Sabbath with a joint or two. Decades later, living as I do in Washington State, I can get as much of it as I want, any time I want, at ten dozen cheesily-named emporia. Bud Barn! Fillabong! The Joint! Cannabis impairs your driving, so like alcohol it’s not without risks, but the sky has not fallen and the people who kept telling us it would fall look very old-fashioned. In fact cannabis has become almost like Pepto or Claritin at the “drug” store: something you can buy with confidence, knowing exactly what you’re getting and what dosage is likely to do what.
I don’t think this has been a shining new dawn exactly, even for regular users. Beyond making you friendly, relaxed, and silly about ice cream, pot’s claims are modest. Certainly it has not been a shining new dawn for me: as I’m sure you’ll have guessed, those youthful encounters brought me a “high” consisting of nothing but sleepiness and a headache. Still, legalization has been a vast improvement over the alternative, and that’s surely in part because despite its medical applications nobody thinks of pot as primarily a medicine. Psychedelics could be like this, if we cared, sooner than most people seem to think wise or possible. And if that day arrives, even those who don’t have a therapeutic need — but who nonetheless have a therapeutic need — will be free to travel at their own pace, recreationally, to all sorts of new and interesting places.
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