THE HUMAN PARTY

Artwork by Margaux Wosk (@artfulretro)

How is it…that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record?”

- Dr. Alexander Shulgin

The “War on Drugs” has been an unmitigated disaster in innumerable ways[1]; the problems with prohibition are so grievous and plentiful that they have filled scores of books. But one of the most philosophically troubling aspects of the drug war continues to receive very little attention: the comprehensive criminalization of chemically-assisted self-exploration and expansion of consciousness. In our modern society, we view the visionary experience through a frame of disapproval and discomfort – if not seen as downright sinful, the use of psychedelics is regarded at best as shameful, dirty, or taboo. But why is this? Examining our strangely one-sided, uncritically assimilated attitudes towards these unique substances shines light on the insidious power of ideology over our beliefs and ideas, and the necessity of freeing our minds from its influence, first as individuals but ultimately as a society and a species.

So, the question to ask ourselves is - why do we think psychedelic drugs are bad? Why are we comfortable talking about anti-depressants, or drugs to combat allergies or high cholesterol (which often have terrible and potentially fatal side-effects), yet, although we hear plenty about their (hugely overstated and often fabricated) dangers, we never discuss the incredible potential of psychedelics? As the brilliant chemist and researcher Alexander Shulgin writes,

Every drug, legal or illegal, provides some reward. Every drug presents some risk…The rewards cover a wide spectrum. They include such things as the curing of disease, the softening of physical and emotional pain, intoxication, and relaxation. Certain drugs – those known as the psychedelics – allow for increased personal insight and expansion of one’s mental and emotional horizons.

The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature. Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for self-awareness a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as the means of opening the psychic doors. But the urge to become aware is always present….For many thousands of years, in every known culture, there has been some percentage of the population – usually the shamans, the curenderos, the medicine men – which has used this or that plant to achieve a transformation in the state of consciousness.… But in this case, our non-native North American society has not given its acceptance to the plants, the chemicals, the opening up our seeing and feeling skills.

As Shulgin points out, despite what the 20^th century’s war on drugs has lead us to believe, mind-altering drugs are not inherently good or bad, and any such simplification does not do the subject justice. In today’s world, most of us now automatically consider mind-altering drugs to be essentially negative forces, and the debate is limited to how their damage may best be minimized. But why on earth should we assume this? A great many societies in different places and times certainly did not see it this way. What if psychedelic drugs were not just things to be controlled and feared, but tools which could actually serve to enhance our lives, to make them fuller, less mechanical and automatic, to give us a different perspective on ourselves and on the way we perceive the world around us?

The simple truth is that drugs can harm or they can heal, and whether they have a positive or negative effect depends on a variety of factors, including the personality and personal chemistry of the user, the dosage and nature of the particular drug used, the reasons for its use, the surroundings, etc. This is not a radical statement – it is plainly true. Yet if you try to talk about the virtues of LSD or mescaline in public, people react as though you’d just advocated clubbing baby seals.

How did this happen? How did something that for almost all of human history was seen as sacred and divine, over the course of less than a century, become something fearful and foul – so unquestionably “bad” that we are utterly unable to discuss or think about it rationally? This radical change in our collective perception did not happen by itself. Michel Foucault showed that power is not only at work in conflict; we also need to look for it in the perceived absence of conflict, for it is here on this level that power is both the most successful and the most difficult to resist. Political theorist Steven Lukes asks,

is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?

This is exactly what has happened with our attitudes towards psychedelics.

When we take a step back and think about it, we realize that the war on drugs has caused all of us, even those that think it is ineffective in its stated purpose, to irrationally moralize, to tacitly accept as a premise the inherently negative nature of these drugs, and to thereby suppress any reasonable discussion on the subject. Much as Nietzsche believed that everyone had uncritically assimilated the “slave morality,” we have all unknowingly internalized the Manichean, polarizing logic of the drug war, and this is one clear indication that the war on drugs is a biopolitical tool that operates on a number of levels to order society.

By reevaluating our inherited stance towards psychedelics, we can see the eminently biopolitical nature of the war on drugs, and its action on our own psyches. But this is just one example; particularly within late global capitalism, this subtle and insidious face of power, the omnipresent psychic “push” of the dominant ideology, is constantly at work within our own minds. As humans, we tend too much to accept the present order as natural, and we consistently fail to examine most of our basic day-to-day operational assumptions.

Paradoxically, psychedelic drugs are one the most powerful tool we have to combat this tendency. This is one reason that it is important for us as individuals to be able to make free and informed choices about these substances. Psychedelic drugs like LSD have a well-documented power to enhance consciousness and facilitate self-knowledge and personal growth – the few legal scientific studies on these chemicals conducted have demonstrated that, because psychedelics allow for such profound introspection and cutting insight, they can be incredibly helpful in everything from psychotherapy to treatment of drug addiction and OCD to end-of-life counseling. A mountain of “unofficial” anecdotal evidence from users reinforces these findings. As author Ryan Grim notes,

Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who invented the drug in 1938, called LSD ‘medicine for the soul.’ Most subsequent users have followed his lead, describing their trips in spiritual terms… Psychedelic drugs give one a very real feeling that there’s some type of intangible divide between those who have turned on and those who haven’t. The psychedelic experience – with LSD’s being perhaps the most powerful – defies credible characterization, largely because accounts of it strike the uninitiated as highly unbelievable and seem to the initiated highly incomplete. [Richard Neville observed that] ‘non-acid takers regard the LSD trip as a remarkable flight from reality, whereas cautious devotees feel they’ve flown into reality…’

In fact, the visionary “trip” can be so profound and life-altering that psychedelic drugs have played, and continue to play, a central role in many religions around the world, and have been an integral part of the religious experience, and particularly in initiation ceremonies, since the dawn of man. They promote incredibly visceral insights, in the form of epiphanic self-discovery, a profound sense of connectedness and participation, and a deep respect for life and the world that gives rise to it. And even outside of religious context, they have the potential to deliver powerful and moving spiritual experiences, experiences at least as meaningful and authentic as the practice of an organized religion - but with the emphasis on participation in the experience, and free of Judeo-Christian-Islamic dogma and emphasis on unconditional belief in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.

In terms of societal influence, psychedelic drugs have also had an incredibly profound and important influence in the visual arts, music, philosophy, literature, and even science. They even helped give rise to the digital age. As Grim points out,

Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America’s foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books…Psychedelic drugs, [New York Times tech reporter John] Markoff argues, pushed the computer and internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbard is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. …[Steve Jobs once said that] his own LSD experience was ‘one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.’

Psychedelics can show us, in a very visceral way, how everything is entwined, interconnected and interdependent. Individual freedoms and the potential for self-discovery, though hugely important, are therefore not the only reasons that psychedelics matter. The decision to arbitrarily lock the doors of perception has profoundly negative consequences for our society, and ultimately for our species.

Drugs like MDMA and LSD are catalysts for positive social change because what they help to foster, and what corporate sovereign bio-power hopes to suppress or commercialize or trivialize, is love, not love that can be reduced to a strictly romantic or sexual sense, nor an indiscriminate and false sedated kind of love.In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch defines love, which she believes is the central and cardinal moral virtue and philosophical principle, as careful and clear outward-directed attention, the attempt to see things as they really are, fairly and openly. It is the search for “a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one.” Love, in this sense, is an attempt to do the world justice in our perception of it. This kind of attitude and attention is anathema to sovereign bio-power, which rules through intimidation, deception, and fear.

This stripping away of ideology, and the recognition of our common humanity which accompanies it, is a prerequisite for real social change, for true progress instead of merely rhetorical reform. Psychedelic drugs can help us to do this, but drugs alone are clearly not the answer – simply dosing the water supply, as Abbie Hoffman wanted to do, would surely do more harm than good. We need to learn how to creatively emulate their effects so as to help cultivate love, in the technical sense in which Murdoch uses it, in order to promote this recognition.

This is not an easy process. It will require recognizing not just the underrepresented and underprivileged in our own societies as equals, but alllife, from New Orleans to Afghanistan to Sudan. As Judith Butler suggests in Precarious Life, we must begin to see even our “enemies” as people, and their deaths as grieveable. We must discover “a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself.” When we are able to do this properly, when the blinders of ideology are removed and we see the violence that we have inflicted upon other peoples of the world in the same light as that which has been inflicted upon us, we will no doubt feel deeply ashamed; but as Marx said, shame is a revolutionary sentiment.

The war on drugs, like the war on terror, makes this complex and difficult process impossible by flattening morality and segregating and dividing humanity. Psychedelic drugs, one of the most powerful correctives to this phenomenon, are prohibited by the very processes and powers they would serve to counteract. But, while useful, they are not essential. The first, and most important, step is this; if you finish this article and find yourself resistant, if the idea of using psychedelic drugs as a force for good seems radical and “out there,” step back and ask yourself, “Why?” A fearless and candid exploration of that fundamental question is the start of the quest for liberation.