Psychotropics help us map our minds. They might also bring us together. August 10, 2023 - Washington Post
Two new histories of drug use suggest a path forward out of the morass of the War on Drugs
“One must conclude that the concept of drugs is not a scientific concept, but is rather instituted on the basis of political or moral evaluations,” said the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a 1989 interview titled “The Rhetoric of Drugs.” For him, to describe something as a “drug” or to speak of “addiction” functioned as a moralistic tautology: The terms themselves imply otherness, a separation of the supposedly selfish user and addict from society’s ostensibly caring embrace. “What do we hold against the drug addict?” Derrida asked. “That he cuts himself off from the world.” Ask politicians, and they’ll tell you that drugs are fringe elements, gateways into degeneracy and criminality.
Yet, as psychedelic historian Mike Jay shows in “Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind,” drugs were once a central facet of intellectual culture, essential to a “self-experimental” tradition through which writers, philosophers, chemists, psychologists and even dentists developed our modern understanding of the mind in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Meanwhile, in “I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World,” science journalist Rachel Nuwer examines groundbreaking new research that demonstrates that MDMA (and to a lesser extent other psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD) may allow those suffering from PTSD, addiction and anxiety to reconnect to a social world from which their ailments have separated them. This reverses what Derrida suggested was society’s primary grudge against drug users, but it is further complicated by the sheer intensity of backlash against MDMA, which Nuwer documents with infuriating detail.
Both Jay and Nuwer demonstrate that humanity’s relationship to mind-altering substances runs deep and long, a fact hidden by puritanical narratives that frame drugs as a modern corruption of the soul. In the Romantic era, thinkers and artists began to recognize that drugs could unlock the mind’s plasticity, allowing them to explore realms of consciousness beyond the grasp of “straight” existence. Jay shows how Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his protégé, Thomas de Quincey — along with those who followed, among them Charles Baudelaire, Jean Lorrain, Fitz Hugh Ludlow and W.B. Yeats — used narcotics to uncover terrains of unforeseen experience that would become key to their work.
Early psychologists and psychiatrists such as Jacques-Joseph Moreau, Sigmund Freud and William James, as well as chemists like Humphry Davy, took inspiration from such writers and sought in drugs treatments for modernity’s spiritual ravages. Scientists pursuing theories of mind were inclined toward pharmaceutical self-experimentation. Freud, for instance, experimented with cocaine while an ambitious medical student in the 1880s, positing in his early article “Über Coca” that it could treat the time’s defining ailment: neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion caused by the taxing intensities of modern life. Jay describes the “strikingly innovative literary style” of Freud’s first-person writing about cocaine, which aspired to dive “deeper into the terrain of introspection and subjectivity.”
James, for his part, argued in his groundbreaking 1902 treatise on religious and mystical experiences, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” that nitrous oxide catalyzed ecstatic visions that transformed his consciousness. James insisted that the gas, for decades a carnival attraction prior to its use as an anesthetic in oral surgery, granted him access to a sublime realm of existence akin to religious exaltation. Freud, James and their peers understood that detailed, precise language describing their explorations in the first person, with literary flair often borrowed from great writers, offered irreplaceable insights into the mind.
Alas, Jay shows, the self-experimental era ended with the ascendancy of 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte’s doctrine of positivism. Comte hoped to rid science of “metaphysical speculation” and argued that “mental events … were not facts, and a ‘science of the mind’ was an oxymoron.” Subjective experience was not considered “properly” scientific, leaving little room for self-experimentation. Freud suppressed his early work after a string of controversies and mishaps led to cocaine falling out of favor, its therapeutic potential overridden by its addictiveness and deleterious effects. Behavior replaced consciousness as psychology’s object of study. When lithium, the first modern psychiatric drug, arrived in the 1870s, it was meant to “adjust” the “maladjusted,” not transform subjectivity.
Substance use grew infamous, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Consumers of drugs were characterized as unpredictable layabouts who endangered national hygiene and productivity. Eugenicists and other “social hygienists” found in drug use a perfect straw man for their racism and xenophobia, again accusing Black and Asian populations, particularly men, with laziness and the degeneration of White society. By the 1930s, with the widespread criminalization of offending substances from ether gas to cannabis and opium, the 19th century’s revolution of consciousness had concluded.
Nevertheless, Jay’s sharp and playful intervention places psychoactive substances at the center of both the fin de siècle psychological revolutions and the rise of the 20th century’s conservative scientific paradigm, with its demand for externally observable, quantifiable evidence. As he also shows, drug use continued (obviously). Chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD’s properties in 1943, and after Beat writers such as William S. Burroughs challenged the prohibitive moralities of the ’50s, psychedelia defined the ’60s. Self-experimentation went underground as shabby or stubborn psychologists, chemists and psychiatrists witnessed the power of psychedelics for treating ailing minds. Jay’s book ends with Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the rogue psychedelic chemist who first synthesized MDMA in the mid-1960s.
“I Feel Love” picks up where Jay leaves off, narrating the first documented MDMA trip, by Shulgin’s student Carl Resnikoff and his then-girlfriend, Judith Gips, in 1975 and covering the often-ignored history of MDMA with breathtaking depth. Shulgin, a career psychedelic chemist, passed some along to Leo Zeff, a Jungian psychotherapist who practiced psychedelic-assisted treatments. LSD, mescaline, cannabis and other psychedelics were illegal, but the novel MDMA was not (yet). Canceling his retirement plans, Zeff began treating patients with the new substance to excellent results and soon showed the drug to colleagues. MDMA-assisted therapy spread underground, though regulatory hostility and bad-faith research constrained its growth for decades and made thorough research impossible.
However, MDMA did not remain a therapeutic secret for long. Nuwer chronicles the arrival of ecstasy (as it was then called) to Dallas’s short-lived but influential Starck Club, an epicenter of mid-1980s queer and dissident nightlife patronized by Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Tom Cruise and even George W. Bush. Users realized that Molly (as it would come to be known) was delightful on the dance floor, especially with repetitive, rhythmic electronic music blasting. Et voilà: Clubs and their music leaped into a new age.
England’s warehouse rave scene of the 1980s and ’90s, fueled by MDMA and born in part as a response to the unrestricted and discriminatory policing of parties, became a global phenomenon, despite violent and counterproductive attempts to restrict Molly’s circulation. That culture gave way to moral panics as the AIDS epidemic intensified and nightlife became a target of conservative paranoia. Drug enforcement agencies and shoddy researchers spread unfounded myths about MDMA’s neurotoxicity and other dangers, which Nuwer diligently picks apart. Ineffective laws created incentives for producers to cut their product with pollutants and hindered harm-reduction efforts.
Fortunately, a shift in federal drug policy over the past decade has enabled new research, which MDMA’s Schedule I classification in 1985 once rendered nearly impossible. Nuwer has been reporting on the stunning results for years. Though no panacea, and with a long way still to go in amassing sufficiently strong research to encourage MDMA’s mainstream therapeutic uptake, recent studies indicate that MDMA-assisted therapy “works an order of magnitude better than talk therapy alone” for PTSD victims, per psychopharmacologist Albert Garcia-Romeu, whom Nuwer cites. Its results are equally stunning for those suffering from addiction, in particular alcohol use disorder, and for social anxiety in those on the autism spectrum.
After four decades of activism by Rick Doblin, leader of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and many others, MDMA grows closer than ever to moving from Schedule I, equivalent to heroin or methamphetamine, to Schedule III, enabling professional therapeutic use. Nuwer’s sober assessment of MDMA’s promise and limitations, written in incisive but generous prose, steers away from the quackery and sentimentality that pervade the field of psychedelic research. Relentless and erudite in her journalistic commitments, unafraid of self-disclosure and unwilling to feign complete detachment, Nuwer searches for healing, and makes painfully obvious the terrifying uselessness and destructive consequences of the past half-century’s drug policies.
As the War on Drugs’ hold on the imagination wanes, an opportunity emerges to reconfigure our cultural relationship to its maligned targets. It is well past time to challenge our vision of the addict as a social pollutant, of all drugs as poisonous, of policing as the solution to anything. Reading Jay and Nuwer, the accused selfishness of addicts, which Derrida criticized in the 1980s, reveals itself to be a product of poverty, immiseration, homophobia and racism, which the failed War on Drugs only aggravated. Alas, until the War on Drugs’ millions of victims get their due, Jay’s and Nuwer’s work will remain a hopeful, unfulfilled prophecy.
*** Psychonauts Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind By Mike Jay Yale University Press. 359 pp. $32.50
I Feel Love MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World By Rachel Nuwer Bloomsbury. 373 pp. $28.99
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