FIFTY YEARS OF PSYCHEDELICS, AND MORE

For the serious-minded they are now entheogens; over a hundred years ago in the quasi-scientifically curious Western world there was nitrous oxide and opium, followed by mescaline and sacramental mushrooms in early C20. The bomb really dropped 75 years ago with Albert Hoffman synthesizing LSD, since when new variations on a theme keep evolving. In the present day questers can choose from a smorgasbord including ecstasy MDMA, STP and so on, so called ‘party’ drugs. The term entheogen is now used to refer to any psychoactive substances when used more intellectually and deliberately for their religious or spiritual effects, and the question arises as to how do these new generations of users behave? Are they using lesser potencies or small doses so not triggering full blown visionary trips? Are the ‘ravers’ and ‘loved up’ integrating the rich experience of their chemically triggered excursions into their normal lives, and how?

Our experimental sixties generation had heavyweight intellectuals interceding to contextualise and assist our understanding of our novel and quite shattering consciousness-changing ‘trips’. Writers like Aldous Huxley with ‘Doors of Perception’, psychologists like Dr Timothy Leary, later more of a guru, and Doctor of Divinity Alan Watts in whose ‘The Joyous Cosmology’ (Vintage Books, 1965) we are told:

“The reaction of most cultured people to the idea of gaining any deep psychological or philosophical insight through a drug is that it is much too simple, too artificial, and even too banal to be seriously considered. A wisdom which can be ‘turned on’ like the switch of a lamp seems to insult human dignity, and degrade us to chemical automata”.

Watts is not deterred by this prejudice from making his case that ingesting psychedelics cautiously or interrogatively, as one approaches a holy sacrament, does provide “a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened..”

 However “drugs of this kind are in no sense bottled and predigested wisdom”. 

It is unsurprising that with his highly developed and practiced knowledge of Eastern religions and practices, especially Zen Buddhism, that Watts sees psychedelics as providing the ‘raw materials of wisdom’ but needing integration by the ‘various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone” as he pithily puts it.  Are modern users hanging up the phone and digesting the consciousness-changing lessons?  Do they, like his friend Aldous Huxley, recognise their special utility for visionary revelations, changed consciousness, enhanced awareness and possible permanent insights?

Dr Albert Hofmann discovered and synthesised LSD 25 isolating it as an active ingredient from the raw plant materials like mushrooms, rye ergot and so on previously utilised throughout human history for divinatory and mystical purposes, and the application of what was learned.  He developed with R Gordon Wasson and others the thesis that the lessons such catalysts of consciousness changing enabled go back to the ancient Greeks and the Elusinian mysteries. This makes them both very central to the development of our western civilisation out of classical times and relevant for personal development in our individual lives.

Watts hesitated before writing and publishing his accounts speculating whether he was “profaning the mysteries and casting pearls before swine” finally deciding “to encourage a positive, above-board, fearless and intelligent approach to what are now known as psychedelic chemicals”.

Watts is highly disparaging of the official classification of what were then new drugs as ‘hallucinogens’, “an astonishingly inaccurate term, since they cause one neither to hear voices nor to see visions such as might be confused with physical reality”. For him, while acknowledging complex patterns before closed eyes “their general effect is to sharpen the senses to a supernormal degree of awareness”.

He would doubtless be equally condemnatory of the mass abuse and exploitation of a wonderful tool for knowledge and inner exploration being a mere adjunct to enjoyment of a disco rave up. Are psychedelic agents now just an indulgence? Are they no more than a wild temporary dancing intoxication without meaning or depth?

Hofmann was definitely critical of the uses and users of his ‘Problem Child’ LSD and the drug-wave which broke out in the 1960s starting in the USA. LSD rose to become the number one drug, not simply because of its effects alone which could vary, but because it was not illegal. As the drug of choice of hippies and flower children it came to be massively used and often incautiously ‘without consideration of the uncommonly profound effect it can have on consciousness’.

For Hofmann far away in peaceful Switzerland he saw (from Hofmann’s Elixir p65-6)

“ The Psychedelic Revolution threatened to become a national catastrophe in the USA, all the more so as the use of this drug was connected with a pacifistic, anti-Establishment movement. It went so far that in 1967 the US Health authorities decided on complete prohibition an example soon followed in other countries around the world”.

Many of us at that time would consider it was not health reasons as there never were any deaths, even from huge overdoses. A collision between militaristic and materialistic authorities and the anti-materialist, anti-war ‘love-generation’ went only one way with brutal repression of a new way of being formed out of expanded consciousness. Hofmann does admit this by then saying:

“The pharmacological and psychological effects, and the toxicological properties of the ‘phantastica’ themselves could not justify such draconian prohibition. It can only be explained by fear of the consciousness-altering effects which extensive use of these drugs might have on society.”

For powerful effects this new shared mind-changing was indeed creating, ancient wisdom could have predicted this if anyone was noticing. Psychedelic triggers or Shamanic entheogens, were formerly considered divine food, according to Carl Ruck and Danny Staples and others in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. From Greek mythology we learn it was not something to be indulged in or sampled lightly, not something to be profaned. It was the food of the gods, their ambrosia, and it mediated between the two realms. It is said that Tantalus‘s crime was inviting commoners to share his ambrosia, and his punishment or fate was to be cursed with eternal deprivation of nourishment which was ‘tantalisingly’ close at hand.

Perhaps it is legitimate to assume that like myself and our generation, (I can hear ‘The Who’ bashing out ‘My Generation’in my ears as I write this) the need for understanding and indeed wisdom comes to us as part of ‘the aging experience’. Now that sounds like a wrinklies theme park! So this new and different way of being was disallowed, prohibited by fiat, even its therapeutic and careful clinical applications were stopped despite its proven beneficial properties and great promise.

As an aside at this time it is worth noting how Hofmann records that Aldous Huxley’s

“fervent mission on behalf of the psychedelic drugs came to be resented, even by the majority of his friends and readers. Some say it cost him the Nobel Prize.”

And today?

What has undoubtedly changed in fifty years of psychedelics is the shrinking of the geographical world. Affordable mass transportation has reduced the divide between the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures of third world undeveloped (read ‘Westernised’) society and Europe, the USA and others. So even ordinary individuals with curiosity and enterprise now visit and sample for themselves the esoteric otherness of alternative systems of belief and their application in psychology , medicine, visionary exploration or whatever. Mark Flaherty has recently written his personal odyssey of searching for relief from his desperate, maddening, physical skin condition. Very new and not yet widely circulated it is worth reprinting here the summary from Psychedelic Press:

“Originally published in 2012 ‘Shedding the Layers: How Ayahuasca Saved More than My Skin’ by Mark Flaherty is an autobiographical account of the author’s efforts to cure himself of severe eczema by undergoing a series of ayahuasca sessions in Peru.

Mark Flaherty suffered a severe case of eczema, which affected large areas of his skin and Western science failed to bring the condition under control. This resulted in a great deal of pain, the erosion of his self-esteem and disenchantment with life. “While my body cracks and weeps, my mind swells with fear, anger and sadness. I hate my body, and I hate my life with a violence that frightens me” (Flaherty 2012, 50). In a narrative that jumps back and forth between Peru and England, and slides between different stages of Flaherty’s life, the book brings to life a slow journey of self-realisation with the hallucinogenic, South American brew, ayahuasca.

From the very beginning of the book, when Flaherty is listening to a shaman named Hamilton recount his own spiritual story, there is an emphasis on two poles; restriction and release. “The shaman told him that he had two options: forget anything ever happened and go back to his old life, or give himself over and find out what it all meant” (Flaherty 2012, 16). The arc of the book follows a movement from restriction, in his outlook and habits, to the release allowed by love and happiness. As Hamilton tells the initially sceptical Flaherty: “You have a very narrow view of reality” (Flaherty 2012, 20). This restricted reality is prized apart by the exoticism of Peru and the Other world of ayahuasca, in preparation for a release and a new way-of-being in England.

A number of elements, or layers, are drawn out that represent the restrictions that had come to define Flaherty as physically ailed and unconfident. For instance, one root of restriction is placed in an LSD trip he had taken in Zambia in which he had stepped on a bewitched trinket. Ever since, he had purportedly harboured a spirit of ill-will and ayahuasca not only demonstrated this occurrence but led to a way of freeing himself from its yoke. However, more often than not after realisations, Flaherty’s eczema would return with a vengeance. As the story progresses, the layers are textually released through their identification, realisation and integration. On a diet of sanango, the snake becomes an ideal metaphor for shedding:

Alberto tells me that the sanango will cause my skin to peel. In snake-like fashion, I shed my entire body, from scalp to toes. Whereas the snake emerges reborn with a bright new layer, my skin continues to peel, again and again, becoming more tender and raw. It’s as though my entire self is being stripped away, leaving nothing but an exposed, hateful core (Flaherty 2012, 77)

Today, there is a sense of growing movement in the spread of ayahuasca; long tendrils increasingly reaching out and touching Western society in a myriad of shamanic and syncretic forms. This is patterned within the narrative. For instance, an article written by a former guest with Hamilton at Blue Morpho, who was cured, in five sessions, of acute depression and suicidal ideation, is mentioned within the narrative. There are the globe-trotting Western ayahuasca participants. And, moreover, Flaherty’s repeated flights between South America and England makes the world feel all the more smaller and accessible. One has the sense, when reading Shedding the Layers, that a powerful plant is not so far away on our doorstep; restricted, yet awaiting full release.”

In a personal communication with the author I expressed my view.

2 Responses to “Literary Review: ‘Shedding the Layers’ by Mark Flaherty”

A traditional difficulty with all psychedelic, in this case shamanistic, experience is integrating it into a ‘western’ rational quasi-scientific world view.
What is too easily dismissed is personal experience, even a cure, regarded as ‘merely anecdotal ‘
evidence.
There is no ‘merely’ about it if you are the actual person, or even a close witness, it is real, factual, solid, true.

Cheers
Mark

Since my windows of perception were cleansed, if not blown completely out many years ago, it has been natural to keep an open mind to other’s unusual and occasionally outlandish experience. But this does not mean dispensing altogether with one’s critical faculties, there is an awful lot of bullshit out there. A later chapter examines how to approach judging the distinctions between Science and Belief and the place of personal experience in serious inquiry.

But here and now, concerning Flaherty’s ‘magical’ cure, if we turn to chemist and LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann writing on ‘Science and the Mystico-Religous Experience of The World’ he quotes Max Planck the German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.^[2]

“The source of all knowledge and thus the origin of all science lies in personal experiences. These are the directly given, the most real that one can think and the foothold for commencing the trains of thought which constitute science”.

Returning to the shrinking of the geographical world and our new proximity to this ancient wisdom, there is the terrible danger that rather than valuing and incorporating it into our scientific systems it will go the way of so much else and be crushed out of existence by our domineering imperialist attitudes devastating local cultures and beliefs. There is great concern evinced by some like Pankaj Mishra that neo-imperialists are returning to rule the roost, denying the ravages of western imperialism.

“Embracing such fantasies of “full-spectrum dominance”, American and European policymakers failed to ask themselves a simple question: whether, as Jonathan Schell put it, “the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st”? After two unwinnable wars and horribly botched nation-building efforts, and many unconscionable human losses (between 600,000 and one million in Iraq alone), the “neo-imperialists” offering seductive fantasies of the west’s potency look as reliable as the peddlers of fake Viagra. Yet, armour-plated against actuality by think tanks, academic sinecures and TV gigs, they continue to find eager customers. Of course, as the historian Richard Drayton points out, the writing of British imperial history, has long been a “patriotic enterprise”. Wishing to “celebrate” empire, Michael Gove plans to entrust the task of rewriting the history syllabus to Niall Ferguson, one of the “neo-imperialist” cheerleaders of the assault on Iraq, who now craves “creative destruction” in Iran and whose “skilful revision of history” the Guardian’s Jeevan Vasagar asserted last month, “will reverberate for years to come”.

Clearly, it would help if no Asian or African voices interrupt this intellectual and moral onanism. Astonishing as it may seem, there is next to nothing in the new revisionist histories of empire, or even the insidious accounts of India and China catching up with the west, about how writers, thinkers and activists in one Asian country after another attested to the ravages of western imperialism in Asia: the immiseration of peasants and artisans, the collapse of living standards and the devastation of local cultures. We learn even less about how these early Asian leaders diagnosed from their special perspective the political and economic ideals of Europe and America, and accordingly defined their own tasks of self-strengthening.”

What hope for the continuance of native ceremonial and beliefs if intolerance and extinction looms? Somehow among the curanderos of Mexican origins their practices have survived imperial conquest thus far and some serious western scientists are investigating their claims and abilities with relatively open minds as in A Visit to a Cuandero, which translates as healer or shaman by J. Dennis Mull, MD, MPH and Dorothy S. Mull, PhD.

Some faltering first steps are also being taken to expanding legal experimentation with LSD in the research sphere under pressure from researchers like Dr David Nutt, former ‘Drugs Czar’ for the UK government who says to the BBC  this year 2012

“We need to have a more scientific rational approach to drugs and vilifying drugs like psilocybin whilst at the same time actively promoting much more dangerous drugs like alcohol is totally stupid scientifically”

Perhaps we shall yet move a little closer to performing the wish in the dedication that Huxley inscribed in his gift of a book on the subject to Hofmann on 29 February 1962, so fifty years ago:

 “Essentially this is what must be developed: the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe…”

Confused by Symbols

For most people in this century Aldous Huxley was a utopian and dystopian writer and a dabbler in mescaline and later the newly available psychedelic consciousness-changer LSD. Author of that bible of intellectual understanding of drug induced visionary and mystical experience “Doors of Perception”.

He was more, a visionary in his own right, and perceptive analyser of man’s understanding of, and dealing with, reality itself.

Consistently and pervasively throughout Aldous Huxley’s work he describes how we are misled by our web of words, along with other symbols which purport to represent reality, the world ‘out there’. We allow ourselves to think and thus ‘see’ their ‘this or that’, ‘either/or’ ‘black and white’ as being the actuality. In fact words are social constructions, abstractions, creations, symbols which allow us to share perceptions and meanings but should not overpower and diminish our view. They have great practical everyday utility but they are ultimately flawed cultural representations of ‘what is out there’, so they also deceive.

“Human beings…naively believe that culture-hallowed words about things are as real as, or even realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm.”

 This awareness of the gap between what is and what we ‘see’ through the ‘mesh’ of cultural conditioning leads him to constant references to our ‘misshapen culture’, as we are persuaded into misperceptions of what is, and what is possible and worthwhile.

Alexander T Shulgin points out in his introduction to ‘Moksha’ how Huxley repeatedly expresses themes of desperation and hope. The utopian hope in his fictional fantasy ‘Island’ is that:

 “a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the non-verbal education of adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices”

 The despair is that this mismatch can even lead us disastrously to war if we blindly follow the persuasive arguments of a few Generals and others with immense concentrated power:

“the few powerful men in whose clutch (like Gulliver in the paw of the Brobdinagian monkey) mankind now impotently writhes, are themselves the victims of their society’s alienation from present reality”.

This is all “thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation”.

A little consideration of the meanings of highly politically charged concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘communism’, ‘defence’, ‘threat’ ‘patriotism’ and so on reveals their distortive potentiality and dangerous ambiguity.

 He was of course writing at the height of the ‘Cold War’, at the time of the stand-off between President Kennedy and Kruschev over rockets inCuba, with nuclear Armageddon around every corner:

“History is the record, among other things of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game goes on.” 

Updating this thesis to today, we easily see we are in the grip of a new ‘hideous game’ lead by bankers and ‘global financial markets’. This new ‘game’ is similarly flaunting a deceiving vocabulary in pursuit of misguided aims, “greed is good”, but with disastrous real-world consequences. The deceptive symbolic concepts are ‘money’, ‘interest/s’, ‘value’, ‘market discipline’, ‘confidence’, ‘currency’, ‘investment’ and of course ‘returns’.

Employing futurology, can we see how this ends? Some commentators judge we must now choose between surrendering to the power of ‘global markets’ and the money-men, capitulating, or true democracy, with money doing the bidding of the majority via elected governments. For instance Johnathan Freedland: 

“Democracy’s humbling has been most dramatically visible in Greece and Italy, where elected leaders have been pushed aside in favour of technocrats and fixers, elevated without so much as shaking a single voter’s hand. Their mission will include the surrender of much economic sovereignty, putting those decisions further out of the reach of their own citizens. What Greeks and Italians endure today, other eurozone nations might well face tomorrow as they are told to make similar sacrifices of autonomy to save their economic skin.” 

Freedland sees the ‘command’ undemocratic authoritarian regimes of Russia, China and Saudi Arabia as better placed to ‘turn on a dime’ and deal with market threats while sensitive market oriented democracies like the US and Europe must search for painstaking ‘consensus’. But to survive democracies must “reassert themselves, they might have to break from the rules now choking them, and insist that it is people, not markets, that are sovereign.”

That new powers were becoming revealed was apparent as a shock to President Bill Clinton as revealed to Bob Woodward says Freedland:

“That it is these men, not those we elect, who are all-powerful is not new: Bill Clinton discovered as much nearly two decades ago when, in a spitting rage, he shot back at advisers who warned he had to trim his economic plans: “You mean to tell me that the success of my program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?“

Huxley’s truth that we allow ourselves to confuse symbol with reality stands apart from his visionary insights employing psychedelics. It does however encourage us to re-evaluate those too, and his prescient views on ecology and demography as he surely seems to be spot on with how easily we are subtly deceived into dangerous byways by misguided powerful men. And it is mostly men.

Oldfenboy.wordpress.com

Out of It a cultural history of intoxication

 

By Stuart Walton (pub Hamish Hamilton 2001) ISBN 0-241-14038-2

I wrote this review when I thought the Lib Dems were worth working for, ie before the last election.

This is a superb work of scholarship for all those Lib dems interested in waving our own human and cultural history on this topic in the face of “legislators, in an attempt to crack their granite-faced refusal to consider relaxing the current prohibitions”. 

Nearly forty years ago, as a fresh faced (and frequently off my face), graduate at the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology, my tripping and stoning did not handicap me in getting my M.Phil with work on this subject. Since those days most changes in policy have been for the worse. We have advanced further up the US led cul de sac of an accretion of legal and moral censure.

As a major point of principle for liberals is liberty without harming others I would like to strongly recommend all liberal democrats with an interest not just in major reform of the policy on drugs, but a normal interest in different states of consciousness should read Walton’s book. Written he says “to begin to rescue the universal human experience of intoxication from the clutches of politicians, health professionals and religious leaders, and to restore it to their beleaguered clients”. 

Seeking to deny the centrality in human cultures of the multitude of forms of intoxication and alterations of consciousness means denying a fundamental human right, as many of us loudly proclaimed wayback in the sixties as I somehow seem to remember. I was there after all at the dawning of the fresh breeze of ‘The Age of Aquarius’.

Walton’s book argues that the sacred role of wine in Greek religious ritual, the respected psychotropia of the Yanomani Indians, through the opium ideology of Coleridge, the nitrous oxide craze of the nineteenth century and the helter-skelter careers of Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday all form counterpoints in his rich and accessible analysis of the reasons we take drugs. And they are many, varied, and usually wholesomely normal.

Intoxication is a fundamental human right indeed, central to our status as social beings and an integral component of a life fully lived. Terrible distortion and dislocation results from ham-fisted and sledgehammer legal prohibitions with enormous individual damage and now entire societies and trading patterns as inMexico andBolivia are deformed.

Come the autumn we shall have Keith Richards autobiography, hooray, I daresay he will throw an idiosyncratic and personal light on musical and creative links.

 

Who said change is needed?

 

Diatribe courtesy of rantalongwithrog

aka Rod Read M.Phil (Cantab), Dip Psych.Couns, Cert.Ed

 

Drugs and Denial

Clever little blighters us human beings, very pushy at getting what we want, and now with the skills of science and chemistry in pursuit of profit we can make all manner of  stuff, easily and conveniently so too, so we do, and we use it.

Use of chemical ‘stuff’ has quietly crept up on us especially during the last century or two, though it has always been there historically. Our cultural history is rife with potent potions and cures, brewed and distilled from all manner of unlikely ingredients, animal parts, poppies and wild plants, hallucinogenics used for divination, patent remedies sacraments and poisons too. But now, the extent of it is both colossal and yet semi-secret, denied or unadmitted very often

The simple fact is we live in a drug soaked chemical society, prescription drugs, leisure and hedonism drugs, harmful and curing drugs, chemicals added to food and drink, sweeteners flavourings, preservatives, organic and natural or synthesised in laboratories and factories. Both legal and illegal substances are commonplace, used for beneficial useful and/or indulgence purposes, without agreement on which quite often. Surely the only rational and sensible policy is to be honest and open about risks and dangers in all these areas. As Professor Nutt, before he was sacked from his drugs advisory post to the government wanted, we have to regulate drugs used for pleasure or indulgence on a scale according to their risk to health, the same as we do for chemical additives to food, or with medicines.

Simplistic prohibition has failed again, as it did with alcohol in theUSA. It is no longer just backroom laboratories, like the ‘operation Julie’ LSD producers of the seventies though as in cannabis farms they still exist, but legal third world factories with industrial technology manufacturing for export.  Mafia type huge corporations form cartels in South andCentral Americato cultivate large poppy and coca plantations and are rich enough and well-connected and skilled enough to suborn security forces and even governments.

The most harmful drug, heroin, was a tiny problem before prohibition. The number of addicts known to the Home Office (mostly heroin addicts) grew from 2,400 in 1979 to around 18,000 in 1990 and almost 45,000 by 1996. Then a new generation of heroin user smoked the drug, although many of these switched later to injecting. LikeAmerica, the drug became associated with poverty and unemployment but soon expanded into all social classes. Acquisitive crime and local low level dealing increased as poor heroin users sought to support their habit.

Today, there are estimated to be close to 340,000 problematic users of heroin in theUK. These numbers are likely to be an underestimate, It is now well beyond any argument that legal prohibition has failed utterly.

A continuing problem is drug use because of performance achievement, most blatantly in sports as in cycling competitions, on demanding and exhausting rock ‘n roll tours and fierce financial markets. The Olympic organisers in theUKnow see their local simplistic user/athlete prohibition disallowed by higher authorities. While peak exceptional performance is so highly valued and rewarded there will always be a demand for a chemical boost.

Those of us who want an end to the increasingly corrupting, damaging and irrelevant 20^th century drugs prohibitions feel we may be pushing on an open door with editorials like The Observer today (08/04/12)

“All wars end. Eventually. Even the war on drugs – resilient for so long – is starting to show signs of exhaustion….

 A regulated market would move the market out of the murderous, barbarous hands of the cartels and into the free market. It would facilitate the introduction of the type of public health programmes that have been so effective in reducing smoking. And it could regulate the strength and even safety of many drugs.”

We all take drugs but rarely keep a record, or even notice our personal drug use, by which is meant ALL self-administered, usually small, doses of chemical substances known to be psychologically or physically active. Most provide more or less effective solutions to perceived need as with painkillers. We all recognise as familiar phrases:

“I could really use a nice cup of tea”, “I cannot start the day without my coffee”

“Goodness knows I could use a drink” meaning alcohol.

Never mind the illicit: “Want a puff, a snort, a trip?” or “Fancy a line?” 

The extent of general use of all drugs is enormous, theUSgovernment’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, known as Nhanes, shows prescription drug use alone soared in the past decade according to Nicholas Bakalar (Published by The New York Times on October 18, 2010). The report cited data findings that spending on prescription drugs more than doubled over the last decade, even after accounting for inflation. In constant dollars, Americans spent more than $234 billion on prescription drugs in 2008, up from $104.6 billion in 1999.

There are also over the counter remedies, pills for a purpose: cold cures, hangovers and digestive complaints, dietary supplements, sweeteners an infinite exoticas Damien Hirst exhibits as Art, and there are the illegal drugs before beginning to contemplate legal indulgence as in beer wine and spirits plus tobacco.

The New York Times reported on June 14 2008 that:

“Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal, Florida Says,

MIAMI— From “Scarface” to “Miami Vice,” Florida’s drug problem has been portrayed as the story of a single narcotic: cocaine. But for Floridians, prescription drugs are increasingly a far more lethal habit.

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.

Law enforcement officials said that the shift toward prescription-drug abuse  which began here about eight years ago, showed no sign of letting up and that the state must do more to control it.

“You have health care providers involved, you have doctor shoppers, and then there are crimes like robbing drug shipments,” said Jeff Beasley, a drug intelligence inspector for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which co-sponsored the study. “There is a multitude of ways to get these drugs, and that’s what makes things complicated.”

The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.”Floridait is generally accepted scrutinizes drug-related deaths more closely than do other states in theUS.

The bifurcation, the division, between the legal and the common prohibited substances like cannabis, LSD, amphetamines and heroin we all know of. The latter have their strength and purity untested, dealers ‘cut’ and adulterate in pursuit of profit generating horrendous health risks. On the other hand there are the totally everyday legally allowed and mass-marketed branded caffeine and alcohol delivery systems, on TV, sponsoring sport and which almost invisible because they are ubiquitous. This bifurcation seems to distract and blind us to an actually seamless reality, inducing a general blind spot over how we live now bathed in a sea of pharmacologically and physically active substances.

This is, in mental health term, called denial. Generally in psychology a state of mind marked by a refusal or an inability to recognize and deal with a serious personal problem, but we have it on a societal/political level. In such debate as exists the focus gets distracted by the prohibition/legalisation argument now becoming current but it is much wider than that. The fact of drug use is huge and everywhere, in the world of sports, in the pop/rock music world, in health, it is instrumental in massive death rates, tens of thousands in the drug smuggling ‘wars’ of central and south America.

In the same issue of the Observer quoted above Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country’s military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use an upcoming summit with President Obama to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition and thus the profitability of smuggling.

 “The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated.” 

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic:

 “To suggest liberalisation – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and and produced without any restrictions?” 

If we move beyond denial, beyond simplistic even risible prohibitions and ‘wars’ and admit it is a common and seemingly eternal part of our humanity to use our wits and apply to ourselves such chemicals as ease our passage through this mortal life, this ‘vale of tears’, then being in possession of the ‘bigger picture’ might, as it does for the individual in therapy, enable more constructive engagement and better solutions. We can then reduce harm, including both to law enforcers and victims, diminish pain, and prevent much death and injury. Surely we can do better than the irrational, illogical, dangerous piecemeal patchwork of laws and regulations we have cobbled together over decades.

An end to the notion of distinguishing quite irrationally between legal and illegal drugs for religious reasons, international convention, cultural difference or moral habit and not on the basis of health and harm caused, could be the beginning of proper recognition of where we are really at and where we go from here. All drugs have effects we need educating about, all need regulating according to perceived risk and need.

In the preface to his world wide survey ‘Out of It, A Cultural History of Intoxication’ Stuart Walton (2001 Hamish Hamilton) says:

“Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived, and yet throughout the entire Christian historical era in the West, it has been subject to a growing accretion of religious, legal and moral censure. These days, we are scarcely able to whisper its name for fear of falling foul of the law, of compromising ourselves in the eyes of others…”

Not facing squarely up to this present reality which has grown from a long history of human use is simply denial.

The UK Parliamentary Science Select Committee said the present system was based on historical assumptions, not scientific assessment.

The designation of drugs in classes A, B and C should be replaced with one more closely reflecting the harm they cause. It rates some illegal drugs as less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, see chart or click on link below.

Suggested rating of drugs according to harm done

 

 

 

 

I am occasionally moved to psychological speculation, who isn’t?

As a former psychodynamic counsellor with years of training and some professional practice am I gifted with any greater insight as a result?

Maybe just a little, I know some of the concepts, Freudian and others and a bit of jargon and sometimes interpretations do seem to leap out. But it is a slippery old practice, its hard enough to even know oneself never mind others.