1. The Visible Backstory of Drugs in America

Someone asked Gandhi his opinion of American civilization.
His reply: "I think it would be a good idea."

The United States was constructed by a collective consciousness shaped by three drugs: alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. Nobody’s written (or, as far as I know, even tried to write) the definitive history of the effects of those drugs on American civilization (pace, Gandhi).

That America is a drug-based culture is, naturally, not a popular truth. It hardly fits with the self-sufficient image of manly, wilderness-taming denial still popular among super-patriots and myopic religionists.

Ever in denial, the more demonstrative neo-puritans among us have railed mainly against alcohol. Their complaints culminated in the disastrous anti-alcohol experiment of the 1920s called Prohibition. Everybody eventually realized that making one of the Big Three Drugs illegal just wasn’t going to work, so Prohibition was cancelled and for a while we coasted along more or less undisturbed in our tripartite national high.

Lately we have begun again to tinker with the approved American dope mix. Rather than making cigarettes illegal, the anti-tobacconists are now using a combination of brain-washing (advertising), selective restriction ("NIMR", i.e., Not in MY Restaurant), and exorbitant taxation.

Quietly, through the centuries of altered American consciousness, as a kind of figured bass which you’re not aware of unless you pay really close attention to the music, there was always another strain of dope at work. For a long time it was simple and herb-based.

Marijuana, in its many forms, grows wild, widely, and well across North America, and nobody knows how much was smoked, nor when, nor where, nor by whom. It was there, all along, and only the most blindered puritan could deny that more than a few of our much-admired, hardy forebears were puffing away.

Historically, stronger, imported stuff was also easily available from your local apothecary. Until the 20th century, morphine, in a concoction known as "laudanum," was a commonly used panacea and pick-me-up (or let-me-down, as you will), providing a convenient break from the rigors of nation-building, slave-holding, and wilderness-conquering.

And not to forget that, still writ very large on billboards around the world, we have the name of the drink that made Atlanta famous, announcing for all to see the fact that cocaine itself was an ingredient in the original, famous "secret formula" locked away in a vault on Peachtree Street. Coca-Cola indeed.

Next thing you know, around the turn of the 20th century, here came ol’ Beelzebub fooling with music, which hitherto had been used as one of the controlling tools of good old-time religion. Before long, he was seducing the young and innocent with the off-beat of syncopation (the evil of rags) and the pellucid moan of blues-colored quarter-tones (the subversive dangers of jazz). When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city tremble.

The altered consciousness of the new music was fertile soil for the perception enhancing drugs already out there in the underground culture.

It was all very marginal, and safely repressed as a racial or "bohemian" thing, until all hell broke loose in the 1960s and suddenly the well-brought-up kids of Sunday-go-to-meeting parents were off at the university learning 1) to think, 2) to feel, and 3) to generally explore and raise hell outside of the box of the burbs.

First came marijuana. Then LSD. Peyote. Psilocybin. STP. DMT. PCP.

And finally, of course, the ultimate product of the alphabetization of drugs in uptight America: DEA. With lots of huzzahs and billions of bucks, the powers that continue to be proclaimed that their dope was the only dope and anybody else’s dope would henceforth and by God be extremely ILLEGAL. And furthermore, they’d set up a huge, expensive, vain bureaucracy, the Drug Enforcement Agency, to wage a huge, expensive, futile war against you-know-what.

Alcohol, nicotine, caffeine? No prob. Say yes as much as you want. But for the rest of the alphabet soup, if you know what’s good for you, sweet Nancy kept reminding us, you sure as hell better say NO and say it loud and clear.

Prohibition by any other name, yes?

If we announce we’re against it, and spend billions of dollars fighting it, that’s all that matters.

Ignore the forbidden fruit effect.

Believe the DEA statistics.

Ignore the fact that in the halls of every high school in the land you can arrange to get just about any part of the alphabet soup you want. Cheap.

Smile contentedly as the horrific public service commercials play across all channels.

Ignore the knowing grins of the young whose media-immersed antennae are so acutely sensitive to adult bullshit that they can spot propaganda coming 10 megahertz away.

As with all great empires, America defines the world and then pretends nothing outside its self-definition exists. Drugwise, no matter that humans have been smoking, munching, ingesting, and shooting up every plant they could get their hands on since Day One. No matter that humans will continue to do that whether Nancy Reagan likes it or not.

Are the drugs dangerous? Of course. Sometimes extremely dangerous. But how safe was life in the 20th century when humans killed 200 million of each other? Oops. I forgot. That was legal murder, called "war".

You would think that a reasonable society would agree that the best way to deal with the dangers of some of the available drugs would be through research. Study them, plot their effects, learn what the drugs do and how they do it. Are they dangerous all the time, in all settings, in all doses, for all people? Or are some of them in some doses and in some settings profoundly transcendental? Are some just plain fun?

Those are important questions to which we, at this late date, still don’t have answers.

Because around 1970 just about all research came to a stop. No career-minded scientist would or, legally, could touch LSD, or any of the other mind-benders.

After a couple of decades of denial, even the managers of the anti-drug war began to realize that they needed to know more about their enemies. In the early 1990s, a lone doctor, working in Albuquerque, broke the barrier. He managed to obtain government funding for a study of one of the drugs: DMT, di-methyl-tryptamine. It was the first legal study of a psychedelic in 30 years.

Rick Strassman, M.D. and psychiatrist, administered DMT to some 60 people in a carefully controlled clinical setting. Using the best scientific protocols, he set parameters and record responses.

He wrote a book about what happened: DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

Not all was sweetness and light in the year-long project. The setting—a hospital room, as Strassman was aware, was difficult, not especially conducive to metaphysical breakthroughs. But Strassman and his co-workers were sensitive to that and other problems as well. Not every subject responded well to DMT. There were a few bad trips. But on the whole, one senses that Strassman set up and ran a pioneering research project under challenging conditions with a great deal of humane insight.

IF you feel the present ruling class (political, scientific, technological, religious, educational, commercial) is running around naked in a terrible and dangerous parody of the King’s New Clothes,
IF you suspect that there’s more to life that accumulating money, toys, orgasms, fame, and emotionally dependent children,
IF the vaunted information revolution seems to you to be a mile wide and an inch deep,
IF your 401K provides little warmth and less light for the dark night of your soul,
Then you should read this book.

Why?

Hope. It offers startling hope in the form of glimpses through—to borrow the excellent trope of an earlier book title—a crack in the cosmic egg.

Like LSD, DMT is a powerful psychedelic. It profoundly alters your perceptions. Unlike LSD, it is fast-acting (within a minute or two of ingestion, you’re THERE), short-term (30 minutes later you’re back), and without appreciable side- or after-effects.

Just two of Strassman’s findings, and that will be enough for you to decide whether to get the book.

1. More than 50% of his subjects had coherent, realistic encounters with sentient beings who interacted intelligently. Further, many of these beings looked and behaved very much like those creatures described by so-called UFO abductees.

2. Many of Strassman’s subjects entered a life-altering, transcendental state.

Strassman, well-trained scientist that he is, is well aware of the many clever ways present conservative scientific thought dismisses such reports as hallucinatory. He goes to some pains to explain why he came to believe that what his subjects experienced through DMT was no more a hallucination than what you see every morning when you wake up.

Excerpt from one subject’s report:

I was in a void of darkness. Suddenly, beings appeared. They were cloaked, like silhouettes. They were glad to see me. They indicated that they had had contact with me as an individual before. They seemed pleased that we had discovered this technology… They wanted to learn more about our physical bodies. They told me humans exist on many levels…

Later the same subject had DMT again:

I went directly into deep space. They knew I was coming back and they were ready for me. They told me there were many things they could share with us when we learn how to make more extended contact…

While Strassman quotes extensively, and fascinatingly, from subject reports, much of the book is concerned with, first, an overview of psychedelics and then a summary of the difficulties he had to overcome in getting the approval and money for the project. At the end, he goes on at length about how and why the project wound down, and concludes with lengthy speculation about what it all means.

Much of the writing is disjointed and this reader longed for fuller excerpts from the subject reports.

Casting about for a helpful comparison, I came up with this analogy. Strassman’s book is sort of like one of those "world" maps from, say, 1450 or 1500. Europe is there pretty accurately. And maybe a good chunk of Africa. To the east, Asia trails off into an amorphous blob, while to the west, across the Atlantic, North and South America exist only as a few uncertain squiggles.

It took a long time and a lot of people exploring before we found out the true lay of the planetary land.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule gives us a faint sketch of an early map of the invisible worlds which the powerful interests of present-day reductive, materialistic science are determined to keep us from exploring.