PSYCHOTROPIC DELIGHTS

Sadie Plant On Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde And The Drug Jones In All Of Us

Beginning in Europe before the Middle Ages, the semi-nomadic tribes of
Siberia and Lapland discovered that their native reindeeer had a voracious
appetite for a certain kind of mushroom, Amanita muscaria.

The mushroom, otherwise known as "fly agaric," is one of the most potent
naturally occurring psychoactive substances known to man, but in its fresh,
unprocessed form, contains chemical compounds that are difficult for humans
to digest.

So the shamans would follow and wait, and when the beasts had eaten their
fill, they would drink the reindeer's urine - and fly. Men with beards,
dressed in fur-trimmed coats and long black boots, tripping in the wake of
their reindeer.

Sound familiar?

Yes, Virginia, Santa was a mushroom head.

This is just one of many enlightening anecdotes Sadie Plant introduces in
Writing on Drugs, a simple and remarkably sober account of the ways in
which drugs have infiltrated nearly every world culture, religion and canon.

It is not a new story - Plant learned of mushroom-grazing reindeer from
Valentina and Gordon Wasson's two-volume Mushrooms, Russia and History, for
example - but it is rarely told with such integrity.

Legends of drugs are legion on the edges of society; you can find them on
deviant Web pages and in books published by fringe houses.

Plant's genius lies in having woven them into a compact and fluid history
of humanity, a respectable chronicle in which Santa-the-mycological-shaman
stands alongside Sigmund Freud, Hasan Sabbah, Edgar Allen Poe and Charlie
Parker in a long line of eminent drug users who in various ways reinvented
their respective cultures.

Writing on Drugs begins, as surveys of psychotropic substances so often do,
with opium.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was on it when he dreamed of "Kubla Khan," and the
drug allowed him to experience fantasies so potent he coined the term
"willing suspension of disbelief" for the benefit of future theater critics.

Opium may have given Poe access to the twilight worlds that inspired "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue," which literary scholars from Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle to Dorothy L. Sayers cite as the first example of detective fiction.

Doyle, of course, had his own day with opium, as did his fictional Sherlock
Holmes. But both Doyle and his Holmes found further inspiration in yet
another substance, the isolated chemical of the coca leaf, cocaine.

Like an ardent conspiracy theorist, Plant finds drugs in everything; like a
scholar, she makes an economical and convincing case for each conjecture.
Jules Verne, she notes, admitted to imbibing "the wonderful tonic wine" of
the coca leaf, which might account for his tripping around the world in a
mere 80 days; Mark Twain may have been moved by the drug to choose a pen
name that acknowledged his split nature.

Robert Louis Stevenson drew upon it to transform Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde,
and the coca brew, in its soda-pop form introduced in 1886, fueled a young
country in the furious throes of technological development. The original
Coca-Cola, says Plant, was marketed as a tonic to "the most nervous nation
in the world."

Cocaine also played a significant role in the development of modern
psychotherapy. The information has been excised from most official
biographies of Sigmund Freud, but in his letters to his beloved Martha, the
father of psychoanalysis acknowledges how his shadow self was revealed to
him on cocaine. "The drug had shown him his own hidden Hyde," Plant writes,
"and allowed him to talk about it too: The drug untied his tongue and
allowed him to make those 'silly confessions' to Martha about both his
'wretched self' and his 'daring and fearless being,' the desiring wolf that
lurked inside his shy sheepskin." Freud later prescribed the drug to his
mentor, Ernst von Fleischl, as a cure for morphine addiction.

But when the treatment failed - von Fleischl died of a cocaine overdose,
still a junkie - Freud took the lesson to heart and forswore drug therapy
in favor of interactive analysis.

In so doing, he created in the psychiatric profession a conflict between
drug and talking cures that endures to this day.

The extremes of ambivalence with which Freud responded to his drug - first
embracing it as a cure-all, then debunking it as a fraudulent distraction -
are common in Plant's accounts.

For all her fascination with psychotropic delights, she is well aware that
the psychoactive substances she speaks of have been alternately dreaded and
revered for good reason.

Nearly every substance that first produces in its subject a superhuman
euphoria loses either its magic or its interest after repeated use or
abuse; worse, drugs used recklessly turn on their users with a vengeance.

In Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey wrote of
longing to be free of opium's nightmares, and yet pronounced himself unable
to break out of its grasp; Anais Nin was a "cascade of blue rainfall" on
her first acid trip, but later disparaged the "dissolving, dissipating,
vanishing quality of drug dreams." After taking mushrooms, Arthur Koestler
decided to side with Charles Baudelaire before him and declared the
psychedelic route to personal growth a facile substitute for enlightenment.
"I solved the secret of the universe last night," he said, "but this
morning I forgot what it was."

Plant lets such stories stand on their own; she doesn't bother to argue
whether drugs are evil or benevolent, and for the most part remains
steadfastly apolitical about her subject.

Her evenhandedness ends, however, in the last third of the book, in which
she tackles the many bizarre and often nonsensical laws governing the use
of drugs.

She is especially forthright on the criminalization of hemp: "Even birdseed
distributors argued that canaries would stop singing without marijuana
seeds," Plant writes, but "several large industries and wealthy
industrialists stood to gain from the prohibition of a plant that had not
only recreational uses but also medicinal value and a wide range of other
commercial uses." With the propaganda assistance of William Randolph Hearst
- - a close friend of President Hoover's drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger - in
1937 cannabis became "the first of many drugs to join opiates and cocaine
on the wrong side of national and international law."

Just as hashish determined the nonlinear structure of the Arabian narrative
and psychoactive Syrian rue wound its way into Persian carpets, speed and
acid influenced profoundly both the political aspirations and artistic
impulses of America. Amphetamine sulfate lifted the country out of the
depression and remained popular through the '50s; Plant speculates that
John F. Kennedy may have been on it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LSD,
which the CIA tested by, among other methods, dosing unwitting businessmen
in a brothel, gave rise to an entirely new culture of intellectuals mining
the mysteries of creation from their souls. "Opiates had calmed and numbed
the 19th century; cocaine came online with electricity; speed had let the
20th century keep up with its own new speeds," writes Plant. LSD, which is
chemically similar to serotonin, taught its users about the chemical and
computational nature of their brains.

Acid gave the world both Prozac and software.

Writing on Drugs is a trifling title for the broad sweep of this small book
- - as Plant herself notes, words often fail the drug experience. But she
also points out that there are other ways of writing. "Drugs have made
music in ways that are far more compelling and immediate than all the
convoluted routes on which they have changed words," she writes, and
proceeds to embark on a description of MDMA-influenced electronica that is
transcendent in its evocative precision.

Her detailed account of the drug's high is no less rich, but it stops short
of a celebration. "MDMA," she says, "takes the fear of death away."

What is true for opium, is true for marijuana, is true for Ecstasy:
Whatever a substance's addictive power or side effects, they are in one way
all the same: Drugs allow humans to discover hidden parts of themselves,
but without conscience and care, they can just as easily bring on
self-destruction. Without them, we may not have discovered the chemicals
that power our brain, the circuitry that makes us feel and think, the
shadows and light that make us human.

Yet under their sway, men and women have suffered miseries a drug-free
world might have spared them. There is, finally, no easy response to the
questions drugs raise: "The reasons for the laws and the motives for the
ways, the nature of the pleasure and the trouble drugs can cause, the
tangled webs of chemicals, the plants, the brains, machines," Plant
concludes, "ambiguity surrounds them all."