Pubdate: Thu, 14 Sep 2000
Source: LA Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2000, Los Angeles Weekly, Inc.
Contact:  P.O. Box 4315, L.A., CA 90078
Fax: 323 465-3220
Website: http://www.laweekly.com/
Author: Judith Lewis

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."
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