Pubdate: 15 Jun 2001 Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, The (US) Copyright: 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Contact: http://chronicle.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/84 Author: Nick Bromell Note: Bromell is an associate professor of English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960's (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education JUST SAY THINK ABOUT IT: THE NEW CULTURAL ASSENT TO DRUG USE AND ABUSE The discovery that our souls are essentially chemicals has turned out to be less shocking than we might have supposed. How readily we are yielding to the knowledge that with the help of a few complex molecules, our thoughts can be sharpened, our moods improved, our despairs alleviated, and our anxieties eased. And while my childhood dream of being able to take knowledge pills instead of going to school remains unrealized, it seems inevitable that children will soon be taking learning-enhancement drugs, memory boosters, and other aids to reflection produced by pharmaceutical giants and happily prescribed by doctors and psychiatrists. It's true that the chemistry of subjectivity is frightening. One motive behind the war on "bad" drugs launched in the 1980's, I'd suggest, was a desire to hide from ourselves our growing acceptance of "good" drugs. But gradually we seem to be realizing that, sooner or later, we will all be on a drug of some kind -- if not on Ritalin in childhood, then on Prozac in our 30's; if not on Viagra in middle age, then smoking pot as we die of cancer. This is why more and more Americans are unwilling to take a hard line against drugs if that means simplistically refusing to consider why people actually take them. As a cultural historian, I see signs of this new tolerance everywhere I look, and Traffic is only the tip of the iceberg. In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey gets powerful help in his quest for a more meaningful life when he smokes some weed given to him by the boy next door. In Family Man, Nicolas Cage compares his miraculous alternative life to an acid trip that never stops. (How would he know?) In You Can Count on Me, the two main characters contentedly grow closer as they pass a joint back and forth. In all these cases, the drugs are what used to be called "mind-expanding" or psychedelic drugs -- substances that promote a vision of multiple realities, thereby nurturing a cosmopolitan sensibility that's at home in the world of different cultures and values. That quality is precisely what the Kevin Spacey character finds so useful as he struggles to get a new perspective on his life. Indeed, one begins to wonder how much of what we call the postmodern temperament has its roots in the eruption of mind-expanding drugs into the cultures of Europe and the United States that began in the 1950's and 1960's. (That Foucault dropped acid in Death Valley seems, after a minute or two, hardly surprising.) Whatever its cause, the shift in the public's attitude toward psychedelics is allowing us for the first time to really talk about them and to investigate their profound and complex impact on American culture. Indeed, the first thing we notice when we pay attention to the phenomenon is just how popular the psychedelic drugs are -- more popular by far than cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs. According to surveys taken since the mid-1970's by the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study, about half of all Americans have smoked pot and about one in seven has tripped on LSD. To anyone who cherishes the belief that mind-altering drugs went out of fashion 30 years ago, along with love beads and granny glasses, a recent New York Times Magazine piece on Ecstasy must have been a rude wake-up call. And of course the Times would not have run the piece if its editors hadn't felt that the news was now fit to print. Much of the discussion of psychedelics is taking place in mainstream popular culture, including movies, music, magazine articles, and television advertising. But what we find there is much more than a mere mention of pot or an allusion to acid. What we discover is the production of new narrative forms and new techniques that are capable of conveying something of the lived experience, or the "inscape," provided by such drugs. For example, researchers have shown that one of the most common effects of those compounds is a collapsing of the distinction between foreground and background. Marijuana and other psychedelics subvert the way we focus on just one phenomenon amid the welter of stimuli bombarding us. Those drugs flatten and democratize the field of vision, so that details usually overlooked suddenly become visible and fascinating. A number of recent films (Mission: Impossible 2, The Blair Witch Project) noticeably reproduce such effects visually, depriving us for moments at a time of the cues that signal what is more and what is less important. We see this playfulness with the object of attention even more strikingly in some TV ads, which we watch from start to finish without being sure we've identified the product or service being advertised. The cultures of hip-hop and rap, too, are saturated with a pot sensibility, audible not just in lyrics but in the way sampling gathers fragments of sound from disparate sources and collapses distinctions between old and new, musical and nonmusical, texture and substance. An even more powerful mimicry of psychedelics is produced by storytelling that radically disrupts a straightforward chronological sequencing of events. Of course, experimental art films and occasional geniuses like Hitchcock were twisting and knotting narrative decades ago. But ever since the huge success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it has become commonplace for the makers of blockbuster popular movies to mess with the minds of their viewers by turning time into a kind of Mnbius strip in which past, present, and future melt into one another. The Back to the Future series, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Pleasantville, and many other films offer viewers an experience not just of traveling through time but of living in time with a heightened awareness of its mystery and complexity. A third method of reproducing the ways psychedelics work is to confuse the distinction between inside and outside, by plunging the implied narrator into the minds of his characters (Being John Malkovich), by revealing suddenly that the narrator himself has unwittingly been a character in someone else's narrative (The Sixth Sense), or by intertwining multiple strands of narrative in ways that render the main characters in one as mere background characters in another (Traffic). In Jim Carrey's The Truman Show, we behold a fiction in which a famous actor plays the part of a man who thinks his life is "real" but who discovers that he's just an actor in a show. (Like the nursemaid on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, he may know that he's in a play, but he is anyway.) We experience an even more paranoid conflation of inner and outer in The Cell and a darkly comic bad trip in Monkeybone. Where do all these bizarre tales of mind travel come from if they're not expressions of a culture in which mind expansion and multiple realities have become facts of life? Even so-called reality TV blurs the line between fact and fantasy so routinely that we should call it by a truer name: alternative-reality TV. As a scholar who has tried to tell the story of the cultural work performed by rock and psychedelic drugs in the 60's, I know how difficult it is for academic historians and sociologists to come to grips with the changes in subjectivity effected by drugs of any kind. It is much easier to see drugs in popular culture when, say, Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller light up a joint in Something About Mary than when John Cusack accidentally tumbles into the mind of John Malkovich. But the latter film's vision of the porousness of subjectivity is truer to the fact that many drugs are not just objects in the world -- they are avenues to different ways of seeing the world. And that means that we will have to move beyond traditional historical methodologies if we want to understand what these drugs do and why so many people take them. Several historians have begun gingerly working in that terrain, sometimes with great success. Jay Stevens's Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream is not just a painstakingly researched chronicle of the popularization of LSD in this country, but a vividly narrated story that seeks out and capitalizes upon the numerous aleatory moments in that history. Ultimately, his account is driven not so much by a cause-and-effect logic of who influenced whom, but by a series of coincidences and synchronicities. (What else can you do with the fact that the C.I.A. was an instrumental conduit in the cultural dissemination of hallucinogens?) In his The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Thomas Frank persuasively advances the time-collapsing argument that capitalism long ago absorbed the sensibility of the counterculture and that Americans have been living in a psychedelicized adscape ever since. David Lenson's wittily titled On Drugs offers a nonjudgmental, comparative account of the workings of a broad spectrum of recreational drugs. The distinguished scholar Huston Smith has just written Cleansing the Doors of Perception, a serious examination of the roles psychedelics have played in world religions. And readers who peruse Charles Hayes's recently published Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures will find a sequence of first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales) that present, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last 30 years as refracted through the prism of a drug experience. What's most interesting about these varied examples of a new willingness to discuss drugs is not that they celebrate drugs (they don't) but that they signal our willingness to reflect, not just repress, to deliberate, not just dismiss. And we will need that kind of flexibility as we forge ahead into the brave new world of mind and mood drugs being created and marketed by pharmaceutical companies. Americans who believe that heroin, powder cocaine, and crack cocaine are the most profoundly dangerous drugs known to us will soon have to cope with the irresistible pressures of the profit motive as drug companies develop ever-more-sophisticated panaceas for the human psyche. Risky enough when they're prescribed and controlled, those drugs will become even more volatile as they enter the black market (as the painkiller OxyContin has) and circulate in a netherworld in which consumers combine and adapt them in ways unintended by their makers. As Americans increasingly accept that drugs are a fact of life, the war on cocaine and opiate derivatives will have to be reconfigured as part of a much broader set of cultural decisions and public policies. A dysfunctional culture would try to reach those decisions and forge those policies by way of denial, without ever really talking and thinking about the subject. A healthy culture, and certainly a healthily democratic one, will find ways to inject the topic into conversation, whether in jokes or in stories, in films or in TV shows, in music or in serious scholarship. I'm starting to hear that enlivened conversation everywhere I turn, and I hope it can be heard on Capitol Hill, too.