Puritanical Assumptions about Drug Use in the Entertainment Field
merican psychology operates according to a long-standing puritanical assumption when it comes to so-called "drug users" in the entertainment field. The party line goes like this:
"They could be as good - or even better - if they were not using drugs!"
Could Jimi Hendrix have been as good - or even better - without drugs? How about Robin Williams?
No. The above citation is a mere statement of faith that belongs in a Christian Science catechism, not in a psychological textbook.
It is a statement of faith because there is no logical reason to suppose that human beings were meant to live their lives without emotional support from mood-altering substances, especially when those substances occur abundantly in nature and grow in profusion all around us, in the form of mushrooms, poppies, ibogaine, etc. In fact, we rely on such emotional support every day when we use drugs such as nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. When we puritanically declare that others be drug free, we simply want them to conform to our own self-serving notions of what the good drugs are. We don't feel any need to expand and sharpen our minds through the use of certain illegal naturally occurring substances: why should they?
(Of course, we're assuming here, as the Puritans do, that by "drugs," we simply mean substances that have not been supplied by a reputable psychiatrist. In other words, we don't so much fear drug-improved performance per se as we fear the use of illegal drugs for attaining this end.)
But the fact is that for many of us, the unmedicated personality says "no" to showing off, to "putting oneself out there," to standing up for oneself, etc., especially before thousands or even millions of people. We are attacked by the psychological quality that Poe called "the imp of the perverse,"* whispering in our ear and telling us to fail. Is it not obvious in such cases that certain mood-altering substances could have the beneficial result of raising one beyond nagging self-doubts, such that one can access and express inner talents that our knee-jerk self-doubt would have otherwise suppressed?
True, a person can cope with this self-doubt by shunning fields like show business entirely, but if that is the field in which one's innate talent lies, would it not be folly for such a person to "just say no" to drugs and thereby just say no to personal fulfillment in his or her life?
Seen in this realistic psychological light, drug use in the entertainment field makes perfect sense - not for all, of course, but for many. But if this statement sounds outrageous to you, let me reword it using terminology that carries less emotional baggage given today's Drug War mentality: "Seen in this realistic psychological light, the use of performance-enhancing medication in the entertainment field makes perfect sense."
The fact that these self-doubting entertainers are taking risks with their lives (by buying performance-enhancing medications on the street) is to be blamed on the Drug War, not on the performers themselves. (How can we blame a person for doing whatever they feel is necessary in order to succeed in their vocational dreams and thus obtain the self-actualizing pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy?) It is the Drug War that ensures such risky behaviour is necessary, first by spreading disinformation about mood-altering drugs (making it difficult for drug users to choose wisely) and then by rendering those drugs illegal (making it difficult for the user to guarantee the purity of the drugs that he or she purchases on the street).
To solve this problem, we have to do more than decriminalize drugs. We have to change American mental healthcare practice so that it recognizes this instinct to self-fulfillment as a (or rather THE) genuine motivating factor in the depressed and the anxious.
Had Hendrix or Williams naively attempted to seek their performance-enhancing drugs through psychiatry, they would have been immediately tagged as potential addictive types. But that is a bad diagnosis. On a fundamental level, those performers did not crave drugs, they craved self-fulfillment. Drugs (or "performance-enhancing medications," if you prefer) were merely a necessary means to that end, even if the hypocritical Drug Warrior (while smoking his cigars and swilling his whiskey) would steadfastly deny it.
Follow-up thoughts March 20, 2019
Yet psychiatry holds to the materialistic notion that the drugs we supply a patient must fix some specific underlying chemical problem, not merely allow the patient to be successful in life -- as if all things good in life (including happiness and serenity) do not follow naturally when we allow a patient to be successful (regardless of our knee-jerk abhorrence for the substances that may be employed toward that end).
To put it another way, psychiatry these days (thanks to its absurdly limited pharmacopeia of mood-altering substances) is not good at helping patients achieve their dreams; instead psychiatry's talent lies in helping patients become satisfied with falling short of their true potential in life (while the psychiatrists insist that - not to worry, Jimi - at least now we are treating the "root causes" of your problems and are therefore being truly scientific about this! So what if you're not a rock star: at least you're getting help from real scientists!)
Yes, Hendrix died of a drug overdose, but only because America never discussed mood-altering substances honestly. Instead, psychiatry ignored illegal substances and Drug Warriors demonized them. The result was that no credible information was out there by which Hendrix might have steered clear of disaster, and even if it were, Hendrix was forced by drug prohibition to rely on street drugs of uncertain potency and chemical constitution.
Yet, the Drug Warriors never learn. They cite each problem that they themselves create (like drug deaths in America and violence overseas) as a reason why the Drug War must go on. It's a circular argument with which they hope to deflect criticism and ignore their own culpability. And it's an argument that psychiatry abets by failing to recognize the true motive behind much illegal drug-taking: namely, the search for self-actualization in life. By ignoring this most fundamental of human motivations, psychiatry contributes by default to the simplistic notion that drug users are rabble-rousing hedonists, a view-point that eggs on the fascist mentality that seeks to suppress illegal drugs with unconstitutional methods.
*See also the correlation that GK Chesterton draws between reason and madness in the first chapter of "Orthodoxy." Though Chesterton never remotely broaches the topic of brain-enhancing chemistry, the phenomenon of madness as he describes it cries out for the intervention of psychoactive substances to distract the mind from mere reason, insofar as there are no other known treatments that have been shown to reliably help a neurotic to think outside the box of the everyday, and thus expand their mental cosmos.
The Links Police
Relax, I just stopped you to give you some link suggestions about the psychology of substance use, of which American psychology is shamefully ignorant, by the way. You might check out, for instance, Using Opium to Fight Depression and how about America's Puritan Obsession with Sobriety or better yet The Philosophy of Drug Use. Oh, and check out your left rear tail light when you get a chance, would ya? It doesn't seem to be illuminating when you tap on the brake. Oh, yeah, here's one more of Brian's essay that we're calling 'a link of interest': Puritanical Assumptions about Drug Use in the Entertainment Field. Get it? 'A link of interest'? Oh, I'm hot tonight.
Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2022
The rock star's use of drugs has much in common psychologically speaking with the use of drugs by Delphic sibyls and other oracles. Each is expected to enter into a frenzied state unfettered by fatigue or neurosis. Both would be booed off their respective stages if they were to evince any uncertainty in performing their job. Today, though, we want to enjoy Sherlock Holmes and Robin Williams while yet disparaging the medicines that helped them be who they were.
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
merican psychology operates according to a long-standing puritanical assumption when it comes to so-called "drug users" in the entertainment field. The party line goes like this:
The rock star's use of drugs has much in common psychologically speaking with the use of drugs by Delphic sibyls and other oracles. Each is expected to enter into a frenzied state unfettered by fatigue or neurosis. Both would be booed off their respective stages if they were to evince any uncertainty in performing their job. Today, though, we want to enjoy Sherlock Holmes and Robin Williams while yet disparaging the medicines that helped them be who they were. 
