Recreational marijuana is now legal in ten states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands (talk about “far out”). Two countries—Canada and Uruguay (the Canada of Latin America)—have fully legalized the consumption and sale of marijuana. Two other countries (with absolutely nothing else in common)—South Africa and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia—have declared all personal possession legal. Marijuana is legally tolerated in licensed cafés in the Netherlands. At least thirty-two other nations, as diverse as Croatia and Jamaica and Luxembourg and Ukraine, have decriminalized the drug.
Medical marijuana is legal in forty-eight countries and in thirty-three U.S. states and all U.S. overseas territories. We know how it goes with medical marijuana. I have a great bumper sticker idea, yours free for the taking.
MEDICAL MARIJUANA MAKES ME SICK!
Health care provider: “What are your symptoms?”
Patient: “I’m not getting high.”
Marijuana has become . . . well, maybe not exactly “respectable” but no more worthy of rebuke than walking down Bourbon Street with a Hurricane in a Solo cup. (Although if you’ve got a doobie in your other hand you can still get ticketed in New Orleans, $40 for a first offense. But to put the social odium in perspective, it’s a $50 fine if you smoke a Marlboro in a Bourbon Street bar.)
Marijuana is an accepted fact. And it’s almost a fact that other mind-altering drugs will be accepted. (I love that phrase “mind-altering drugs.” As if there were no changes in brain function after you drink six cups of coffee before doing your taxes or after you drink four martinis before putting the nut dish on your head, mounting the back of the sofa, and reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to the cocktail party. But I digress. Which I find I’m doing a lot while writing about the drug culture. It may have something to do with the drugs. I’ll have to go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.)
In 2014 Scientific American ran an editorial, “End the Ban on Psychoactive Drug Research.”
In 2017 the National Institutes of Health publication Neuropsychopharmacology (take a big toke and say that without exhaling) presented a peer-reviewed paper, “Modern Clinical Research on LSD,” supportive of the position taken in the Scientific American editorial. The paper noted, “Clinical research on LSD came to a halt in the early 1970s because of political pressure,” said, “The first modern research findings from studies of LSD . . . have only very recently been published,” and concluded, in its abstract, “These data should contribute to further investigations of the therapeutic potential of LSD in psychiatry.”
In 2018 the Journal of Palliative Medicine published an article, “Taking Psychedelics Seriously,” saying, “Recent published studies have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of psilocybin [’shrooms], MDMA [ecstasy], and ketamine [rave drug favorite Special K] when administered in a medically supervised and monitored approach.”
Of course “palliative medicine” is the treatment of terminally ill patients so no jokes, please, about people “dying to get a hold of these drugs.” But the path to legalization does seem to go through the doctor’s office before it gets to The Doors of Perception, as Aldous Huxley called his serious, thoughtful, scholarly book about getting stoned.
Which is the point of drugs. Not that we sixties “heads” weren’t “like, really into” serious, thoughtful, scholarly excuses for drug taking.
Back in 1902 William James, philosopher, physician, and “the father of American psychology,” wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
This was James’s excuse for getting stoned on nitrous oxide. None of us heads had sat down and read The Varieties of Religious Experience. But we all knew about the laughing gas.
More contemporaneous to the 1960s, psychology PhD and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary was on the college lecture circuit advocating that we blow our minds: “These wondrous plants and drugs could free man’s consciousness and bring a new conception of man, his psychology and philosophy.”
I went to hear Leary speak when he came to my school and . . . I refer the reader back to the second paragraph of this chapter.
I got the Leary quote from an anthology of 1960s Esquire articles that was sitting on my bookshelf. In 1968 Leary wrote a piece for the magazine that starts out as an account of a 1960 psychedelic drug experiment supposedly for clinical research purposes supposedly conducted under controlled circumstances and ends with two naked beatnik poets—Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky—wandering around Leary’s house while his teenage daughter is trying to do her homework.
Leary also spoke at my friend Dave Barry’s school. Dave has a better recollection of the experience, which he recounts in his book Dave Barry Turns 50.
Naturally, being college students, we did not rush out and take a powerful, potentially harmful drug that we knew virtually nothing about just because some guy told us to. No sir. First we asked some hard questions, such as: “Where can we get some?” Then we rushed out and took it.
We participants in the sixties drug culture did want to open “the doors of perception.” There is indeed a lot about life, the world, and the universe that we don’t perceive in our ordinary day-to-day consciousness. And we could have perceived a lot more of it if we’d taken courses in biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy instead of getting wasted and spacing out on the slideshow in Art Appreciation 101. (“Darkness at Noon”—easy A. The doddering professor had been giving the same multiple-choice exam for forty-five years.)
We were searching for “cosmic truths.” Although we weren’t searching very hard, judging by the cosmic truths we found.
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are
