You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (49 page)

Science has found the biological underpinnings of some of these social benefits. One example is the effect of alcohol on the male brain. Men have more difficulty expressing their feelings verbally than women. The portions of the male brain that handle these matters are less integrated than in the female brain.
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Alcohol breaks down the discrete compartments in the male brain and allows males to “open up” emotionally.
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Perhaps the most social drug is Ecstasy (MDMA). MDMA is a stimulant with psychedelic qualities. It releases people emotionally and allows them to relate to others. Its possibilities were demonstrated by the couple Sue and Shane Stevens.
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In the mid-1990s Shane learned that he had terminal cancer. The resulting stress was destroying their relationship until a friend suggested they try Ecstasy.

Under Ecstasy’s influence they talked about all their emotions and fears. As Sue described, “One night . . . changed our life permanently . . . . We woke up to the same people we had fallen in love with . . . There were no barriers between us, no fears, no anger . . . .”
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Afterwards Shane was a new person. He stopped using painkillers and led an active life with their children. A month before his death in 1999 they used Ecstasy for the last time: “We wanted one last night. We spent the next six hours recapping our lives together. We talked about everything . . . We lived our entire life together in that night, plus we lived fifty more years.”
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At one point during that evening Shane said, “You know, it’s really great not to have cancer tonight.”
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Despite its promising use by psychiatrists in therapy, when kids started using it at raves in the mid-1980s the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made MDMA a Schedule I drug. Schedule I is the most severe category, supposedly reserved for drugs with high abuse potential and no acceptable medical use. MDMA has virtually no addiction potential and researchers protested its criminalization.
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Since the 1920s federal drug agents have harassed the medical profession into ignoring patients with chronic pain from catastrophic injuries. In 1996,
60 Minutes
ran a segment on the ludicrous ramifications of the drug war on pain treatment. It featured the hearing of Dr. William Hurwitz in which Virginia’s board of medical examiners debated whether to revoke his license to practice.

The hearing involved a procession of tragic victims from all over the country testifying that Hurwitz was the only doctor who had the courage to assist them. One man was in a car crash and by the time he was discovered his legs had completely
frozen. After the gangrenous parts of his body were amputated he had lost everything below his navel. He testified that morphine prevents the sensation that his lower half is still being sawed off. Another witness was a former police officer from upstate New York who had been crushed by a school bus. He threatened the board that if it revoked Hurwitz’s license and cut off his prescription he would commit suicide.

Amazingly the Virginia Board of Medicine held its line in the war on drugs and revoked Hurwitz’s license. As the Virginia state police manual warned, “Physicians should be alert for ‘Professional Patients’ showing up in wheelchairs missing various limbs.”
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None who testified were able to bewitch the medical examiners with their sob stories. One examiner said that by revoking Hurwitz’s license the board might have saved other lives. The crushed police officer followed through on his threat and killed himself four weeks later.

Law enforcement continues to send undercover agents and informants into doctors’ offices to lure them into writing bad prescriptions.
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Only 3.27 percent of users of medically prescribed opiates develop any form of addiction. This figure drops to .19 percent for patients who did not have a prior history of drug abuse.
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Winston Churchill used amphetamine and barbiturate to help him navigate World War II.
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The entire American military used as well. With amphetamines being packed in ration kits, the American soldier in World War II averaged one pill per day.
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Despite going through the equivalent of a four-year speed binge, “The Greatest Generation” managed to avoid mass addiction and went on to “build modern America.”
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Nor did drugs appear to damage the faculties of greatest generation member John F. Kennedy. Kennedy continued to use uppers into his presidency, including during his summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 and during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
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Amphetamine was not reserved for the performance of the fighting men. Although the habit was probably widespread in sports, European cyclists were the most candid. Italian champion Fausto Coppie told French radio in the late 1950s that all competitive cyclists used amphetamine and those who disagreed did not know what they were talking about. Jacques Anquetil, who won the Tour de France, told a
journalist in 1967 that only an idiot would believe a professional cyclist who races 235 days a year could manage without stimulants.
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Even regular folks used amphetamine in the middle of the century.
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It was available without prescription until 1954 and was widely used to stay awake by truck drivers and students during final exams. A historian notes, “enormous quantities of oral amphetamines were consumed in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s with apparently little misuse.” It was not until criminalization in 1965 that the methamphetamine “speed freak” became responsible for “a wave of unspeakable acts of violence.”

Just as stimulants are used for energy, depressants are used to relax. The most common depressant is alcohol. During the late 1960s and 1970s, another popular depressant was Quaaludes. Brooklyn College went through five thousand pills a day and at Ohio State University, where fraternities had jars of it available, football players routinely used Quaaludes to come down after games.
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Before the war on drugs, other drugs were used to relax as well. One of these was opium, the precursor of heroin. Unlike alcohol and Quaaludes, opium—taken in moderation—does not interfere with performance. William Gladstone (1809–1898), one of Britain’s most esteemed prime ministers, took laudanum (an opium/alcohol mix) before giving speeches to appease his nerves and keep him controlled.
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The noted British abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759–1833) attributed all his success as a public speaker to taking opium beforehand.
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Any new experience can foster creativity, and drugs can provide fascinating and unique experiences. The ancient Greeks and Romans were well aware of this and believed drug-induced dreams, visions, and hallucinations were an avenue to self-knowledge, discovery, and creativity.
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The most famous example of Plato’s “divine madness” could be the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. His heavy use of yellow pigment, most notably the yellow coronas in
Starry Night
, likely came from the visual distortions of the drug digitalis.
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Some drugs have left their imprints on entire eras. The influence of LSD’s perceptual distortions can be seen all over the art of the 1960s, from the surreal music of the Beatles and Pink Floyd to the comic artist Robert Crumb, who credits acid for molding his trademark distorted figures.
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The writer Ken Kesey came up with the idea of a schizophrenic mute narrator for his acclaimed book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1962) during an acid trip.
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Allen Ginsburg wrote the famous poem
Howl
(1956) after a night spent walking San Francisco’s streets under the influence of the natural hallucinogen peyote.
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Just like LSD was
the
influence on 1960s artists, marijuana was
the
influence on
French artists one hundred years earlier. Members of the Hashish Club included the great literary figures Dumas (
Count of Monte Cristo
), Nerval, Hugo (
Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
), Boissard, Delacroix, Gautier, and Baudelaire.
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Across the ocean, their American counterpart, Edgar Allan Poe, was also a marijuana “adherent.”
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The twentieth-century literary giant Norman Mailer has said that marijuana is “divine” for providing one with new associations and “extraordinary thoughts.”
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When asked if drugs aided his creativity, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys replied, “Very much so, yeah. Marijuana helped me write
Pet Sounds.”
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(Pet Sounds
was ranked by
Rolling Stone
magazine as the second greatest album of all time.)
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The contemporary novelist Tom Robbins explained further:

Drug-invoked creativity has not been limited to artists. A Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has credited LSD with assistance in formulating the concepts for a paper he published in 1968.
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Arguably the most prolific mathematician of the twentieth century, Paul Erdös, attributed his creativity to amphetamines.
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Similar credit has been given to marijuana by the psychologist Susan Blackmore
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and the astronomer Carl Sagan.
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Ralph Abraham, the mathematician who invented chaos theory, said, “In the 1960s a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians.”
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Perhaps the most stunning acid-induced discovery was that of DNA’s structure by Francis Crick in 1953. Crick, who was active in the drug legalization movement, told associates that he was on acid when he perceived the infamous double helix, the
software of life. When confronted about this by a reporter he did not deny it but did threaten to sue if the reporter made it public. (The reporter went public after Crick’s death in 2004.)
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Hallucinogens also played a role in the personal computer revolution that has transformed society. Early visionaries such as Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Douglas Englebart (invented the computer mouse), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Bill Gates (Microsoft) all used LSD. It is not coincidence that the tech capital of the world, Silicon Valley, sprouted adjacent to the psychedelic center of the universe.
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Kevin Herbert, a programmer who was an early employee of Cisco Systems, still solves his toughest technical problems on acid and was instrumental in Cisco banning drug testing.
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