I was recently moping around my local Kroger's food store, waiting for the refill on the Effexor to which I am chemically addicted, when I noticed a colorful Time supplement entitled "The Science of Creativity" in the magazine aisle. "Great," I thought to myself, "here's another politically correct attempt at explaining creativity without reference to the psychoactive substances that can so obviously help one achieve it."
Mind you, I haven't read the supplement, and maybe Time magazine got it right, but I'm not optimistic given the plethora of timid tips on cultivating creativity that have passed for self-help in American journalism over the past 50 years of psychoactive prohibition. Authors on feel-good pieces about creativity have never been in a hurry to rock the boat by suggesting the politically incorrect fact that psychoactive substances can generate creativity out of whole cloth in a receptive mind under the right circumstances.
Why this huge omission?
It's based on the unspoken Drug War assumption that psychoactive substances are (drumroll, please) evil "drugs" that must be avoided at all costs (as opposed to socially blessed "medicines," of course), and therefore the less said about these evil "drugs," the better... when in reality, a substance is a substance is a substance - and is only good or bad as any specific use should prove it to be.
But thanks to the political manipulation of the discussion by the Richard Nixons of the world, we Americans (and our global counterparts, whom we have financially blackmailed into adopting our own jaundiced viewpoint on this matter) take a Christian Science view of psychoactive drugs and thus have the puritanical expectation that "true" creativity is that which occurs without the influence of chemical substances - as if the human mind is ever free of chemical substances in the first place. The only real question, of course, is: which chemical substances should we knowingly imbibe?
The Drug War answer is simple: "Any drugs, as long as they do not provide anything that could be remotely considered to be a 'high'." And so the Drug War signs off on anhedonia-causing anti-depressants that foster chemical dependency while yet reviling non-addictive psychoactive drugs which have the unseemly property of actually making the user feel good in real-time. ("How scandalous is that!" cries today's stealth puritan.) In other words, {^the Drug War is not based on a rational concern for human welfare; it is just the modern-day expression of the know-nothing prudery of the 17th-century puritan, from whose misogynist and myopic mindset we have inherited today's illogical antipathy to Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines.}{
And so the clever modern articles about creativity provide the reader with only the most feeble hints as to how human beings can actually achieve the creative state: "get your omega-3's, sleep eight hours a night, eat whatever vegetable is currently at the top of science's ever-changing healthy food list, yada yada yada." Meanwhile, the authors on the subject of creativity willfully ignore the psychedelic gorilla in the room: namely, the fact that psychoactive drugs in the right setting can work wonders in generating the kind of free mindset that these authors are attempting to describe and recommend. It's as though the clueless authors were sitting outdoors beside a half-dozen psilocybin mushrooms in full bloom, asking themselves, as they look up at the sky with wrinkled eyebrows: "Gee, why is it so dashed hard for we adult human beings to be creative???"
Any sensible onlooker wants to shout at them: "Hello? You're sitting right next to a blankety-blank batch of magic mushrooms, for God's sake!"
No, God is not a drug kingpin. Neither is Mother Nature. Those plants have healing properties for a reason, and not just for physical complaints either.
Unfortunately, Americans have been brainwashed by the Drug Warrior lie that Mother Nature's plant medicines will fry our brains, when the reality is quite the opposite. HG Wells and Jules Verne used coca wine to increase mental focus. Benjamin Franklin used opium to increase creativity. And Francis Crick used psychedelics in order to think outside the box, thanks to which strategy he discovered the DNA Helix. In fact, if any substances fry the brain, they are the antidepressants to which one in four women are addicted today, pills that were never intended for lifetime use and which are often harder to quit than heroin.
But the Partnership for a Drug Free America isn't interested in telling Americans the truth, they're interested in scaring them away from the plant medicines that grow at our very feet. Incidentally, the Partnership mentioned is just a Christian Science front, for the idea that America should be drug free when it comes to mood medicine is a religious premise, based on assumptions about what constitutes the good life. It is not a logical conclusion that naturally recommends itself to an unbiased and rational mind. It is, in fact, a hypocritical refinement of the Christian Science ideology of Mary Baker Eddy.
But once we reject the Christian Science propaganda of the Drug War, we have no excuse for ignoring the subject of psychoactive plants when we write about creativity. To do so would be like ignoring the topic of water whenever we write about staying hydrated in the desert.
Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2022
I am not suggesting that any given drug will necessarily give creativity to any given person merely by imbibing said nostrum. Creativity comes about from a wide variety of factors, including the individual's past experiences, education, social upbringing and genetic makeup, etc. In fact, that's why materialist academia tends to look down on psychoactive substances because they are not "one size fits all" and there is no direct correlation between using such substances and any one given outcome. For when it comes to psychoactive medicine, the user plays a large role in what the outcome will be. Yet creativity for me comes when I'm in a good mood, relaxed and optimistic about the future, and psychoactive medicines properly employed as to time, place and dosage, can improve my mood, feeling of relaxation and my optimism, thereby increasing the likelihood that I will become more creative and productive.
There is also a more direct creativity that comes to the open minded user through the use of certain drugs like opium in particular, which is known for producing metaphorical dreams, as when throbbing pain is morphed through synesthesia into the deep tolling of a bell, and thus no longer perceived as pain. Because of its power of metaphorical transformation, opium could be a huge psychotherapeutic tool for psychological self-discovery, but no academic in the world dares even mention the word "opium" these days, since the Drug War has fed us the lie that it has no possible reasonable uses. We have been taught that any psychoactive substance that is addictive must always lead to addiction -- as if humankind is so infantile that it cannot learn how to use such godsend medicine wisely.
Had cavemen embraced that fearmongering approach to godsends, Prometheus would have been jailed for giving humanity fire, after which Og and company would have launched a "war on combustibles," in a dingbat effort to protect Og junior from burning his fingers. Meanwhile, talk about how to use fire safely would be banned for fear that it will put ideas into young prehistoric heads. Fire would be what opium is today: the devil incarnate.
Author's Follow-up:
May 16, 2025
One must remember that I wrote the above six years ago, when I was just commencing my philosophical attack on the disastrous public policy known as drug prohibition. I feel that I would have gone more directly to the jugular, had I written on the topic today. I would have stated, for instance, that saying things like "Fentanyl kills" and "Crack kills" makes no more sense than saying "Fire bad!" All such statements are attempts to demonize substances and hold them responsible for evil rather than learning how to use those substances as safely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
Speaking of "drugs and creativity," this topic is rarely broached these days for the simple reason that Drug Warriors and their accomplices in the materialist world of academia completely ignore blazingly obvious benefits of drugs, such as their power to inspire creativity in the prepared mind. See, for instance, "The Crawling Chaos" by HP Lovecraft, in which opium takes the user's mind off of pain in a psychological manner, by transforming the internal throbbing pain into the tolling of an external bell.
"Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force."1
Consider also the inspirational power of morphine as described in this quote from a Poe short story entitled "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains":
"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."2
While we're on the subject of drugs that inspire creativity, consider the following reports on the use of phenethylamines as reported in "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin3:
"Intense intellectual stimulation, one that inspired the scribbling of some 14 pages of handwritten notes."
"Poetry was an easy and natural thing. Both the reading of it and the writing of it."
"All emotions and feeling available, but there is a cool perspective which informs all thinking... Could do a lot of learning with this material."
"Everything was seen with new eyes, new meanings, faces, figures, the colors of the rainbow subconsciously individually applied. A 'soul-scape'."
"The eyes-closed imagery is excellent, with clearly delineated patterns, pictures, and colors. Perfect for an artist, and next time I'll devote some time to painting."
Such results clearly demonstrate that there are endless potential ways to use drugs for gaining inspiration. Anyone who says otherwise is gaslighting us in the name of a make-believe morality which tells us that "meds" are good and "drugs" are bad. The fact is, of course, that psychoactive substances are psychoactive substances, and our goal should be always to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity, rather than obsessing one-sidedly on their potential downsides alone. If we took that lopsided view of alcohol, or mountain climbing, or car driving, then we would have outlawed drinking, climbing and driving long ago.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.