The following is a continuation of my philosophical remarks on Artificial Paradises by Mike Jay, in which I comment on the pontifications of various drug-related movers and shakers. For an introduction to these philosophical critiques and a navigational menu with which to locate them, please visit part 1 of this essay here.
"The contempt with which the jazzman is regarded can be seen in a story which famed trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie tells about being searched for drugs by police in Philadelphia. He refused to be searched and asked the police if they searched violinist Isaac Stern when he played in Philadelphia. Obviously, the police applied different standards to Stern than to Gillespie, although both men are great musicians."
Despite this important and rarely noted insight on Winick's part, the so-called heroin specialist evinces Drug War prejudices of his own. He speaks of a musician's use of heroin as a "crutch," failing to realize the moral and philosophical judgements implicit in that assessment. One doubts whether Winick would have referred to antidepressant use as a "crutch," for instance. Winick has, in fact, fallen victim to the Drug War idea that we should medicalize and moralize drug use rather than accept it as a valid and time-honored way of altering one's perceptual world for the better, as "better" is defined by the user, not by the onlooking Charles Winicks of the world and their fellow armchair intoxiphobes. Winick, in short, refuses to see the use of heroin in the entertainment field for what it is: namely, the common-sense practice of self-medication1! His use of the term "crutch" thus has a self-interested connotation: as who should say, "Only by paying gatekeepers like myself can one hope to find 'real' answers to their life problems."
In reading this section, one realizes that relatively sane people like Winick are playing the same game as the Drug Warrior: they are trying to evaluate drug use in the abstract, as good or bad, as a "crutch" or as a "real" treatment. "Does heroin REALLY help one, musically speaking?" they ask. But it is silly to ask that question. It is silly to ask if heroin use helps folks musically speaking for the same reason that it is silly to ask if heroin use is healthy or not. Healthiness (and musical ability of which good health is but one aspect) are determined by the complicated interaction of a wide array of factors -- and yet the Drug War convinces us of the delusion that we can meaningfully opine, both morally and medically, on drug effects in the abstract, without consideration of the existing hopes, dreams and desires (not to mention the default biochemistry, metabolism and genetics) of those who use them. The question is never, is a drug good or bad in the abstract, but to what extent does it bring about good or bad outcomes for a particular unique user. Is it good to own a snowplow? Not for most people, perhaps, but such a device may be a godsend for many. Please spare us, then, any of your hyper-annotated "scientific" papers on the dangers and uselessness of snowplows!
I do not mean to suggest that unwanted dependency is a good thing: rather that the goal of our "addiction experts" should be to help musicians -- and everybody else -- achieve the good life as they define it, to achieve transcendence in this case as wisely as possible. If this means lifelong dependency, so be it. I should quickly add, however, that in a free world, the frequency of unwanted dependencies would tank as we all learned how to achieve our psychosocial goals of life with the use of a wide variety of substances that the government has outlawed wholesale. Moreover, addiction thrives because of recidivism, and recidivism would disappear in most cases when we were free to get through those occasional hours of psychological angst with the help of laughing gas and phenethylamines and opium and coca and mescaline, etc. etc. etc.
Meanwhile, if you're worried about unwanted dependency, wake up: 1 in 4 American women are already dependent on Big Pharma meds for life thanks to drug prohibition, which has given self-interested mega corporations a monopoly on mind and mood medicines, a monopoly that they have not stinted at using to turn America into a nation of lifetime Big Pharma clients.
There is no single ideal approach to helping a musician just as there is no single approach that is wrong outside of all context. Circumstances matter. There is nothing wrong about using "crutches" if in so doing one can actually walk! Materialist scientists would prefer instead that the depressed and the psychosocially unfulfilled among us should hobble their way through life, boasting of the fact that they do not need crutches! We live according to precepts of a purely negative religion. We are judged, not by the contents of our character but by the contents of our digestive systems. That's why America settles for antidepressant pills that have nothing to do with facilitating self-actualization: we believe instead that the good life is to be defined purely negatively, as one that avoids the use of all "crutches," all "drugs," -- a conclusion that we often come to, of course, while glibly "throwing back a cold one."
The term "Crutches" has a pejorative ring to it, as if "drug users" were violating the Protestant Ethic and not "working through" their problems. And yet this attitude is fraught with philosophical assumptions. When we arrive home after a long day at work and we "throw back a cold one," is that beer or wine cooler a "crutch" -- or is it not rather a common sense way for us to "get out of our head" and relax? Is heroin use a crutch, or is it not rather a way for us to be comfortable in our own skin and so to get on stage and "let ourselves go"? Moreover, what is precisely wrong with that latter approach, especially if our living depends on making music and we would starve to death -- physically and psychologically -- if unable to practice our trade because of self-doubt brought about by the defeatist self-talk of the subconscious mind in specific actual cases -- the specifics that Drug Warriors always ignore?
How is that use then pathological, in what sense is it a "crutch" in the moralistic connotation of that term? Accept that hyper-judgmental doctrine, and virtually every optional activity can be denounced as a "crutch" from someone's perspective -- though our own biases will have more "staying power" if we happen to be considered as "specialists" in the business of evaluating a human life other than our own. From someone else's perspectives, the actions that we deem important will be seen as superfluous and even counterproductive. This is ultimately just because they are not us, and they have no business judging us in the first place on such a line-item basis -- lest they should be judged by us in turn according to the same pitiless and context-free criterion.
The use of the word "crutches" implies that there is a "real" cure to psychological problems, which, in America's world of science triumphalism, means a materialist cure -- one in which human beings are interchangeable widgets and so amenable to the same one-size-fits-all pills for whatever ails them. And where has this approach gotten us as a society? It has created the largest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, the one already mentioned above, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life. Meanwhile, even scientists themselves no longer believe that they are treating the "real" problem with antidepressants, you know, by fixing those supposed "chemical imbalances" about which we "learned" from the talking heads who appeared under the pay of Big Pharma on talk show television. As Noam Shpancer admitted in Psychology Today in 2022, "We don't know how antidepressants work," to which I always add: We don't even know THAT they work, at least if the term 'work' means to help the user to fulfill their life dreams, as opposed to merely helping them to refrain from committing suicide.
If a unique individual's mindset is so constituted that he or she cannot express their inborn talent without pharmacological incentive, we should not moralize their consequent use of psychoactive substances as "crutches" -- whether those substances mean casual drinking, smoking cigarettes, or the daily use of heroin. Winick may as well look at the action film of John Wayne and say, "Yes, he was a great actor -- such a shame that he had to rely on the crutch of alcohol to get through his life." Of course, Winick would have said just that had the government doubled down on liquor prohibition rather than giving liquor the ultimate constitution-backed Mulligan for killing 178,000 Americans a year. In that case, alcohol would be officially considered a "crutch" by the medical establishment and our experts would be shaking their heads asking, "Why cannot these people just be high on sunshine? Why do they need this crutch called alcohol!"
CONCLUSIONS
There is no "moral weakness" inherent in using a drug without which one could not make a living.
Winick has been seduced by the Drug War lie that we can judge drug use in the abstract -- and so he judges people for using a substance without which they might starve.
Winick hypocritically assumes that drug use (as opposed to "med use" and "alcohol use") represents a moral shortcoming.
Indeed, in studying the Drug War from a philosophical perspective over the last seven years, I have come to the following conclusion: that anyone who uses the term "crutch" to define drug use has been bamboozled by Drug Warrior ideology. Winick's case merely demonstrates that this can happen "to the best of us," and no wonder: given that we have all grown up in a world wherein the conglomerate media ruthlessly censors all reports of positive drug use on the grounds that it is "encouraging use" -- as if that were wrong in the first place -- and this in a country where the Jim Beam liquor company targets young people with prime-time television ads singing the praises of drinking bourbon with one's friends!
Even the most simple and seemingly straightforward statement must be questioned in the age of the Drug War, a world in which we have all been filled with pejorative and anti-indigenous presuppositions on the subject of psychoactive medicines. A clear example of this need for circumspection is apparent in reading Jay's introduction to this section about the song "White Rabbit" by Grace Slick. Jay writes that:
"Carroll/Dodgson scholars insist that the author never took drugs."
What a silly thing for those scholars to say! It only makes sense if we believe that the politician's political categorization of drugs is a real objective category, rather than a catch-all designation used to trash substances of which racists disapprove for a variety of politically motivated reasons.
Drugs are drugs are drugs, whether we are talking about caffeine, antidepressants or heroin. Carroll used them. Everybody "uses" them. We are all biochemically activated no matter how much we may preen ourselves on avoiding those substances that politicians are working with media to depict anti-scientifically as being "beyond the pale" regardless of circumstances.
Given that we all are full of drugs thanks to our biochemistries and the fact that we are surrounded by drugs in daily life -- many of which are used without judgmental fanfare such as coffee and alcohol -- the claim of such scholars is clearly a political statement, not a factual one. They do not really mean what they say. They would not make such a silly statement unless they believed in the Drug Warrior lie that there are evil substances called drugs in the first place, as opposed to godsend meds, and such a distinction is political in nature, not scientific. The fact is that psychoactive substances are psychoactive substances. To say that someone "never took drugs" is merely to say that they have not used specific substances that Drug Warriors have demonized as evil. To say that they never took drugs is therefore a lie, a lie whose mindless reiteration helps to normalize drug prohibition.
This situation reminds us that the Drug War is all one massive branding operation designed to create a faux category of presumably useless substances called "drugs" -- a category that only exists in political life, not in reality, least of all in a world in which we consider all psychoactive substances to be potentially beneficial for someone, at some dose, in some circumstance. What I am trying to get across here is that the Carroll/Dodgson scholars are bamboozled by Drug War propaganda: they want to protect their hero from being associated with those substances that our racist politicians have strategically decided to demonize. By thus attempting to protect him, they are tacitly agreeing with the Drug Warrior that there really are drugs that are "beyond the pale," which is the big lie of the Drug War. All substances have potential positive uses for someone at some dose in some circumstance. And yet Americans evaluate drugs according to the following inhumane algorithm:
namely, that a drug that can be misused in theory by a white American young person when used for one reason at one dose, must not be used by anybody for any reason at any dose.
This is the hateful conclusion of the Drug Warrior, one that these "scholars" help perpetuate by pretending that the political category of "drugs" is a scientific category. But what can we expect? These scholars have been indoctrinated since grade school in the drug-hating ideology of the Drug War, above all thanks to the media's ruthless suppression of all talk about positive uses for the substances that our racist politicians have decided to demonize -- to demonize for the purpose of throwing minorities in jail and so winning elections for still more racist Drug Warriors at the polls.
In short, the Drug War triumphs because it controls the language. For the word "drugs" in the context of the Drug War is no more neutral than the word "scabs" in the context of labor relations. Both terms not only denote a thing but they pass judgement on that thing in so doing. The prohibitionist bias has thus been built into our very language, until only the most clear-headed philosopher can extricate our philosophical cart from the unproductive mire into which it has been driven blindly by a bandwagon full of brainwashed American drug haters. As Thomas Szasz reminds us, this is the one thing that the diverse species known as Americans have in common, the fact that they all agree about one thing and one thing only: the ontological evil of "drugs" -- which is the superstitious attitude par excellence. For saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements teach us to demonize and fear a potentially dangerous substance rather than to learn how to use it as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
Consider the following quote from Edgar Allan Poe:
"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." --Edgar Allan Poe, from A Tale of the Ragged Mountains2
That drug-induced attitude has prima facie benefits for a potential poet -- and yet Mayter judges opium based on the apparent misuse of a handful of well-known literary figures in the intoxiphobic west -- a demographic that is notoriously suspicious of the psychoactive drugs that indigenous people have used time out of mind for the improvement of mood and mentation. When I compare the liberation of the mindset cited by Poe with the stifling nature of the mental dialogue produced by a subpar upbringing, I am outraged that Mayter wants to pontificate about only the problems of opium use, about highly speculative and debatable problems at that. If use of the drug in the abstract stifles and limits some poets, surely it would empower new ones as well, some of whom would never be inspired by a pathological sobriety to even begin putting pen to paper. So what if those latter poets seldom make the NYT Bestseller List? Few people ever do. The point is that the opium user -- if enabled by a free society to do so -- could thrive and love nature despite a negative upbringing. Yet like most westerners, Mayter believes in the existence of a supposedly beneficial one-size-fits-all "sobriety" shared by everybody -- else she would not implicitly speculate about the nature of the poetry that such a sober person could and could not create.
Sure, opium use, by itself, in the abstract, might be said to favor certain mental propensities -- but this is not a definitive observation for the real world when we include all circumstances of use, especially the fact that in a free world, we would not necessarily rely on any one drug to produce any one psychological effect -- but rather alter and combine drugs to produce effects BASED ON THE BIOCHEMISTRY AND PSYCHOSOCIAL HISTORY OF THE USER -- of the unique USER, mind, and not of the morally tinged and high-horse speculation of an outsider about the supposed downsides of the sole and exclusive use of any one drug in the abstract without regard for whom might be using that drug or why, or in what circumstances, what doses, etc.
Presumption, presumption, presumption!
It is such context-free moralizing of folks like Mayter that keeps me from using godsend medicines at all, because folks like Mayter implicitly pretend to know what I can accomplish with my own default biochemistry. Like all Drug Warriors, she claims that I could get by much better without "drugs" -- which is a hugely presumptuous and condescending conclusion for someone who does not know the first thing about the nature of my biochemically charged "sober" state and its proclivities -- or disinclinations -- when it comes to poetry, or any other activity for that matter.
Moralizing opium-bashers like Alethea are working with precious little data. Westerners have no history of using drugs wisely and in combinations and various dosages to obtain various desired utilitarian outcomes-- and so we focus our scrutiny on just one drug at a time and pretend to judge its value by comparing it to a sobriety about which we know nothing at all. The default sober state is different for each individual, based on genetics, biochemistry and upbringing. It is therefore the height of presumption to set ourselves up as the judges of what drugs should or should not be needed for the purposes of creating poetry or anything else. Sure, opium use may generically inspire certain tendencies -- but opium is never used completely in the abstract: it is used by specific people in conjunction with a default biochemistry and life history of which outsiders know nothing.
Take that quotation from Poe again. A person like Augustus Bedloe made thus appreciative of the world around them thanks to his use of morphine could obviously produce a wide variety of bucolic poetry celebrating nature. Mayter maintains that there is a dearth of such opium-inspired poetry, but this conclusion is based on her rash assumption that poets who partake of opiates are going to make it clear to their readers that they have done so. Poets do not generally "own up" to their use of coffee or alcohol in introducing their latest quatrain: why should they inform us that they were partially inspired by a few drops of laudanum, especially in an age when laudanum was still legal, especially if they used the drug sensibly, unlike the "addicts" on whose use Mayter focuses her attention (probably because no other poets ever dared to publicly mention their sensible drug use in our intoxiphobic world here in the west)? After reading the Poe quote above, we might even speculate that Walt Whitman used opium from time to time but felt no need to tell the world of that fact -- any more than he might have felt the need to keep his public up to date on the amount of beer or coffee that he consumed prior to inditing a stanza.
And a word about Coleridge and other "opium addicts": I have had to go a lifetime without godsend medicines because poets like Coleridge blamed all their problems on drugs rather than on their refusal to learn and practice safe use. All we need now is for a moralizer like Mayter to come along and denounce opiate effects in the abstract, without regard to context, thereby serving to fortress the drug-demonizing attitude that has destroyed western democracy and deprived billions like myself of godsend medicines.
I could just as plausibly set myself up as a judge of poetry written by avowedly "sober" individuals, you know, the kind of self-help poets who imply that blue skies should be invigorating to everyone, failing to realize that pathological mental scripts of a sober mind can render one incapable of such enjoyment and that a poem that implies otherwise is shallow. I could easily conclude that sober poets are self-satisfied moralizers: that they feel self-sufficient with their own version of that default biochemical state that we call "sobriety" and are incapable of understanding that others may feel differently. The sober poet, I could conclude, is known for their damnable presumption -- something for which, by the way, I would recommend the following antidote: namely, the occasional wise use of a wide variety of mind-expanding drugs -- from phenethylamines, to coca, to opium, etc.
Who knows? Someday Mayter's ancestors may create a calculus whereby one could determine the generic poetic tendencies that are thought to be vouchsafed IN THE ABSTRACT by all sorts of combinations of drugs. Such tasks are highly simplified when, like Mayter, we ignore the influences of the unique individual circumstances on drug outcomes, their motivations, their biochemistry, their goals in life, etc. etc. etc. -- all in favor of our drug-warrior thesis that drugs are the ultimate causative agent and act in and of themselves to achieve identical outcomes in a wide variety of biochemically and psychosocially diverse users.
The problem is that the potential benefits of opium use for certain depressed individuals is just too enormous for folks like Mayter to even notice: the nightly smoking of opium could help get some otherwise hopelessly depressed people out of bed in the morning -- and that is surely the first step to any activity, including poetry. If she is not happy about the poetry produced by "addicts," then she should look the poetry produced by wise users of opium who owe their engagement in life to the informed use of a variety of such drugs. But in the age of the Drug War, we are all encouraged to demonize substance use in the abstract. Above all, we are urged to completely ignore the most obvious benefits and focus only on the perceived downsides.
Let's suppose that Alethea is right, however, that opium use (at least by "addicts") tends to produce morbid poetry. There are endless phenethylamines whose use could temper or even eliminate that supposed tendency such that we can have the benefits of opium use without the poetic downsides, should Alethea be correct in concluding that such general and abstract downsides exist as a function of opium use and not just as a function of social attitudes and laws in the intoxiphobic western world. But most Drug Warriors have no interest in the sane and sensible use of drugs. That is why they try to demonize them by talking about them in the abstract. This is why we do not give the suicidal individual laughing gas or cocaine or opium: so focused are we on drug downsides as considered in the abstract that we would actually prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than to use substances that could cheer them up in a trice. In a trice! Talk about being blind to drug benefits! And yet surely the first and biggest step in writing poetry is to actually be alive to do so!
If the reader senses a combative tone here, they are correct. A combative tone is appropriate on this topic. Why? Because all speculation about drugs is political in the age of drug prohibition and censorship. If this were just an academic debate taking place in a free world, I might try to keep a civil tongue in my head, but in the age of the Drug War, all such speculation as Alathea's is sure to be put to use for political purposes -- namely, to justify the government in depriving me of godsend medicines and the right to take care of my own health based on my own unique needs, especially as Alathea's judgment of drug use in the abstract dovetails so nicely (or should I say so damnably) with the Drug Warriors' attempts to demonize so-called "drugs" and their use outside of all context.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.