Let’s Get High

Here’s what I’m thinking: The current trend of therapeutic psychedelics is doing the right thing in the wrong way, and for the wrong reason.

Almost all psychological “pathology” seems in some way to connect to basic existential angst and anxieties. Under the umbrella of existential anxiety I would include, unpredictability, impermanence, powerlessness, ignorance, and death.

In the absence of the feeling that things proceed in an intelligible way for predictable periods of time, and that we have some meaningful understanding and control over them, we get very anxious indeed. The process of life and death, living and dying is the example par excellence of one of this.

Worry, Worry, Worry

We worry about these things, or better put, when we feel we’ve lost our grasp of these things, we start to worry.

Worry is one of those phenomena which refuses to stay in its box, and so once one thing starts to worry us, everything starts to worry us. Anxiety around the basic, but intangible facts of existence gradually seeps up through the layers of our minds. How this worry manifests depends on the person, but hypochondria and germophobia are excellent examples.

Tension

Whether or not our basic existential angst manifests in some identifiable and/or “pathological” way, most of us carry our silent anxieties as a basic tension. Sometimes this tension becomes literal muscular tension, the famous “psychosomatic” illnesses of chronic headaches or back pain.

To me, however, it seems more common that these silent anxieties manifest in the form of obsession, which is to say, a constant psychological tension centred on a particular theme. These themes can be highly idiosyncratic, but far and away the two most common are money and status.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: money and status are reciprocal functions that directly connect to our survival. Your social status influences how much money you make (hence the corporate obsession with titles and pecking order), and how much money you make determines your social status (poor people are disregarded and rich people have real influence). Without money, you can’t buy food and shelter, and you can’t get money without being regarded as at least minimally respectworthy by someone who has money (who themselves has their money through demonstrating to others their respectworthiness).

Psychedelics

A lot of people find drugs like alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, heroin, and caffeine helpful, because in one way or another each of these give the illusion of removing tension, either by literally relaxing us, or by making us feel powerful and intelligent enough to solve any problem.

But life being life, each of these solutions only ends up making the problem worse because of their short-term and long-term side-effects (hangover and addiction, respectively).

Enter psychedelics. Rather than temporarily relieving the symptoms of tension and allowing temporary relaxation, drugs like LSD, psiloscibin, and ketamine seem to affect the bodymind directly and “permanently,” reliving not only tension, but resolving the silent anxieties themselves.

Temptation

Obsessive worry is all about finding the final solution a given problem. Psychedelics represent this for a lot of people. It’s exactly the same function that pharmaceuticals plays for those people who are into SSRIs &c. Because the obsession craves the simplest possible solution, we delude ourselves into believing a) that a simple solution must and does exist, and b) that we have finally found it.

For me, this is the main problem with the resurgence of the trend to psychedelia. Psychedelics are seen as a short-cut to enlightenment, the easy way of attaining a more relaxed view of the basic facts of existence which cause us so much silent anxiety. In their desperation, people wracked with silent tension drop acid or take mushrooms in exactly the same way that people take SSRIs or drink alcohol: to make the pain go away. This is how addiction starts.

It is absolutely possible to become addicted to weed, for example. It may not be a physiological addiction, but once your bodymind acclimatises to the continual presence of THC, its removal creates physical withdrawal and psychological cravings every bit as powerful as alcohol and other classically “addictive” substances.

Specifically, people become terrified that they cannot survive without weed, or shrooms, or LSD (or whatever feel-good drug they’re microdosing with).

Reality-Friction

More importantly, they lose their tolerance for reality-friction. They lose their psychological calluses, as it were, and can only function when in their hazy bubble of pure comfort and perfect confidence.

The drugs are not to blame for this. This is a problem of attitude and psychological tolerance. And my fear is that the clinical use of psychedelics will have the same result as the clinical use of SSRIs: creating the feeling that people cannot cope with life unless they are regularly taking a drug of some kind that pads the sharp corners of life and dulls the edges. And more importantly, that they as a being are somehow incomplete and unable to function without being neuro-chemically “repaired.”

Cultural Appropriation

Oof, don’t even go there, I hear you say.

The main issue of cultural appropriation isn’t so much borrowing ideas from other cultures as it is doing so disrespectfully. Essentially, you take and idea or ritual out of its original context, and stripp it of its history and meaning for the people you’re taking it from. For western, “scientific” culture, this generally includes being pretty fucking insulting towards the “savages” and “primitives” you’re taking your ideas from.

And yet, inter-cultural pollination has always been a feature of human civilisation, and so to me it seems that “cultural appropriation” differs from “cultural influence” in that the later is a natural process which occurs over hundreds and thousands of years of respectful interaction, and the latter is more or less an act of theft and includes a tone of insult or disrespect.

Western medicine has been incredibly disrespectful towards other systems of health and wellbeing, and what little of those systems it does accept and take into itself it takes begrudgingly and with clear communication that modern medicine has somehow improved or refined it over its original primitive state.

The White-Coat Brigade

Turning a psychedelic drugs into a psychotherapeutic “intervention” is an act of blatant cultural appropriation. It has stolen the idea from innumerable traditional cultures which have incorporated various mind-altering subtances into their spiritual and religious traditions. It furthermore accepts only those parts of the mystical traditions it’s “borrowing” from which don’t contradict its own underlying worry-managing delusions (eg. that “mental illness” can be banished through the controlled by the application of certain substances mind-controlling substances).

I’m not surprised that the white-coat brigade of western medicine would do this, because it’s what they do and always have done.

Most of all it bothers me that the use of psychedelics has been removed from their mostly pretty sane and well-reasoned cultural traditions centred on harmony between self and environment and embedded into an ideology that is centred entirely on control and domination of the environment by the self. In other words, as a product of modern western industrial society, modern medicine is demonstrably insane, and in its madness has begun to apply psychedelics as a cure for the illnesses created by modern western industrial society.

In other words, modern culture is trying to cure itself through the use of psychedelics.

Wait, What?

The “mental health epidemic” is not and never has been caused by not enough people taking psychedelic or pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is that we westerners have allowed our collective anxiety-delusions to create a society which not only gives material form to those delusions, but actively makes them worse by doing so (cough cough, capitalism). Rather than constructing social systems and rituals rites which calm and connect people to one another, anxiety feeds anxiety by generating artificial scarcity and encouraging direct competition.

So, my fear is that the use of psychedelics will only make things worse. SSRI “antidepressants” are wonderful in the short term on the personal scale, but in the long term and on a societal scale they are a disaster. Depression is the appropriate emotional response to a depressing situation, but getting rid of depression doesn’t change your situation. If our depression is situational (which I believe it is), then the key to solving it is to fix the situation. Prescribed drugs do the opposite of this. SSRIs get rid of the depression while leaving the external causes of dais depression utterly unchanged.

Psychedelics are potentially even worse, because they don’t simply take your depression away, they make you HAPPY. Which means that we are medicating people to be happy with a situation that they shouldn’t be happy about.

This is irrational, irresponsible, and frankly both stupid and insane.

Mind Control!

Nah. I’m definitely not going to go all conspiracy on you here.

Proponents of psychedelics hope (some secretly, some less so) that the happy drugs will precipitate a societal shift away from greed and paranoia and towards connection and generosity. I think this is naive, in that the two have to go together. Changing your ideas and confronting your anxieties is hard, which is the appeal of psychedelics: mega results with minimal effort.

Not only is there no change without effort, but that change is more meaningful the more effort you have to put into it to create it. And it’s not so much that psychedelics are the game-genie of psychology that allows you to perpetually play in god mode. They definitely aren’t, no matter how badly some people definitely wish they were.

No.

That point at which any drug, experience, or spiritual practice becomes more than a supporting adjunct to your basic human experience is the exact point at which exploration ends and addiction begins.

By transposing psychedelics into the insane collective delusion of western culture without beforehand making any meaningful effort to change that collective delusion to something which makes psychedelics unnecessary for survival, the drug can and will only ever be used to support that collective delusion. By not changing anything but which drug you take, you not only guarantee the intervention’s failure, but you make the whole problem more confusing and frustrating, which, in turn, makes us all more and more desperate to find a simple, easy solution.

Put a Microchip in my Brain, Please!

Again, not a paranoid conspiracy thing.

The fundamental problem is that we believe we are incomplete and unable to cope on our own with the anxiety-generating facts of existence. This is patently false, and yet unbelievably convincing, and many people genuinely believe that they would be better off if their brain was actually a perfectly logical computer utterly incapable of emotion.

This is the cultural idea-system that psychedelia is now being atrifically shoe-horned into.

Compassionate Disappointment

All of which is to say that it frustrates me and saddens me to watch people perpetuate their problems with the very things they hope will give them relief.

The nicotine addict creates their own suffering by using nicotine to relieve their suffering. The alcoholic creates their alcoholism by believing they need alcohol to feel good, when alcohol actually makes them feel bad. In other words, we create our own psychological problems by the way we try to solve our self-created psychological problems.

This has been understood from long before Buddhism was ever formulated as a spiritual system. And, basically, it’s really annoying that even after 5,000 years, the basic fact hasn’t yet permeated our collective delusion-systems: we already have the answer and we’ve always had it.