I’m not one who favors the use of recreational or addictive drugs. I’m usually on an “Earth-high,” what with all the wondrous natural beauty and interesting good people on this planet. Yeah, I’m a bit of an optimist. But I can understand that some people find their lives uninteresting or depressing, or find themselves ushered into using through social pressures and physical pain. There are also those who seek to find their identity or “expand their minds” through hallucinogenic substances, à la Timothy Leary’s followers. And there are those devoid of any support by loved ones, driving them to seek substitute "love" in mind-altering drugs.
Like any of us, I can’t point to a single cause as the source of my negative attitude toward mind-altering drug use. Maybe my never having suffered the pain that some suffer because of cancer or accidents makes me speak about something I don’t understand. I can, however, think of something my paternal grandmother told me a long time ago when she was suffering from breast cancer. Seeing her swollen left arm and hearing her say, “Donald, you can’t imagine the pain,” I said as a naïve youth, “Grandma, why don’t you take something to dull the pain?” It was her response that might have been a key shaper of my attitude toward drug use. She said—and mind you she was about 90— “I don’t want to take anything that will dull my mind. I want to be fully conscious and in charge of my life.” That was a very tough lady who had lost her husband before the Great Depression yet still managed to own two homes and rear three children.
I suppose I can also attribute my anti-mind-altering-drug attitude to playing football, to having a WWII marine father teach me to “rub a little dirt on it” in response to injury, and to a dentist who convinced me that I didn’t need any numbing substance just to have my teeth drilled. And I can also think of my seeing the negative effects of drug abuse on peers during the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was convinced that we were headed for a Frank Herbert Dune society in which just about everyone would be on some mind-altering drug like melange. Can anyone say “Colorado”?
That I thought drugs had become insidious was probably also influenced by my living in Miami a few years before Miami Vice began its six-year run on TV. I had witnessed the growing infusion of drugs into that city’s culture. Pop TV, pop films, and pop songs captured the drug culture’s spread. I can think of Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues,” as an example, a song whose lyrics contain the lines “You ask any DEA man/He’ll say there’s nothin’ we can do/From the office of the President/Right down to me and you…/It’s a losing proposition….” There lies in that song the encapsulation of hopelessness: “But it doesn’t go away….” Insightful composing, right?
The drug culture of the past 60 years has been unstoppable, partly because it has been glamorized and partly because shrewd pushers have infiltrated every level of society. Yet, there might be another, more ancient motivation afoot. Now, we know for certain that a millennium ago people gravitated toward mind-altering drugs. Because we tend to think the world began when we began, we sometimes fail to see our relationship to the past. Apparently, humans have long had a fondness for drugs and their various effects.
José Capriles, a Penn State anthropologist, and colleagues discovered a millennium-old cache of psychoactive compounds in a rock shelter called Cueva del Chileno in Bolivia. About 1,000 years ago people in the Andes were sniffing cocaine and drinking ayahuasca, as Michael Price reports online for Science (May 6, 2019). * Speak of smuggler’s blues! Price quotes Melanie Miller, a bioarchaeologist at the U. of Otago (New Zealand): “Whoever had this bag of amazing goodies…would have had to travel great distances to acquire those plants…or they had really extensive exchange networks.”
So, the hopelessness of Frey’s song has roots in an ancient past that, in Central and South America, includes widespread use of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms. In the cache that Capriles found were traces of cocaine, benzoylecgonine, bufotenine, harmine, and dimethyltryptamine.
I write this at a time of extensive opioid use that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. At the same time, I see the push for legalizing recreational drugs out of both a desperation that efforts to stop drug traffic and use have failed and a Dune-like attitude that finds drug use not only favorable but also desirable and “harmless.” There are those who argue that if mind-altering drugs have been around for thousands of years, they would always likely fail to prevent their use.
In spite of the seeming hopelessness of anti-drug efforts, there are those who energetically try to alter cultural attitudes of acceptance. Their efforts are commendable, but not commendable by all, as those firmly convinced that mind-altering drugs are harmless make the battle against abuse as uphill as climbing into the Bolivian Andes.
I suppose I can offer no solution because those who don’t see a problem just don’t see a problem, and I don’t have the wisdom other than what my grandmother, my dentist, and my parents taught me about life, about pain, and about being who I am. I could, however, cite another popular work of the 1980s, a song by Huey Lewis and the News called “I Want a New Drug.” It’s as clever a set of lyrics as those of “Smuggler’s Blues.” Lewis sings about finding a drug in the companionship of another, a drug with no negative side effects, a drug of love.
So, maybe there is a solution to our societal addiction to drug use, an individual solution. That solution rests in an individual’s finding what I mention at the outset of this little essay: An Earth-high grounded in a personal, loving relationship. In my experience, love has never been a losing proposition. I think I’ve been fortunate to have the influences I’ve had, and I know that I can’t share them with anyone else. If I could take you to back in time to meet my grandmother during her trial by cancer, my parents, my dentist, and my various coaches who advocated a toughness in times of stress and injury, I would. I understand that two people cannot have similar experiences that produce similar results, but I’m sure that a little of their attitude would rub off on almost anyone, maybe not enough to prevent drug use, but certainly enough to understand why they were anti-mind-altering drugs.
A millennium from now some archaeologist will stumble not just upon small bag of mind-altering drugs, but also upon a widespread diffusion of them. Possibly, “stumbling upon” might be an inappropriate description. More likely and because of the widespread use of drugs today, that future archaeologist will “stumble over” ubiquitous leftover drugs. “Hey, this stuff is everywhere. How addicted were these ancients?” It won’t be the isolated bag of drugs found in a cache that will be significant those many years hence, it will be the isolated place where drugs aren’t found. Maybe that archaeologist will conclude that he or she had just discovered an ancient place of love and wonder.
*Price, Michael. Archaeologists find richest cache of ancient mind-altering drugs in South America. Science online. 6 May 2019, 3:00 PM, online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/archaeologists-find-richest-cache-ancient-mind-altering-drugs-south-america Accessed on May 13, 2019.A Losing Proposition?
Like any of us, I can’t point to a single cause as the source of my negative attitude toward mind-altering drug use. Maybe my never having suffered the pain that some suffer because of cancer or accidents makes me speak about something I don’t understand. I can, however, think of something my paternal grandmother told me a long time ago when she was suffering from breast cancer. Seeing her swollen left arm and hearing her say, “Donald, you can’t imagine the pain,” I said as a naïve youth, “Grandma, why don’t you take something to dull the pain?” It was her response that might have been a key shaper of my attitude toward drug use. She said—and mind you she was about 90— “I don’t want to take anything that will dull my mind. I want to be fully conscious and in charge of my life.” That was a very tough lady who had lost her husband before the Great Depression yet still managed to own two homes and rear three children.
I suppose I can also attribute my anti-mind-altering-drug attitude to playing football, to having a WWII marine father teach me to “rub a little dirt on it” in response to injury, and to a dentist who convinced me that I didn’t need any numbing substance just to have my teeth drilled. And I can also think of my seeing the negative effects of drug abuse on peers during the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was convinced that we were headed for a Frank Herbert Dune society in which just about everyone would be on some mind-altering drug like melange. Can anyone say “Colorado”?
That I thought drugs had become insidious was probably also influenced by my living in Miami a few years before Miami Vice began its six-year run on TV. I had witnessed the growing infusion of drugs into that city’s culture. Pop TV, pop films, and pop songs captured the drug culture’s spread. I can think of Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues,” as an example, a song whose lyrics contain the lines “You ask any DEA man/He’ll say there’s nothin’ we can do/From the office of the President/Right down to me and you…/It’s a losing proposition….” There lies in that song the encapsulation of hopelessness: “But it doesn’t go away….” Insightful composing, right?
The drug culture of the past 60 years has been unstoppable, partly because it has been glamorized and partly because shrewd pushers have infiltrated every level of society. Yet, there might be another, more ancient motivation afoot. Now, we know for certain that a millennium ago people gravitated toward mind-altering drugs. Because we tend to think the world began when we began, we sometimes fail to see our relationship to the past. Apparently, humans have long had a fondness for drugs and their various effects.
José Capriles, a Penn State anthropologist, and colleagues discovered a millennium-old cache of psychoactive compounds in a rock shelter called Cueva del Chileno in Bolivia. About 1,000 years ago people in the Andes were sniffing cocaine and drinking ayahuasca, as Michael Price reports online for Science (May 6, 2019). * Speak of smuggler’s blues! Price quotes Melanie Miller, a bioarchaeologist at the U. of Otago (New Zealand): “Whoever had this bag of amazing goodies…would have had to travel great distances to acquire those plants…or they had really extensive exchange networks.”
So, the hopelessness of Frey’s song has roots in an ancient past that, in Central and South America, includes widespread use of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms. In the cache that Capriles found were traces of cocaine, benzoylecgonine, bufotenine, harmine, and dimethyltryptamine.
I write this at a time of extensive opioid use that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. At the same time, I see the push for legalizing recreational drugs out of both a desperation that efforts to stop drug traffic and use have failed and a Dune-like attitude that finds drug use not only favorable but also desirable and “harmless.” There are those who argue that if mind-altering drugs have been around for thousands of years, they would always likely fail to prevent their use.
In spite of the seeming hopelessness of anti-drug efforts, there are those who energetically try to alter cultural attitudes of acceptance. Their efforts are commendable, but not commendable by all, as those firmly convinced that mind-altering drugs are harmless make the battle against abuse as uphill as climbing into the Bolivian Andes.
I suppose I can offer no solution because those who don’t see a problem just don’t see a problem, and I don’t have the wisdom other than what my grandmother, my dentist, and my parents taught me about life, about pain, and about being who I am. I could, however, cite another popular work of the 1980s, a song by Huey Lewis and the News called “I Want a New Drug.” It’s as clever a set of lyrics as those of “Smuggler’s Blues.” Lewis sings about finding a drug in the companionship of another, a drug with no negative side effects, a drug of love.
So, maybe there is a solution to our societal addiction to drug use, an individual solution. That solution rests in an individual’s finding what I mention at the outset of this little essay: An Earth-high grounded in a personal, loving relationship. In my experience, love has never been a losing proposition. I think I’ve been fortunate to have the influences I’ve had, and I know that I can’t share them with anyone else. If I could take you to back in time to meet my grandmother during her trial by cancer, my parents, my dentist, and my various coaches who advocated a toughness in times of stress and injury, I would. I understand that two people cannot have similar experiences that produce similar results, but I’m sure that a little of their attitude would rub off on almost anyone, maybe not enough to prevent drug use, but certainly enough to understand why they were anti-mind-altering drugs.
A millennium from now some archaeologist will stumble not just upon small bag of mind-altering drugs, but also upon a widespread diffusion of them. Possibly, “stumbling upon” might be an inappropriate description. More likely and because of the widespread use of drugs today, that future archaeologist will “stumble over” ubiquitous leftover drugs. “Hey, this stuff is everywhere. How addicted were these ancients?” It won’t be the isolated bag of drugs found in a cache that will be significant those many years hence, it will be the isolated place where drugs aren’t found. Maybe that archaeologist will conclude that he or she had just discovered an ancient place of love and wonder.
*Price, Michael. Archaeologists find richest cache of ancient mind-altering drugs in South America. Science online. 6 May 2019, 3:00 PM, online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/archaeologists-find-richest-cache-ancient-mind-altering-drugs-south-america Accessed on May 13, 2019.A Losing Proposition?
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