For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lying between the large rings of a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. This was the psychonautical equivalent of a three-star Anthology meal at the Fat Duck, or a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh by the Berliner Philarmoniker, if the meal were eaten standing up in an airplane toilet, the concert heard over the mêlée of Black Friday on Oxford Street.

Ketamine: special K.

“It’s a mong for end-stage burners,” said Palmer, techno DJ and medicinal gourmand. “I could play Abba and no one would clock it.”

“It’s a horse tranquilizer,” said my drug-naïve mum. “Those Thai soccer boys took too much and got stuck in a cave for days.” (She’d only heard about the Netflix documentary.)

“I think the rescue team gave them it to stop them panicking, Mum.”

“It’s a Swiss Army knife,” said an anesthetist colleague, “used off- label as an anti-inflammatory, for pain relief, for neuroprotection, as well as an anesthetic in surgery and critical care.”

I’d also read about anti-aging hacks in California “playing” with mega-doses that led to a complete collapse in space–time coherence, a few minutes stretching out to a “felt” century. I would be catheterized for the best part of an hour. It might be that the first human to live 5,000 years (me) had recently turned fifty and already had flattening arches and an arthritic hip.

These perspectives layered my ketamine “set”—my “priors,” to use the jargon of the neuroscientist, meaning the beliefs one holds before any experience has taken place, and the tendency for those beliefs to shape the experience itself.

The study was being conducted by Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, an international leader, and one of the first groups to be established with seed money from the philanthropist/ investor/podcaster/author Tim Ferriss, of The Four-Hour Work Week, The Four-Hour Body and The Four-Hour Chef, fantasies of compression enabled, I imagined, by the 4,000 years he’d spent exploring these things in psychedelic space-time. I had just received the patient information sheet (PIS), following a two-hour interview with one of the research assistants that had covered my psychological history, my educational history, my relationship history, my drug and alcohol history. And this was just the pre-screen.

In the days to come I would have a formal clinical interview lasting several hours with a consultant psychiatrist. It made sense to be careful about who one loaded in the barrel of an MRI scanner and shot into unimagined realms. In most psychedelic trials there were general criteria for “healthy”: no history of suicidality, psychoses, bipolar, personality disorders or long-term drug addiction. And for this particular trial there were extra criteria: that I was both ketamine-naïve and hadn’t been near psychedelics in three months, the latter being why I had elected to make ketamine the first of my ten trips.

The PIS was long, detailing every stage of the investigation in language that was supposed to be accessible to the layman to ensure the study’s safe passage through the ethics committee. It didn’t begin promisingly: “Detecting synaptogenesis induced by Ketamine/ Dimethyltryptamine and motor learning using the tracer [11C] UCB-J in an integrated PET-fMRI paradigm.”

“The brain’s ability to reshape and make new connections during adulthood,” it continued, “is essential to our ability to learn new skills and form and access memories. This process, broadly described as neuroplasticity, can be disrupted by many different factors and is increasingly believed to be centrally involved in a number of mental health disorders and cognitive impairments.”

This related to the “synaptogenesis” part of the title. New experiences may be registered in the brain by the generation of dendritic spines which sprout, tree-like, on one end—the dendron—of the neuron. The language of neuroplasticity is infused with the metaphor of the tree: the sprouting is called “arborization” after the Latin; under high magnification the dendrites look like foliage.

New Age psychedelic therapists like the recently disgraced Françoise Bourzat take the metaphor a stage further, seeing in the images of tripping brains anatomical symbols of the plants or mycelial (fungal) networks that inspire them. To the more circumspect this might be no different from getting high and seeing the profile of Donald Trump’s quiff in wispy clouds.

Most neuroscientists would think of both as examples of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous sensory pattern. Bourzat’s gloss on ancient human-plant synergy works less well for ketamine, which has no botanical basis but was developed in 1962 in a Detroit lab owned by a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer: a little more difficult to romanticize than Mazatec mushrooms and Amazonian vines.

Neuroplasticity has for decades been one of the most popularized areas in neuroscience, long predating the current interest in psychedelics. “Rewiring” has become part of the vernacular of life coaches, football managers, schoolteachers and mobile apps. (One might describe its recent ubiquity as the “Joe Dispenza Effect,” after the chiropractor-turned-neuroplastic guru.)

Plasticity is seen as a “hack” allowing us to acquire new skills and knowledge, change old patterns or “priors,” re-think ourselves. (Today Joe’s tweet reads: “To create a new personal reality—a new life—we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”) This mode of understanding makes it inevitable that plasticity and psychedelics are saddled together: two “new” instruments of improvement, passwords for the near-limitless possibilities of self-transformation, couched in the sexy-sounding language of neuroscience.

Keen to learn something of what might be about to happen to my brain, I run a Google search for “evidence of imaging of synaptogenesis.” It yields little. A few lead-in adverts (dictated by the engine’s plastic algorithm) for how to train your brain to give up sugar or “speak proper grammar,” then a low-res black and white clip lasting a few seconds that resembles the beginnings of cinema: dendrites like tiny forks of lightning across a night sky, appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again, until they stabilize. This was arborisation alright, but in larval jellyfish.

In clinical neurology, the field I work in, there’s a different emphasis on neuroplasticity. It’s understood not as “growth” or “transformation,” but as the mechanism of repair or compensation after devastating injury. The tone is different too, of course: more circumspect, less certain, at least as far as hard evidence goes. The effects of plasticity are seen clearly on brain scans taken at different intervals after a traumatic injury, for example, but its mechanisms, and the extent of its capacity to restore the injured brain, remain vague. At present there are no commonly used drug interventions with the power to significantly promote it.

But it remains a term in daily use. Every trauma patient will, after they are sufficiently reoriented in space and time, be given a basic lesson in the brain’s ability to heal itself: that the restoration of lost speech, a paralyzed leg, amnesia, an altered personality, depend on old pathways being restored, or compensatory pathways being forged. Some patients make complete recoveries, many don’t. Most clinicians cite two years as the length of the window in which such changes might be seen in the adult brain. A few make it longer, three to five years; a few are more conservative, confining the window to eighteen months.

In the absence of detailed evidence, this becomes a matter of convention rather than science. It’s also clinically strategic, something to give the patient and her family hope, the motivation to rehab, to keep emotional devastation at bay for as long as they remain “in” the window. In this context plasticity is often more a matter of faith than science. It’s also a way of distracting everyone (including the clinicians) from the terrible reality of how little can be done medically for the patients, how a significant percentage of their recovery remains in the lap of the gods. Then the window closes.

The PIS continued, “In depression, connections between regions involved in cognitive, emotional and memory processing appear to be weaker, and the brain’s ability to form new connections in these regions also seems to be reduced.”

Imperial is now widely known for psychedelic imaging in the field of mental health. Since the first wave of research there in the Fifties and Sixties, advanced neuroimaging technologies have been developed which can map the effects of psychedelics on specific areas of the brain.

One of them is the default mode network, a collection of structures in the mid-brain associated with mind-wandering, remembering the past and planning for the future—all those self-referring thoughts that demand their thinking. Another is the salience network: interconnected regions of the brain that select which stimuli are deserving of our attention. Some kind of dysregulation in these networks is thought to be associated with the experiences of “meaninglessness,” the negative appraisals of self and mental rigidity that are symptomatic of clinical depression.

To date, much of the neuroimaging research has depended on observing general changes in levels of activation across these networks following psychedelic treatment. Plasticity, which happens at the level of individual neurons, has been inferred rather than observed directly. The Imperial study I was being screened for aimed to take this a stage further. Combining fMRI imaging, which offers the precise location of activated areas, with PET scans, which allow any changes to be tracked across time, the intention was to observe synaptogenesis as it was happening. As per the PIS, “there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that ketamine’s antidepressant action may stem from temporary enhancement of neuroplasticity in important areas.”

A quick search of the literature suggested that most of the “growing” evidence was indeed inferred rather than directly observed, based on changes to larger patterns of brain activation or to neurochemistry. The only other evidence comes from animals: a couple of studies reported growth of dendritic spines in rats. But there are limits to translating rodent psychiatry: however grim it might be to spend your entire, brief life confined to an environmentally impoverished cage, the rat cannot be meaningfully diagnosed with depression or other human mental health conditions.

The lack of direct evidence reflected something of how provisional and callow much of the neuropsychiatric research on psychedelic therapy was. Even so, the current study was groundbreaking, using state-of-the-art technology in a clinically relevant area of investigation, and at the “hard science” end, compared to the vast majority of therapeutic research. It would also be eye-wateringly expensive: running scanners over multiple sessions with all the adjacent tests and staffing requirements meant the cost, even with a cohort of fewer than ten volunteers, would run into the high six figures.

The finance and science of psychedelic medicine are complexly entwined. In 2013 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated a variant of ketamine a “breakthrough therapy” on account of its apparent ability to reverse the acute symptoms of “treatment-resistant” depression. This led to a pharmaceutical arms race, the details of which were explained to me by Josh Hardman, founder of Psychedelic Alpha, one of the most reliable sources of financial information and commentary on the nascent psychedelic “sector.”

“Ketamine has been used ‘off-label’ for a number of years in the treatment of depression,” he told me, “but according to the calculus and playbook of pharma there’s little ‘defensibility’ in these cases: it’s not patented in any meaningful way for these uses, so there was no prospect of digging a meaningful IP moat around it.”

This changed in 2013 when the pharmaceutical company Janssen decided to use what Hardman called a “textbook procedure from the pharma playbook” to bring a variant of ketamine to market with patent protection. It chose one variant, s-ketamine (or “esketamine”), and partnered it with a specific drug-delivery mechanism, in this case a nasal spray. They then sought and achieved patent protection from the relevant government body on the intranasal administration of esketamine in treatment-resistant depression, under the trade name Spravato.

In other words, certain design choices that had little to do with empirical evidence allowed them regulatory exclusivity on their variant and permitted them to market it as a “new chemical entity.” This type of “innovation,” commonplace in the broader pharmaceutical industry, is, Hardman suggests, now entering the psychedelic sector.

But Janssen ran into significant problems with the health economics of its “invention,” as the price was forced up to $6,785 for a month of treatments twice a week. “Remember,” explained Hardman, “ketamine, unlike other psychedelic interventions, is associated with ‘temporary’ changes in neuroplasticity; meaning that its prescription has a different economic model than ‘one-off’ treatments.” Then, he went on, there was the fact that there was little long-term evidence for its efficacy. “Some experts, like former FDA reviewer Erick Turner, were flagging that even the more short-term data showed only modest efficacy and raised some concerns over patient safety.”

These factors have meant that even if Janssen is able to convince healthcare systems that it has a product with a novel mechanism of action, the cost and lack of evidence make it very difficult to produce a convincing economic case for a health authority, especially in the U.K., where NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has a cost-effectiveness requirement for recommending treatments for the NHS. Meanwhile, Hardman told me, Canada had flat-out refused to grant Spravato data protection, the Canadian court finding that it did not warrant the designation of “novel compound.”

Such limitations do not obtain in the U.S. The FDA’s initial approval of esketamine involved loosening its definition of “treatment-resistant depression.” Previously this diagnosis had been restricted to those who had tried two classes of antidepressant medication (there are several, including SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics). It changed this to mean any two different pills: i.e., it could be the same class of antidepressant, as long as over the course of their depression history the patient had taken two different brands. Given the whims of prescribers and patients, this sets a very low diagnostic threshold.

Despite this, the initial FDA approval remains, and much of the subsequent clinical research has adopted the same criteria for treatment-resistant depression. Even with such low-hanging fruit, Hardman told me, Spravato has not quite been the blockbuster Janssen had hoped for, though it remains lucrative by most standards, just not by pharma standards: by 2029, Global Data predicts, it will generate world sales of approximately $383 million.

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Excerpted from Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics by Andy Mitchell. Used with permission of the publisher, Harper Wave. Copyright 2023 by Andy Mitchell.

After working as a Rape Victim Advocate, I knew that I wanted to become a prosecutor. I saw how violence impacts survivors. I wanted to end the cycles of violence and stop the perpetrators. I thought prison was the answer, and that I could be a protector.

We all have origin stories. Mine began in the Midwest. I grew up, went to school, and worked in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. My dad and grandfather worked for ACDelco, a car parts manufacturer, in Anderson and Kokomo, Indiana. Kokomo, the “City of Firsts,” was a pioneering automotive town, and their Delco Radio Division developed the first push button car radio. We were a General Motors family, relying on the company that, in our words, “put every meal on the table.” My mom was a high school teacher with the Indianapolis Public Schools system, where she taught home economics and child development. I was a Midwesterner at heart, and in my family history.

When I was twenty-seven years old, I made a big move to Washington, D.C. There, I would finally start my career as a federal prosecutor. I was confident, righteous, and excited, armed with my newly minted law degree and job experience clerking for federal judges. I was proud to be an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the nation’s capital, proud to be fighting for others.

But that wasn’t necessarily the job. My year as a prosecutor brought me face-to-face with how prosecutions did not always help victims. In fact, victims often resented me.

Of course they did. I quickly learned to have the police arrest victims in order to make sure they showed up in court to testify against the defendant. That was just one of the common and callous tactics adopted in the office. Yet I continued to cloak myself in a shroud of righteousness.

I never thought about being wrong. I didn’t think about charging the wrong person as the perpetrator, or about prison as the wrong solution.

I saw prison as the answer through my own experiences growing up. As a kid, I didn’t see many men in my family and family circle go to prison. In my neighborhood, I didn’t see many harms from far off prisons and over-policing. So I superimposed my own past and my own view on survivors—that they undoubtedly would benefit from incarcerating the person who hurt them.

I remember one incident, when a victim called a prosecutor down the hall from me. The victim was calling from the lobby of our office building, just downstairs. Her boyfriend was with her. He was the charged perpetrator in her domestic violence case. Together, they wanted to talk with the prosecutor about dropping the charges.

At the time, D.C. had a mandatory arrest law that required police to arrest someone if they received a domestic violence call. After the arrest, a local court would frequently impose a no-contact order. As prosecutors, we then brought charges against people who violated these initial no-contact orders, or orders of protection. When a defendant contacted “our” victim, it became a criminal charge.

In this case, there was a civil order of protection in place after the domestic violence arrest. The survivor’s boyfriend could not legally be in touch with her—let alone stand next to the victim in the lobby of the prosecutor’s building.

The prosecutor called the police, who promptly arrested him. Now he had another charge—violating the order of protection.

We saw police and prisons as the solution to domestic violence and sexual violence.

I ignored survivors’ concerns that the charged person was the coparent of their children. I discounted that the alleged assailant provided a salary and funds for the family. And I diminished that they provided and could provide companionship and support.

I was averse to compassion or sympathy for anyone other than the few people, and few situations, I decided deserved it.

Instead, the common refrain was that if the defendant didn’t do this crime, they did something else. He was a bad guy. If she didn’t assist with the case, she was a “crack-whore.”

*

At the time that Kim, Tami, and Leigh were in rehab, the national overdose crisis was in its beginnings. Notably, Tami, Kim, and Leigh were all white women—in what grew to be an epidemic centered on whiteness, white addiction, and white suffering.

They also lived in rural Mississippi. “Rural” frequently, and inaccurately, read as white. Rural people of color remained overlooked. Mississippi’s population is almost 40 percent Black in a state where the largest “city” is 100,000 residents. In rural areas like the Black Belt, the majority of residents are Black. Yet while the whitewashed opioid overdose crisis brought attention to rurality, overdose victims of color were sidelined.

Drug use was stigmatized, but so was rehab. Federal law prohibited doctors from prescribing methadone or buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) at outpatient treatment facilities. Rehabilitation centers like Cady Hill instead relied on abstinence-only treatment models: the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step method, group therapy, and individual talk therapy. At the time, the prevailing—and antiscientific—view was that substance use disorder was a moral failing. As such, the cure was individual willpower.

But the definition of addiction is doing whatever it takes to obtain the object of addiction, no matter the consequences. As it turned out, willpower was a weak match for OUD, which is more severe than alcohol use disorder.

In the 2000s, the tide began to turn in favor of enhanced access to evidence-based treatment.

Today, rehab for opioid use disorder includes medication, where patients in recovery receive doses of a prescription opioid agonist, which can break the cycle of addiction. The Cady Hill Recovery Center still provides an intensive residential treatment program but has incorporated medication as well.

Providers can still be hostile to medication treatment, criticizing that it just swaps out one drug for another. Worse yet, there’s more stigma in the treatment community for methadone, the medication most frequently used to treat opioid use disorder by people of color, than buprenorphine, the less effective analgesic used by white people. Significant drug policy changes have occurred since Leigh, Tami, and Kim were in rehab, but what a difference those advances would have made for these women. What if they had all received medicine to overcome their addictions?

If someone used and overdosed, the reality was bleak. People overdosing were hastily dropped off at a hospital or a public park. Worse, sometimes the person overdosing was left to die alone. Anyone using a drug with the overdosing person could be charged with possession of drugs, distribution of drugs, or even worse: drug-induced homicide. Drug-induced homicide is a charge that an individual is responsible for the overdose death because they gave drugs to the person—regardless of whether there was any intent for that person to overdose and die. The intent doesn’t matter, just the act. Criminal drug laws were discouraging reporting overdoses, and instead leading to more people dying.

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From Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. Used with permission of the publisher, Citadel Press. Copyright 2022 © Valena Beety.

If cannabis has an energizing effect on the brain and body, how did we end up the couch-locked, junk-food-eating, lazy-stoner-who-can’t-find-their-car stereotype?

I mean, it almost seems as if someone made it up.

The answer to that question begins with an ambitious racist looking for some job security. In 1930, when Harry Anslinger was appointed the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (known as the FBN, which later became the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA), most Americans were not terribly afraid of drugs. However, they were remarkably susceptible to racism, presenting Anslinger with the opportunity to demonize opium via the Chinese immigrants and heroin via black jazz musicians, thereby ginning up tax dollars for the FBN—not an easy feat during the Depression.

“The Negro population… accounts for ten percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts,” he said at the time, pulling the statistic out of his ass.

While heroin and opium weren’t a large enough problem to get Anslinger the funding he was accustomed to during his years enforcing prohibition, there was a new smokable plant popping up throughout jazz clubs and in the bars of Mexican laborers: cannabis.

Actually, it wasn’t new. The plant had been grown in the United States since the 17th century and had been a staple of pharmacies for generations. In fact, years earlier Anslinger himself publicly declared cannabis to be harmless.

He was able to divert the public from these facts by ditching its botanical name and calling it “marihuana,” a rarely used term that sounded exotic and insidious (i.e., Mexican) enough to frighten the public into associating it with all their worst fears about nonwhites. In 1936, Anslinger proclaimed that 50 percent of all US violent crimes in areas populated by “Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans and Negros, may be traced to the use of marijuana.”

“By the tons it is coming into this country—the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms,” Anslinger said. “Marihuana is a shortcut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters.”

Media mogul and inspiration for the film Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst promoted Anslinger’s theories and stoked racist fears about “marihuana” in his papers. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” trumpeted one such article—adding that, under the influence of cannabis, these black men would seduce white women.

Or, even worse, “marihuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with negroes!” Anslinger proclaimed.

He would plant these stories in the press, then cite the articles as evidence of his rhetoric’s legitimacy, thereby creating an echo chamber that grew so loud that US legislators were convinced to vote in favor of a federal ban against marihuana in 1937—despite never hearing a minute of medical evidence justifying the measure—laying the foundation for the nearly century-long war on drugs.

Anslinger would often drift back and forth between the contradictory ideas that on the one hand, “marihuana” turned users into violent, sex-crazed maniacs with superhuman strength, and on the other hand it could turn susceptible youths into listless, mindless, unambitious zombies. The former worked when playing on the racist myth of sex-crazed black men attacking innocent white women, and the latter when targeting the influx of lazy Mexican immigrants coming for white men’s jobs, or the nefarious communist plot to incapacitate Americans via cannabis.

This proved so effective that even when overt racism became socially unacceptable, fearmongering politicians still preyed on Americans’ belief in an “other” (whether racially, culturally, or economically different) who was so fundamentally lazy and sinful, all they could think about was stealing your money and corrupting your children while living on government handouts.

DIRTY HIPPIES
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” John Ehrlichman, adviser to President Nixon, candidly said in a 1994 interview with Harper’s Magazine. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalize both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

When conservative Americans viewed the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s on the evening news, they didn’t see an artistic revolution based on community and spiritual enlightenment—they saw lazy parasites looking for a handout. This was not helped by their ubiquitous catchphrase, created by acid guru Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Intended to inspire youth to rethink the competitive rat race and create their own individualistic path forward (a very American concept, at its heart), it was interpreted by Nixon and his supporters as “Don’t work, smoke pot.”

While today we associate the 60s with hippies and civil rights marches, it’s easy to forget how wildly popular Nixon was (his 1972 victory was one of the biggest landslides in election history, winning 49 of 50 states), and how galvanizing the fear of blacks and hippies was to his supporters.

Country music star Merle Haggard penned a series of counter-counterculture anthems for this movement, with lyrics like “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee” and “I ain’t never been on welfare, ‘n’ that’s one place I won’t be, I’ll be working.”

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In 1969 Nixon coined the phrase “war on drugs” during a press conference announcing the Controlled Substances Act, which dramatically increased penalties for drug offenders and declared cannabis a Schedule I substance (alongside heroin) as having “no medical value and a high potential for abuse.”

Seeking justification for this move, Nixon appointed the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, tasked with investigating the social and medical science surrounding the plant. When the commission returned to Congress with a report titled Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, arguing that cannabis is not harmful, doesn’t present a threat to society, and should be decriminalized, it was vilified and buried.

Seeking a counterpoint, southern senator James Eastland launched the Senate subcommittee hearings titled “Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on US National Security.” Known as the godfather of Mississippi politics, who once declared African Americans “an inferior race” and the civil rights movement as promoting “the mongrelization of the white race,” Senator Eastland was the ideal torchbearer for Nixon’s strategy of disarming hippies and blacks via drug laws.

Hearing only from those with a negative view of marijuana—who claimed the plant caused brain damage, impotence, obesity, impaired immune function, uncontrollable homosexuality, and breast development among men, and, of course, laziness—Eastland proudly declared, “We make no apology for the one-sided nature of our hearings—they were deliberately planned that way.”

The hearing leaned heavily on the condition of “amotivational syndrome,” which was said to be a state of stupefied, zombielike behavior on the part of marijuana users, which explained the “drop-out” mentality of hippies and poor people on welfare.

Inspired by the Eastland hearings, the newly minted National Institute on Drug Abuse gobbled up taxpayer funds for studies looking for a scientific basis for amotivational syndrome. In one study, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University—known for his unethical “conversion therapy” tests on homosexual men involving electrodes, prostitutes, and legal coercion—strapped gas masks on a team of rhesus monkeys, forcing them to inhale the equivalent of 63 joints in five minutes. When the monkeys wound up with brain damage, Heath claimed to have found evidence of cannabis’s detrimental effect, and not, as many pointed out, a case of suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning. Heath’s study was never duplicated, and his experiment was repudiated by the National Center for Toxicological Research.

The more funding that was shoveled into NIDA to provide scientific evidence of marijuana’s evil charms—with the hopes of justifying its prohibition—the more evidence yielded its medical benefits. In time, the reputations of both Anslinger and Nixon were severely tarnished, and many were beginning to rethink their approach to drugs in America. (Years later it would be revealed that Anslinger had spent the second half of his life addicted to injected morphine, and Nixon was often so sloshed on Seconal and gin he would miss important meetings during national crises.)

People often forget that throughout the 1970s a wave of reforms led to cannabis being decriminalized in Minnesota, Alaska, Colorado, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Nebraska. For a while, it was even looking like President Jimmy Carter would federally decriminalize cannabis, which would surely lead to a fully legal system within a matter of years, thereby undoing a great deal of Nixon’s racist war on drugs.

But then a Hollywood cowboy came to town and turned back the clock.

WELFARE QUEENS
“Leading medical researchers are coming to the conclusion that marijuana, pot, grass, whatever you want to call it, is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States,” then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan said in 1980.

Viewed at the time as the best hope for a conservative revolution since Barry Goldwater, Reagan effectively created the classist (and racist) “welfare queen” trope—characterizing all poor people as unwilling to work because the government will take care of them—with the aim of demonizing social programs like food stamps, mental health care, and housing assistance, while subtly tapping into middle-class bigotry against poor minorities. The not-so-subtle message was that welfare recipients were both sneaky and lazy, mooching off the hardworking “real American” taxpayers—and we must weed them out of the system.

Throughout his career, Reagan effectively dismantled a number of social programs, cut the taxes that funded them, and successfully took on the unions fighting for the rights and wages of working poor people. Though his biggest legacy was to pick up where Anslinger and Nixon left off with the war on drugs.

And he really had it in for weed.

Foreign relations were upturned to accommodate seizures of pot in international waters. South American countries were pressured to spray harmful herbicides on suspected marijuana fields (poisoning the land, water, and human residents). Any positive reference to marijuana was scrubbed from NIDA databases, and any government scientist contradicting the party line was fired. Mandatory minimum sentences forced judges to pass outrageous, decades-long prison terms for minor marijuana infractions, causing an explosion in the prison population. Asset forfeiture created a lucrative revenue source for law enforcement, incentivizing the extrajudicial prosecution of both dealers and users—often creating cases of guilty-until-proven-innocent shakedowns when someone is found with a joint.

Within a generation, this would lead to the United States having the largest prison system—and the nation with the largest amount of its population incarcerated—in the world.

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Excerpted from Runner’s High: How a Movement of Cannabis-Fueled Athletes Is Changing the Science of Sports. Used with the permission of the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Josiah Hesse.

I’m a knife cutting through the desert in a truck with the windows open, oven air blasting in my face and my curls getting tangled while a beer sweats between my thighs. One hand on the wheel. Time has no hold on me. There’s another five beers on the floor next to me and many more drinks ahead when I reach town, the old western town where I’ve laid my head a few times in the rooms with fake fireplaces, stumbling distance to the bar. The sun bakes my arm that’s parked in the open window, my left arm, freckled, scarred, the arm of the hand I write with, and my silver ring glints in the sun.

Wait, should there be a silver ring there?

Yeah, it’s fine. I can be partnered and still have this fantasy.

It’s my daughter that gets in the way of carrying out such a fantasy.

And my career, which would not look kindly on a DUI. So it remains unspooled. Remains in daydream.

We are at a playgroup at a playground with no fences and I have a bolter. At the moment, though, my toddler isn’t bolting but sitting in the sand with another child’s doll—oversized head, big doe eyes, and a voice that is disembodied because her mouth doesn’t move. I don’t even try to listen to what the doll is saying. I don’t need to know. My daughter doesn’t have much of an interest in dolls but this one is a stranger’s doll, and she seems taken with it. I look at the other mother I’m standing with, trying to carry on a conversation with.

Somehow we start talking about psychedelics.

“I’m kind of a psychedelic girl, myself,” she says.

In that moment I’m aware we’re heading into territory that’s possibly taboo, on this playground, among the mothers in the playgroup, the strangers standing around us in the sandbox. It’s a conversation I definitely want to go deeper into, as I, too, am “of the psychedelic variety.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean.”

Because it’s been years since I’ve ingested a psychedelic. And it’s been years since I’ve even seriously considered ingesting one. I’m not the 15-year-old girl I once was, who looked up the drugs she planned to ingest that night in her health class textbook, dog-earing the page “Designer Drugs.” I’m not the 19-year-old girl who did her final paper on MDMA for “Drugs and Society” class, complete with an informal case study of her own Ecstasy use. I am also no longer acquainted with the people who made drug ingestion easy, or free, or carefree.

But I still identify.

The pulsing paisley waves still want to overwhelm me. I still long to see plants breathe once in a while, words appear in the sand when the tide goes out, every granule whispering their secret under my feet.

I’m sitting in the sand. Desert again. The place I once wanted to be my home until I remembered the ocean. There is a stillness in the air that almost sounds like the portent of a bomb. I’m waiting for it until I forget about it.

There’s the hum in my mouth I can’t be sure I’m creating. The sun bakes a point on the top of my head and I lazily lift my arm. I can see where my arm just moved from, the smear of movement, still apparent in the air. I let one arm circle lazily, eyes catching all the trails, until my shoulder surprises me with a small protest.

A lizard traipses by and my breath catches. I laugh out loud. The lizard was asking for it.

Night is still hours away and I have nowhere to be, and no one is looking for me, and I’m safe. Water, food if I want it, simple building blocks of protein and amino acids and nutrients I might require in these circumstances, where my brain is blown to smithereens and I am by my lonesome, recording it and living it, that altered space I am always trying to get back to.

There are several bottles of beer in our refrigerator that seem lodged there, in the back bottom shelf, never really moving until a group of friends is coming. Bottles of wine in our cupboards and living in our wine rack, gathering dust until I wipe one down and transport it in a paper bag to a party or to a dinner as a gift.

Rarely do I find myself with a particular thirst for alcohol in my house. The thirst finds me, though: as I drive down Western Avenue toward the hiking trail in Griffith Park, when I see Frank & Hank’s, an old haunt of mine; when a certain song arrives by radio station oracle and there is an afternoon or evening ahead of me with nothing I must do. Always during my twice yearly visits to the dentist, which makes me park somewhere near the Drawing Room, scene of so many previous blasted nights.

Even then, though, the thirst is contained.

The thirst wishes itself into my present, the kind that would have me day-drinking and happy-sloppy. Rarer and rarer, if ever.

I’ve caught myself telling students about how listening to music, to me, can often feel like ingesting drugs. About how I have to limit my intake, listen under ideal circumstances, because some songs have the ability to pull me under, steal an afternoon, rattle my heart and fuck up my psyche for hours. My only relief is if, in exchange, I’m able to write about it.

But why write about it when I can lose myself in it?

“I am of the psychedelic variety” is code.

My admission to students, to readers, about the power certain music holds over me feels weirdly vulnerable, as though you will find the music and play it to undo me, to liquefy and puddle me.

At age six, my child occasionally stared off into the middle distance and turned off her hearing, transformed into enlarged eyes, wan smile. Whenever I noticed I asked, Are you zoning?

“Zoning” is my code with her for enjoying what is in one’s head, what no one else can touch or see or feel, that landscape that is all one’s own, limitless. Ultimately unreachable but for the moments when the conditions are perfect to careen around in there while everyone sees your corporeal form upright, eyes glazed. This is my code for checking out.

My child slowly nods if she has even one tendril left tethering her to the earth.

My own “zoning” is composed of the few moments when I can let go of this plane enough to make the internal dive. The structures of my life don’t always allow for the complete “zone” experience. The structures of my life don’t allow for sweaty afternoons recovering from a pitcher of brunch margaritas. The structures of my life don’t allow for me to get in my car right now, point east on the I-10, and land with my head mushrooming under a brutal desert sun.

It might be a consequence of my mid-forties, because I never remember asking myself this before now, but how about making a decision I’ll thank myself for tomorrow? The structures of my daily life sigh long and hard but grind on. I amuse myself with a daydream involving camping out at the beach, planting a square bit of paper on my tongue, letting the sunrise destroy me. I ask for the plants to breathe for me, just enough that I can witness. When I switch on the radio it presents a song I can resist, or not.

My doctor notes in my chart that I am a “passive smoker.” A passive smoker like me can live for years smoking three, four, maybe five cigarettes a day. I can live with this definition of passive, applied to me.

Smoking cigarettes has never been a linear habit for me: I have gone off and on for years. I rarely smoked in any of my homes as an adult. Like many people, I smoke more when I’m drinking alcohol. Like many people, I smoke more when I’m stressed.

When my father unexpectedly died in 2014, I told myself, You get to smoke for as long as you want. In addition, I went unconscious in many ways.

Years later I look up from where I inhabit what little square footage I take up on this planet and think, It’s time. And as a natural purger, I make it happen. I quit.

I write to you, craving. I know there are music and texts I won’t gravitate toward in these next few fragile weeks of newness, because they threaten to drive me back to the pleasure, the simple pleasure of lighting this stick of tobacco. The ritual I’ve agreed to set aside for newer other rituals, still to be determined.

To even write this is to want.

The want of the chemicals that I know will work their weirdness in me. A place to step away to, me and my body, while not leaving completely. (I write, craving.)

It’s sometimes a struggle to be as contained as I am expected to be. Supposed to be.

The beers stand sentry in their long-held positions in the fridge. Empty packs of cigarettes with a smattering of loose tobacco in their confines lie at the bottom of the damp trash. Someone is looking for me, needing something. I feel my feet anchored to the ground, crown chakra itching. Something shimmers in the periphery.

I write, craving.

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From ZYZZYVA No. 119, Fall-Winter 2020. Used with the permission of ZYZZYVA.

Twenty-five years ago, marijuana dispensaries did not exist. In 2020, many states deemed them to be “essential businesses” allowed to remain open during Covid-19 stay-at-home orders. While many of those in the burgeoning cannabis industry have continued to operate in the midst of the shutdown, such businesses are ineligible for federal assistance under the various economic recovery plans passed by Congress, as the distribution and possession of marijuana remain illegal under federal law.

The variable treatment of marijuana dispensaries during the pandemic is a microcosm of how marijuana is treated under federal law. Marijuana is a legal product for medicinal use in most US states, and nearly a dozen allow the sale and use of marijuana for recreational purposes. Yet the federal prohibition on marijuana remains in place, so what is legal under state law still violates federal law.

The conflicting treatment of marijuana puts those who produce, sell, and consume various marijuana products in an interesting position. Marijuana businesses pay taxes, but cannot deduct business expenses on their federal tax returns. They sell products to consumers, but are generally excluded from credit card transactions and banking services due to federal regulation.

A state-issued medicinal marijuana card may enable an individual to obtain cannabis-based medical treatments, but may also preclude them from buying a gun or living in public housing. And because lawyers are not allowed to assist clients with actions that will violate the law, marijuana businesses can face a harder time trying to comply with the law of their state.

How did we get here? This state of affairs is a consequence of America’s federalist system, in which individual states have substantial legal authority and practical ability to go their own way. Under the US Constitution, government power is divided between the states and the federal government. Article I of the Constitution delegates to Congress a set of broad, but limited, powers, leaving all other government powers to the states, including most criminal law enforcement, land-use planning, and regulation of businesses.

While federal law is supreme, in that the laws Congress enacts preempt or supersede conflicting state laws, the federal government lacks the authority and the ability to make all law uniform. In addition to constitutional limits, the federal government lacks the resources and personnel to enforce most criminal laws at the local level and the Constitution prohibits the federal government from forcing state or local governments to enforce federal law.

What this means as a practical matter is that if Uncle Sam wants to prohibit marijuana, it has to enforce the law itself, at least in those jurisdictions that prefer a different approach. This is a real constraint on federal power because the average cop on the street is part of a state or local police force, not a federal agency. In the case of drug enforcement, there are approximately four times as many state and local law enforcement officers in the first two states to allow recreational use of marijuana—Washington and Colorado—as there are federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents across the globe.

So while a federally regulated bank may have to worry about providing financial services to a local dispensary, the dispensary and its customers have little to fear from federal law. If the dispensary’s activities are allowed in their local jurisdiction, the likelihood of prosecution is very small.

This practical reality meant states felt free to experiment with marijuana policy reform despite federal prohibition. Beginning with California, some states tried legalizing marijuana for medicinal uses in the 1990s, and then in 2012 Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use. Nine more states and the District of Columbia have followed since, and over half of the states allow medicinal use.

Because different jurisdictions have adopted different policies, we have been able to learn a fair amount about the effects of marijuana law reform. As it turns out, the predictions made by supporters and opponents were exaggerated. Legalizing marijuana has generated tax revenue, but has hardly been an economic savior. Making marijuana more available did not eliminate drunk driving, but it does not appear to have had significant negative consequences either, nor is there evidence yet of new youth epidemic.

And some of what we have learned was totally unpredictable, such as that respiratory illnesses from vaping THC are much lower in states that legalized marijuana, perhaps because users have legal alternatives to black-market products.

While marijuana is legal in many states, the effects of federal marijuana prohibition can be felt by those in the industry, and distort the effects of legalization. Reducing this conflict does not require nationwide legalization.

When the nation ended its experiment with alcohol prohibition by adopting the Twenty-First Amendment, alcohol did not suddenly become legal throughout the nation. Rather, the decision whether to legalize was left to the states. But that’s not all. The federal government retained its prohibition on interstate trafficking such that violations of state alcohol laws became violations of federal law too.

This enabled the federal government to assist states in implementing and enforcing their alcohol policy preferences. A similar approach could work with marijuana, thereby making it easier for businesses to operate where marijuana is legal, and protecting those states where marijuana is not.

Allowing different jurisdictions to try different things makes states into “laboratories of democracy,” in Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous formulation, whereby citizens and policymakers can discover the effects of different policy choices. Thus far, voters in most states that have reformed their marijuana laws seem happy with the results, as political support for legalization has continued to climb, but that could always change as latent effects of marijuana legalization emerge over time.

As recent political events demonstrate, there are wide divergences in policy views between Red and Blue parts of the country. One virtue of a federalist system is that we all don’t have to agree on a policy for each of us to have the opportunity to live in a jurisdiction where the laws reflect our preferences. The key marijuana policy debate going forward may not be whether to legalize so much as how to make marijuana laws work in our federalist system, where people in some states want marijuana available, and others do not. Allowing divergent policies proliferate could be a better approach than assuming every part of the nation needs to embrace the same approach.

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Marijuana Federalism, edited by Jonathan H. Adler, is available now.

The weed business is booming. So much so that the Green Rush, the surge of commercial opportunities opening up in the sale of weed, will soon be old news. Weed remains illegal under federal law, classified, along with heroine and LSD, as a schedule 1 drug: “defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Nearly two-thirds of states, however, have progressively legalized various types of usage and sale of the drug, pushing its legality into a gray area for much of the nation. As laws have shifted so has public opinion, dissolving stereotypes and taboos and thus expanding the market.

The legal industry was valued at over $10 billion in the US in 2018, estimated to grow by at least $30 billion over the next decade. The jazzman turned pusher—“harsh, predatory, cruel”—has become The Guy, “a white hipster Jesus in a bike helmet,” writes Niella Orr. The Guy is not only the protagonist of the web show turned HBO series High Maintenance following the fictional adventures of an anonymous weed dealer in Brooklyn, he is an archetype, says Orr, “redrawing the public face of pot dealing in America.” The Guy as well as his clientele—white and secure, if not well-off—is joined by beloved stoners Abby and Ilana of Broad City, together the composite for a newly visible class of lady weed enthusiasts.

The truth is even more fanciful than pop culture. Dispensaries now resemble boutique grocery stores, one-stop shops for all things cannabis. Today, the weed business is so much more than kush: portable vape pens and tinctures, “cannabis-infused” salted caramel almonds and sour apple gummy bears. There are weed critics and connoisseurs, weed magazines, weed yoga classes taught by off-duty Equinox instructors, multiday weed conferences, weed weddings and bud bars, 22-karat-gold-dipped one-hitters for $75 and sterling silver grinders for $1,475. Cannabidiol (CBD), a nonpsychoactive cannabinoid found in cannabis, has taken off in a boom of its own, spreading to beauty aisles, pharmacies, juice bars, and pet stores.

CBD providers also operate in a gray region, legally and bodily. While product pushers are effusive over the effects of CBD—promised to reduce anxiety, smooth wrinkles, relieve soreness and pain, mitigate chronic health conditions, and more—skeptics wonder whether companies provide high enough doses to reap the compound’s benefits, or whether CBD does anything at all. “The problem is,” writes the Atlantic’s Amanda Mull, “it’s not easy to know what you’re actually ingesting, or if it’ll actually change how you feel.”

As weed becomes so mainstream as to make puffing passé, it’s become easy to overlook the legality of the matter. Weed is only contingently legal, even in states with fairly liberal positions on possession, and yet the asides journalists and trend forecasters once dedicated to the contradiction of legal weed in America shrink and shrink, if included at all. It becomes less morally relevant to remind readers, consumers, and voters of all the people imprisoned, those who have been convicted and those who simply cannot make bail, for possession of a product now bought and sold at Barneys. As the makeup of the market attests, only certain kinds of people are able to take advantage of the gray, the same kinds of people for whom the law has always been more suggestion than fact.

Obama’s relative lenience—which still saw millions arrested—was a dream state quickly dissolved in 2017 when the Trump administration took the helm. In May 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions overrode former attorney general Eric Holder’s 2013 memo, which advised prosecutors against pressing charges for nonviolent, isolated drug offenses. In the 2017 memo, Sessions mandates prosecutors “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” warning that “any decision to vary from the policy must be approved by a United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General.” Marijuana is increasingly decriminalized across the country, yet the number of marijuana arrests is rising. On February 15, 2019, after Congress refused to allocate $5 billion to pay for a wall spanning the length of the 1,954 mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, the president declared a national emergency to seize funds. “One of the things I said I have to do and I want to do is border security,” the president said, “because we have tremendous amounts of drugs flowing into our country, much of it coming from the southern border.”

Even in communities where the drone of presidential xenophobia and racism feels far away, the weed business remains out of reach for black and brown experts who’ve risked the most to learn their craft. Perhaps as an overcorrection due to the tenuous nature of the law, states that have legalized weed for medical or recreational use prohibit people with drug offenses on their record from being involved in a cannabis business in any way. (In my state, Illinois, people with drug felonies are not even allowed to be medical marijuana patients.)

A survey published by Marijuana Business Daily in 2017 found that just 10 percent of respondents who founded or possessed an ownership stake in a cannabis business identified as Latino or African American. “Yes, investors and state governments are eager to hire and license people with expertise in how to cultivate, cure, trim, and process cannabis. But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black,” surmised reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis in a BuzzFeed investigation of racial disparities in the Green Rush. The black and brown people running weed businesses most endangered and devastated by busts, who, like their forebears, created opportunities in the interstices of American propriety in order to get by, are systematically prevented from thriving now that the business is out in the open. Weed, originally criminalized for being too Mexican and too black, now sheds its racial residue without reparations. (Amnesia strikes again.)

Owing to initiatives by local activists, some cities and states have instituted programs designed to improve parity. In California, Oakland’s Equity Permit Program promises at least half of its licenses to Oakland residents who’ve either incurred a weed conviction in the city since 1996 or lived in neighborhoods “with disproportionately higher number of cannabis-related arrests.” Similar, if softer, programs have appeared in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Recreational use is still illegal in Maryland, but State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced in early 2019 that marijuana possession would no longer be prosecuted in Baltimore. “Communities are still sentenced under these unjust policies, still paying a price for behavior that is already legal for millions of Americans,” she said. And as New York moves toward legalization, New York politicians such as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic gubernatorial primary candidate Cynthia Nixon have taken the position that the topic of race is inextricable from the topic of legal weed.

During her 2018 gubernatorial debate with Governor Andrew Cuomo, Nixon called legalization “a racial justice issue,” one that ought to “prioritize the communities that have been most harmed by the War on Drugs.” Equity goes beyond awarding licenses, Nixon noted, and includes financial support. She added, “We need to parole people who are in jail for marijuana arrests and we need to expunge their records and use some of this tax revenue [from legal marijuana] for them to reenter [the business].”

Financially, the barriers to entry into weed commerce look a lot like the barriers that have kept black people from authorized commercial activity since ever. Weed’s first movers are not only white but well-funded. “Getting funded is a bitch,” Wanda James told Vice’s Benjamin Goggin. James, Colorado’s first black dispensary owner, recalls minimum start-up costs upwards of $250,000 when she got her start in 2009. Speaking with Goggin nearly a decade later, those costs had since run up into millions at a minimum, and business owners cannot count on bank loans for a federally illegal pursuit. Even with diversity initiatives at the licensing level, “The only way for black and brown small businesspeople to enter is if you can partner with a large funded white business,” Amber Senter, cofounder of Supernova Women, which uplifts women of color in the weed business, told Goggin.

Additionally, black people and other people of color already in on the legal side of the industry are uniquely burdened with issues of reparations and inequality compared to their white peers. Kadeesha, cofounder of the Metropolitan Collective, told Refinery29 of several “unprofessional” encounters at conferences, instigated by white men who prefer to hit on her than network or discuss issues of race and gender. Rina Cakrani, a Whitman College student, wrote in 2018, “Everyone should feel uncomfortable with how white America is setting up generational wealth off of weed when so many Black and Latino men have been incarcerated and lost their livelihood over the same thing”—yet remorse among proprietors runs low. As David Bruno, leader of a failed bid to legalize weed in Ohio in 2015, told Chicago Lewis, “We’re not a nice society, and there’s not going to be reparations.”

And as white “potrepreneurs” disavow reparations, the mere suggestion of the subject also harms legalization efforts among the general public. In an essay in The Stranger, a white reporter, Dominic Holden, revisits his participation in the campaign for Seattle’s Initiative 75, a 2003 measure to make weed possession the lowest priority for police enforcement. Holden, who didn’t even smoke at the time, advocated for I-75 as a racial-justice matter. Campaign consultants more or less told Holden that this was a bad idea.

Because we could run that campaign, if we wanted. But that campaign probably wouldn’t win. The polling was clear: Those aren’t the messages that convince voters to relax the rules for pot. Nobody made us do anything we didn’t want to do, but we wanted to win, so we mostly shut up about that race stuff.

Instead, I-75 became about saving time and reducing paperwork, empowering cops to focus on “protecting our communities from serious and violent crime.” I-75 passed with the approval of 58 percent of the votes. Legal weed not as reparations but another means for white people to get rich and high.

Weed is not the only place where legal gray areas grease the way for white entrepreneurs to make it in a big way. At the 2018 State of the Black Tech Ecosystem conference in Chicago, the author and entrepreneur Felecia Hatcher compared extralegal workarounds like jitney cabs and Malachi Jenkins and Roberto Smith’s Trap Kitchen to gig-economy wunderkinder like Uber, Lyft, and Grubhub. Many companies that rely on apps to connect with their customers skirt the issue of licenses and certifications, while black workers caught working around legislation are not so favored. In Tennessee, for example, aggressive cosmetology regulations require hair braiders to be licensed “natural hair stylists” to legally do cornrows, Senegalese twists, or any other popular chemical-free styles. Failure to get a license results in exorbitant fines. The licensing requires expensive instruction at cosmetology school, yet few schools in the state offer such courses. The fines demonstrate no concern for black people and their hair, but rather the felt threat of black labor practices outside the state’s reach.

These appropriated ventures have not disrupted the hustle so much as normalized it. What started as creative but necessary means to make a dollar away from Uncle Sam’s roving eye have increasingly entered the domain of moguls who act like close-fisted pimps. Tech companies wrest away these means in order to further devalue workers by allowing customers to underpay for services. They leave the working poor—usually black and brown folks hanging on to urban life by a thread—with two choices: join and work for pennies, or be pushed out from the trade, from the neighborhood, from the block that used to be theirs. Some go with the first, some with the second, and most choose a bit of both, adding another notch to their hustle and finding other undetected ways to feel a bit free.

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From White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson (Beacon Press, 2019). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Despite the daily deluge of opioid crisis reports, you might not know that drug deaths rates aren’t just bad—they’re worse than they’ve ever been. Though last year’s tally is projected to tick down slightly from the year previous, around 70,000 Americans per year are dying from drug overdoses, which is more than from guns and more than the peak of the AIDS crisis, even driving down US life expectancy.

Great nonfiction books on the subject help us move beyond the headlines and understand how addiction and overdose impact families and communities. Drug trafficking also affects global politics, with President Trump regularly threatening Earth’s other superpower, China, for not controlling its illicit export of fentanyl, which is spurring the American crisis.

I spent four years reporting my new book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Crisis, spending time with addicted users and health care professionals. I spoke with both law enforcement officers and harm reduction activists who would dismantle nearly every aspect of current drug control policy. Focusing on new drugs like fentanyl, K2, and cheap, dangerous replacements for LSD and ecstasy, I embedded with corner dealers and Dark Web distributors, and even infiltrated a pair of fentanyl operations in China. I found that, despite China’s promises to curb this illicit industry, it is actually encouraging it through the tax code.

My work built on the nonfiction drugs books below. Many of their authors have also traveled the world, risking their personal safety to understand drug frontiers impacting users at home. Others were involved in seminal moments in drug history, from the so-called “Godfather of Ecstasy” to a young woman who accidentally stumbled onto the country’s biggest LSD lab. Each of these works are as readable as they are informative, and help us understand how we got from “Just Say No” to a swelling international crisis.

Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Most of America’s heroin comes from Mexico, but until the 1990s the cartels mainly trafficked it to the major cities. This left major swaths of the US map up for grabs, and so small groups of traffickers fanned out around the United States to previously under-served markets like Nashville, Tennessee, and Boise, Idaho. Most of them came from the small Mexican county of Xalisco; they were a steady pipeline of young men coming to America with hopes of getting rich. Unlike traditional dealers, however, they weren’t armed, and the focus was on customer service. They handed out business cards at methadone clinics, and made home deliveries.

Quinones shows how the overprescription of opioid pills by American doctors opened up this market, and how law-abiding citizens turned to the Xalisco heroin dealers when their prescriptions ran out. Dreamland is a monumental work of reporting and analysis. At its heart, the book is about the effects of a single molecule so powerful it can produce both the greatest pleasure possible, and the greatest suffering.

Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

No matter where you come from or how old you are, you’ve likely been given misinformation about drugs for most of your life. Chasing the Scream is one of those “everything you know is wrong” texts that uses first-hand reporting from around the globe to show how we’ve gotten in wrong, and how we can right the ship. Hari travels from Arizona—where prison camps try to humiliate users into going straight—to Portugal, where decriminalization has actually helped solve drug problems. Most astonishing is his reporting on heroin abuse. Counter to the traditional narrative that once an opiate or opioid get its “chemical hooks” into users it’s nearly impossible for them to break free, Hari shows the situation to often be less chemical than psychological. If users can get their personal lives in order, they can frequently get clean.

Alexander Shulgin & Ann Shulgin, PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story and TiHKAL: The Continuation

Chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin began his career at Dow Chemical. After he created an extremely-profitable insecticide they let him work on whatever he wanted, which happened to be psychedelic drugs. His mind-expanding creations turned out to be too much for Dow, but, brewing up potions in his mad-scientist lab across the Bay from San Francisco, Shulgin made countless new drugs from scratch, sampling them himself to understand their effects. He thought these chemicals could benefit everything from science to religion, and, in particular, believed MDMA could aid psychiatry, thus earning him the nickname “Godfather of Ecstasy.” He published detailed synthesis techniques for his drugs in his 1991 tome, PiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and in 1997 followed it up with TiHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved).

The books are co-authored by his wife Ann, who goes beyond the chemistry to describe their courtship, research, and many psychedelic trips—4,000 for him, and about half of that for her. The books have been staggeringly influential, inspiring a generation of do-it-yourselves chemists to tweak the chemical structures of known drugs to try to make new ones. The DEA was not amused, however, and in 1994 raided the Shulgin property, stripping its patriarch of the DEA-granted drug-making license he somehow possessed.

Mike Power, Drugs Unlimited: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High

Drugs Unlimited is the first book about novel psychoactive substances, formerly known as designer drugs. These are the new psychedelics, amphetamines, opioids, cannabinoids and other drugs replacing traditional recreational substances, and they are the direct result of Sasha Shulgin’s do-it-yourself revolution. When Shulgin first published PiHKAL chemists thumbed through the thick tome in their labs, but the Internet age brought drug recipes to psychonauts around the world, who could share their musings on chat boards and even buy and sell online. This spawned an entire industry of new drugs that were largely made in China, which upended drug policy around the world.

Of course, as Power shows, most governments reacted reflexively, criminalizing them all without considering the consequences, and often inspiring more insidious substances in their wake. The book is revelatory throughout, but perhaps most compelling is the story of how international crackdowns on Cambodian traffickers harvesting ecstasy ingredients from native trees created a massive MDMA drought in English rave culture. This led to an influx of new chemicals used to make fake ecstasy pills, many of which led to deaths.

Ko-lin Chin and Sheldon X. Zhang, The Chinese Heroin Trade: Cross-Border Drug Trafficking in Southeast Asia & Beyond

Though countries like Afghanistan, Mexico, and Colombia, and the “Golden Triangle” region in Southeast Asia have long produced the world’s illicit drugs, China is quickly taking center stage. My book Fentanyl, Inc. focuses on China’s role as a producer of fentanyl and novel psychoactive substances—almost all of which are exported to the West—while The Chinese Heroin Trade, published in 2015, concerns traditional drugs like heroin and meth, which China both makes and consumes in great quantities. Very little has been published about the subject, making this book particularly valuable. It traces how Chinese history, culture, and criminal institutions shaped its drug industry. Unlike violent Latin American cartels, these Chinese organizations eschew violence, preferring to make money quietly.

Perhaps most shocking is the book’s exploration into how China treats its own drug abusers—basically like criminals. Citizens can be executed for possessing small amounts of drugs, and those who escape this fate are often sentenced to years of hard labor. It’s a fascinating peek inside a secretive regime, one whose policies are shaping drug trends around the world.

Krystle Cole, Lysergic

Cole was working as a stripper outside of Topeka, Kansas in 2000 when a tall, strange man carrying a metal briefcase named Gordon “Todd” Skinner came into her club. They hit it off, and he ushered her into his playground of psychedelic substances, located in a decommissioned underground Atlas E missile silo. He soon imparted that he helped run one of the largest LSD laboratories in the world. It was all fun and games until Skinner became paranoid, turning himself in after being granted immunity for testifying against his partner, William Leonard Pickard.

I won’t spoil the ending, but Lysergic is part bizarre love triangle, part psychedelic treatise, part true crime story. Cole’s no-frills writing moves quickly, and the story is captivating; though some aspects of her account have been disputed, it is an indispensable window into a case that had implications for the international drug trade.

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Ben Westhoff’s Fentanyl, Inc is out now from Grove Atlantic.

In 1995, two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, were made honorary Knight Commanders of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in honor of their “professional, humanitarian and exploration” achievements—an award that has been bestowed on an eclectic assortment of luminaries including Mother Theresa, Bono, and J. Edgar Hoover.

The same year, Purdue Pharma, a company owned by the Sacklers, received approval from the FDA for OxyContin, a new extended-release painkiller that would later be blamed for starting an epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses that America and many other countries continue to spend vast resources trying to contain today.

Since then, Purdue has been sued, vilified, and held up as a poster child for everything wrong with the healthcare system in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular.

The research scientists at Purdue who developed OxyContin made the same mistake Frederick Sertürner had made when he developed morphine in 1803; the same mistake Heinrich Dreser at the Bayer Company had made when he synthesized heroin in 1895; the same mistake Martin Freund and Edmund Speyer had made in 1916 when they synthesized oxycodone; the same mistake Otto Eisleb and Otto Schaumann had made in 1939 when they synthesized meperidine (Demerol); and the same mistake Carl Mannich and Helene Lowenheim had made when they synthesized hydrocodone in 1943.

All of them believed they were developing less addictive and more effective alternatives to existing opioids. All of them were wrong.

In terms of marketing and sales, the timing of OxyContin’s release could not have been better. In the late 1990s, the VA hospital system began to consider pain the fifth vital sign (along with pulse, temperature, respiration, and blood pressure). Doctors were encouraged to deal with pain more aggressively, which meant walking an even finer line between providing relief and risking addiction. Purdue argued that, as an extended release version of oxycodone (which had been a standard opioid medication in America since 1939), OxyContin would be less addictive because it delivered lower doses of the drug over longer time periods. They, too, were wrong.

Patients had become addicted to prescription opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone throughout the 20th century as well as barbiturates (e.g., Seconal and Nembutal) and benzodiazepines e.g., Valium). But the numbers were minimal compared to the epidemic of opioid addiction that began when doctors began over-prescribing OxyContin and Purdue began concealing its risk.

That risk was even greater when it was tampered with—e.g., by crushing and snorting or dissolving and injecting. Both techniques brought a sense of deep relaxation and euphoria similar to heroin—at least the first time. Increasingly, patients who had begun taking OxyContin legitimately for pain relief found themselves chasing this high.

Regardless of their path to addiction, when a patient could no longer get any by prescription—or simply wanted more than they were prescribed—they would buy some from friends and then strangers on the street. And when that supply dried up, many turned to more readily available and less expensive heroin.

Doctors and patients wanted OxyContin. The FDA approved it. The government’s efforts to mandate data monitoring and sharing technologies that would expose prescription drug fraud were woefully inadequate. Was it really Purdue Pharma’s fault it was so widely used and abused? After all, what they did was simply the continuation of a long tradition of poorly tested medical miracles and shameless overmarketing. Were they really so much worse than “Mrs. Winslow,” who in the 1800s claimed right on the label of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup that it was The Mother’s Friend for Children Teething? (Unbeknownst to many mothers—and the person on the label who looks suspiciously like a nanny—the bottle had 65 mg of morphine in it.) Similarly, when Bayer introduced heroin, it claimed the new drug was the “Cheapest Specific for the Relief of Coughs (bronchitis, phthisis whooping cough etc.).”

Actually, it was Purdue’s fault. If they had just been self-deceiving hucksters like those patent remedy marketers of the 1800s, they—as well as the FDA and the doctors who trusted them—would “simply” be guilty of sloppy science and wishful thinking. Their crime was ignoring and concealing indisputable reports from the field that the pills were being overprescribed, sold on the street, and adulterated. By the time the company came out with an “abuse-deterrent formulation” (which, ultimately, didn’t completely deter abuse), and states slowly began to pressure doctors (and pharmacies) to decrease prescriptions, many users had already turned to heroin.

In 2007, the president, top lawyer, and former chief medical officer of Purdue Pharma were ordered to pay $634.5 million in fines. The company itself agreed to pay $19.5 million to twenty-six states and the District of Columbia (Purdue earned over $1 billion in OxyContin sales that year). Ten years later, in September 2018, as part of negotiations to settle 1,000 lawsuits, Purdue reportedly offered to give away buprenorphine—one of the main drugs used in medication-assisted treatment for addiction. The patent for buprenorphine is owned by a company known as Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, which is owned by the Sackler family.

Estimates are that 200,000 Americans have died directly from OxyContin-related overdoses since 1999. Countless other addicts have been given long, if not lifetime, sentences for opioid sales and use.

By the end of 2017, Purdue had sold approximately $35 billion worth of OxyContin.

No one from Purdue has ever served time in prison.

*

While people were just becoming aware of how dangerous OxyContin was, George W. Bush became president. At first, it appeared his drug policy would be more compassionate than Clinton’s. While there was $2.3 billion for border control in his first budget, it also included $3.8 billion for treatment and research as well as $650 million for youth education programs at schools and in the community.

Yet, however sincere his attempt to deal with the drug problem in a more enlightened way, his response to 9/11 would end up exacerbating it significantly, as once again, America made opium a foreign policy tool.

Afghanistan’s opium production had increased by twenty times between the 1970s and the early 1990s, thanks in part to the CIA using the drug to fund Afghanistan’s resistance to Soviet occupation. Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the country plunged into civil war until the Taliban, backed by al-Qaeda, formed a tenuous central government—one whose gross national product depended heavily on raw opium and heroin. While the West officially frowned on this, it was too busy in the Middle East by then to address it.

By 2000, the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of the country, with the rest controlled by the Northern Alliance, which was supported by Russia and other neighboring countries. When a severe drought destroyed the poppy crop, the Taliban government needed money badly and looked to the United Nations for foreign aid, offering in exchange to crack down on future opium production. As far as the international community was concerned, Afghanistan had to stop supporting terrorism and violating human rights before they would be given any assistance. Bush, seeing the opportunity to expand American influence in the region, agreed to give them $43 million in foreign aid—a decision he soon regretted when Osama bin Laden (whom the Taliban had been protecting on behalf of his Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda) choreographed the most successful terrorist attack on US soil in history.

After 9/11, when the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden, the United States and Great Britain attacked alongside their former enemies, the Northern Alliance. The Taliban government crumbled and a new government was formally elected. The Taliban started a counterinsurgency movement, which they financed by getting back in the opium business. So, in turn, President George Bush decided to get back into the opium-fighting business and authorized major crop-eradication efforts. He also turned a blind eye to certain factional warlords of the Northern Alliance who were allied with the United States versus the Taliban, despite abundant evidence that they, too, were involved in heroin trafficking.

Crop eradication is a zero-sum game. There are 10,000 seeds in a single opium poppy pod. A farmer whose crop has been destroyed (or who has been driven off his or her land) can easily walk away with enough seeds to start over. Not only do new crops and other sources of supply seem to pop up overnight, eradication turns farmers who are just trying to feed and shelter their families into willing recruits for governments, terrorist organizations, and revolutionary groups. As one Afghan woman shouted, “They will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy.”

If farmers could make as much money (or at least a reasonable living) growing legal crops and raising flocks of sheep, goats, and cows, most would be happy to do so. It would certainly be far less dangerous than being in the middle of warring factions in the drug trade. Instead, after years of warfare, Afghanistan’s irrigation systems have been ruined, orchards devastated, animal flocks decimated, and seed supplies destroyed. The United States has spent billions of dollars on military solutions, money that would be far better spent “winning the hearts and minds of the people” by rebuilding the country’s economic infrastructure.

This is obvious to some of those who have witnessed the problem firsthand. It is the reason that a group of US military veterans started a nonprofit called Rumi Spice to help farmers in Wardak Province grow and market premium saffron, one of the world’s most expensive spices. At approximately $200 per kilogram, it doesn’t quite match the $300 per kilogram they could make from poppies but it’s much more reliable, sustainable, and safe to grow; and since, like poppy cultivation, it’s labor intensive, it employs a similar number of people. The country’s agricultural ministry has embarked on a similar initiative in the province of Herat, where there are now 400 farmers in the saffron business.

In the long run, crop replacement might do no more than crop eradication to reduce overall worldwide supply, since other countries can increase their crops within a season to compensate. However, it is certainly a more effective and honorable—and potentially even more strategically successful—way to work with countries that have been ravaged by drugs, in part due to America’s nation-building efforts.

When Barack Obama came into office, he renewed America’s commitment to defeat the Taliban and, by the end of 2009, he had raised the number of US forces to 100,000 as part of what he called a “surge” to make it possible to begin withdrawing troops. After the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Congress began to push for more rapid troop withdrawal. By the end of 2015, there were only about 10,000 American troops still in the country.

Some foreign policy experts continue to insist that destroying poppy crops is essential to accomplish our goals in Afghanistan. They also say troop levels will have to go up again to 100,000 or more to do that job. They point out that, when the number of soldiers tripled (from 30,000 to more than 90,000) between 2007 and 2012, the area under cultivation went down 25 percent (200,000 hectares to 150,000 hectares). Whereas after Obama’s troop reductions the hectares under production more than doubled.

If only the math were so simple. If only more troops = fewer poppies = 0 Taliban = America wins. However, other experts argue that, no matter how much nation-building and investing the West does to support Afghanistan’s economy, it won’t have a major impact on production because, for most of its people, drugs remain the most reliable source of income.

One writer, after enumerating the total number of troops deployed, soldiers killed, and stunning amount of money spent in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2017, concluded, “In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower—the opium poppy.”

Even if America “succeeded” in Afghanistan there’s one very inconvenient truth that changes all these equations. Less than 10 percent of the heroin smuggled into America originates there. Most of the heroin entering the country is instead processed from poppies grown in Southeast Asia and increasingly Mexico and other Latin American countries. In other words, even if there weren’t a single poppy growing in Afghanistan, America would still be awash in opiates.

The even more inconvenient truth is that heroin’s long reign as the primary addictive “hard” street opiate is coming to an end, regardless where it’s being grown. Free from the ingredients within the opium flower, opiate analogs are synthesized rather than grown and are designed to be hundreds of times stronger than heroin.

_____________________________________

Excerpted from the book Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World by John Halpern and David Blistein, to be published on August 13, 2019 by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2019 John Halpern and David Blistein.

Remember Pizzagate, the insane 2016 conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta were involved with a child sex-trafficking ring being run out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC, pizza joint? Completely and utterly false.

Comet Ping Pong doesn’t even have a basement. Nonetheless the story went viral, culminating with a heavily armed guy charging into the place and shooting it up, to save the kids. This is an extreme example of how misinformation and outright lies can be passed off as truth and lure people into action.

And how about UFOs? For decades we have been assured that they are hoaxes, illusions, conspiracies. Turns out that they are probably real. In unpacking three extraordinary drug-induced experiences documented by brothers Terrence and Dennis McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick, Eric Davis’s High Weirdness is mandatory reading to help make sense of our current moment in time when it is hard to differentiate between popular culture, politics, and religion.

The “high” in this book’s title is self-explanatory but “weirdness” is such a slippery word. As Davis sees it, the weirdness under his kaleidoscopic magnifying glass originated in William James’s embrace of accepting subjective experiences to validate encounters and events too elusive for traditional objective research to classify, coalesced in 1970s California, and from there has accumulated into a disorienting white-out of information and content in which it is increasingly difficult for people to orient themselves.

If you remember the Animal House stoned quandary of how the solar system might just be one atom in the fingernail of some other giant being, Davis has ingested and internalized all the ways into thinking about such a concept and readily dispenses roadmaps that are equally erudite and poppy; ideas from Jacques Lacan and Félix Guattari are slotted under section titles like “Shroom with a View” and “Romancing the Stone,” and the pages are peppered with terms like “mindfuck” and “coinkydinks” but not to be cute or offhanded about the subject matter; quite to the contrary, such a truly holistic approach to culture, to existence really, is the only way to begin trying to understand how the book’s primary subjects strove to understand moments when, in the words of Dennis McKenna, the brain is “experienced not as part of the self, but as the ‘other.’”

*

Much is made of Dr. Albert Hofmann’s April 19, 1943, bicycle ride home from his lab at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, contending with the first ever intentional LSD trip. It was the first, and last time the drug would be taken and experienced without the baggage of preconceived expectations infiltrating the several hours of a trip. Hofmann, a chemist, had taken the 25th variation of a synthesized compound of the fungus ergot and from there, using samples and reading material provided by Sandoz in the name of white-jacketed research, scientists and psychiatrists experimented with LSD-25, attempting to determine the best uses for the substance.

After decades of tests and case studies, which produced thousands of scientific papers presented at conferences and published in journals, in 1968 much of the research was driven underground after the drug was criminalized in the United States and elsewhere. By then, of course, it was too late, it had already been siphoned out into the public: by the late 1950s Hollywood stars like Cary Grant sang the praises of LSD therapy; Ken Kesey commandeered doses of the stuff he’d been paid to take as part of the CIA’s MKUltra program, spiriting into existence the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests; and by the time Timothy Leary, who’d bucked academic rigor for the sublimely suggestive tropes of Eastern religions and mythologies, exhorted the crowd gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In in 1967 to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” the media didn’t need any more fodder to truly freak out the establishment about the dangers of LSD.

Within the context of High Weirdness, however, perhaps the most important takeaway from Hofmann’s first trip is the fact that he’d isolated LSD-25 in 1938; when it did not yield the desired effects of being a circulatory and respiratory stimulant, Hofmann moved on to LSD-26. But then, five years later, he returned to LSD-25, because of a “peculiar presentiment” and on April 16th he accidentally dosed himself, which led him to take a quarter-milligram of it on April 19th. What exactly was that “peculiar presentiment” and what do we make of such odd but no less real occurrences that are part of life, these “coinkydinks” in High Weirdness speak? How are we supposed to fold challenges to consensus reality into the accepted and vetted status quo?

As Davis documents in exquisite detail, the McKennas, Wilson, and Dick all worked to make sense of patterns, symbols, and messages they received in the name of elucidating greater truths about the world, truths that to this day most people only appreciate as drug-induced hallucinations that were products of misguided and addled minds: on a 1971 vision quest in La Chorrea, Colombia, the brothers McKenna ate substantial quantities of fungi and heard frequencies and saw visions that, to them, indicated “a revolution in the nature of reality itself”; Illuminatus!, a novel that confuses history and fiction like some pulp hybrid of Ragtime and Gravity’s Rainbow co-written by former Playboy editors Wilson and Robert Shea, establishes a conceptual framework for how “the world is considerably more malleable than it at first appears,” which led to “an extraterrestrial intelligence from the star system Sirius regularly [sending Wilson] telepathic messages while staging ominously significant synchronicities in his everyday life”; a glimmering necklace defined by a “fish sign” set off for Dick a series of uninvited transcendent visions, which became part of what he called “2-3-74.”

Outlandish and implausible as this all sounds—and this is a most cursory gloss of these high-dose plunges into altered states of awareness—they are not fictions. We are not discussing a Philip K. Dick novel; we are discussing his life and the lives of three other individuals who believed with unwavering conviction that their experiences revealed and spoke to something beyond religion, what Davis has coined as “weird naturalism”: not signs of a separate reality but as mutated manifestations of this one.

There is no appreciating what these men went through without understanding they are inheritors of the weird, dating back to figures like Charles Fort, who published books in the first decades of the 20th century that documented centuries worth of unexplainable occurrences, such as oddly colored, viscous material raining from the sky, as well as numerous stories of mysterious airships. As Davis astutely points out, Fort’s project “showed that science, like all ‘systems,’ strives to maintain and extend itself by ruthlessly policing its borders.” What work like Fort’s proves is that, in Davis’s words and one of his book’s linchpins, “anomaly is a characteristic of the real” and “the narrative implications that [Fort] wove from his collages of wild facts were in many ways indistinguishable from the occult tales and ‘scientific romances’ being published in the pulps around the same time.”

Enter H. P. Lovecraft, whose fictions conjured strangely eerie horrors that overlapped with the accounts Fort collected. Lovecraft in fact had a working definition for “weird”: “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” As Michel Houellebecq writes in Against the World, Against Life, his ode to Rhode Island’s most famous misanthrope: “Lovecraft uses the multiform descriptive methods of science: the obscure memory of fertility rites practiced by a degenerate Tibetan tribe, the baffling algebraic particularities of pre-Hilbertain spaces . . . to evoke a multifaceted universe where the most heterogeneous fields of knowledge intersect and converge to generate the poetic trance that accompanies the revelation of forbidden truths.”

The visions seen and communications received by Davis’s subjects—all of which shared the essence, in Terrence McKenna’s words, of an “uncanny presence”—contain these “forbidden truths” but such truths are myriad, and undermine or discount other established truths. Raising the question: What is truth?

When anthropologist Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, the first in a series of “authentic” accounts of Native American sorcery, was found out to be more fiction than anthropological research, readers kept buying the book because they were introduced to shamanistic concepts that were new to them, and seemed useful, indicating “how permissive the idea of spiritual ‘truth’ had become.” From Fort and Lovecraft, through the devastation of World War II to the material abundance bestowed upon the Baby Boomers, political coups, assassinations, and the ever-present tales of UFOs and alien abductions, by the 1970s, the American psyche was primed to accept almost anything that could find cultural purchase.

As Davis concedes, his research, thoroughly impressive and engaging as it is, presents countless of ontological problems. But let’s face it, what do most people care about ontology? It’s what we feel that matters, and this emphasis on an individual’s sense of self is a core component of why Davis’s subjects all had their encounters in the 1970s, what Tom Wolfe dubbed the “Me Decade” in a 1976 New York magazine article that connects the unguarded admittance of one young woman wanting to rid her life of hemorrhoids to America’s Third Great Awakening. As Wolfe saw it, this was the result of “unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self.” And, of course, this rise in reflection on the self resulted in no shortage of capitalist enterprises devised to keep people constantly thinking about themselves, like the hemorrhoid sufferer, who announced her affliction to over 200 people attending a seminar in the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

When Wolfe announced a new great awakening for America he was referencing a belief held by Gnostic Christians that the light of God is present in all, but concealed under “the junk heap of civilization” (that’s Wolfe, not the Gnostics), and while most aren’t able to let this light burn brightly, it can. Wolfe argued that “Every major religious wave that has developed in America has started out the same way: with a flood of ecstatic experiences.” There is no denying that Davis’s subjects describe and believe in their respective experiences with pious verve, but so too do people who have made contact with aliens. And here is the High Weirdness through-line, everything Davis covers shares “a similar mix of sacred and profane, of extraterrestrial possibilities and paranoid conspiracies, of mystical databases, redemptive psychoses, and turbulent time loops.”

*

The cultural and medical value of psychedelics have been receiving renewed interest over the last few years in books like Jesse Jarnow’s Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Ayelelt Waldman’s A Really Good Day, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and the catalogue for the 2018 exhibition Altered States: Substances in Contemporary Art, which revolved “around the effects and potential of various substances, economic interests, and highly profitable black markets, as well as subcultures and their capitalist appropriation.”

Jarnow, using the Grateful Dead as the point of entry, links the psychedelic warriors borne out of the Acid Tests with the overriding spirit of DIY ingenuity that pumped through the 1960s and 70s. In High Weirdness, Davis reaffirms that “countercultural creativity can be seen as a massive and decentralized construction project designed to replace or outpace a corrupt order of technocracy . . . all manner of freak pragmatists attempted to build new frameworks of possibility.” To that end both books cover figures like Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand.

Pollan reports on how LSD and psilocybin benefit those with ailments like depression and anxiety, and along the way goes slightly gonzo with his own trips, and hangs out with people like mycology madman Paul Stamets; while Waldman’s book is a month-long diary of microdosing LSD to combat a mood disorder, ingesting ten micrograms once every few days as a sort of mental recalibration.

Davis’s and Jarnow’s books are of a piece in that they document individuals who intentionally pushed limits with psychedelics and other controlled substances. Waldman and Pollan are skeptics who come around; the former never looking for a transcendent trip in the first place and the latter having ones that he admits are more than drugged-out indulgences. Taken together, these books chart how contemporary Western psychedelic culture has gone down the rabbit hole and come back out, or burrowed all the way around. Much of the artwork that comprises Altered States takes aim at the corporate presence behind drugs today, like Suzanne Treister’s “HFT The Gardener” series, which explores, in her words, the “holographic nature of reality through the use of psychoactive drugs and shamanic ritual.”

Before Dr. Hofmann invented LSD people the world over had been taking psychoactive drugs. But Hofmann’s discovery happened as a direct result of corporate auspice, inherently forging the promise of unlocking profound insight with bottom-line interests. In this sense, there is a noteworthy connection here to the birth of the internet; as Heads documents, many of the programmers working in labs at Stanford and MIT, developing email and other modes of virtual communication through the nascent ARPANET, found great intellectual and innovative value in LSD.

Against the backdrop of the ever-present weird, the techno-utopian visions of early internet pioneers were taking shape, and being primed for corporate intervention. And this is why Marshall McLuhan’s prescient sound bites pop up throughout High Weirdness. The weird and the drugs had been there all along, but now the media ecology was connecting people with any and all ideas faster than ever, to the extent that consciousness became “a tweakable or hackable interface.” Here, then, we arrive at the network society where, in Davis’s words, “information becomes a thing-in-itself, an almost metaphysical substance that . . . massively shapes both individual and collective existence.”

The import put on the constant flow of information today is undeniable, whether we’re talking about social media influencers or news outlets. The navel gazing of the 1970s has morphed into endless screen time, where it seems like the self is subsumed, dissolving into newsfeeds and updates, likes and reposts. There is a great deal of potential baked into this reality, a landscape that has been simultaneously colonized by every interest imaginable. As this has happened, it has become harder and harder to tell where things begin and end, from content and advertising to truth and fiction. Our activities are tracked and predicted by network systems, essentially wiring us into these systems, making us components in them. In Evelyn Underhill’s seminal 1911 book Mysticism she wrote “the watchword of all mysticism [is] Surrender.”

Surrender we have, and plenty of people have projected mystical values onto our hyper-connected existence. This existence has also produced no shortage of “ecstatic experiences,” lending our era, for some, the spiritual mystique of transhumanism or other such techno-utopian ambitions. Could we be on the cusp of a new great awakening, or headlong into severe somnambulism?

High Weirdness isn’t about answering that question, but with prose as fluid as his subjects’ beliefs regarding consensus reality Erik Davis brilliantly dissects three otherworldly experiences and in doing so makes clear how “a decentralized and postmodern nation—the nation Americans still live within, even more fractiously—became codified.”