If talking about the effects of psychedelic drugs on the mind means talking about much else as well, a similar enlargement of the issues is even more obviously necessary in any discussion of the future of psychedelic drug use and research. If it were only a question of diagnosing the present status of these drugs in our society and offering a rational prescription, there would be no great difficulty. We know (or ought to know) that they are neither a menace to mental health and civilized society nor the great liberating force of our time, the destined sacrament of the Aquarian Age. We have a reasonably good idea of their actual dangers and their prospects as experimental and therapeutic tools. The trouble is that it seems impossible to restrict the subject in this way; it touches too deeply on our fundamental conception of ourselves. Just as the effects of these complex drugs form an indissoluble unity with the mind of the individual user, the social response to them is intimately bound up with a whole common set of attitudes about everything from drugs-in-general to mysticism-in-general.

But let us begin with a narrow definition of the problem, considering it as a matter of drug regulation. Two separate issues are involved here, and illicit street use (unusually, for a drug problem) is the minor one. Since about 1970 there has been a moderate decline in illicit use of psychedelic drugs and a substantial decline in publicity about it. What cut down the amount of use—and the number of adverse reactions—was certainly not criminal legislation; at the height of the hippie era in the late 1960s, LSD was illegal, as it is now. No one wants to see a revival of LSD use on the scale and in the style of the 1960s, and nothing is less likely, not because of the laws but because people have learned better how and when to use and avoid it, and because it does not have the kind of attraction that makes people continue to use a drug against their better judgment. The most sophisticated attempt that we know of to measure the comparative dangers of abused drugs places LSD somewhat below the middle of the list—below alcohol, heroin, amphetamines, and barbiturates (Irwin 1973). But this kind of list is somewhat beside the point; drugs differ qualitatively rather than on a continuum, and set and setting (especially, of course, in the case of psychedelic drugs) are decisive. To ask whether one drug is more dangerous than another is like asking whether it is more dangerous to fly a plane than to sail a boat: the question cannot be answered without a great deal more information about the nature of the voyage and the skills, temperaments, and intentions of the travelers.

In any case, psychedelic drugs are not mainly a present and potential drug abuse problem. The question is not how to get them off the streets, which is probably impossible anyway, but how to get them back into hospitals, laboratories, and other supervised settings. There are some special points to be made here. In the first place, it should be obvious that permitting more controlled use of psychedelic drugs would no more encourage illicit abuse than the use of wine in the Mass encourages public drunkenness and alcoholism. But in another way the parallel is not exact. It would be absurd to describe the use of wine in the Mass, or laboratory experiments on alcohol, as actually preventing alcohol abuse by providing a substitute. But many of the people who now use LSD illegally and with only informal supervision would prefer to take it in a setting especially arranged for the purpose with suitable safeguards and qualified guides, and without the paranoia of illegality. In other words, permitting more institutionalized use of LSD might actually cut down the risk of illicit use; that could hardly be said of most other drugs. The irony of the situation becomes obvious in rereading the public debates of the sixties. The most determined opponents of the drug culture and advocates of restrictive legislation continually warn against allowing the concern about abuse of psychedelic drugs to prevent legitimate research. But that is in effect what we have done. Uncontrolled use continues, possibly at the same level it would have reached even without the laws, while controlled legal use has become impossible.

Almost everyone who has worked with psychedelic drugs, and many who have not, think that their research potential is great; and many who have worked with them also still think they have therapeutic potential. Walter Houston Clark and G. Ray Funkhouser show this in a survey of professional opinion published in 1970. They sent questionnaires to 302 former psychedelic drug researchers and to 2,011 randomly chosen members of the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, receiving 127 and 490 replies respectively. Forty percent of the first group and 71 percent of the second group considered unsupervised use of LSD very dangerous, but 82 percent of the first group and 62 percent of the second group wanted the federal government to offer much more encouragement to research. Even in the second group, 74 percent thought psychedelic drugs might prove useful in the study of the mind, 39 percent thought them possibly useful in psychotherapy, and 39 percent considered them potentially helpful to the dying. Among the researchers who had worked with psychedelic drugs, more than half considered them potentially useful for a wide variety of therapeutic, religious, and creative purposes (Clark and Funkhouser 1970). In evaluating the estimates of dangerousness in this study, it is important to remember that in 1970 the thromosorrie hazards of LSD were taken more seriously than they are now.

Clark and some colleagues later tabulated the first 100 responses to a questionnaire published in two professional journals (Behavior Today and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology) in 1972. All the respondents wanted to be able to do research with psychedelic drugs, and more than half thought they represented a potential breakthrough in at least one of these fields: basic sciences, mental health, education, religion, social, cultural. Most thought the risks slight, and all complained of administrative obstacles, lack of funding, and disapproval by superiors. Their comments, as quoted by Clark, show frustration, discouragement, and resignation. Obviously this was a self-chosen group with an especially strong interest in psychedelic drugs, but Clark suggests that they probably represent the views of thousands of researchers in the United States and Canada (Clark et al. 1975).

The interest is there, though stifled, and the problem is how to satisfy it safely and usefully. After more than ten years of almost total neglect, it is time to take up the work that was laid down unfinished in the sixties. We need to arrange a way for people to take psychedelic drugs responsibly under appropriate guidance within the law, and a way for those who want to administer them to volunteers for therapeutic and general research to do so.

Some of this, at least, could be achieved within the present legal framewor it is a matter of overcoming an exaggeratedly bad reputation, making fun available and cutting red tape. Although any change in policy will fa strong opposition, it should not be impossible; for example, marihuana is su ject to the same formal rules as the more potent psychedelic drugs, but in r cent years they have not hampered research nearly as much. This is not ti. place to go into details about informed consent and selection, preparatio and training of subjects and guides. But it is important to keep in mind th from 1950 to 1962, when LSD and mescaline were more freely availab within the law than they are ever likely to be again, there were very few r ports of adverse reactions.

To discuss how to handle the problem of psychedelic drugs within the pr ent system of rules and institutions, however, is to suggest what a restrict and historically peculiar system it is. For research purposes, LSD and its rela tives are treated very much like a new antibiotic, as medicines to be tested f specific, concrete, limited efficacy and safety and accepted or rejected o that basis. In other words, the model is Western physical medicine of the last fifty years. Compare the great variety of more or less successful alternatives. Huichol peyote ceremonies, Mazatec curing rites, solitary vision quests, psycholytic therapy sessions, the Native American Church. Because of problems that arose in our society in the 1960s, when psychedelic drugs were a fascinating novelty and we had very little understanding of how to use them, we have rejected and outlawed all these models. But they are the arrangements that arise naturally in any culture where the drugs are not suppressed, and analogues of them were developing among us even when the LSD abuse problem was at its height. They still exist, but they have been driven underground, and we have effectively foreclosed our choices.

For example, it has often been proposed that government-licensed and government-inspected centers be established where people could go to take psychedelic drugs under supervision, at their own expense and risk, for esthetic, therapeutic, or religious purposes. There would certainly be enough interest to sustain such centers. But to set them up would require a drastic overhaul of our present laws, which exclude such institutions not just incidentally but by the very categories in which they are framed. We are not allowed to think in that way about anything called a drug: it must be either a simple medicine or a -drug of abuse." Evaluating psychedelic drugs in the same way that we evaluate aspirin will always be enormously to their disadvantage, since they do not bring guaranteed relief for any simply defined problem. But the Mexican Indian who said, -Aspirin is a drug, peyote is sacred," was making a distinction that our laws do not permit.

Using different analogies makes the anomalies in our laws and attitudes obvious. For example, as a voyage and an adventure, taking LSD might be compared to flying a plane or climbing a mountain, and is in fact probably far safer. Who would seriously suggest denying everyone the right to pilot a private plane because some might prove incompetent and crash? And who would say that pitons should be outlawed because they encourage people to endanger their lives? To take another analogy, LSD has been called a mental radio telescope for the reception of messages from otherwise inaccessible ranges of consciousness; it has also been compared to an X-ray machine. The radio telescope is harmless; X-rays are dangerous; neither is useful except in the hands of an expert. By comparison, LSD is more dangerous than a radio telescope but safer than an X-ray machine (which may cause cancer or birth defects). In any case, we do not deny properly trained persons the right to take X-rays just because children have been found playing with the machines. Psychedelic drug use as a form of spiritual or psychological exploration might be compared with methods like kundalini yoga, Tantra, or the more emotionally intense forms of psychotherapy, all of which induce drastic changes in consciousness that may occasionally endanger emotional stability for the sake of some alleged insight, awakening, or realization. Even psychoanalysis can produce psychotic reactions. Yet no one considers outlawing any of these practices. To many people familiar with psychedelic drugs, such comparisons seem more appropriate than an analogy with antibiotics or aspirin, or even with drugs used mainly for pleasure or because of addiction.

Consider another analogy. Imagine that no one has ever remembered his dreams before, except a few widely ignored mystics, primitives, and madmen. Then someone invents an electrical gadget that permits them to be recalled. At first, dreams come as a revelation. People who use the machine are overwhelmed by their depth of emotion and symbolic significance. They rush out to look up the obscure literature about this neglected state of awareness. Psychologists discover that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. Others examine them for prophecies, philosophies, and religions, clues to personal salvation and social revolution. Meanwhile, there are the many who have never remembered their dreams and do not understand why anyone considers them important or useful; they declare it all to be mental illness and social decadence, and demand that the machines be outlawed. Ultimately the dreamers too become somewhat disillusioned. Remembering and interpreting dreams provides no sure cure for any illness and no obvious alternative view of the world. Their meaning for art, philosophy, and religion is ambiguous. Many dreams are unpleasant or frightening. People sometimes act foolishly in following the commands of their dreams. Some dream interpretation is superstitious, some of the popular dream interpreters are of dubious character, and some of the dream cults have repellent practices. Dreams are not the Answer.

One possible outcome is that we decide to record and study dreams, relate them to other states of consciousness and to neurophysiology, find out their possible scientific, therapeutic, and creative uses, and so on, while cautioning against overvaluation of them. Another possibility is withdrawing in fear, declaring that we were meant to forget our dreams and that remembering them is pathological and socially debilitating, and finally suppressing the means by which they are remembered. We have removed a source of disturbance, at the price of denying part of our own potential. Psychedelic drugs resemble this imaginary machine. They allow people to see things about themselves that they did not know before, without telling them how to interpret and act on what they see. We have the choice of ignoring and suppressing this knowledge or finding ways to make use of it.

Writing polemics on the topic of psychedelic drug regulation is easier than analyzing it. There has been a great deal of self-righteous posturing on both sides: against the fanatical rigidity of medical orthodoxy and government inquisitors, or against cultist threats to mental health and social peace. This debate is based partly on the illusion, apparently shared by both sides, that psychedelic drugs have inherent moral qualities and social consequences. They are seen, perhaps, as tending to produce a stereotypical hippie: passive, gentle, contemplative, vaguely benevolent (perhaps ineffectually so), unable or unwilling to work and act in socially prescribed ways. But this stereotype is hardly recognizable in the Aztec nobility eating psilocybin mushrooms at its cannibal feasts, or the Yanomam6s snuffing epina during their battles. Among Amazon Indians, the use of psychedelic plants is actually associated with bellicosity. The cannabis-using Brahmins of India may be passive and contemplative, but the cannabis-using Rastafarians of Jamaica are not. Again, it all depends on set and setting, especially the set and setting created by a particular culture.

If psychedelic drugs had some simple, easily defined social consequences, the explanation for their present status would be easy: rebels want and authorities fear a change in attitudes toward work, politics, power, and religion that would overturn the social system. It is doubtful whether anyone on either side has actually believed this, stated so baldly, since the 1960s. Nevertheless, students of preindustrial cultures tend to be peculiarly indulgent about their drug use, and the authorities in industrial societies are peculiarly self-disparaging about our own capacity to control these drugs. There must be a powerful historical reason for this, since the difference is too great to be explained by simple empirical observation of the immediate dangers involved. For example, the way the Yanomamiis use epena snuff would certainly be called drug abuse in our society. The anthropologist who has studied them most closely describes them as cruel, brutal, and treacherous, and says that constant use of psychedelic plants probably makes them worse (Chagnon 1968). Nor is there any evidence that shamans in general have higher standards of honesty and prudence than, say, psychiatrists. Yet anthropologists continue to state that there is no drug abuse in primitive cultures. Meanwhile we deny ourselves the opportunity to develop the kinds of institutions that some of those cultures have established to insure beneficial use of psychedelic plants. It is as though we considered modern industrial society so fragile that it could not tolerate the arrangements that work elsewhere.

Considering all the dangerous and subversive forces, technological and cultural, that modern societies have managed to control or assimilate without legal repression, it hardly seems that we can be so inept and deficient in powers of management that we have to draw the line against these drugs, most of them not even addictive or physically poisonous. If the psychedelic rebels are wrong in saying that they represent an enormously important immediate danger to the established order, there must be other reasons for this defensive response. One of the main problems is that we have no appropriate classification for them. We cannot regard them as divine: should we then treat them like aspirin or heroin? Are they outlawed because we fear drugs, or because we fear the social effects of altered states of awareness, religious intensity, and mysticism? The use of LSD may be conceived as part of a drug problem that also includes something as utterly different as heroin addiction; it may also be seen as part of a social trend toward irrationalist religious enthusiasm combined with scorn for gainful labor and political participation. Obviously all these fears are in practice inextricably entangled, and all were necessary components in the formation of our present laws and attitudes.

We have become so accustomed to talking about the drug problem that it is hard for us to see how odd such talk might sound to an unbiased observer. An extraterrestrial visitor who noted our declarations that drugs are a major problem, and then contrasted official attitudes toward cannabis with official attitudes toward tobacco and alcohol, would have to conclude that the drug problem is not a genuine social issue at all, but the center of a murky cloud of symbolically projected passions. Obviously drugs can be dangerous and are sometimes misused. But we do not consider the danger of drowning to be a -deep water problem,- or refer to adults beating children as a -physical strength abuse problem.- Why the peculiar emphasis on drugs, and the peculiar failure to make appropriate distinctions where they are concerned?

The answer often given, correct as far as it goes but incomplete, is that drugs are symbols charged with cultural tensions. They provide a way for conventional people to displace their anxieties and a way for rebels to declare their opposition to accepted laws and customs. But why is the focus on drugs, and why on some drugs rather than others? Psychopharmacological properties alone do not explain why certain drugs become such an emotionally charged issue and why they are defined socially as they are.

Although in any culture drug use can become a carrier of deep emotional meanings, it bears a special ideological weight and special implications for cultural conflict in our society. The spectrum of conceptual categories to which drug use can be assigned includes magic, religion, medicine, recreation, disease, vice, and crime. In twentieth-century Western society we are eager to keep these categories separate, and that is one reason why psychoactive drugs are such a disturbing element for us. As a matter of intellectual principle, we regard medicine or therapy as one thing, fun another, religious ritual and madness still others. Our need for distinctions is reflected in separate formal and informal institutions regulating illness, recreation, religion, crime, and so on; any activity like the use of psychoactive drugs that crosses the lines and muddies the distinctions appears as a threat to control and rationality, a problem for the law and for society.

Our social and legal categories for psychoactive drug use and our dilemmas and controversies about which drugs to assign to which categories—our drug problems—are not universal features of the human mind or of certain chemicals, but products of a particular historical situation. To understand this, it is important to see that the conceptual partitions we have erected did not exist in the primitive cultures where drugs first came to be used. In particular, the distinctions between magic, religion, and medicine have not always been so clear as we make them, or at least profess to make them. In primitive cultures much disease is considered the work of spirits, and the shaman or medicine man combines the roles of healer and sorcerer. The power of drugs like peyote and datura is a magical or religious one; it is both terrible and wonderful, divine and demonic, potentially either healing or destructive.

Medicine no longer thinks of its powers as magical. The separation of medicine from religion began thousands of years ago in the West, and by the nineteenth century, physicians accepted Newtonian physics as a model science and believed most diseases to have physical and chemical causes. But the gulf between the accepted view of what medicine should be and its actual capacities was enormous; no one could explain the laws of the human body and mind as Newton did the laws of the heavens. Together with the growth of manufacturing, capitalist entrepreneurship, and the spirit of liberal individualism, the fallibility of medicine made the nineteenth century a great age of free self-medication and competing medical authorities. Physicians often had little more to offer than did the proprietary drug industry which sold nostrums with the help of advertising that generated a placebo response. In fact, proprietary manufacturers and physicians often dispensed the same drugs, and among the most important of them were psychoactive drugs—mainly opium, alcohol, and cocaine. Acting on the central nervous system, they made people feel better in the most varied situations, without being specific cures for specific diseases. In effect, just as the distinction between medicine and religion was not institutionalized in primitive societies, the distinction between medicine and pleasure was very imperfectly institutionalized in the nineteenth century.

Toward the turn of the century a demand arose for new distinctions, compartmentalizations, and restrictions, conceptual and legal. Ostensibly the purpose was to prevent commercial fraud, drug abuse, and drug addiction, and that concern was legitimate. But something more than a new dawn of probity and prudence was involved. The victories won by the reform movements against patent medicines and free self-medication with psychoactive drugs rested on prior institutional and intellectual changes in medical science, the medical profession, and society as a whole. They were part of a process by which organized medicine and the larger drug companies consolidated their power in alliance with the federal government. Among the reasons for this were a reaction against chaotic entrepreneurial competition and a general tendency toward consolidation, rationalization, and formal regulation in business, the professions, and government. It is no coincidence that the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed at the same time as the Federal Reserve Act, which reorganized the banking system under federal supervision.

But specific changes in medicine and the medical profession were also important It was an era in which many social functions were becoming professionalized, and the newly powerful professions often demanded that their standards be enforced by law. Medical education was being improved and standardized. Physicians felt a greater self-respect and esprit de corps, which added to the growing power of their professional organizations. And behind these institutional changes lay genuine advances in medical science. Synthetic chemistry, experimental physiology, and above all bacteriology had opened new prospects. The work of men like Pasteur and Koch became a model, and the promise of a materialist, -Newtonian- medicine based on the recognition of specific disease agents for each disease finally seemed about to be fulfilled. Free self-medication began to seem disorderly, dirty, and dangerous; it became a matter of intellectual and social hygiene to insist on clear and legally enforced categories for drug use. The nineteenth-century ambiguity between health and pleasure began to seem dangerous, as the primitive ambiguity between health and holiness (embodied in the etymology of the words) had long seemed absurd. In these circumstances, psychoactive drugs in the hands of freelance practitioners and the lay public became especially suspect. They had indeterminate and apparently uncontrollable powers; they were used in a way that blurred the distinction between medicine and pleasure; and their effects were not related to any specific disease process. Whether they worked, or had no effect, or actually made things worse, they limited the role of the physician.

Federal legislation on psychoactive drugs began with the relatively mild Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and has been progressively strengthened since. The public is no longer allowed to make its own choices about using these substances (with the important exception of alcohol), and the ordinary use of alcohol, opiates, and cocaine can no longer be legally regarded as medicinal: it is fun, vice, disease, or crime. This set of conceptual distinctions, backed by the alliance of organized medicine and government, still rules our present drug policies. But its authority has been increasingly challenged in the last twenty years, partly because of the loss of moral authority that established institutions have undergone in industrially advanced countries, and partly because of an efflorescence of drug technology and marketing. Many people now reject the distinctions that medicine and the law have made compulsory over the last seventy years.

We have socially accepted pleasure drugs (mainly alcohol and nicotine), medicines, and -drugs of abuse," acceptable (if at all) only as medicines, whose use for pleasure is considered vice and crime. It is these distinctions that are challenged by people who want to expand the list of permissible pleasure drugs to include, say, marihuana and cocaine. And those who oppose such changes are taking the attitude that certain pleasures are by definition different, a threat to individual self-control and social order in a way that more familiar habits are not. We have two varieties of drug vice: the exotic, fascinating, tempting, and debasing kind that goes with illicit drugs and is often somehow related to illicit sex; and the homey, domesticated kind connected with legal drugs, which is regarded with less fascinated interest and more tolerance. That is why the sexual effects of alcohol are an object of amusement or annoyance, while those of marihuana as imagined by people who do not use it become an object of secret envy and expressed horror. In the same way, we can treat the terrifying hallucinations of alcoholism almost as a joke (-pink elephants and snakes"), while becoming panicky about -reefer madness." Most of these reactions are rooted in displaced anxieties and have little to do with actual psychopharmacological properties of the drugs.

Some of the hostility to psychedelic drugs, especially among people who are relatively unsophisticated about them, is based on the assumption that they are just another exotic vice providing enviable but dangerous thrills, which like all such stereotypical vices can also drive the user into addiction, madness, and despair. The talk of metaphysical and psychological insights is simply not heard, or is interpreted as meaningless rhetoric. If the average person on the street today were asked to characterize LSD, he would probably liken it to drugs of pleasure and abuse; all our laws and attitudes about drugs promote that way of thinking.

But at a deeper level the social response to psychedelic drugs is also connected with their users' tendency to revert to religious language and interpretations in talking about them. Such language challenges accepted contemporary distinctions in still another way. Drug sharing, in the form of passing the peace pipe or passing the joint, a coffee break or a beer with the boys, can be a ritual expression of communion and solidarity. When the users of a drug are persecuted or threatened, they may want to fortify that solidarity with doctrine. Religion is a shared system of justification much stronger than mere fun, and the reactions evoked by psychedelic drugs are particularly subject to religious interpretation. It became clear very soon that LSD would not fit neatly into established categories; the term "consciousness expansion" was meant to suggest something more than medicine or pleasure, if not actually religion. Orthodox religion in the West had long since abandoned the sacramental use of drugs, so the field was appropriated by unorthodox sects, eclectic or syncretic, that challenged the hegemony of established medical and police rules. The "LSD priest" (Leary's term) who led a "drug cult" was in effect a 'rival of the physician in imparting and applying expertise on drugs. The old calling of priesthood or shamanism invaded territory claimed by modern medical professionals.

This implied a return to the practices of primitive cultures that do not carefully distinguish medicine from religion, and in fact the drug culture of the sixties favored talk about the virtues of primitive community and the handling of drugs by primitive societies. A self-conscious and ideological primitivism is almost a contradiction in terms, so such talk has never amounted to much in practice. But this doctrinal revolt can make us conscious of certain unexamined assumptions. Psychedelic rebels have likened modern medicine to a state religion, with imposing organized strength, an intellectually powerful ideology, an ability to create and sustain faith, and the all-important support of civil authority. This established religion is said to treat unorthodox healing practices as heresy or pagan superstition to be eliminated by a mixture of official coercion and missionary activity. Like the Inca and Aztec nobility, it tries to monopolize the use of psychedelic drugs, or like the Spanish in Mexico it tries to eliminate them. This religious war in which medicine serves as the ideological arm of cultural orthodoxy is disguised by scientific terminology and talk about health hazards. Fears about mental health are the modern version of the Spanish conquerors' conviction that the Indians' immortal souls were in danger.1

However dubious its source, this polemical exaggeration has a disturbing element of truth. Consider the religious exemption offered to the Native American Church for the use of peyote. It is not as though science has determined that mescaline is safe for Indians and dangerous for everyone else. Nor is the peyote religion protected legally because it is genuine or sincere in some way that other attempts to use psychedelic drugs for sacramental purposes are not. The exemption for peyote is in essence an exemption from modernity, from the rules that insist on placing drugs and religion in two emphatically different realms of experience. When the official policy toward Indians was one of assimilation, peyote was regarded as a drug abuse problem, and there were sporadic attempts to suppress the peyote religion. Now that Indians are successfully reclaiming their cultural identity, peyote has become legally sanctioned. Others who consider their LSD or mushroom use to be religious in nature are demanding a similar exemption from the modern medical-legal control system in the name of an older conception of drug use. They fail mainly because they are not permitted to claim a separate cultural identity, rather than because of any considered judgment on the hazards of psychedelic drug use.

These religious controversies suggest that our attitude toward psychedelic drugs is a response to certain kinds of experience as well as to certain substances. We have a mysticism problem as well as a drug problem, and its historical causes are older and more complicated than the causes of the drug controversy. Intellectually, as we have mentioned, it is connected with the rise of modern science and what Weber called the disenchantment of the world. But some social aspects of the conflict are evident in preindustrial and premodern societies as well. Mystical, messianic, and shamanistic religion always comes into conflict with established authority after social evolution has reached the stage of hierarchical state systems. Any contact with divinity not subject to priestly mediation and formulation in terms of traditional doctrines appears as a threat to the political and social order, and may be classified as madness or vice. It is feared that all accepted standards will be abandoned in a frenzied antinomian search for some individual or communal self-realization. The old joke about the experience that begins in mist and ends in schism expresses this fear in an understated, ironical way. Weber comments:

The empirical fact that men are differently qualified in a religious way stands at the beginning of the history of religion.... "Heroic" or "virtuoso" religiosity is opposed to mass religiosity. By "mass" we understand those who are religiously "unmusical."...

Now, every hierocratic and official authority of a "church"—that is, a community organized by officials into an institution which bestows gifts of grace—fights principally against all virtuoso-religion and against its autonomous development. (Gerth and Mills 1958, pp. 287-288)

Psychedelic religiosity is virtuoso religiosity. In Weber's language, it is a form of -genuine" charisma, and therefore opposed to the -routinized" charisma that guarantees traditional authority. Naturally, established churches have to tame or suppress it. Christianity has been particularly intolerant in this respect, at least until the rise of the peyote religion. In Mexico the Aztecs tried to monopolize psychedelic drugs, but the Spaniards tried to suppress psychedelic shamanism completely. In medieval and early modern Europe
witches were persecuted by authorities who hoped to save Christian souls. The Eleusinian Mysteries, regarded with respect in the ancient world for nearly two thousand years, were suppressed when Christianity, itself originally a messianic cult with a charismatic leader, became the state religion of the Roman Empire.

The potential challenge to social order in all forms of religious intoxication is augmented by special characteristics of modern Western society. Weber discerned a cultural foundation of modernity in the Protestant ethic of inner- worldly asceticism, which developed at about the same time as the scientific revolution. The Protestant ethic demands the attainment of salvation by work and activity according to rational norms within this world. In identifying religious duty with rule-governed mastery of everyday life, it opposes all forms of otherworldliness in religion, including the otherworldly asceticism of desert saints; it also opposes all mysticism, for in mysticism the highest virtue is to be possessed rather than active, a vessel rather than an instrument of divinity. Both conservatives and radicals in a society that is devoted to the extension of rule-governed control over the external world are likely to see great dangers in mystical and messianic religion, either because it is too passive and socially quietist, or simply because it may tend to devaluate everyday life and economic activity.

This mistrust of religious virtuosity, whether it takes the generic or the specifically modern form, should not be regarded as mere cowardice, intellectual rigidity, or defense of established privilege. As the sadder aspects of the hippie culture showed, all standards of truth and social responsibility may be abandoned in the search for spiritual revitalization by means of magic, myth, and mystery. Mysticism claiming ineffability is a common form of rebellion in rationalistic ages like our own; it can be useful in moderating the excessive pretensions of intellect, but the danger is that it will turn into a mere plea of impotence: a denial of reason and an admission of incapacity to cope with social problems that take the form of quietism or messianic fanaticism. The danger is especially great when enthusiastic and cultic religion is obviously a refuge of politically hopeless groups.

So the belief that psychedelic religiosity may cause a breakdown of social order (as conservatives fear) or abandonment of the struggle for social change (as radicals fear) is no more and no less reasonable than the fear of a breakdown of individual mental stability during a drug trip; in some circumstances this fear could be justified. But for the most part these circumstances do not exist now. The vision of the sacred achieved in ecstatic states usually depends for its social content on the intellectual set that is brought to it; once it recedes it can serve as a backdrop for action as well as passivity, and for moderate as well as extreme action. In any case, it is doubtful that modern society is in much danger of an excess of contemplative passivity.

If the self-image of modern Western society cannot easily accommodate virtuoso religion and mysticism, it also precludes the suppression of virtuoso religion and mysticism. Liberal principles demand free speech, freedom of worship, and the right of privacy. Minority sects are rarely persecuted, no matter how peculiar their rites and morals, no matter how eccentric, intellectually questionable, and socially debilitating their doctrines seem to be. A liberal state does not define values and goals for its citizens; it does not pretend to tell them what to think. A totalitarian system has no difficulty here, as Buddhist monks, Baptists, or Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse to conform soon learn. A totalitarian government knows what sorts of experiences and thoughts its subjects should and should not cultivate. Liberal societies, to their credit, lack that confidence.

But drugs are a special case. Thoroughly desacralized by modern science, they are no longer seen as the flesh of the gods but as instruments for medicine or recreation. Although we may indulge Indians who want to make them the center of a religion or belief system, we cannot take the idea seriously. So we do not admit, even to ourselves, that outlawing psychedelic drugs is in part an attempt to eliminate certain kinds of experience and thinking. By regarding them as merely exotic vice, dangerous instruments, or poisonous substances, we avoid the issue. Therefore, in the case of drugs, the liberal principles that prevent the typical modern distrust of enthusiastic and mystical religion from being expressed in the form of legal suppression do not operate.

The irony is that if we genuinely regarded psychedelic drugs as nothing more than a potentially dangerous form of recreational or medical technology, we would have to weigh their dangers against those of other technological instruments, and then we might have to change our ideas. The social cost of permitting people to ride motorcycles, for example, is surely greater than the social cost of permitting them to use psychedelic drugs ever was or is likely to be—thousands of deaths and serious injuries every year. Yet no one considers outlawing motorcycles, and cyclists (rightly or wrongly) consider it an imposition even when they are compelled to wear helmets to protect themselves from injury and society from the costs of their injuries. A hundred other examples could be given. On the other hand, if psychedelic drug use were regarded as simply a form of religious or psychotherapeutic practice, we would have to allow it no matter how distasteful or even dangerous it seemed, because that is what liberal principles require. We pretend to ourselves that we are merely restricting access to a dangerous instrument, but the standards of dangerousness we apply are not derived from proven risks to health; they arise out of deeper unacknowledged fears about unhallowed rites and disorderly pleasures.

The gap in liberal principles that allows this disapproval to take the form of total legal suppression is created by our confusion about what categories to apply to psychedelic drugs. They are a borderline case in many ways—therapeutically, intellectually, and socially. The components of research, therapy, religion, and recreation in their use are hard to separate (the awkward term -consciousness expansion- is an attempt to define a role for them by avoiding all these familiar categories). Since we do not know where to place them, they become, an easy target for confused fears about drugs in general or matters unrelated to drugs. For example, we have mentioned the idea of psychedelic centers where people could go to take LSD in a safe environment. But are these centers conceived as analogous to resorts, amusement parks, psychiatric clinics, religious retreats, Outward Bound expeditions, or scientific research institutions? Without any further examination, the very ambiguity of purpose is enough to create hostility and suspicion. And in this field liberal governments feel justified in asserting themselves with the kind of confidence that only despotic governments display with respect to other social questions. The problem of psychedelic drugs in a modern industrial society is complicated, and such problems, as H. L. Mencken once said, always have solutions that are simple—and wrong. For the moment, we have found one.

Our legal and political institutions, like our natural science and psychiatry, are failing to supply the complex response these complex drugs demand. We should show more confidence in our capacity to tolerate and make use of them. That demands, first, a more consistent application of liberal principles. The liberal purist Thomas Szasz recommends dismantling our whole system of drug regulations and permitting adults to take whatever drugs they want when they want, holding them responsible only for acts committed afterward. But there is no need to go that far; it would not even be wise to make psychedelic drugs as freely available as, say, alcohol or handguns are now. Instead, we need to establish a suitable balance between individual choice and protective authority.

It is probably useless to try to find replacements for the existing inadequate conceptual categories. We simply have to tolerate some openly recognized ambiguity in dealing with psychedelic drugs (tolerance for ambiguity is supposed to be an antiauthoritarian trait). The old forms of religious justification, for example, are obviously no longer plausible. Except for a few isolated individuals and groups like the peyote church, intoxication can no longer be sacred in the primitive and ancient sense, no matter how intensely religious it may seem as pure experience. Too much has been changed by the intellectual and social revolutions of the modern age; there is no point in mourning the loss, if it is one. But we have something to learn from religious forms of drug use, especially about the protective and assimilative function of ritual. Outsiders who participate in Mazatec or Huichol rites often note how well designed the ceremony is to get the most individual and communal benefit out of the drugs. The hierophants of Eleusis may have known this secret too. In our society, physicians, psychiatrists, clergymen, or other contemporary potential heirs of the shamans might provide appropriate substitutes for ritual without embedding them in any limiting mythology or therapeutic faith.

Preindustrial societies may also have something to teach us about the proper balance between democracy and authority in managing psychedelic drugs. Here we must consider Weber's distinction between virtuoso religiosity and mass religiosity, between the creators of religion and its routine perpetuators. Psychedelic drugs have the property of making the "religiously unmjisical" into virtuosos, at least temporarily. (That might partly explain the affinity of the drug culture for "the religiosity of Indian intellectuals," which "unites virtuoso-like self-redemption by man's own effort with universal accessibility of salvation" [Gerth and Mills 1958, p. 259].) Primary religious experience is no longer restricted to specially qualified charismatic individuals, and the resulting democratization presents special dangers and opportunities. The danger is that everyone will think himself qualified to start his own religion, as Leary half-facetiously recommended and Charles Manson, among others, managed to do. To avoid this parody of liberal individualism, some sort of authority and tradition is needed. A few cultures like the Huichols seem to have found a way to combine widespread use of psychedelic drugs with a system of shaman-guided ritual and interpretation that prevents the democracy of mass virtuoso religiosity from degenerating into a mob of psychopathic prophets who have turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.

We cannot accept Huichol thought categories or Huichol mythology, but we can heed the lessons from preindustrial societies that Aldous Huxley applied in his unjustly neglected last novel, Island. Here he tried to salvage a communal significance for the drug experience by imagining a utopia in which psychedelic drugs play an integral part. On his fictitious island in the Indian Ocean, a decentralized political system and a Western science and technology stripped of their excesses are guided by a Buddhist philosophical-religious tradition, with the help of a psychedelic drug called moksha-medicine that is used on carefully defined occasions—especially by the dying and by youth in initiation rites. Huxley's utopia avoids the danger of excessive individualism by an emphasis on community, discipline, and tradition in the use of psychedelic drugs. But it also avoids the cultural limitations of primitive mythologies and communities by incorporating the most tolerant and ecumenical of the great world religions and the most universally applicable body of human intellectual achievement.

The interest of this utopia is that it makes enlightenment a communal responsibility. Metaphysical appetites are slaked, partly by the use of psychedelic drugs, in a socially beneficial way. Drug use is not a mere pleasure trip, nor is it a reaction, an individual escape from some general condition seen as intolerable. In this way Huxley avoids the difficulties endemic to Eastern religions of individual salvation which dismiss most social questions as irrelevant. He also avoids the danger identified by Harvey Cox in Western pursuit of Eastern philosophies and Eastern ecstasies: that they will serve only as experiences fo be consumed as commodities and will further inflate the already bloated Western self.

Unfortunately, Huxley is pessimistic about his own solution, at least for the short run. His utopia survives only because it is an island that has been fortunately isolated for generations from the malevolent forces of the modern world. In the moving and horrifying final chapter, it is destroyed in a coup d'etat by a neighboring ruler who represents Oil, Progress, Spiritual Values (Huxley's capitals), military force, lying propaganda, and demagogic tyranny in a combination with all the worst features of capitalism, communism, and third-world nationalism.

If the fate of Huxley's Pala turns out to be the fate of the world, there will be no place in it for psychedelic drugs. Whatever their dangers and potential for abuse, they are useless as tools for a modern despotism and might even represent a potential threat to it. In his anti-utopia Brave New World, written thirty years before Island, Huxley created the blandly horrible drug soma, a universal mild tranquilizer and narcotic for inducing social conformity. If one thing is certain about existing psychedelic drugs, it is that they are nothing like soma. They do not create a drug habit; they do not reconcile the user to a routine or keep the fires of intellect and passion burning low. On the other hand, the hippie idea of drugging ourselves into individual and social salvation is obviously illusory; and Huxley was not promoting that illusion when he created moksha-medicine, for in Pala the usefulness of the drug depends on the quality of the social system, much more than the other way around.

Something in the nature of our society and of the drug trip itself tends to make us fall into erroneous attitudes of worshipful awe or frightened contempt when thinking about psychedelic drugs. It is as though they had to be either absolutely central or beyond the periphery of normal human experience, as though allowing more people access to virtuoso religiosity would make it so important that everything else would be neglected. But in primitive shamanism that is not what happens; instead, at least ideally, -the otherwise unfettered power of the world beyond human society is harnessed purposefully and applied to minister to the needs of the community" (Lewis 1971, p. 189). That is just what technology, including drug technology, is supposed to do in our society. Albert Hofmann has suggested that "the Indians' religious awe of psychedelic drugs may be replaced in our society by respect and reverence, based on scientifically established knowledge of their unique psychic effects" (Horowitz 1976, p. 27). That would be a beginning, at least. We should find a modest role for these drugs, not deifying or demonizing or ignoring them, and we should distinguish rational from irrational fears. The metaphysical hunger that provides one reason for the interest in LSD is a permanent human condition, not an aberration that is created by the drug or one that can be eliminated by suppressing it. Huxley's Island expresses not faith in psychedelic drugs, which would be a form of idolatry, but hope for mankind. It dramatizes the conviction that the drugs can be used, rather than condemned and neglected, and that finding a way to use them well is a test for humanity. We are facing that test now. The genie is out of the bottle, and we neither need nor are able to force it back in, so we must use our resources of intelligence, imagination, and moral discernment to find ways of making it serve us.

1 For further discussion of the historical roots of the modern system of drug classification and the revolt against it, and also additional comments on its meaning for the medical profession, see Grinspoon and Bakalar 1976.