DRUGS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

...In his excessive zeal, Weil has put himself into an untenable position and has weakened the credibility of his basic argument...

...It collapsed first among researchers and next among practitioners and professional popularizers...

...Mind-altering chemicals are a kind of trigger, a catalyst...

...But I believe that Weil is dead wrong in attributing the locus of the prime mover in the neurological workings of the human organism...

...THE NATURAL MIND: ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT DRUGS AND THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS, by Andrew Weil...

...Another example: LSD, we now know, is an extremely weak mutagen, and does not significantly alter chromosomes at the dosages typically taken by humans.2 A third example: the proportion of users who experience frightening and undesired psychotic episodes under the influence of any drug commonly taken "is minuscule...

...Weil and Zinberg also published a paper in Britain's leading science journal, Nature, which, judging from the tests administered, suggested that casual and moderate marijuana users appeared to have entirely normal personalities and were far more similar in a wide range of respects to nonusers than they were to chronic marijuana users.' Weil, independently, also published a major clinical piece in 1970 in the New England Journal of Medicine that rasped the grain of nearly all previous work in the clinical tradition...

...It] looks like a real drive arising from the neurophysiological structure of the human brain...

...His chapter "Is are found together inevitably belong together...

...The materialistic pseudo-solutions we now apply merely fumble about with the most superficial manifestations of the problems, thereby escalating their seriousness—the solution becom 648 BOOKS ing a major part of the problem...

...Why not say that the possibility of developing the desire to alter one's consciousness is wide open— that humans can move in any direction their civilization encourages them to go...

...Moreover, there is no subjective effect following the ingestion of chemicals which cannot be achieved through meditation, Yoga, Zen...

...evitably were entangled...

...Weil believes that "straightland"—the thinking that underpins materialism—is responsible for society's most serious and catastrophic problems, such as warfare, ecological rape, racism, political upheaval, and a medical practice that kills and maims more often than it heals...

...This process of dissemination operates through a highly selective filter...

...It is certain that the book will be attacked, dismissed, or ignored by members of the scientific and medical fraternity, even (or perhaps especially...

...That the overwhelming majority of marijuana users suffers no medical pathology of any kind has been accepted as fact among marijuana researchers for probably a half-dozen years...

...Thus, to understand science, we should be interested not only in how scientists come to accept certain propositions as true, but also in their reception by the society at large...

...they both think it is the drug itself that is responsible for doing things—for good or ill—to people...

...The most recent figures indicate that the users alike, would find repugnant are a direct number continues to grow in this country...

...Weil develops what amounts to a general theory of consciousness, centered on a contrast between our normal, everyday mentality with the drug-induced high as the fulcrum...

...THESE FOUR POINTS are neatly tied together by Weil's analysis of materialism—or what he calls "straightland...

...BOOKS (1) Humans are born with an instinct to alter and suspend their ordinary everyday consciousness...

...A similar experiment with similar findings was rejected at about the same time by the JAMA, and later published in Science, which may say something about the rift at that time between researchers and prac titioners...

...According to this model, nonmedical drug use is by definition "drug abuse...

...After all, if we throw out the reifying constraints of instincts of all kinds—the maternal instinct, the aggressive, or "killer," instinct, the male-bonding instinct, the male dominance instinct, even the sexual instinct— we then have an intellectual system that demystifies human behavior in the extreme, and opens the gates to considering the validity of an incredible range of utopias...

...Essential to this model was a radical disjunction between legal and illegal drug use...

...with training, they could be eliminated while still using drugs—or brought on without them...

...The responsibility for this achievement rests ultimately with the sick person...

...Third, the AMA, which could always be counted on to supply antimarijuana tracts to bolster the legitimacy of the pathology litany, has recently adopted a resolution bordering on the legalization of the use and possession of small quantities of marijuana...

...In a crucial and widely publicized experiment published in Science in December 1968, they established that among experienced users and in the doses typically taken, marijuana tends not to impair mechanical coordination or intellectual functioning...

...The earliest efforts of LSD opinion," they write, "laws defining drug use medical and psychiatric researchers were di-as antisocial have intensified the very trends rected toward examining parallels between the the law was intended to curb...

...Thinking that highs come in pills or joints or shots is, according to Weil, an error...

...chemical intoxication is one species of a broad variety of techniques of moving into and experiencing a "stoned" existence...

...Its conclusions concur with Weil's...

...5.95...

...In its classic form, this view rested on the following ele ments: (1) Users of illegal drugs are neurotic...

...The fact that Weil and other transcendentalists have arrived where they are can in part be attributed to their experience with psychedelic drugs—but the possibility should be explored that this stage can be elim inated altogether...

...At this point I would, therefore, like to register a few of my objections to The Natural Mind...

...They present what than marijuana...

...A few mavericks, naturally, led the pack long before that...

...What we really want is a dialogue between "straightland" and "stonesville," and not a total embargo on communication...

...This model does not claim that drug "abuse" is in all cases harmful, nor that all drug "abusers" are neurotic—only that a generalization of pathology aptly typifies the phenomenon...

...Only excessive and inappropriate use of legal drugs was considered "abuse," whereas any and all use of illegal drugs was defined as abuse...

...For Weil, these concerns only lay the groundwork for a far more ambitious undertaking...

...It would seem to me to be far more fruitful (as well as consistent with Weil's general theme) to hold the locus of causality to be variable, an empirical question...

...It is my belief [Weil writes] that the desire to alter consciousness periodically is an innate, normal drive analogous to hunger or the sex drive...

...Exceptions may be found to any rule, but knowing that an individual uses one or another drug outside a medical context immediately sends the researcher looking about for a medical or psychiatric pathology...

...Yes, American physicians have closed themselves off from Eastern healing practices, and have a great deal to learn from them—witness their stunned realization that acupuncture can actually work...

...In the case of infectious illness, the initial causative change is not that germs appear to attack the body but that something happens in the person that permits a breakdown in thenormal harmonious balance between the bodyand the microorganisms surrounding it...

...The key to healing lies not in dealing with the superficial external manifestations of illness, but lies in the restoration of the natural state of openness between the conscious and unconscious minds—the reintegration of consciousness, whose disintegration leads to illness in the firstplace...

...Today the pathology model lies in shambles...

...Back then, this was one item even provement can be effected...

...Subsequent experiments have produced mixed results and have qualified the validity of the Weil-Zinberg experiment...

...tional, but damning critique of prevailing drug Weil concurs with the conclusion that the policies and enforcement practices...

...Humanity's ability to transform its environment from within, through masterly and systematic meditative techniques, is almost limitless...

...It is a drug laws are iatrogenic—and the drugs themfallacy of reification to assume that things that selves relatively nontoxic...

...Anything Wrong With It...

...There is a dialectical relationship between a drug's "effects" and the consequent response to them by the mind—which then turns them into further "effects...

...The essence of materialism is the attribution of causality to external, physical reality...

...And yes, many allopathic techniques do generate, eventually, more virulent diseases...

...Indeed, Albert Hoff-of character degeneration is almost unshakable...

...about 90 percent felt the drug did not significantly impair the user's physical health, while not quite four-fifths said that the marijuana user's mental health was not significantly impaired by use of the drug...

...The drug-dependent are guilty of precisely the same empirical error as are the moral entrepreneurs who attempt to criminalize drug use out of existence...

...4) Drawing a parallel between druginduced states of consciousness stemming from within, and not without, and the etiology of illness, Weil holds that all illness is psychosomatic...

...His theory progresses through the following points...

...Somehow, the Washington Post managed to summarize this article with the following headline: "Virginia Doctor's Study Indicates Use of Pot Is Harmful...

...This process of demythologizing has been much slower in regard to the use of the socalled hard drugs, especially heroin...

...True, the zeal of some is a bit excessive, misdirected...

...First, a study conducted recently among senior medical students showed that the majority had tried marijuana...

...Findings accepted as facts by research experts are often firmly disbelieved by the population at large...

...A few avant-garde researchare very much in need of medical attention— ers have maintained for decades that these death from an overdose is almost a fixture of pathological aspects of the heroin scene had the junkie subculture and could come seconds little to do with the drug itself but a great after any shot they take...

...Only a few years ago, these developments would have been inconceivable...

...consequence of the law and its enforcement, Britain's legislation, of course, only covers narand not of the biochemical action of the drugs cotics addiction...

...Junkies usually predatory crimes...

...Illness, Weil believes, is caused by a break down in the dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious...

...using drugs nonmedically tends to be harmful, and drug users tend to be neurotic...

...Besides, there are often wide rifts among the researchers themselves...

...There are times when I feel that it is one of the most creative, daring, and exciting works on drug use published in the past few years...

...I have the sense that Weil is up to something, but I am not altogether sure what it is...

...By now, it psychedelic experience and schizophrenia— would appear that any sane observer would with the hope that the key to the latter could be forced to admit that we have committed a be found in the former...

...Fourth: the concept of "psychic dependence," or "psychological addiction," is little more than a pejorative judgment made by a person about "someone who does something repeat edly because he likes it...

...A typographical errorwas committed by Nature, and the word "no" was accidentially omitted...

...In short, "the medical harmlessness of most classes of illegal intoxicants—particularly the hallucinogens and marihuana—is remarkable...

...Boston: Houghton Mifflin...

...if they can learn to use that talent for creative ends, there are no limits to what they can ac complish...

...ZINBERG AND ROBERTSON are primarily interested in sketching out the lineaments of the drug scene, pointing out the destructiveness of the laws, and suggesting alternative policies...

...but in 1971, a number of JAMA articles stressed the nonpathological and even beneficial side of the drug...

...The acceptance of this view among medical practitioners as of the early 1970s may be surmised from the following items...

...Weil found adverse psychic reactions to marijuana to be extremely infrequent, and those that do come to the attention of the psychiatrist to be, overwhelmingly, mere panic reactions—usually magnified in severity by inept physicians who act as if they are witnessing a full-blown psychosis...

...An "instinct" to get high...

...They possess the secret of changing reality by changing the mind...

...In sum, Well feels that "the limits to what human consciousness can cause in the physical body are far beyond where most of us imagine them to be...

...are always effects, while the causes lie within the realm of the mind...

...The age of scientists, for example, influences their world view and, consequently, their acceptance or rejection of certain classes of facts...

...How does this strengthen the argument...

...The "magic" of drugs "resides within the mind of the user and not in the drugs...

...2) Although in some societies this drive is given legitimate expression, in Western society there are very few accepted avenues of transcendence...

...Radicals, in counterpoint, would regard Weil's theories as bourgeois idealism, escapism, even counterrevolutionary mysticism...

...dicts during the early and middle 1960s) have Indeed, both books take one step further and managed to level off their addict population point out how many of the features of the at the rate of about 5 percent of that in the hard-drug scene that everyone, users and non-U.S...

...It is my belief that our most worthwhile ideas stem from theorists whose work is initially regarded as outrageous, but their contributions are felt only after more cautious thinkers have refined and retranslated them into slightly more conventional terms...

...But it is clear that among policyanother rich mine for the pathology machine makers and the public—to whom Drugs and was discovered...

...We will lose, I think, if Weil's theories elicit from us an automatic rejection...

...The] physical manifestations of illness...

...In some quarters, harsher penalties are segment of those using drugs more potent called for as a solution...

...What is known or believed at the researcher level is usually quite different from what is known or believed at the level of popularization— which is, in turn, usually quite different from what is known or believed by the public...

...ANDREW WEIL AND NORMAN ZINBERG have been key figures in the wrecking crew that has annihilated the pathology edifice...

...Drugs do not hurt the body in the ways most physicians think...

...but it remains strong among the public...

...Stoned" thinking, in contrast, deals with problems profoundly, starting within the mind of humankind...

...Weil agrees wholeheartedly with Zinberg and Robertson in holding our narcotics legislation and enforcement responsible for more damage than the drugs themselves could possibly do: "I cannot help feeling that what we are doing in the name of stopping the drug problem is the drug problem...

...If heroin could be isolated from its context in our society, we would soon see that the drug per se is relatively innocuous from the purely medical point of view...

...Thepower to heal like the power to make ill resides in the patient...

...pinpoint sources of public and official unwillCertainly the pathology model would ap-ingness to change or acknowledge past mispear to be an accurate typification of a large takes...

...In fact, seen in this light, strictly speaking, specific drug effects do not exist...

...they do not hurt the mind in ways most psychiatrists think...

...A key guide to a great deal of past research on drugs has been the "pathology" model, neatly crystallized into the term "abuse," defined (and promulgated for decades) by the American Medical Association as any drug use outside a medical context...

...And in the spring of ghastly mistake in the narcotics area, and that 1967 an even more dreadful specter loomed a considerable move away from our past puniupon the drug scene: the threat of genetic tive policies has to be made before any immutilation...

...One ex 646 BOOKS ample: except for overdosing—itself a deformed offspring of the drug's illegality— heroin is far less damaging medically than alcohol, our most widely used intoxicant drug...

...Certainly the hallucinogenic the Public is addressed—the notion that, somedrug experience departed sufficiently from how, there is some black magic in heroin that normal, everyday mentality to be considered causes illness, death, criminality, and a kind ipso facto pathological...

...This tabula rasa thesis gives more power to Weil's argument because it is less determined by inexorable forces—and, at the same time, is consistent with a developing line of social-psychological thinking...

...Research and public opinion on drug use illustrate these processes...

...So much for the worst of all drugs...

...Still under 30, Weil has produced a long series of scientific, medical, and popular articles of high quality...

...An extreme case of the internality of reality would, of course, be the psychotic— who, at present, lacks the ability to control this teeming inner world—of whom Weil writes: [The] positive potential of psychotics [is] a po tential so 'overwhelming that I am almost tempted to call psychotics the evolutionary vanguard of our species...

...But the fact that their nonpathological findings were published in the country's leading science journal said more about sentiment within the scientific comBOOKS munity on marijuana in general than it did about whether these, specifically, were re garded as right or not...

...4) Drug use becomes the central fact of the lives of users, and it tends to take over, crowding out normal and valued activities...

...But I feel that both approaches, in their critiques of the smug destructiveness of traditional medicine, and its role in society, may very well be seedbeds for future developments...

...3) All drugs are, to use Weil's term, "active placebos...

...But medicine stands to gain by absorbing some of its most interesting and avant-garde younger members...

...could be viable alternatives...

...By the time his classmates embark on lucrative and prestigious careers, Weil will be studying Yoga with India's holiest...

...It now seems certain that the medical profession has on its hands substantial numbers of young physicians who are challenging traditional medicine and its collusion in prevailing social and economic arrangements...

...model by casual observation...

...now, and probably And it would seem that anyone who chose to only now, has this view become dominant live the wretched sort of lives most junkies among those who research dangerous drug use...

...2) The nonmedical use of drugs is dangerous both medically and psychiatrically...

...The authors also the druggies believed...

...Weil's is a radical denunciation of Western allopathic medicine...

...Anyone who feels, as I do, that human possibilities are almost unlimited will grant the worthiness of any serious and systematic effort to explore various means of realizing them...

...they accord a tiny push in the direction the mind already wants to go...

...These publications, in addition to several others, have made significant contributions to the scientific and medical literature on marijuana use and have bestowed an antidote to the naive moralizing that has been passed off for so long as objective medical science...

...Weil feels that these efforts at social control are probably impossible "and might be dangerous...

...The fact that psychedelic drugs may be a path BOOKS to enlightenment and liberation certainly had its heyday a few years back...

...British laws dealing with other themselves...

...Certainly enough well-designed experiments in real-life situations have been conducted comparing the effects of "active placebos" with test drugs to convince anyone that drugs have "real" subjective effects—highly variable, to be sure, highly sensitive to set and setting, but certainly far from limitless...

...is the most lucid, In the U.S., the junkie is often sick, stands a vigorous, and informative discussion I have strong chance of dying from an overdose of read pointing out the inadequacies of the obheroin, and commits a monstrous number of solete pathology school of thought...

...The next day, *he Washington Post ran a story bearing the headline: "DailyPot Smokers Erode in Intellect, Researchers Claim...

...At this moment, while most of his Harvard Medical School classmates are finishing their residency training, Weil is in the jungles of Southern Mexico and Central and South America, puzzling over, and participating in, the use of psychoactive botanicals by tribal peoples...

...Weil's earlier essays informative and useful...

...by those who found Dr...

...I simply do not know how to relate to The Natural Mind...

...One sentence read, describing chronic users: "There were no signs ofintellectual deterioration...

...The key to it all is the realization that our reality is not "out there," in the stars, but "in here," within the mentality of each of us...

...The traditional field of medicine has always accidentally turned out a few heretics, but their numbers have been minuscule and scattered...

...5) Anything that a drug user verbalizes about his or her drug experiences is irrational or epiphenomenal—unless, of course, it is negative and condemnatory, in which case, the user is being "realistic" and "rational...

...Their lives revolve deal with the problems in which junkies inabout acquiring and using their drug of choice...

...Of course, Weil could in no conceivable way be seen as a political radical—in fact, he regards the radical route as another manifestation of materialism and "straight" thinking...

...Thus, this basic, elemental, normal, and instinctual—and potentially valuable— drive is repressed...

...The] omnipresence of the phenome non argues that we are dealing not with some thing socially or culturally based but rather with a biological characteristic of the species...

...Second, consider the fact that articles on marijuana published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the 10 or 20 years prior to 1971 almost without exception conformed to the classic pathology mold...

...After all, anyone who has even the most superficial acquaintance with the world of heroin addiction is capable of verifying the pathology 'This article touched off an enormous blunder bythe press—illustrating the axiom that pathology isnews while normality is not...

...3) There are no beneficial features of nonmedical drug use...

...The most fundamental thesis in WeiI's book —we could be much more than we actually are—is old hat, but always worth reiterating...

...The British, for The Natural Mind and Drugs and the Public instance, after a restructuring and tightening argue persuasively that most of the basic fea-of their policy in 1967 (subsequent to a mastures of the pathology model do not even apply sive nearly ten-fold rise in the number of adto the nonmedical use of "dangerous" drugs...

...And why invoke instincts...

...Moreover, its demise has been gradual, according to the drug in question...

...others should be trained in the art of getting high without drugs...

...Both are victims of the "materialistic illusion...

...man, the discoverer of LSD and its very first Zinberg and Robertson have assembled a user, declared, "This drug makes normal devastating review of this fallacy...

...drugs are similar to ours and this is one reason Norman Zinberg and John Robertson, a why we both have similar problems with nonlawyer, have written a sober, measured, ra-narcotics...

...lead simply had to be neurotic...

...On the other hand, "stonesville"—appreciation of and belief in the validity of nonordinary, intuitive, altered states of consciousness— can be a fruitful means of dealing with, and moving beyond, these problems...

...Regular use of heroin, even for many years, does not in itself preclude good physical health...

...229 pp...

...2 Over 100 research reports have been summarizedin an excellent review of the LSD-chromosome question in an article by Dishotsky, et al., in theApril 30, 1971, issue of Science...

...He invokes strictly behavioristic metaphors in positing an "instinct" to get high, a biological (as opposed to chemical) cause for subjective drug experiences, a cerebral etiology of illness...

...In our people psychotic...

...But to ignore the fact that members of societies armed with Western-style allopathic techniques live Ionger, healthier lives than members of societies without them is to miss a fundamental truth about healing...

...They deserve to be taken seriously...

...Drugs only appear to work," he writes...

...At other times I remind myself that, although the errors of the largeminded are more fruitful and interesting than the accurate but petty facts of the smallminded, there are serious flaws in the book's analysis...

...The] disease processes seem to me to be initiated always by changes in consciousness...

...Although if this is such an obvious notion, why don't granting agencies fund research to establish centers designed to teach young people to turn on with maximum profit and minimum damage...

...Many who have the most to learn from The Natural Mind won't, and that is in large part Weil's own fault...

...Whatever detriments or benefits that seem to come from drugs can actually be achieved by the mind alone...

...Perhaps in a few years, it will trickle out to With the explosion of psychedelic drug use, those who make use of and broadcast this inespecially LSD, in the early and middle 1960s, formation...

...A key issue in looking at science sociologically is the way research findings become disseminated beyond the tiny band of specialists who generate them...

...Yes, many medical practitioners threaten the Iives of their patients...

...At least some of the younger medical practitioners hold that, as applied to marijuana, the pathology model is archaic...