JUST SAY THINK ABOUT IT: THE NEW CULTURAL ASSENT TO DRUG USE AND ABUSE

The discovery that our souls are essentially chemicals has turned out to be
less shocking than we might have supposed. How readily we are yielding to
the knowledge that with the help of a few complex molecules, our thoughts
can be sharpened, our moods improved, our despairs alleviated, and our
anxieties eased.

And while my childhood dream of being able to take knowledge pills instead
of going to school remains unrealized, it seems inevitable that children
will soon be taking learning-enhancement drugs, memory boosters, and other
aids to reflection produced by pharmaceutical giants and happily prescribed
by doctors and psychiatrists.

It's true that the chemistry of subjectivity is frightening. One motive
behind the war on "bad" drugs launched in the 1980's, I'd suggest, was a
desire to hide from ourselves our growing acceptance of "good" drugs.

But gradually we seem to be realizing that, sooner or later, we will all be
on a drug of some kind -- if not on Ritalin in childhood, then on Prozac in
our 30's; if not on Viagra in middle age, then smoking pot as we die of cancer.

This is why more and more Americans are unwilling to take a hard line
against drugs if that means simplistically refusing to consider why people
actually take them.

As a cultural historian, I see signs of this new tolerance everywhere I
look, and Traffic is only the tip of the iceberg. In American Beauty, Kevin
Spacey gets powerful help in his quest for a more meaningful life when he
smokes some weed given to him by the boy next door. In Family Man, Nicolas
Cage compares his miraculous alternative life to an acid trip that never
stops. (How would he know?) In You Can Count on Me, the two main characters
contentedly grow closer as they pass a joint back and forth.

In all these cases, the drugs are what used to be called "mind-expanding"
or psychedelic drugs -- substances that promote a vision of multiple
realities, thereby nurturing a cosmopolitan sensibility that's at home in
the world of different cultures and values.

That quality is precisely what the Kevin Spacey character finds so useful
as he struggles to get a new perspective on his life. Indeed, one begins to
wonder how much of what we call the postmodern temperament has its roots in
the eruption of mind-expanding drugs into the cultures of Europe and the
United States that began in the 1950's and 1960's. (That Foucault dropped
acid in Death Valley seems, after a minute or two, hardly surprising.)

Whatever its cause, the shift in the public's attitude toward psychedelics
is allowing us for the first time to really talk about them and to
investigate their profound and complex impact on American culture.

Indeed, the first thing we notice when we pay attention to the phenomenon
is just how popular the psychedelic drugs are -- more popular by far than
cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs.

According to surveys taken since the mid-1970's by the University of
Michigan's Monitoring the Future study, about half of all Americans have
smoked pot and about one in seven has tripped on LSD. To anyone who
cherishes the belief that mind-altering drugs went out of fashion 30 years
ago, along with love beads and granny glasses, a recent New York Times
Magazine piece on Ecstasy must have been a rude wake-up call. And of course
the Times would not have run the piece if its editors hadn't felt that the
news was now fit to print.

Much of the discussion of psychedelics is taking place in mainstream
popular culture, including movies, music, magazine articles, and television
advertising. But what we find there is much more than a mere mention of pot
or an allusion to acid. What we discover is the production of new narrative
forms and new techniques that are capable of conveying something of the
lived experience, or the "inscape," provided by such drugs.

For example, researchers have shown that one of the most common effects of
those compounds is a collapsing of the distinction between foreground and
background. Marijuana and other psychedelics subvert the way we focus on
just one phenomenon amid the welter of stimuli bombarding us. Those drugs
flatten and democratize the field of vision, so that details usually
overlooked suddenly become visible and fascinating. A number of recent
films (Mission: Impossible 2, The Blair Witch Project) noticeably reproduce
such effects visually, depriving us for moments at a time of the cues that
signal what is more and what is less important.

We see this playfulness with the object of attention even more strikingly
in some TV ads, which we watch from start to finish without being sure
we've identified the product or service being advertised. The cultures of
hip-hop and rap, too, are saturated with a pot sensibility, audible not
just in lyrics but in the way sampling gathers fragments of sound from
disparate sources and collapses distinctions between old and new, musical
and nonmusical, texture and substance.

An even more powerful mimicry of psychedelics is produced by storytelling
that radically disrupts a straightforward chronological sequencing of events.

Of course, experimental art films and occasional geniuses like Hitchcock
were twisting and knotting narrative decades ago. But ever since the huge
success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it has become commonplace for the
makers of blockbuster popular movies to mess with the minds of their
viewers by turning time into a kind of Mnbius strip in which past, present,
and future melt into one another.

The Back to the Future series, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Pleasantville, and
many other films offer viewers an experience not just of traveling through
time but of living in time with a heightened awareness of its mystery and
complexity.

A third method of reproducing the ways psychedelics work is to confuse the
distinction between inside and outside, by plunging the implied narrator
into the minds of his characters (Being John Malkovich), by revealing
suddenly that the narrator himself has unwittingly been a character in
someone else's narrative (The Sixth Sense), or by intertwining multiple
strands of narrative in ways that render the main characters in one as mere
background characters in another (Traffic).

In Jim Carrey's The Truman Show, we behold a fiction in which a famous
actor plays the part of a man who thinks his life is "real" but who
discovers that he's just an actor in a show. (Like the nursemaid on the
Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, he may know that he's in a play, but he is anyway.)
We experience an even more paranoid conflation of inner and outer in The
Cell and a darkly comic bad trip in Monkeybone.

Where do all these bizarre tales of mind travel come from if they're not
expressions of a culture in which mind expansion and multiple realities
have become facts of life? Even so-called reality TV blurs the line between
fact and fantasy so routinely that we should call it by a truer name:
alternative-reality TV.

As a scholar who has tried to tell the story of the cultural work performed
by rock and psychedelic drugs in the 60's, I know how difficult it is for
academic historians and sociologists to come to grips with the changes in
subjectivity effected by drugs of any kind. It is much easier to see drugs
in popular culture when, say, Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller light up a joint
in Something About Mary than when John Cusack accidentally tumbles into the
mind of John Malkovich. But the latter film's vision of the porousness of
subjectivity is truer to the fact that many drugs are not just objects in
the world -- they are avenues to different ways of seeing the world. And
that means that we will have to move beyond traditional historical
methodologies if we want to understand what these drugs do and why so many
people take them.

Several historians have begun gingerly working in that terrain, sometimes
with great success.

Jay Stevens's Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream is not just a
painstakingly researched chronicle of the popularization of LSD in this
country, but a vividly narrated story that seeks out and capitalizes upon
the numerous aleatory moments in that history. Ultimately, his account is
driven not so much by a cause-and-effect logic of who influenced whom, but
by a series of coincidences and synchronicities. (What else can you do with
the fact that the C.I.A. was an instrumental conduit in the cultural
dissemination of hallucinogens?)

In his The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise
of Hip Consumerism, Thomas Frank persuasively advances the time-collapsing
argument that capitalism long ago absorbed the sensibility of the
counterculture and that Americans have been living in a psychedelicized
adscape ever since. David Lenson's wittily titled On Drugs offers a
nonjudgmental, comparative account of the workings of a broad spectrum of
recreational drugs.

The distinguished scholar Huston Smith has just written Cleansing the Doors
of Perception, a serious examination of the roles psychedelics have played
in world religions.

And readers who peruse Charles Hayes's recently published Tripping: An
Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures will find a sequence of
first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales)
that present, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last 30 years as refracted
through the prism of a drug experience.

What's most interesting about these varied examples of a new willingness to
discuss drugs is not that they celebrate drugs (they don't) but that they
signal our willingness to reflect, not just repress, to deliberate, not
just dismiss.

And we will need that kind of flexibility as we forge ahead into the brave
new world of mind and mood drugs being created and marketed by
pharmaceutical companies.

Americans who believe that heroin, powder cocaine, and crack cocaine are
the most profoundly dangerous drugs known to us will soon have to cope with
the irresistible pressures of the profit motive as drug companies develop
ever-more-sophisticated panaceas for the human psyche. Risky enough when
they're prescribed and controlled, those drugs will become even more
volatile as they enter the black market (as the painkiller OxyContin has)
and circulate in a netherworld in which consumers combine and adapt them in
ways unintended by their makers.

As Americans increasingly accept that drugs are a fact of life, the war on
cocaine and opiate derivatives will have to be reconfigured as part of a
much broader set of cultural decisions and public policies.

A dysfunctional culture would try to reach those decisions and forge those
policies by way of denial, without ever really talking and thinking about
the subject. A healthy culture, and certainly a healthily democratic one,
will find ways to inject the topic into conversation, whether in jokes or
in stories, in films or in TV shows, in music or in serious scholarship.
I'm starting to hear that enlivened conversation everywhere I turn, and I
hope it can be heard on Capitol Hill, too.