DRUGS: THE HIGHS AND LOWS

Natural or Synthetic, Legal or Illegal, People Have Been Taking Drugs
for Thousands of Years

High Society, a New Exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Explores
the Culture of Getting Out of It

By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come
to an interesting conclusion. "It's even harder to exhibit rats than
drugs," she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the
necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium,
some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some
hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy
favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian
cannabis "as many drugs as we could get our hands on". But Health and
Safety weren't having the rats. "We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat
Park," Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian
experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not
by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in
History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers
a history of narcotics that feels fresh.

After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets
getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from
acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going
to Sunrise.

"I don't think anything similar has been done before," says Mike Jay,
the exhibition's co-curator and author of an accompanying book.
"There's always been two different discourses, the 'drug culture
underground' one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at
it, from a medical or political view. It's the middle ground that
feels interesting."

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as
possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned
from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed
synthetic stimulants of the 21st century.

Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel
chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany.
Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and
there's plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few
people live their lives without resorting to some sort of
mind-altering substance.

Taking drugs, it suggests, is "a universal impulse". "Drug cultures
are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less
ubiquitous among our species," writes Jay. Later he quotes American
anthropologist Donald Brown's celebrated work Human Universals, which
lists "mood-or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances"
as one of the essential components of human culture, along with
"music, conflict resolution, language and play". "The public
perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with
hippies in the 60s; that they're a modern disease," Jay says. "The
historicality has been lost."

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and
society, and how a drug's definition is determined by non-chemical
factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration
and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when
used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern
soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives
accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets
enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle
rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

"It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they
were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,"
writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were
treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s,
ushering in the first "morphinomaniacs" in the process.

Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer
Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee he felt it sapped vitality and
brought on early senility but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting
infection.

In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea
being reprimanded for "drinking themselves to death" in the mindless
pursuit of fashion.

Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed
lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes
of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against
fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to
have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of
the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic
world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral.

There won't be any disclaimers. "We're not doing, 'Hey kids, drugs
are good', so ultimately we don't need to do, 'Hey kids, drugs are
bad,'" reasons Jay. "Since that's basically the entire popular
discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and
take the subject on its own merit."

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help
convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober
medium of an exhibition space.

Joshua White was the resident artist at New York's Fillmore East
theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids,
hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces,
he projected his psychedelic "liquid light shows" on to live
performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane,
among others. "Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so,
yes," says White, who'll travel to the UK to install his new show at
the Wellcome Collection. "Everybody had a different relationship with
drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents' generation had a
different relationship with alcohol.

Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire
speed freaks for our special projects get them to stay up all night
gluing jewels on to a ball."

There will also be a recreation of the "dreamachine", the
light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William
Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville. "You look at it with
your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the
hallucinatory experience," explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the
UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire's Les Paradis
Artificiels and Walter Benjamin's Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis
plants ("I hope it won't be taken too seriously," says Harris. "I
just thought, 'If you're going to read to plants to make them grow,
what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the
effects of the drug?'"), and photographer Mark Leffingwell's
"collective intoxication" picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at
the University of Colorado for a "smoke-in" to commemorate "420", an
event observed across America every 20 April to promote the
legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the
history of self-experimentation. There's the study on nitrous oxide
performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with
testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic
quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that
"nothing exists but thoughts". There's the story of the family who
discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for
a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming
sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and
forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a
doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved
by the family's eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique:
bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents
opened their mouths.) And there's French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph
Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab
world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his
theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself
preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there's a photograph of "father of MDMA" and
sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin.
Shulgin's popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid
house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely
steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact
there's little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the
first place. "I just think it's self-evident that people wouldn't
take drugs if they didn't enjoy them," Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn
(UKP200bn) a year the third biggest international market on the
planet, after arms and oil. "2011 is the 50th anniversary of the
United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs," Jay says.
"That's the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they've been
trying for 50 years to achieve that. What's so ironic is that 1961
was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point
where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming.

Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as
a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it
just wasn't 50 years ago. So it's very hard to say, 'That's the way
we are in culture.

Oh except for drugs, which have to be hived off.'"

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in
history, you might wonder if they'll ever be part of a counterculture
again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the
back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana
possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling "hippy
crack", it's difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. "I
wouldn't be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn't fully
legalised all over the US," says Leffingwell. "Most people don't see
it as any more harmful than having a beer."

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are
all around us. "I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such
as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music," says Jay.
"Very techy electronica."

To return to High Society's premise, then: the drugs we consume may
change from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to
over-the-internet mephedrone today but the human relationship with
them remains strangely constant. "Nothing's changed," says White.
"The form changes, the fickleness changes but our cravings stay the same."