War on Drugs: Difference between revisions

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 === Criminalisation Rationale ===
 The period just before the criminalisation of psychedelics, at the peak of their use, was typified by the 1960s counterculture movement spreading ideas of antiwar, sexual liberation, environmentalism and women's rights. All of these new ideas were framed by the media as threatening traditional mainstream conservatism. This sentiment became most apparent when US President Richard Nixon proclaimed a thought leader of the counterculture movement, a Harvard psychiatrist Timothy Leary as “''the most dangerous man in America''”. Leary’s mantra of “''turn on, tune in, drop out''” was seen as a direct threat to the corporate establishment and the consumerist, materialist mindset and the state at large.
-== Pre-Modern Era ==
-As early as the 1790s, doctors, scientists and other specialists sought to plumb the expanses of their minds through psychoactive drug use in pursuit of better knowledge of their chosen substances’ effects. On these quests, self- experimentation was long regarded as indispensable and, before the late 19th century, had public and professional support. As the century progressed, the mood changed due to growing concerns regarding the risk of addiction, a preference for ‘objective’ forms of research that overlooked a drug’s benefits, and – consequently – support for outlawing their use.
-Advocates of self-experimentation insisted that, without trying it themselves, they could not understand a drug’s effects, given how inscrutable second-hand accounts could be. In the 1790s, one such psychonaut wrote of laughing gas that, under its influence, ‘''I feel like the sound of a harp''’. Many researchers hoped to experience the visions and feelings that the substances inspired, and thereby to determine the drugs’ value in treating ailments. Others saw substances as providing a portal to insights and truths otherwise unattainable or hidden. When the French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau tried hashish, for example, he concluded that ‘''the inner world of dreams and the waking state of reason''’ could ‘''coexist and observe one another''’. In 1902, the American philosopher William James claimed that our ‘waking consciousness’ was not our only consciousness.
-During the 19th century there was popular interest in attaining different levels of consciousness; experimentation with drugs was just one of many available paths. Some people attended séances or underwent hypnosis in order to further explore the mind. There was interest in the potential of split personalities, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ''The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'', published in 1886, provided a metaphor for the ‘drug-induced personality change’. But the accounts produced by the self- experimenters exerted signicant cultural inuence. After the French writer Jean Lorrain wrote about his use of ether, James Joyce adopted his stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Paul Cézanne gave visual expression to the American philosopher William James’ experiences, combining ‘multiple perspectives of the same object in a single canvas’, while Albert Einstein demonstrated that ‘time was not a single and universal measure but perspectival and plural’. Reality was more complex than many had assumed.
 '''References'''
 <references />

War on Drugs (view source)

Revision as of 22:47, 3 September 2023

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