Psychedelic History
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 significant cultural influence. 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.
In the US, self-experimentation was discouraged during the Progressive Era, when social scientists focused on the degree to which drug use endangered the user and, more broadly, society. This perspective, and resulting policies, endured for most of the 20th century. After the 1912 International Opium Convention at The Hague, the US, France and Britain would ban various drugs, including cocaine and heroin. In 1971 Richard Nixon declared a ‘War on Drugs’; there has yet to be an armistice.