Weil why do people take drugs

If the proper approach to a drug is adopted, then it can be used responsibly, even profitably. That approach involves seeing the drug in question as a conduit to spiritual growth rather than a pharmacological solace from pain and misery.

The key to drug addiction, he says, is not eliminating drugs but changing the consciousness of those who choose to use them. While popular with readers, Weil's thesis has not been without its detractors. Arnold S. Relman, former editor of the "New England Journal of Medicine," is among many who criticized Weil for a general lack of scientific rigor, and for his view that valuable insight can result from drug-induced states of altered consciousness. As reported in the "Los Angeles Times," Relman said the following of Weil's theory: "It hit me that this was the explanation for what I consider to be the odd, unconventional and often irrational attitude of people like Weil who champion alternative medicine.

It explained a lot about their attitude. The development of this kind of fear may account for the change from looking forward to falling asleep to being afraid of it; in many cases it leads to repression of memories of the experiences. Yet co-existing with these emotional attitudes is always the underlying need to satisfy an inner drive. In this regard, the Freudian analogy to sexual experience seems highly pertinent. Like the cyclic urge to relieve sexual tension which probably begins to be felt at much lower ages than many think , the urge to suspend ordinary awareness arises spontaneously from within, builds to a peak, finds relief, and dissipates - all in accordance with its own intrinsic rhythm.

The form of the appearance and course of this desire is identical to that of sexual desire. And the pleasure, in both cases, arises from relief of accumulated tension. Both experiences are thus self-validating; their worth is obvious in their own terms, and it is not necessary to justify them by reference to anything else.

In other words, episodes of sexual release and episodes of suspension of ordinary consciousness feel good; they satisfy an inner need. Why they should feel good is another sort of question, which I will try to answer toward the end of this chapter.

In the meantime, it will be useful to keep in mind the analogy between sexual experience and the experience of altered consciousness and the possibility that the former is a special case of the latter rather than the reverse. Despite the accompaniment of fear and guilt, experiences of nonordinary consciousness persist into adolescence and adult life, although awareness of them may diminish. If one takes the trouble to ask people if they have ever had strange experiences at the point of falling asleep, many adults will admit to hallucinations and feelings of being out of their bodies.

Significantly, most will do this with a great sense of relief at being able to tell someone else about it and at learning that such experiences do not mark them as psychologically disturbed.

One woman who listened to a lecture I gave came up to me afterward and said, "I never knew other people had feelings like that. You don't know how much better I feel.

The process is curiously circular and self-perpetuating. There is one more step in the development of adult attitudes toward consciousness alteration. At some point rather late, I suspect , children learn that social support exists for one method of doing it - namely, the use of alcohol - and that if they are patient, they will be allowed to try it. Until recently, most persons who reached adulthood in our society were content to drink alcohol if they wished to continue to have experiences of this sort by means of chemicals.

Now, however, many young people are discovering what drug users themselves say: that certain illegal substances give better highs than alcohol.

This is a serious claim, worthy of serious considerations. We will evaluate it later in this book. At this point, I would like to summarize the main ideas I have presented so far and then illustrate them with personal examples. We seem to be born with a drive to experience episodes of altered consciousness. This drive expresses itself at very early ages in all children in activities designed to cause loss or major disturbance of ordinary awareness.

To an outside, adult observer these practices seem very perverse and even dangerous, but in most cases adults have simply forgotten their own identical experiences as children. As children grow, they explore many ways of inducing similar changes in consciousness and usually discover chemical methods before they enter school. Overwhelming social pressures against public indulgence of this need forces children to pursue antisocial, secretive behavior patterns in their explorations of consciousness.

In addition, the development of a strong ego sense in this social context often leads to fear and guilt about the desire for periods of altered awareness. Consequently, many youngsters come to indulge this desire in private or to repress it. Finally, older children come to understand that social support is available for chemical satisfaction of this need by means of alcohol. Today's youth, in their continuing experimentation with methods of changing awareness, have come across a variety of other chemicals, which they prefer to alcohol.

Thus, use of illegal drugs is nothing more than a logical continuation of a developmental sequence going back to early childhood. It cannot be isolated as a unique phenomenon of adolescence, of contemporary America, of cities, or of any particular social or economic class. I feel confident about this developmental scheme for two reasons. First, I have seen it clearly in the histories of many hundreds of drug users I have interviewed and known.

I was an avid whirler and could spend hours collapsed on the ground with the world spinning around - this despite the obvious unpleasant side effects of nausea, dizziness, and sheer exhaustion the only aspects of the experience visible to grownups.

From my point of view these effects were incidental to a state of consciousness that was extraordinarily fascinating - more interesting than any other state except the one I entered at the verge of sleep. I soon found out that my spinning made grownups upset; I learned to do it with other neighborhood children in out-of-the-way locations, and I kept it up until I was nine or ten.

At about the age of four, like most members of my generation, I had my tonsils out, and the experience of ether anesthesia administered by the old-fashioned open-drop method remains one of my strongest memories of early life.

It was frightening, intensely interesting, and intimately bound up with my thoughts about death. Some years later I discovered that a particular brand of cleaning fluid in the basement of my house gave me a similar experience, and I sniffed it many times, often in the company of others my age.

I could not have explained what I was doing to anyone; the experience was interesting rather than pleasant, and I knew it was important to me to explore its territory. Alcohol was not forbidden in my home; I was even allowed occasional sips of cocktails or after-dinner cordials.

Because I never liked the taste of alcohol, I was unable to understand why grownups drank it so often. I never connected it with my own chemical experiences. I did not discover a real alcohol high until I was a senior in high school; then at age sixteen it suddenly became clear to me what alcohol was - another method, apparently a powerful one, of entering that interesting realm of consciousness.

Soon I fell into a pattern of weekend drinking parties at which everybody consumed alcohol in order to get drunk. These highs were enjoyable for a time, but once their novelty wore off, I indulged in them for purely social reasons. Before long, I began to find the objective, physical effects of alcohol unpleasant and hard to ignore. I hardly knew of the existence of illegal drugs and would not have considered trying them.

To me, marihuana was a narcotic used by criminals, and I had no idea why anyone would take amphetamines or opiates. In the summer of , just before I entered Harvard College as a freshman, I read an article in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin about the death of a student at a southern California college supposedly from an overdose of mescaline.

He had been taking it "to get inspiration for papers in a creative writing course. My curiosity was aroused at once, and I resolved to devote my ingenuity to getting and trying mescaline. At Harvard, excessive weekend consumption of alcohol by students and faculty was the rule rather than the exception, and I went along with the majority even though the experience of being high on alcohol had long since ceased being interesting to me in my explorations of consciousness.

Use of illegal drugs was nonexistent except in a very submerged underground. I read everything I could find in scientific journals about mescaline, then came across Aldous Huxley's famous essay, Doors of Perception. The little book convinced me that my intuitions about mescaline as something to be checked out were right.

For example, I read:. Coincidentally, he appeared at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that fall to give a series of Saturday lectures on visionary experience that were broadcast on the Harvard radio station. I listened carefully to Huxley's thesis that altered states of consciousness included the highest forms of human experience and that chemicals like mescaline were the most direct means of access. That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely.

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor, and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots - all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial.

And to these natural modifiers of consciousness, modern science has added its quotas of synthetics. An instructor in the course suggested that I look up a psychologist, Timothy Leary, who, he thought, was actually doing research with hallucinogens.

He spoke with sincerity, conviction, and enthusiasm about the potential of drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. He envisioned a graduate seminar based on regular consumption of hallucinogens alternating with intensive periods of analysis to identify and apply the insights gained while high.

He predicted that within ten years everyone would be using the drugs "from kindergarten children on up. I asked whether I could be a subject in his psilocybin studies. He said no, that he was sorry, but he had promised the university administration not to use undergraduates.

He encouraged me to try to get mescaline, which he thought would be possible. It took two months and only moderate ingenuity to obtain legally a supply of mescaline from an American chemical firm. Then seven other undergraduates and I began taking mescaline and evaluating our experiences with great care. A dozen experiences I had with the drug in in half-gram doses were highly varied.

Most were nothing more than intensifications of preexisting moods with prominent periods of euphoria. Only a small percentage of the time did the sensory changes such as constant motion of boundary lines and surfaces or vivid imagery seen with the eyes closed seem worth paying much attention to.

In a few instances great intellectual clarity developed at the peak of the experience, and insights were gained that have had lasting importance. After a dozen trips we called them "sessions" I was able to see that much of the mescaline experience was not really so wonderful: the prolonged wakefulness, for example, and the strong stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system with resultant dilated eyes, cold extremities, and stomach butterflies.

Yet its potential for showing one good ways of interpreting one's own mind seemed enormous. And what is the solution to the craving? About five years ago a patient came to me who was shooting five to six grams of cocaine a day intravenously. I had never before encountered cocaine use on that scale. She had gotten into her current pattern of usage after several years of snorting vast amounts of cocaine.

Remarkably, given the nature of the drug and the nature of her usage, she was in good health and was holding down a job. A young single mother, she was doing a fantastic juggling act to keep her life together despite her drug usage. Listening to her talk, I learned a number of things about addiction.

She said that the first few minutes after the first injection of the day, she experienced an overwhelming rush. But that was it for pleasure. The rest of the time was sheer horror — paranoia, violent shaking, palpitations, and unmanageable insomnia. My patient went on very articulately about how awful her life had become, how she was a slave to this compulsion. What is this problem of craving, and where does it come from?

Eastern spiritual philosophies have the most to say on this subject. Rather, the emphasis is on the incompleteness, the lack of fulfillment. But the Buddha has nothing to say about where craving comes from.

In , I spent a month on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. I had gone there to study with a medicine man named Leonard Crowdog and to learn about Lakota religion. He put me through a lot of trials. One of them I remember distinctly. It was a very bleak time of year. The sky was leaden. There was a cold wind, and it felt like it was going to snow. The ground was already frozen.

We walked over the hills and came to a little bush that was about a foot high and barren of leaves. And he told me that I had to dig the root of this bush up intact. If I cut it or damaged it in any way it would be useless, and the root was necessary for the ceremonies we would be performing. So I dug down about three or four inches and found a slender, woody root; I was very careful not to damage it.

I got down about six inches and was still going down when suddenly the root spread out: it was the top of an enormous taproot that weighed about pounds and was the size of a sheep. It took me all day to extract it. I think of that when I consider trying to follow the root of craving to its origin. Let me give you an idea of where I think it leads. One of the things that strikes me about it is the arrogance that comes through. Here is a man who says right out that everything is on the point of being known, that with a few experimental observations we will soon know everything.

What arrogance! In the great spiritual traditions, arrogance is seen as one of the chief obstacles to enlightenment. I think this is a major distinction between knowledge and wisdom. However much you illuminate your world with the light of knowledge — the bigger that fire becomes and the brighter it burns — the more you are aware of the extent of darkness yet to be illuminated. Hawking takes you back to within a millionth of a second of the Big Bang and says that shortly we will go even further back than that.

But what about before the Big Bang? Why was there a Big Bang? That is a question that mystics look at. In psychiatry and medical science today, the prevailing view is that consciousness is incidental rather than fundamental — an epiphenomenon that happens to arise out of matter arranged in certain ways.

But an alternative view — one more characteristic of mystics than of cosmologists — holds that consciousness precedes matter. At the moment, human consciousness is the form in which this process has reached its highest expression thus far.

But why must consciousness know itself in this roundabout way? The whole paradox of existence is tied up in that question.

The essence of paradox — and its problem — is self-reference. Push knowledge far enough in any direction and you run into the limit of paradox. We know ourselves to be connected, part of a universe trying to understand itself. And so we enter that endless loop of paradox like a dog chasing its tail.

But all this was initiated by consciousness attempting to know itself and, in the process, initiating a cycle of manifested existence. The Big Bang was not the universe-initiating event. And what is that Little Itch? What is it that disturbed consciousness and led to all this?

The primal craving. To me, if you try to trace the root of craving, you get to that point, for it is literally tied up with the origins of the universe and the evolution of human consciousness. Given that, what can we do about addictive behavior?

I can think of only two choices. The first is to try to shift it so that the forms it takes are less harmful: it is better to be addicted to a twelve-step program than to alcohol, better to be addicted to exercise than to smoking.