Let Us Intoxicate

Will Self

The Observer, October 1994

So, the Liberal Democrats have voted to legalize marijuana and their 'leaders' are refusing to go along with it. So much for liberalism, so much for democracy. I heard one of these wallahs on the radio news the other night: 'Do you want to see a hash-sponsored Grand Prix? Do you want marijuana cigarettes on sale in tobacconists?' As if this were the very height of folly. Well, in some senses, no. While I, like many many other people, would like to see marijuana decriminalized, I don't want the intoxication it engenders to become conflated with the dreadful rituals already surrounding our society's drug of choice. I refer, of course, to our old friend ethyl alcohol.

What is wrong with intoxication in our society is that it is becoming increasingly decoupled from any meaningful ritual. In so-called 'primitive' cultures intoxication is almost always incorporated into ceremonies, whether they be rites of passage, shamanistic feats of auspication, or the visible expressions of social bonds.

You need look no further than the rituals surrounding kava in Tahiti to see just how elaborate these can be. In traditional Tahitian society, where you sit during the mastication of this distinctly unexciting drug (Westerners who have taken it say the effect is pretty much like a whole-body shot of Novocaine) defines your social status more exactly than your social status itself. Indeed you can read off from the kava ceremonial an entire structural analysis of Tahitian power-relations, much in the manner that Lévi-Strauss defined the complex tattooing of the Amazonian Bororo in Tristes Tropiques.

What the kava ceremonial serves to show is that the use of a drug is just as much a function of set and setting as it is of any irreducible neuropharmacological property of the substance. This theory of 'set' and 'setting' was initially propagated by Dr Timothy Leary and Andrew Weil (most notably in the latter's seminal work The Natural Mind). It states what is obvious to anyone who has ever experienced any form of intoxication. Namely, that your anticipation of a drug experience, and the setting in which you take that drug, influence its effects just as much as -- if not more than -- the drug itself.

How else to explain the radically different effects that the same drugs have on the same people at different times? Put bluntly: if you drop acid with a sense of trepidation and

then head off for a late-night showing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you can more or less guarantee yourself a bad trip. But at a less extreme level, sometimes you can find ethyl alcohol making you gregarious, sometimes you can find it turning you into Mr Blubby. Same drug -- different set and setting.

Anthropologists who study the use of intoxicants in different cultures have a radically different view of the phenomena we call 'drug addiction' and 'alcoholism' than do the medical and legal establishments who make it their business to police what we do with our consciousnesses. In her foreword to a collection of essays embodying this anthropological approach to intoxication, entitled Constructive Drinking (one of my favourite book titles), Mary Douglas writes: 'The concept of "alcoholism" is not understood outside developed cultures.' For a vivid account of constructive drinking, look no further than Norman Lewis's A Dragon Apparent, in which he describes the rice spirit rituals of the Vietnamese M'nong. Although by our standards the entire people are chronic alcoholics, by theirs they are just living in the way they always have.

By the same token, while I was resident in Orkney over last winter I was amused to see that in the local doctor's surgery there were no less than fifteen pamphlets warning patients of the dangers of illegal drugs - which are pretty scarce in Orkney - and just the one advertising the services of Drinkwise Scotland. This in a place where it is not unknown for people in their twenties to have chronic stomach ulcers from imbibing 'the odd dram'.

The point is that drinking or drug-taking is only 'pathological' in so far as it departs from meaningful ritual. 'Alcoholics' and 'drug addicts' are merely that statistically definable component of our collectivity who are paying with their lives for our inability to take a more constructive view of intoxication. Of course, I'm not the first person to have hit upon this view. I remember being absolutely gripped some ten years ago by Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers. In this book the veteran Viennese anti-psychiatrist argued that the illegal status of drugs in our culture was a function of what he termed 'professional closure' on the part of the medical and pharmacological professions.

To a doctor, who wishes to maintain his exclusive right to prescribe drugs, the spectacle of people self-medicating is an intolerable infringement, a challenge to his income source and expertise. Szasz argued that the rituals that have developed around the use of illegal drugs are a kind of intoxicated black mass, a counter-religion to the established orthodoxies of popping benzodiazepines, drinking ethyl alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Certainly that's the way that many drug-takers view them themselves: the more illegal the drug, the more ritualized the behaviour. The lineaments of the 'hard' drug culture I have found to translate across almost all other cultural barriers. People shoot smack in the same way in Sydney, London and Los Angeles.

Doctors, politicians and jurists talk about drugs as if they were some scourge attacking our society. They personify 'drugs' as if they were sentient beings, deciding to wreck our children's lives. The same old shibboleths are tirelessly repeated in the press day after day, about how unscrupulous pushers are targeting our kids. Although, as William Burroughs so justly remarked: who would want a child as a customer - they're unreliable and don't have much money. But on the other side of the argument, the people who wish to legalize, or at any rate decriminalize, drugs don't propose any meaningful way of using them, which brings us back to Alan Beith, the aforementioned Liberal Democrat spokesman.

No one would want to see drugs freely available so that they could be used in the way that alcohol currently is. I don't want to see Needle Park any more than I want to see the grass arena of Camden Town. I don't want to see the Crack County Championship any more than I want to see cricket sponsored by tobacco companies.

But attitudes and practices of this kind cannot be determined from above, by governmental fiat. That's the mistake of all of those currently engaged in the so-called 'debate on drugs' (a debate which Thomas Szasz has quite rightly defined as boring). This loose coalition of doctors who believe they have the right to force us to be healthy, and politicians who kowtow to them, imagining that the law exists to encourage our best impulses, not disbar our worst, are engaged in a futile pursuit.

Of course, not all of our current drug rituals are antisocial and antispiritual. You can still experience the odd evening in which the collective imbibing of ethyl alcohol appears not simply enjoyable, but in some way instinctively right: a proper expression of the conviviality that should bind us together. But all too often this doesn't hold up. Young people aren't taught how to drink 'constructively' any more, instead they are brought up to view all intoxication as 'naughty but nice'.

Young people should be educated to use drugs in a meaningful way. Our culture should have its own defined initiation ceremonies involving the use of drugs, just as other cultures do, and these rituals should be socially approved and perhaps even enjoined. I'm not talking about some awful, contrived cobblers made up in equal parts of spliff, Khalil Gibran and Bob Dylan, but something that is generated by the people themselves. For that reason, I believe there is more genuine 'spirituality' in most acid-house raves than you'll find in a pub.

The great thing about the language of intoxication is that it is a more compliant idiom, it helps people to bridge the gap between less mutable aspects of themselves: looks, confidence, social and economic status. Being high is a great leveller. What I think confuses people about the whole drive to intoxication (which some theorists, notably Ronald Siegel, have proposed as an instinctive drive like any other) is that the positive

and negative urges to get stoned can exist side by side in the same individual, let alone the same society.

And it is at this collective level that the problems associated with drug-taking need to be addressed. The move to pathologize habitual drug-takers and drinkers is now so well established that we hardly give it a second thought. 'Put them in clinics,' we cry. 'Give them treatment.' But as the redoubtable Szasz has observed, putting alcoholics and drug addicts together to discuss their problems is as asinine as confining tuberculosis sufferers in one place and getting them to cough on one another.

No, our relationship to intoxication is something that we all need to think about. We cannot delegate the job to some rarefied group of 'experts'. To do so is to hand over management of a key aspect of our spiritual lives to a gang of bureaucrats. In the meantime I'm off to have a beer, but not before making the requisite ninety-seven obeisances to the Great God Bacchus, a deity I happen to believe in fervently.