[Paleopsych] Telegraph: Susan Blackmore: I take illegal drugs for inspiration

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http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/telegraphdrugs.htm

              Daily Telegraph, Saturday May 21st 2005, pp 17-18

      (Note: This version is very slightly different from the published,
                               edited, version)

    Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that
    she's not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It can be a
    tough and dreary time - and much as I enjoy a glass of wine with
    dinner,  alcohol cannot take its place.
    Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the
    reason goes deeper. In fact,  I can honestly say that without
    cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done
    and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been
    written.
    Some evenings, after a long day at my desk, I'll slip into the bath,
    light a candle and a spliff, and let the ideas flow - that lecture I
    have to give to 500 people next week, that article I'm writing for New
    Scientist, those tricky last words of a book I've been working on for
    months.  This is the time when the sentences seem to write themselves.
    Or I might sit out in my greenhouse on a summer evening among my
    tomatoes and peach trees, struggling with questions about free will or
    the nature of the universe, and find that a smoke gives me new ways of
    thinking about them.
    Yes, I know there are serious risks to my health,  and I know I might
    be caught and fined or put in prison.  But I weigh all this up,  and
    go on smoking grass.
    For both individuals and society, all drugs present a dilemma:  are
    they worth the risks to health, wealth and sanity? For me, the pay-off
    is the scientific inspiration, the wealth of new ideas and the spur to
    inner exploration. But if I end up a mental and physical wreck,  I
    hereby give you my permission to gloat and say: "I told you so".
    My first encounter with drugs was a joint shared with a college friend
    in my first term at Oxford. This was at the tail end of the days of
    psychedelia and flower power -  and cannabis was easy to obtain. After
    long days of lectures and writing essays,  we enjoyed the laughter and
    giggling, the heightened sensations and crazy ideas that the drug
    seemed to let loose.
    Then, one night,  something out of the ordinary happened - though
    whether it was caused by the drug, lack of sleep or something else
    altogether, I don't  know. I was listening to a record with two
    friends, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I had smoked just
    enough to induce a mild synaesthesia.  The  sound of the music had
    somehow induced the sensation of  rushing through  a long, dark tunnel
    of rustling leaves towards a bright light.
    I love tunnels. They come on the verges of sleep and death and are
    well known in all the cultures that use drugs for ritual, magic or
    healing. The reason for them lies in the visual cortex at the back of
    the brain, where certain drugs interfere with the inhibitory systems,
    releasing patterns of circles and spirals that form into tunnels and
    lights.
    I didn't know about the science then. I was just enjoying the ride,
    when one of my friends asked a peculiar question: "Where are you,
    Sue?".
    Where was I? I was in the tunnel. No, I was in my friend's room. I
    struggled to answer; then the confusion cleared and I was looking down
    on the familiar scene from above.
    "I'm on the ceiling, " I said, as I watched the mouth down below open
    and close and say the words in unison.  It was a most peculiar
    sensation.
    My friend persisted. Can you move? Yes. Can you go through the walls?
    Yes. And I was off exploring what I thought, at the time, was the real
    world. It was a wonderful feeling - like a flying dream,  only more
    realistic and intense.
    The  experience lasted more than  two hours,  and I remember it
    clearly even now. Eventually,  it came to seem more like a mystical
    experience in which time and space had lost their meaning and I
    appeared  to merge with the  universe. Years later, when I began
    research on out-of-body and near-death experiences, I realised that
    I'd had all those now-familiar sensations that people report after
    close brushes with death. And I wanted to find out more.
    However, nothing in the physiology and psychology that I was studying
    could remotely begin to cope with something like this. We were
    learning about rats' brains, and memory mechanisms, not mind and
    consciousness - let alone a mind that could apparently leave its body
    and travel around without it. Then and there,  I decided to become a
    parapsychologist and devote my life to proving all those closed-minded
    scientists wrong.
    But I was the one who was wrong. I did become a parapsychologist,  but
    decades of difficult research taught me that ESP almost certainly
    doesn't exist and that nothing leaves the body during an out-of-body
    experience - however realistic it may feel.
    Although parapsychology gave me no answers,  I was still obsessed with
    a scientific mystery: how can we explain the mind and consciousness
    from what we know about the brain? Like any conventional scientist,  I
    carried out experiments and surveys and studied the latest
    developments in psychology and neuroscience.  But since the object of
    my inquiry was consciousness itself,  this wasn't enough. I wanted to
    investigate my own consciousness as well.
     So I tried everything from weird machines and gadgets to long-term
    training in meditation - but I have to admit that drugs have played a
    major role.
    Back in those student days,  it was the hallucinogens, or
    "mind-revealing" psychedelics, that excited us - and the ultimate
    hallucinogen must be LSD. Effective in minuscule doses, and not
    physically addictive, LSD takes you on a "trip" that lasts about eight
    to 10 hours but can seem like forever. Every sense is enhanced or
    distorted, objects change shape and form, terrors flood up from your
    own mind, and you can find joy in the simplest thing.
     Once the trip has begun, there is no escape - no antidote,  no way to
    stop the journey into the depths of your own mind. In my twenties,  I
    used to take acid two or three times a year - and this was quite
    enough, for an acid trip is not an adventure to be undertaken lightly.
    I've met the horrors with several hallucinogens, including magic
    mushrooms that I grew myself.  I remember once gazing at a cheerfully
    coloured cushion,  only to see each streak of colour turn into a scene
    of rape, mutilation or torture, the victims writhing and screaming -
    and when I shut my eyes,  it didn't go away. It is easy to  understand
    how such visions can turn into a  classic "bad trip" , though that has
    never happened to me.
    Instead,  the onslaught of images eventually taught me to see and
    accept the frightening depths of my own mind - to face up to the fact
    that, under other circumstances, I might be either torturer or
    tortured. In a curious way, this makes it easier to cope with the
    guilt, fear or anxiety of ordinary life. Certainly, acceptance is a
    skill worth having - though I guess there are easier ways of acquiring
    it.
    Then there's the fun and just the plain strangeness of LSD. On one
    sunny trip in Oxford, my friend and I stopped under a vast oak tree
    where the path had been trampled into deep furrows by cattle and then
    dried solid by the hot weather. We must have spent an hour there,
    gazing in wonder at the texture of this dried mud; at the hills and
    valleys in miniature; at the hoof-shaped pits and sharp cliffs; at the
    shifting patterns  in the dappled shade. I felt that I knew every inch
    of this special place; that I had an intimate connection with the mud.
    Suddenly,  I noticed a very old man with a stick, walking slowly
    towards us on the path. Keep calm, I told myself. Act normal. He'll
    just say hello, walk by, and be gone.
    "Excuse me, young lady," he said in a cracked voice. "My eyes are weak
    and, in this light, I can't  see my way. Would you help me across?"
    And so it was that I found myself, dream-like,  guiding the old man
    slowly across my special place - a patch of mud that I knew as well as
    my own features.
    Two days later,  my friend came back from lectures, very excited.
    "I've seen him. The man with the stick. He's real!"
    We both feared that we'd hallucinated him.
    Aldous Huxley once said that mescaline opened "the doors of
    perception"; it certainly did that for me. I took it one day with
    friends in the country, where we walked in spring meadows, identified
    wild flowers, marvelled over sparkling spider's webs and gasped at the
    colours in the sky that rippled overhead.
    Back at the farmhouse,  I sat playing with a kitten until kitten and
    flowers seemed inextricable. I took a pen and began to draw. I still
    have that little flower-kitten drawing on my study wall today.
    On another wall is a field of daffodils in oils. One day, many years
    later, I went to my regular art class the day after an LSD trip. The
    teacher had brought in a bunch of daffodils and given us one each, in
    a milk bottle. Mine was beautiful; but I couldn't draw just one.
    My vision was filled with daffodils, and I began to paint, in bold
    colours, huge blooms to fill the entire canvas. I will never be a
    great painter but, like many artists through the ages, I had found new
    ways of seeing that were induced by a  chemical in the brain.
    So can drugs be creative? I would say so, although the dangers are
    great - not just the dangers inherent in any drug use, but the danger
    of coming to rely on them too much and of neglecting the hard work
    that both art and science demand. There are plenty of good reasons to
    shun drug-induced creativity.
    Yet, in my own case, drugs have an interesting role:  in trying to
    understand consciousness, I am taking substances that affect the brain
    that I'm trying to understand.  In other words, they alter the mind
    that is both the investigator and the investigated.
    Interestingly, hallucinogens such as  LSD and psilocybin are the least
    popular of today's street drugs - perhaps because they demand so much
    of the person who takes them and promise neither pleasure or cheap
    happiness. Instead, the money is all in heroin, cocaine and other
    drugs of addiction.
    I have not enjoyed my few experiences with cocaine. I don't like the
    rush of false confidence and energy it provides - partly because
    that's not what I'm looking for and partly  because I've seen cocaine
    take people over and ruin their lives. But many people love it - and
    the dealers get rich on getting people hooked.
    This is tragic. In just about every human society there has ever been,
    people have used dangerous drugs - but most have developed rituals
    that bring an element of control or safety to the experience.  In more
    primitive societies, it is shamans and healers who control  the use of
    dangerous drugs,  choose  appropriate settings in which to take them
    and teach people how to appreciate  the visions and insights that they
    can bring.
    In our own society, criminals control all drug sales. This means that
    users have no way of knowing exactly what they are buying  and  no-one
    to teach them how to use these dangerous tools.
    I have been lucky with my own teachers.  The first time I took
    ecstasy, for example, I was with three people I had met at a
    Norwegian  conference on death and dying.  It was mid-summer, and
    they had invited me to join them on a trip around the fjords. One
    afternoon,  we sat together and took pure crystals of MDMA - nothing
    like the frightening mixtures for sale on the streets today.
    MDMA has the curious effect of making you feel warm and loving towards
    everyone and everything around you: within a few short hours, we were
    all convinced that  we knew each other in a deep and intimate way.
    Then we deliberately each set off alone to walk in the mountains,
    where the same feeling of love now seemed to encompass the entire
    landscape.
     I was told then that I should make the most of my first few
    experiences with MDMA because, after five or six doses, I would never
    get the same effects again. In my experience, this has been true,
    although prohibition makes it all but impossible to find such things
    out. In fact, we know horrifyingly little about the psychological
    effects of drugs that people take every day in Britain because
    scientists are not allowed to carry out the necessary  research.
    That is why  I've had to do my own. I once had an expert friend inject
    me with a high dose of ketamine because I had heard it could induce
    out-of-body experiences. Known as K, or Special K, on the street, this
    is an anaesthetic used more often by vets than anaesthetists because
    of its unpleasant tendency to produce nightmares.
    Get the dose right, as I did, and you are completely paralysed apart
    from the ability to move your eyes. This is not very pleasant.
    However, by imagining I was lifting out of my body, I felt I could
    fly, and I set off home to see what my children  were up to. I was
    sure that I saw them playing in the kitchen; but when I checked the
    next day, I was told they had been asleep.
     Back in the room,  my guide began holding up his fingers out of my
    line of vision and, as soon as my mouth started working again, made me
    guess how many. I seemed to see the fingers all right, but my guesses
    were totally  wrong.
    I didn't repeat the experiment. It was not nearly as interesting as
    those drugs, such as  LSD, psilocybin, DMT or mescaline, that
    undermine everything you take for granted. These are psychedelics that
    threaten our ordinary sense of self, and that is where  they touch
    most deeply on my scientific interests.
    What is a self? How does the brain create this sense of being "me",
    inside this head, looking out at the world, when I know that behind my
    eyes there are only millions of brain cells - and nowhere for an inner
    self to hide? How can those millions of brain cells give rise to free
    will when they are merely physical and chemical machines? In
    threatening our sense of self,  could it be that these drugs reveal
    the scary truth that there is no such thing?
    Mystics would say so. And, here, we hit an old and familiar question:
    do drugs and mystical experiences lead to the same "insights"? And are
    those insights true?
    Since those first trips, I have taken many other drugs -  such as
    nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. For just a few moments, I have
    understood everything - "Yes, yes, this is so right, this is how it
    has to be" - and then  the certainty vanishes  and you cannot say what
    you understood.
    When the  discoverer of nitrous oxide, Sir Humphrey Davy, took it
    himself in 1799, he  exclaimed: "Nothing exists but thoughts". Others,
    too, have found their views profoundly shifted. It seems quite
    extraordinary to me that so simple a molecule can change one's
    philosophy, even for a few moments, yet it seems it can.
    Why does the gas make you laugh? Perhaps it is a reaction to a brief
    appreciation of that terrifying cosmic joke - that we are just
    shifting patterns in a  meaningless universe.
    Are drugs the quick and dirty route to insight?  I wanted to try the
    slow route, too. So I have spent more than 20 years training in
    meditation - not joining any cult or religion but learning the
    discipline of steadily looking into my own mind.
    Gradually,  the mind calms, space opens up, self and other become
    indistinguishable, and desires drop away. It's an old metaphor, but
    people often liken the task to climbing a mountain. The drugs can take
    you up in a helicopter to see what's there, but you can't stay.
     In the end, you have to climb the mountain yourself - the hard way.
    Even so, by giving you that first glimpse,  the drugs may provide the
    inspiration to keep climbing.
    Psychologist Susan Blackmore, neuro-scientist Colin Blakemore and
    author Mike Jay will be appearing at the Cheltenham Science Festival
    (June 8-12) to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about
    ourselves. For tickets to the Altered States session at the town hall
    ( £6, 4pm on Saturday, June 11) or for any other festival  event ,
    please call 01242 227 979 (information:
    www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk)