David on Drugs

“Ashes to ashes, funk to funky We know Major Tom's a junkie Strung out in heaven's high Hitting an all-time low”

“After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.”

“Today, for a few hours, MDMA offers perhaps the richest chemical tool for social intimacy in existence. If nothing else, the MDMA experience demolishes the conventional wisdom that "artificially"-induced happiness must be amoral and selfish - hedonistic, one-dimensional and shallow.”

“... on pure MDMA, the subject can inwardly access the kind of person s/he wants to be; "the ideal me". Whether this idealised self-identity is created or discovered may be philosophically debatable. But the deeply-felt sense of authenticity and emotional self-honesty of the MDMA experience is an unexpected delight. One just won't ever get to read about its nature in the peer-reviewed Journal of Introspective Studies.”

“As chemical stopgaps go, MDMA is a magical revelation. It's perhaps the best aid to insight-oriented psychotherapy ever synthesized. Tragically, when MDMA is used to excess the outcome can be harmful, not healing. So as a weekend club drug, MDMA is seriously flawed. Today, of course, empathogens and entactogens are outlawed for any purpose. The altered states of consciousness they induce are criminalised. People who take such agents are stigmatised as "drug abusers". Yet some MDMA users feel, rightly or wrongly, they've been granted a tantalising glimpse of what true mental health may be like in centuries to come; and an insight into what the rest of us are missing.”

“A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.”

“MDMA doesn't just make us honest. E-like consciousness makes us sweeter-natured. Even better, the idealised self activated by MDMA does not take the form of alien impostor, so to speak, but feels utterly authentic, constructed from elements of an idealised persona that we can't live up to in drug-naïve life. If, in a hypothetical E-based society, everyone were constitutionally sweet-natured, then enriching our cognitive architecture would entail capturing this sweet-naturedness in our interpersonal perceptions. With E-like consciousness, emotional honesty and intellectual integrity can, in principle, go hand in hand. It is possible, but unproven, that ugly representations of ourselves and each other belong to a dark Darwinian world that we will shortly leave behind.”