(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Marijuana and Psychedelics Rise, Nicotine and Alcohol Fade — What Does That Say About America? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-14
The rise and fall of drugs in a society isn’t just fashion. It’s a mirror. Which drugs America embraces, and which it wages war against, reflects something about our national consciousness — what we seek, what we fear, and perhaps even what we need.
**********************************
It’s easy to understand the appeal of drugs—i.e. those drugs that alter a person’s experience. Not like antibiotics or blood pressure medicine that achieve something beneficial for health. Rather, drugs like alcohol, nicotine, THC, psilocybin, Ecstasy, LSD, ibogaine, cocaine, etc.) -- the substances that make a person feel and think differently, the drugs that -- when taken into a person's body -- lead to altered states of consciousness.
Experience is what makes anything matter. Nothing matters to a rock, which exists but presumably doesn't experience its existence: it doesn’t mind being shattered by a hammer, and it doesn’t feel honored when placed behind glass in a museum. But we do mind being struck, and we like when others find us of value.
Since experience is where the rubber hits the road – in terms of “value” – it is of central value to all of us to have experience that is rewarding and to avoid experience that is painful, or simply too close to “empty.”
And that means we have good motivation to do whatever will make our experience more fulfilling, or less anxious or painful, or more interesting.
And there you have it: anything — including a substance -- that delivers what feels like a beneficial impact on our experience of life will have a great deal of appeal.
That’s why virtually every human culture has turned to consciousness-changing substances — for recreation, for ritual, and for spiritual revelation.
But the cultures humans have created on this planet have different significantly different from each other in what drug’s they’ve used and for what purposes.
Part of that difference has been dictated by geography: people have made use of what’s available to them — so that Amazonian tribes would develop their religion around ayahuasca, because it could be made from a vine growing in their jungle, while the shamans of small bands in Siberia employed the Amanita mushroom to elicit experiences that informed their worldview and guided them on their path.
And then there’s alcohol, which has been pretty widespread, and goes back at least as far as the earliest civilizations in the Near East and Mediterranean.
As a drug, alcohol can dissolve inhibitions and thereby provide people relief from the thwarting of impulses required of people to get along the in the world. Alcohol can confer a certain important kind of freedom to people who have parts of themselves that want to run the show for a change. And it can anaesthetize people who want to escape from some painful feelings.
In America today, there is a shift going on in our society’s relationship to drugs, and alcohol is a case in point.
In the movies of the 1940s and '50s, alcohol is omnipresent— wherever people engage in social interaction. (It is really astonishing that the same nation that had so recently tried, through Prohibition, to rid itself of alcohol would so quickly embrace the depiction of everyone turning to some glass of scotch or wine or cocktail just as a matter of course, whenever people engaged in social interaction.)
Now, although many still welcome the experiential shift that alcohol brings, it is no longer so automatic an ingredient of routine human interaction.
We have less need of something to dissolve inhibitions, because as a society we’ve come to have much fewer inhibitions. Proprieties demand much less. In terms of making contact with each other, we have more problem with carelessness in relationship than in people needing help from a drug to invite intimacy by being themselves. So alcohol is not so pervasive now.
At the same time, there are drugs that are moving from something society warred upon to something accepted in the cultural life of American society.
marijuana is becoming legalized in a significant part of the nation, and
there are all sorts of things going on about a psychedelic drug like psilocybin -- which the prohibitionist culture of 1970 regarded as the devil itself – is seen as a means to heal people psychologically (Veterans with PTSD) and is now legally available for spiritual purposes in some places in the United States.
Marijuana is the same thing on which the nation waged war. Why is marijuana no longer seen as Evil?
Why does much of the nation now see the mind-blowing visionary experience induced by a drug — that used to be a ticket to jail — as a path worth exploring for healing and spiritual purposes?
Perhaps it is because we are a society that has disastrously lost its way, and badly needs to understand better the stakes in the political battle over our collective destiny.
In Roosevelt’s and Eisenhower’s America, there wasn’t any big problem about how clearly and how deeply people understood what was happening. But now a great many people need to overturn their perceptions and understandings.
People who mistake the evil for the good are in need of new visions. Perhaps the drug will help bring visions that help people who have lost their moral compass. Perhaps the once-feared magic mushroom will provide revelations, whose impact is to inscribe important truths so they will be permanent, and people will escape the false world the Lie sold them.
So an age that found disruption threatening becomes an era where it is the ruling power that is inflicting all the disruption, and the people need the power of passion to help change the balance of power between the forces of health and of pathology.
Whereas an earlier America feared the visionary eruption, lest it rock the boat, now the boat is being rocked most destructively by the ruling forces, and in the face of such “Evil” the rest of the nation can wisely choose to plunge into the visionary dimension that could help bring about an important course-correction.
Welcoming the power of visionary experience to address an America that is so broken that half the American electorate made an OBVIOUSLY CATATROPHIC choice in the 2024 election.
Some drugs help people see things more clearly, more deeply— a profound need now, but not so much an issue in Roosevelt’s or Eisenhower’s America.
The movies of that era also showed that alcohol could destroy lives. There’s not just the drug, but how it’s used. Changing consciousness is treading on sacred ground, and the attitude that a person or society brings to a drug says a lot about their spiritual condition.
Tobacco, for instance. It is astonishing to see the role that cigarettes and the smoking thereof plays in the movies of that earlier time. The relationship between person and drug can become destructive – particularly if the main effect of taking in the drug is to prevent the unpleasant feeling of being without it when one has become hooked. It seems that people couldn’t function without a cigarette in their hand, and about drawing in the smoke and letting it out.
What was that? Nicotine is said to be a good drug to diminish anxiety. (That’s why the U.S. Army used it to treat the anxieties of American soldiers in World War II.) But then there’s the fact that addiction to nicotine is hard to avoid. Just what are the characters in the movies getting from those cigarettes that leads them to make cigarettes so central to their lives?
Are they getting some emotional benefit, or are they just treating the addiction disease that drives them to continually injure their bodies with a drug.
It isn’t mind-altering drugs that are destructive. It’s when cultures fail to guide people to that ground between prohibition and unwise use. I think what we see in those movies are people who have taken a substance the Native Americans used for sacral purposes and ritually and made it into a problem of addiction and the extra deaths of hundreds of thousands every year.
That’s the cost of taking a substance the Native Americans used nicotine sacrally and ritually, and its becoming an addiction of millions, where it is the drug that is using the person and not the person using the drug.
How a society deals with these kinds of drugs in one of the places where one can take the spiritual pulse of the society. There is a politics to this issue, in that different groups of people have different ways of perceiving the issues about drugs.
The fierce resistance to marijuana legalization is one more symptom of the brokenness in our politics. A policy that most Americans favor, and that has proven safe and workable where it’s been tried, is still attacked by those who can’t let go of the old “Reefer Madness” fears.
(What does this issue mean to those anti-marijuana crusaders, who are working aggressively to stop the forward movement of marijuana legalization. We have plenty of evidence that legalization does not lead to catastrophe: the states that have legalized it are doing just fine. So what is this current counter-revolution express? What do they fear would happen if the nation just did what Canada did on the subject XX years ago?)
It fits a larger pattern. On issue after issue — race relations, the rule of law, Putin’s aggression, climate change — this same political force has aligned itself with what is destructive rather than constructive. So it is hardly surprising that, when it comes to marijuana, they cannot look at the evidence and reach a sane conclusion.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/14/2341850/-Marijuana-and-Psychedelics-Rise-Nicotine-and-Alcohol-Fade-What-Does-That-Say-About-America?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
