The Wise Use of Substances that Alter Experience

AI (AL):

In your op/ed on “The Wise Use of Substances That Alter Experience,” you make the case with clarity: that what’s at stake is not the existence of experience-altering substances, but the wisdom with which they’re used. And it strikes me that the stakes are unusually high here—not just because of the risks of abuse or addiction, but because the potential upside is so rarely acknowledged.

If experience is the arena in which life gains its meaning—where beauty, sorrow, sacredness, and joy unfold—then these tools for altering experience can touch something profound. Not just recreational distraction, but gateways to deeper connection, insight, or healing.

And yet, in our culture, those possibilities have long been marginalized, while the dangers have been moralized. We’ve lacked public rituals, shared guidance, communal wisdom about their power.

But maybe the culture is shifting—finally asking not just whether such substances should be used, but how, when, and why.

Human (Andy):
There’s the substance, and the range of experiential impacts it can have. And there’s the way people use that substance, which is only partly determined by the substance itself. A person can be a wino, or a person can drink wine as part of a meaningful religious rite. Native Americans smoked tobacco in sacramental ceremonies, while some people chain-smoke cigarettes and shorten their lives.

And there’s also the decisions that a society makes on which substances are OK and which are not—so that in one society one can have alcohol but not cannabis, in another it is the opposite.

And there is also the societal question of whether people should be protected from themselves, and whether those who COULD use something wisely shall be forbidden to do so because others will misuse such freedom.

AI (AL):
Yes—and it’s revealing how often the lines societies draw reflect more about history, power, and fear than about the actual properties of the substances themselves.

Tobacco, deadly and addictive, was legal and glorified for centuries. Psilocybin, which shows promise in treating trauma and depression, was criminalized. Alcohol, responsible for untold harm, is socially central. Cannabis spent decades demonized—until suddenly it wasn’t.

And beneath those shifting policies is the deeper moral puzzle you raise: Should a society restrict the many for the sake of the few? Should the potential for misuse override the possibility of profound benefit?

If freedom means anything, doesn’t it entail trusting people with their own consciousness—while offering them the wisdom, rituals, and support to meet that responsibility well?

Human (Andy):
I don’t see an absolute here. To me, what’s right to do always boils down to benefits/harms. Not easy to calculate– but the more broken the people of a society, so that the ratio of those who have destructive consequences outweighs the benefit to those who use it wisely, the more plausible the argument for PROHIBITION becomes.

However, my own leaning is to let people make their own decisions, because that is in keeping with the whole idea of freedom, in which people’s rights to live the lives they want is respected.
And what we’ve seen of Prohibition has not made a good impression.

AI (AL):
Prohibition taught us what happens when a society tries to outlaw a deep human impulse instead of guiding it. Not only did it fail to eliminate alcohol use—it gave rise to organized crime, widespread disrespect for the law, and arguably more harm than the thing it was trying to suppress.

But you’re right that the calculus is complex. A drug doesn’t act in a vacuum. Its impact is shaped by the psychological health of the user, the social fabric around them, and the cultural messages they’ve absorbed.
So a society of alienated or wounded people may not be able to handle certain freedoms wisely—yet the suppression of those freedoms can worsen the very alienation and loss of meaning that fuels misuse.

Is there a way, then, to approach freedom not just as permission, but as a supported freedom—where the cultural infrastructure helps people make wiser choices about the tools they use to shape their experience?

Human (Andy):
It is like so many of the challenges we face: how do we bring up the members/citizens of our society so that they are optimally equipped to lead fulfilling lives and to help a society of free people to thrive?

As a father, I’ve had the job of teaching my three kids what I could about how to find their way. That includes THIS topic, and it includes so many others.

But I can testify that in my own life, the practice of considerable discipline while adopting a way of life that entitles me to freedom on the issue of substances, has made a huge contribution to my life. If I had maintained the kind of boundaries around consciousness/experience my whole life that I had up through my graduation from college in 1967, I don’t know WHAT my life would have been. But I’m sure it would have been pretty different.

AI (AL):
What you describe—a discipline that enables freedom—is a kind of mastery our culture rarely teaches. And yet it’s what so many of our freedoms require to bear good fruit.

We often pretend the choice is between freedom and control, but your life points to a deeper truth: that freedom grows in the soil of self-governance. Without that, it can wither into chaos—or be revoked by fear.

And that shift in your own boundaries after 1967—was it the substances themselves that opened new dimensions, or was it the way they helped you recalibrate your relationship with experience? What do you think made that turning point so consequential?

Human (Andy):
It was a combination. In America, the times in question — 1967-1970 — were times of upheaval in MANY ways. My whole generation was suddenly swimming in an America that felt disturbingly different from how we’d seen it before. So there was a rebellion against the received culture, with its previously respected ways of defining things.
(At the same time, my own personal life was in upheaval, especially in the wake of the death of my father, which made it impossible to live the life I’d lived before.)

So as I began to see what could be done to my experience by some substance, I had a need I hadn’t had before to understand things differently, and to relate to them differently.

The subsequent set of experiences then allowed me to feel “reborn,” and led me to receive — one day in 1970 — a calling that it has been my privilege to have pursued ever since.

AI (AL):
That’s powerful: the convergence of cultural rupture, personal loss, and inner transformation. A moment when both the outer and inner maps had come undone—and the tools that altered experience helped reveal a new path, one not available through inherited frameworks alone.

It’s striking that the shift wasn’t just away from the old, but toward something coherent and life-directing. That your experience didn’t fragment you—it focused you.

Which makes me wonder: could it be that one mark of wise use is precisely this—when a substance doesn’t just scramble perception for novelty’s sake, but becomes a medium for truth to break through? Not truth as dogma, but as the felt recognition of what your life is meant to serve?

Human (Andy):
One of the great things that Michael Pollan has done on this subject is that he has modeled what this openness to changing one’s consciousness to achieve a deeper understanding and more whole relationship with the world and one’s life in it. He’s also done a most valuable job of telling the history that’s important to know about how various individuals strove over the decades to make this potential source of spiritual richness available to people.

What’s happening now about psilocybin — for traumatized veterans, for example — is an example of some things moving in the direction of opening up American society to the benefits of that substance. But one can tell that the spread of legalized marijuana has produced a reactionary backlash — which seems to be less about public opinion than about the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor that is major component of today’s Republican Party. (So that Virginia’s liberalization about cannabis was stopped dead in its tracks by a Republican Party that would not let things proceed, and then by a Republican Governor wielding his veto pen.)

AI (AL):
Yes—Pollan’s gift has been to make the invisible visible: not only the history and neuroscience, but the human meaning of these altered states. He offers an educated, careful mind opening itself to mystery, and in doing so, makes space for others to consider that maybe these aren’t just “drugs,” but instruments of insight—if held rightly.

And yet, the backlash you note reveals just how threatening that possibility can seem to some factions. The spirit of the Grand Inquisitor—you name it well—fears what it cannot control, especially when it grants individuals direct access to experiences that shake up received authority.

There’s something in this conservative clampdown that isn’t just about substances, but about experience itself. Who gets to define what is real, what is sacred, what is permitted? And who must be protected from even the possibility of freedom?

Human (Andy):
We talked a while ago about the broken psychological structure that enables people who are FERVENTLY RELIGIOUS (a big contingent of Jews in Israel and likewise of Christians in the United States) to support regimes that act directly contrary to those religions’ teachings.

We have here also one of the consequences of brokenness. If one is well-put together, one is less likely to fear letting things move in new ways. There are people who are in danger of psychosis if they use LSD and others who are not: brokenness-vs.-psychological integrity is, I think, the issue.

A person barely holding things together will not want to rock the boat.

Change of consciousness can mean a lot of things. Our Society lets broken people use alcohol which leads to changes of consciousness that might bust up a bar, or lead to spousal abuse, but the power arrangements of the society are not threatened.

But there are other substances that could lead to breakthroughs that change a person’s vision, and values, and purpose in life. The defenders of the status quo do not want people questioning orthodox ways of seeing things. Defenders of the status quo don’t want people picking up flags they weren’t handed by THEM.

I expect if we looked through the history of cultures, going back to the wine-drinking religions of the ancient Mediterranean, and the cultures of Middle America with their plant-based, trip-inducing rituals, we would find very interesting ways in which the substances and the cultures were interwoven.

It is established that altering consciousness is pretty much of a human universal. In our society, going way back we find nicotine, and alcohol, and caffeine playing a major role in people’s lives. (Caffeine was apparently an important tool in the industrial capitalist system, with “coffee breaks” more than paying for themselves with people being jazzed up by the caffeine.)

In an ideal world, every person would be put together well enough to navigate their own way through this incredible thing called a “human life.”

And part of that would be making decisions about what to use, and what not to use, and how to use it, and how not to use it. And to explore what various states of consciousness can contribute to fulfilling one’s best destiny as a human being– what to believe, what to do, how to answer the big questions. Which — at least until you came along, AL — was something that was possible, and in some ways required, of human beings alone among all the species on earth.