...how did America’s relationship with psychoactive substances become so troubled? In The Cult of Pharmacology Richard DeGrandpre argues that dominant voices in US culture and science distort our understanding of psychoactive substances through a form of essentialism he calls “pharmacologicalism”, in which drug effects are explained entirely by the physical and chemical properties of the drugs themselves. [ read more ]
This is a remarkable book. Epidemiologist Leigh A. Henderson, as a consultant to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and NIDA Project Officer William J. Glass started with the government’s own survey data, worked with the authors of a new, individual and community-level ethnographic study, analyzed and interpreted these half-dozen data sets very conservatively, and ended up concluding that LSD is relatively safe and the laws far too severe. Some would say that these conclusions are still too conservative. Perhaps that’s the point: Even a conservative reading of government data will not support today’s absolutist attitudes and draconian laws. [ read more ]