In Heroin's White Thrall (2013)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
In the very first paragraph, the author makes abundantly clear that he experienced a major whoosh while reading one of the greatest American novels and drug sagas of all time.
The "Fear and Loathing" books were only about giant lizards, Richard Nixon, or LSD on the thinnest of surfaces - the author needs to re-read.
> What most drug books don’t do is make the reader, upon closing the book, feel as though he or she really ought to think more seriously about experimenting with drugs.
Really? The Invisible Landscape? Food of the Gods? The Human Encounter With Death? The Doors of Perception? The Spirit Molecule? PIKAL: A Love Story?
What exactly is the author reading? Of all the classic "drug books," the only one I can think of that matches the author's description is Be Here Now, which the author does not mention.
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I'm not sure, after reading this review, whether I'm more or less inclined to read Clune's book - probably less.
In this review, such as it is, Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category?
It seems useless in this context to compare a book about the highs of heroin with other books that happen to feature "drugs" in completely different contexts or as metaphorical devices.
Reading this, I learned nothing except that pharmacological contrivances still have a grip on the editorial 'we.'
That sounds like a reasonable assumption about the reader; that they understand how words are used in contemporary English. The answers to your questions are "yes" and "no".
The reader can also be assumed to know that, for instance, vancomycin and doxorubicin are also drugs, but that in this context the word "drug" is being used in a context which excludes them, just as the word "animal" is sometimes used in a context which includes humans and sometimes in one which excludes them.
They're certainly more similar to each other than they are to antibiotics or chemotherapy drugs, both of which are also labelled with the term "drug".
You are mistaking noise for signal here.
> the fact that they should both be avoided for similar reasons
In no sense is this a "fact." Many people suggest LSD use. Many people regard themselves as better for having used LSD. I don't think LSD is something to be avoided at all - it's utterly benign and very, very interesting.
> They're certainly more similar to each other than they are to antibiotics or chemotherapy drugs, both of which are also labeled with the term "drug".
In which ways? LSD is dissimilar to just about anything else on the planet, and has little in common, as far as I can tell, with opioids, antibiotics, or chemotherapy drugs.
And again, let me bring up refined sugar. Sugar is a refined white powder, made by solvent extraction form plant matter, and is consumed solely for its chemical effects on the nervous system. It seems far closer to heroin than either of them are to LSD or MDMA or psilocybin. Yet these three, along with heroin, are "drugs?"
I can't imagine a consistent taxonomy which casts such a wide net on behalf of the term "drug" as to include both heroin and LSD but exclude sugar.
I take it you've never had a bad trip then?
I used to use mushrooms and LSD as a teenager and enjoyed it a lot. Until I had a bad trip, which was a truly horrible experience that at the time seemed like it would never end. I've never used any psychedelics since, and never will.
LSD is a very strong medicine, but it's possible to consume it in such a way that is profoundly helpful; what's more - it generally visits upon its users substantially less grief than heroin, to which it was being compared.
Apart from the "legal framework" what would be those "similar reasons" be?
What have you been smoking?
Heroin is several orders of magnitude more similar to antibiotics / chemotherapy drugs than LSD.
But then, as you get closer, you can see that, in smaller letters above "DRUGS", it also says, "Ocean City says No To" - literally two apparently conflicting definitions of the word on a single sign.
And I don't think this is even slightly uncommon.
Second, and more importantly, by putting LSD and heroin in the same category, the author comes up with a genre of writing he calls "drug books," which appear to me - if the author's reading of the book being reviewed is even accurate - too little in common to be useful.
Like most of McKenna's ostensible empiricism, he didn't try to convince anyone that this was true in some objective sense, but rather that it was useful as a mindset to withstand the psychedelic experience.
I find this view more effective at helping to explain how my neurochemistry interfaces with reality.
It's not really in constrast though.
Gibson means: better tweak what you produce or how you act, instead of merely tweaking how your isolated self experiences reality.
That's the same whether it's a "slight tweak of incoming data" or something that can be seen as novel content (a full tweak).
This especially applies to situations where the brain starts off "tweaked" into some messy suboptimal configuration (depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc.) where it's making very bad use of incoming data.
(I always thought Gibson's real argument was just that your goals shouldn't be considered in terms of sensory inputs, unless you want to end up like AIXI, converting your own mass into paperclips because you don't realize that that will kill you.)
I'm for the combination of both: tweaking the incoming data affects how you act and change the external world (obviously you need to have an idea before acting), and at the same time, being active the external world tweaks and improves your interpretation of the incoming data (experience).
So you need both. And since drugs helps with the first, that's cool. Part of the revolution of the sixties was fulled by drug experimentation (not the "hippy-lifestyle" thing people today mock -- the whole shift in attitudes towards politics, sex, fun, religion, arts, science etc, which people have inherited and respect today).