How I Got Here

(It's been weird, to say the least...)

Dec 13, 2023

[Continued from “Drugs, Class, + Power”]

I’ve always loved getting high. Many of you can relate, I’m sure.

From the first time I ever smoked pot, I was deeply bothered by the fact that an experience which was so fundamentally pleasurable should be subject to such unjust restrictions. How could something that felt so good possibly be so bad? This was the gist of my initial feeling on the matter.

Wanting to understand the issue more deeply, as I continued to smoke weed and dabble in other drugs, I made a point to bring up drug use in conversations with others, to parse their feelings on the topic. Did other people who got high also agree that it is a more or less beneficial experience? Did anyone else have insight into this whole mess that I didn’t?

I quickly found that there were many people who knew much more about all this than I did. Fascinated, I began to devour everything I could find on the relationship between drugs and government. This material only raised more questions.

The Art of [the] War [on Drugs] (Part 1)

Vincent Rado

January 3, 2023

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Why are “drugs” and “government” seemingly opposed in the public imagination? After all, if drugs were “illegal,” didn’t that mean that we shouldn’t even be able to get our hands on them in the first place? What was really going on here?

Over time I learned that drug laws are the product of very real historical circumstances, each of which has its own bearing on the larger meanings attached to drug use and power. Perhaps more importantly, I learned that drug laws are the result of choices made by people as they sought how to respond to the onward march of history.

That may sound stunningly obvious, but it was a key revelation for me. I have Smoke Signals by Martin Lee to thank for it. His meticulous social history of cannabis revealed to me the vast depth of experience which informs today’s drug policy and culture. Enraptured with his work, I looked for other material he had written. I found Acid Dreams, a masterpiece that Lee coauthored with Bruce Shlain in the 1980s that deals with the complicated and nuanced history of LSD.

Lee’s books represent an important moment in drug literature, in that they combine themes of social justice and historical political conditions with the development of chemistry, pharmacology, and drug culture. Lee’s work was (and still is) really ahead of its time in many ways.

Plato on Drunkenness in the Upper Class

Vincent Rado

December 18, 2022

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These and other accounts of drug history lit a spark in me that has not since died down. Eventually I decided to act on it, and in March 2017 I founded DC Psychedelic Society. I hoped that by creating space for people who use illegal drugs, I could form new bonds of understanding and, with this, propel drug policy forward, in better and healthier directions.

I really had no idea what I was in for.

In the course of organizing meetings and events for the Society, I periodically encountered people who raised questions about the CIA’s involvement with psychedelic drugs. It was as if I could count on someone, anyone, to bring up this issue whenever the conversation took certain turns.

“Didn’t this whole thing, like, originally start with a CIA project or something?” I recall several people asking, among other things.

A friend of mine adamantly insisted that the entire drug scene is monitored and manipulated by government agencies for their own strategic benefit. Initially I dismissed such questions and admonitions with laughter. I assumed that the relationship between the CIA and, for example, LSD was real but negligible and not important for what we were trying to do. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of such claims, and never really had a good answer for people who brought it up. But their questions stuck with me.

[Keep reading.]