This post consists of quotations from Aldous Huxley‘s 1954 book “The Doors of Perception” which elaborates on his psychedelic experience the previous year under the influence of mescaline, a substance originally derived from the Peyote cactus among other natural sources. A short comment is given at the end.

“””That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H. G. Wells‘ phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots – all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial.

Most of the modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s order, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use in the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All other chemical Doors in the Wall are labelled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.

And in spite of the evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer, practically everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural than eating. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian this may seem odd.

The problem raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones.

To most people, mecaline is almost completely innocuous. Unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, cimes of violence and traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business. Moreover, the business he minds is an experience of the most enlightening kind, which does not have to be paid for (and this is surely important) by a compensatory hangover.

The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors into the Other World seem to be wholly good. Dr Slotkin reports [reference to another study] that habitual Peyotists [consumers of mescaline] are on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of the hand as evil.

To be shaken out of the ruts of the ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large [i.e. by unfiltered perception] – thus an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every [person] would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, of necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience.

If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books.

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship between words and things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”””

Comment: Reflecting on Huxley’s words, two points stick out. First, how far ahead of his time his insights were in terms of the benefits psychedelics can offer to the user, especially in comparison to other drugs like alcohol. Psychedelics are only now (and very slowly) being rediscovered for their treatment potential, e.g. to address drug addiction (ironic isn’t it!) or mental health conditions like treatment-resistant depression.

Furthermore, psychedelics have arguably the lowest harm potential of all commonly consumed drugs (“To most people, mescaline is almost completely innocuous.”), especially when compared, again, to all-present and widely promoted alcohol. This means that, given the fact that general prohibition is both futile and morally unjustifiable, our current approach to substance management has nothing to do with science or reason, but with tradition and – very much so – dogma.

The second point is the elephant in the room the current societal approach to drugs creates: The promotion of drugs with the greatest harm potential, especially alcohol, and the prohibition and the persecution of users of innocuous substances. This creates many issues: (1) harm from substance (ab)use is increased, (2) people’s livelihoods are destroyed for unjustified persecution, (3) public resources are grossly wasted, such as on uncessary policying and increased healthcare costs, and, last but not least, (4) access to state-of-the-art treatment and vehicles of personal growth is blocked.

While hard to quantify, the costs to society of this situation over many decades must be enormous. Just imagine the countless suicides of people with severe depression which could have been avoided while research into psychedelics’ treatment potentials has been killed off in the 1970s by the “War on Drugs“. No smartness, no liberty here, only dogma.