Balm or Bane? A Review of Timothy McMahan King’s What Are Drugs For?
Balm or Bane? A Review by Carl Blumenthal of Timothy McMahan King’s, What are Drugs for? An Exploration of Stolen Fire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 328 pages, hardcover)
What is the good, bad, and ugly of drug and alcohol use? Much depends on why and how much. In college, I smoked weed on weekends to heighten the pleasure of rock concerts. During the week I maintained a clear head and stellar grades. My drug habit ended when I broke my nose diving into a stream while high. As for experiments with hashish, I was so spaced out watching 2001: A Space Odyssey that I didn’t notice when I angrily smashed a window and slashed my wrist.
Why I drank three beers a day for years, I don’t remember, which was probably the point. But during the Covid pandemic, after my shift as a peer counselor on a suicide hotline, the wine and liquor I imbibed intensified the videos of ecstatic dancing I watched, allowing me to briefly feel immortal. Any buzz wore off during my depressions. When the last one a year ago coincided with a diagnosis of pre-diabetes, I stopped drinking altogether.
Writing is like a drug because it enhances my will to live and without inspiration I experience withdrawal symptoms from existence. Akin to the varieties of religious experiences that the philosopher William James described, these are my varieties of drug use. And the medication I take for bipolar disorder keeps my trials in heaven and hell winnable.
But what if, after your addiction to and recovery from opioid use, you weren’t satisfied writing a book about how everyone else is currently addicted to one thing or another? In other words, by tracing the use of drugs, in the broadest sense, from time immemorial, you wanted to demonstrate how only lately they got such a bad rap. To Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals About Us, Timothy McMahan King has added What are Drugs for? An Exploration of Stolen Fire.
This latest book’s central metaphor is the double-edged nature of drugs, which were either a gift of the gods to enlighten us or fire stolen by Prometheus, which, if we’re not careful, will burn everything in sight. In chapters, such as “Stolen Fire,” “Why Drugs,” “Plants of the Gods,” “For the Love of Wisdom,” “Oil of Gladness,” and “The Little Anointed Ones,” King catalogues the many plant and animal products mentioned in Greek and Roman myths, by Socrates and Plato, in the Hebrew Bible, and during the practices of early Christians.
This reverence for plants and their place in the divine order was inextricable from their aesthetic, moral, and medicinal uses, but over time local husbandry was replaced by international trade of coffee, cocaine, and other commodities, creating by 1500 what historian David Courtwright calls the “psychoactive revolution.” The irreverence of improper and excessive use of blessed substances was replaced by a utility that could render the user useless.
The second half of the book chronicles this secularization in “Drugs That Shaped the World,” “Revival and Reform,” “New Demons,” “The Gods Fight Back,” “Return to Reverence,” and “Between Extremes.”
It’s hard to keep track not just of the dozens of oils, spices, alcohols, drugs, fungi, opioids, and psychedelics used throughout history, but also when and why they were favored or forbidden and by whom. The most provocative chapter is about how, while labeling Jews a bunch of drug addicts among other slurs, and generally frowning on drug use, Hitler and the German army relied on a stimulant, Pervitin, to enhance their ruling and fighting capacity. Its overuse sapped many soldiers of their energy, eventually contributing to the Nazis’ demise. Another surprise is the Black neuroscientist, Carl Hart, who, after studying how drugs affected poor communities like his own, adopted controlled heroin use as a way of maximizing his potential.
But analyses of Prohibition and the War on Drugs reiterate common knowledge, mainly that the proponents of these bans believed in the inferiority of immigrants and Black people, the basis of the overconsumption the rest of the country needed to be protected from. However, in the last chapter, the author receives his comeuppance as a white Christian do-gooder, after renting one of his apartments to two recovering addicts, who wreck the place while turning it into a drug den. Though King doesn’t identify the women by immigrant status or race, he is torn between a desire for justice, which he recognizes as revenge, and a “reverence” for their survival despite the trauma of parental abuse.
This conundrum is amplified in the “Afterword,” where we (re-) learn of his initial opioid addiction due to the pain of a botched operation (when he hesitated to detail his recovery because of his many privileges). This time he describes back surgery that briefly reintroduced him to opioid use. In the first case, we discover that psychedelics helped him heal; in the second, it was loving-kindness meditations. Although What are Drugs for? recounts the evolutionary sacred and profane of drug use, with his Christian faith, Timothy McMahan King seems to opt for a middle road to Damascus.
In a book about the use of plants that is so historically innovative, King too often gets lost in the weeds of philosophizing. For instance, he devotes significant space to “virtue ethics,” which possess so many nuances I couldn’t keep track. After 225 pages meant to illuminate what for many is a black-and-white subject, he only briefly recommends four rather common-place policies: 1. Drug use is not an either/or proposition; 2. Thus, harm reduction is an important alternative to abstinence; 3. Governments that don’t control the supply of drugs are derelict, and 4. Just policies should be based on reverence for users not fear (of retribution).
Finally, don’t be surprised if, after chronicling the past and present of drugs and their practices, King writes a sci-fi thriller in which we earthlings mainline AI to our brains until aliens reprogram us using interstellar substances grown in stardust.
