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and Demerol, for instance. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his 1930 work The Conquest of Happiness, wrote, “I am not prepared to say that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever. There are moments, for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician, and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose.”21 The acceptance or rejection of drugs on the basis of cultural bias—that is, on the basis of historical ignorance—is a cognitive trap. The way out, of course, is a self-induced shift in perspective, an opening to the notion that the way we see things is not objective and true, which means we have a responsibility to try to undermine this trap, to think otherwise. The years go slowly if they are not happy. We have drugs that can help make people happy—short-term bliss, long-term grins. It is not fair to you or to the many people you influence to dismiss this question without giving it some serious thought.

7

Religion and Revelation

Growing up in the second half of the twentieth century, in New York, I gleaned from my culture the message that drugs and religion were very much interconnected, but not for us. In my family, the holidays were our time for wine: four cups at Passover. We lived on Catholic Long Island, and wine was clearly important to that religion, too. Wine was the blood of Christ. Yet neither Manischewitz nor Gallo was an entheogen, a drug that brings religious experience. Was wine at Passover or at Communion ever an entheogen? I search the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles for references to wine, and I do not see anything that looks even vaguely entheogenic. Wine is discussed as a food staple in the Hebrew Bible, and people are warned against excessive drinking in the Christian Bible, but throughout both, wine is a happiness potion and people thank God for it, over and over. In Judges an explanatory clause is nicely revealing: “wine, which cheers both gods and men.” Psalm 104 says wine “gladdens the heart of man.”1 When Jesus turned water into wine, it was “the first of his miraculous signs…. He thus revealed his glory” and won his disciples’ faith (John 2:11); later it was wine that he chose as the matter of his blood. Alcohol cheers, gladdens, and allows for the miraculous and the glorious to be revealed. All this shows that wine has long served as a happiness drug in the Judeo-Christian world, but it does not suggest that people were inducing drunken religious revelations. I had heard of entheogens only as part of Native American religion.

Native Americans seemed to know what to do with teenagers. Their culture provided challenges; meaning; episodes of freedom; festivals with drugs, music, campfires, mad dancing; and adults on hand as guides. Native Americans took peyote and became one with hawks or wolves, and when they came back from their trips, other people wanted to know what they saw. Peyote trips were counted as part of the relevant universe. As I was growing up, this appeared to seem sublime to my elders, and it certainly sounded sublime to me. Today the culture has preserved interest in these religious drug experiences, though both the legal mood and the general sensibility have grown less awesomely respectful. There may have been bad trips among the Native Americans. There may have been sad people who found escape in peyote and took it too often. There must have been fatal bad batches, or simple overdoses. There is little evidence of these, though. Peyote seems to be a drug that brought common happiness by occasional use: an incredible experience now and again that made the rest of life seem less limited. Something transcendent was part of real life. It was shared across generations in a way that felt vital. Drugs, by definition, can engender euphoria, feelings of insight, love, and freedom. Religions have used drugs throughout history. Private individuals who take drugs have also used religion to help manage the emotional and psychological meanings of their psychotropic experiences. William James wrote that while some mystical states of consciousness