The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [63]
Every week, according to the most conservative estimates, half a million Britons take a pill to make them happy. This pill was originally developed as an appetite suppressor. Now it is an adjunct to partying. In America, some 5m people regularly take a different sort of pill. This one was developed as an anti-depressant….
The British users are breaking their country’s law. The Americans are not. Which raises an important question. If it is not acceptable to take [MDMA, or Ecstasy]…to make you feel happy when you just want to have fun, why is it acceptable to take [Prozac]…to make you feel happy if you are not actually clinically depressed?1
The article suggests that the answer is a “pharmacological Calvinism” that causes people to reject any drugs that are used by some people for fun. Most of us assume that drugs are a less authentic way of attaining psychological goals, but there is no reasonable argument for this. The Economist cited studies by Eric Hollander, of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, showing that treating obsessive-compulsive disorder with drugs changes the patients’ brains (disentangling the action of four groups of nerves) in the same way as treating them with psychotherapy. The article concluded, “It hardly seems that one method is morally inferior just because it is easier.”
Julie Holland, an attending psychiatrist at Bellevue and on the faculty at the New York University School of Medicine, edited a compendium of opinions about MDMA, and in it many doctors and scientists talk about the drug’s potential for creating happiness and alleviating symptoms.2 Dr. Andrew Weil, the famed health theorist, attests to the therapeutic uses of MDMA, writing that “MDMA can give you a chance to have a new perspective on your body, and…that’s part of breaking old habits.”3 More specifically, he has seen people physically relax, for the first time, on MDMA. That, Weil says, has meant long-lasting reduction in allergies, back pain, and digestive problems. Also, the memory of the immense optimism brought on by the drug has lasting effects. Weil also argues that an MDMA experience can make a person dying of cancer feel a lot better about dying, as well as significantly reducing their physical pain, and that the drug belongs in the regular arsenal of palliative care.
Other authors have collected stories not from scientists but from spiritual leaders (who seem to be less willing to give their full names). A Catholic monk, Brother Bartholomew, says he has taken MDMA twenty-five times in the last ten years. “While using MDMA, he has experienced a very deep comprehension of divine compassion. He has never lost the clarity of this insight, and it remains as a reservoir on which he can draw,” reports author Nicholas Saunders.4 A rabbi at a London synagogue spoke to Saunders of the value of the drug for terminal patients because it allowed them “the feeling of oneness.” The rabbi added that “taking drugs is like reaching the top of a mountain by cable car instead of through the toil of climbing—it can be seen as cheating but it gets you to the same place.”5 A Rinzai Zen monk named Bertrand, in his seventies, agrees: “The result is in every way as real because it is the same.”6 The consolation of a bit of euphoria and a palpable sense of the unity of life seems worth offering. Should we hold back this opportunity for insight into spiritual peace? It does not seem justifiable.
Whatever kind of consolation MDMA should be allowed to be, in the 1980s and 1990s it was a drug for the club and rave scene. Particularly in England and across Europe, and later in the United States, the Ecstasy dance scene was big. There was often a sense of communal revelation in the drug,