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By Root 1139 0

but someday people may speak dreamily of the good old days when doctors handed out prescriptions for SSRIs as if angels were handing out Toll House cookies. Or people will buy them at the supermarket and wonder what the fuss was. Two hundred years from now, what will be the history of caffeine? Of nicotine? Of cold medicines? Studies are beginning to show that depression and anxiety have a significant adverse effect on lifespan and health. In the future, we may become more aware of the health ravages of depression, and find that happiness drugs have a less adverse effect. What if, because of some disease or comet, momentary happiness becomes a lot more important than long life, for some people or for all of us? We would have to come up with a new calculus of happiness risk. That idea calls our attention to the fact that we now use some such calculus.

Psychic pain is similar to physical pain. A broken leg that was never set properly may hurt throughout one’s whole life. You need to have that leg looked at, and probably broken and reset. For psychological pain, we often need to engage in years of talk therapy. In the meanwhile, drugs to lessen the pain make sense. Drugs to lessen psychic pain cannot be sorted out into piles of curative versus masking. Modern antidepressants are not curative medicine fixing a broken you. There is nothing wrong with your little gray brain blobs, labeled A and B as in the television commercial. I repeat: there is no evidence that depression is caused by a deficiency of serotonin. Your psyche got knocked around. You never fixed it, and you’re still in pain. You want to feel better. As for euphoria, it seems that many people through history, many religious people among them, have made use of drugs for a blast of euphoria every once in a while, and have been able to use such experiences to enliven their everyday lives over years of abstinence. Hallucinogens like Ecstasy, mescaline, and peyote are euphoric, but they also change your reality, and for some people, the use of these drugs even once in a lifetime brings insight, comfort, and spiritualism.

The lesson of history is that drugs are mostly good. They are in our world, like food and sunshine, and we have always made use of them. In our world there is a shocking abundance of everything, so it is hard to know what’s for you, and when to stop—and this goes for drugs as much as for anything else. We manage this deluge by all sorts of classifying systems about what is good and what is bad, what is healthy and what is unhealthy, what makes us seem weak and what makes us seem strong. Taking drugs can do you harm, but so can not taking drugs. Many physicians and researchers argue that people heal faster when they are not in physical distress, such that painkillers can be seen as part of a healing treatment. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and grief shorten people’s lives in a variety of ways, from simple failure to take care of oneself, to suppression of the immune system, all the way to suicide.

It is clear to me that adults who want to know more about happiness ought to employ drugs in that effort. Many people try drugs, let’s say out of curiosity, and do not find the experience rewarding. If such people do not long to affect their happiness, and their curiosity on the subject is low, I would not counsel them to press on and try more drugs. But here are some circumstances in which to try a potion:

If you are tortured or even bothered by heavy moods.

If you long for a break from your “symptoms” or merely from your personality.

If people keep telling you that you should ask your doctor for an antidepressant.

If you want to know more about the nature of reality and how the mind creates it.

If you want to set up conditions for a mystic’s revelation.

If you want to have an intense communing experience with someone.

If you want to have a good time on a given evening.

If you want to dance and be social, but you are too inhibited.

I would not counsel the use of illegal drugs for happiness, because despite the moral call to civil disobedience