I.
I recently finished a new book about Miles Davis and the rise and fall of cool jazz by James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool (2024). It’s about what you’d expect from a professionally-written jazz book by a guy who isn’t apparently all that into jazz and was assigned the topic by his publisher. Not bad, but not mind-blowing either. But I was struck by the sheer amount of time Kaplan spends discussing how rampant heroin addiction was within the jazz scene, a topic he could have de-emphasized or ignored if he had wanted to. Throughout the chapter “Junkie Time,” he even intersperses throughout the text a list of musicians and their dates of birth and death who were all addicted to smack. You can see that most of them didn’t live long, though he did include a few who survived for way longer than they should have, at least theoretically.
As Goethe once argued, histories must be continually rewritten to reflect the ongoing concerns of the culture as it evolves, and the past twenty years or so have made clear that everyone in America now knows a thing or two about heroin, even among the upper-middle class. So I think it was a sensible decision to be crystal clear about how much damage the stuff was doing to the musicians’ lives during the 50s and 60s, and also how intertwined with the sound of the music it really was.
In one extended quotation from an interview, the saxophonist Jimmy Heath explains,
Alcohol throws your talent out; your technique gets sloppy. Marijuana makes you get plenty of ideas, but then your mind moves too fast. You move off one idea to another. Heroin was a concentration drug… If you can concentrate better, you can work on things very meticulously. Coltrane used to get high and practice all day. When I would go to see him, he would have nothing on but a pair of pants. Sometimes it was so hot in his house that he would be drenched in sweat, and he would practice endlessly.
According to trumpeter Randy Brecker, heroin “made you feel like playing. There’s a phrase, ‘junkie time,’ You kind of end up playing behind the beat—it’s just a little lag—and it’s a great way to play.”
And there’s no question that the drugs a musician chooses will affect what he wants to play and how he plays it. John Coltrane famously switched from heroin to a brief period of sobriety to LSD as he moved from the 50s to the 60s. He recorded “Giant Steps” (1960), a master-display of technique and one of his most celebrated records while off heroin, and he was using LSD by the time he recorded “A Love Supreme” (1965), another one of his most celebrated works. But during his acid period, he also alienated two members of his band and prompted them to quit, and his onstage antics regularly alienated audiences. As Stanley Crouch recalls in his highly critical essay “Coltrane Derailed,”
By 1966 Coltrane was not only having troubles in clubs, sometimes being fired on opening night, he could also empty an entire park, which, as [his drummer] Rashied Ali recalls, he did in Chicago. During that performance and others witnessed in New York, Coltrane put down the saxophone and started shouting, yodeling, and screaming through the microphone while beating on his chest. The saxophonist told Ali that he couldn’t think of anything else to play on his horn so he tried that.
Additionally:
[His other saxophonist, Pharaoh] Sanders says that they never talked about music and never rehearsed, but he feels that Coltrane was interested in experimenting with the saxophone because, being such a relatively new instrument, it had not been fully explored. Perhaps. But there are also rumors about hallucinogenic drugs, which intensify narcissism and spiritual fantasies.
The rumors about LSD have been confirmed, but nothing about narcissism. In fact, most of Coltrane’s acquaintances have said the opposite.
Drugs and how they impact music is a fun subject to think about, but it’s typically limited in what it can reveal. For untalented musicians, the effect doesn’t seem to produce much one way or the other. It’s interesting that Jimmy Heath felt that marijuana was conducive to generating new ideas but not maintaining a structure. I can easily see that being the case for a gifted composer and/or improviser… but then you uncover the musical sub-sub-genre of “stoner doom metal” and find some of the most untrained, uninspired, insipid, bland, and uncreative musical acts ever to walk the earth, with goofy pun names like Ironweed, Weedcraft, Weedsnake, Weedruid, Keef Mountain, Your Highness, Bong Wizard, Bongzilla, and King Weed. In that world, you’ve got the opposite of what Heath describes: rigorous adherence to simple, formulaic structures, and hardly any new ideas at all.
But all the same, anyone who has experimented with using different drugs while at least listening to music will report that each one has a different effect on how the user encounters the information she’s hearing. Drugs and alcohol also take on the effect of changing the experience of music, adding a bodily dimension to it that would otherwise not be there. Raves aren’t about passive listening, nor are hippie jam fests. Half the reason people enjoy “stoner doom metal” while high on marijuana is because they can physically feel the bass tone, making the music not only an aural but a tactile experience.
II.
Drugs, to put it bluntly, are media. Recall Marshall McLuhan’s point about how a light bulb constitutes a medium because it “creates an environment by its mere presence.” Drugs don’t provide content for the user directly, but they tincture the information each user encounters. They shape the user’s Umwelt, and thus inform the meaning of what he perceives.
That drugs themselves constitute a kind of media is something that the notorious Harvard-researcher-turned-LSD-guru Timothy Leary understood well, and it’s in fact why he met with McLuhan personally to discuss the topic and seek out career advice. McLuhan himself was not at all disappointed in what Leary had to say, and he had plenty to tell him. All this happened at a lunch date at the Plaza hotel in New York in 1966, and according to Leary’s memoir Flashbacks (1990), here’s what went down:
The lunch with Marshall McLuhan at the Plaza was informative. “Dreary Senate hearings and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message, Tim. You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce — beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.” He sang: “Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”
He didn’t stop there, though. He really went on and on. Observe:
You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.
McLuhan was absolutely right about computers, perhaps more than he knew. But McLuhan is a theorist who often straddled the line between the divine and the demonic in his thinking, regardless of how sincere his faith in God may have been.
Anyhow, from there, Leary reportedly went home and came up with his famous slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The rest is history.
III.
Now, there’s a serious problem if we’re going to take seriously the idea of drugs as media, and it’s that it’s a very hard subject to study with the requisite degree of disinterest. Leary himself is a perfect example of a researcher who began with earnest intentions, then quickly “went native” and became a counterculture celebrity.
As the Harvard psychology web site explains,
By 1962 various faculty members and administrators at Harvard were concerned about the safety of Leary and Alpert’s research subjects, and critiqued the rigor of their unorthodox methodology (in particular, the researchers conducted their investigations when they, too, were under the influence of psilocybin). Leary and Alpert’s colleagues challenged the scientific merit of their research, as well as the seemingly cavalier attitude with which it was carried out (e.g. poorly controlled conditions, non-random selection of subjects). Editorials printed in the Harvard Crimson accused Alpert and Leary of not merely researching psychotropic drugs but actively promoting their recreational use.
And then in 1963, he was kicked out for doing shrooms with an undergrad off-campus. Though McLuhan certainly gave him some good self-promotion advice, we’ve learned little from Leary’s actual stardom, and we’re no better off than we were before.
Drug advocates frequently try to elevate the importance of doing drugs to levels beyond what most non-drug-users would consider plausible. The counterculture figure Terence McKenna, for instance, has argued that psilocybin mushrooms have played an integral role in man’s evolutionary development, including the evolution of language. He felt that mushrooms fostered cooperation and allowed the apes to evolve more or less along the egalitarian lines he advocated for, resulting in a human species that eventually forgot about the wonders of these drugs that played such an integral role in their very development.
However, no reputable researchers take this argument seriously. Some have even pointed out that the known historic usage of hallucinogenic drugs, ritual and otherwise, often contradict his hippie-dippie notions about how they foster community, cooperation, free love, and the elevation of women. Speaking only for myself, I’ve used hallucinogenic mushrooms before, and I fail to see why they would play such a role in any of these things. Maybe the solution is to do them a hundred times, or a thousand, or just enough until I reach the point where I find the notion plausible!
And there have been other serious researchers who have jeopardized their careers with outlandish theories about drug use. One somewhat famous example is the historian John M. Allegro, who was one of the original translators and commentators on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and quite a respected scholar… that is, until he published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which argued that Christianity was originally a shamanistic mushroom/fertility cult. Possibly no other scholar has ever seen his reputation plummet from such high heights to such low depths in such a short time.
IV.
However, there is a certain squeamishness from scholars to broach the subject at all, and this mentality is leaving some good research on the table. The historian of esoteric spirituality Wouter Hanegraaff has discussed the reluctance of other academic historians to take seriously the evidence that entheogenic drug experience was a component of various religious practices in the past. He points to the content of the Mithras Liturgy and the theurgic practices of Iamblichus as examples of fairly straightforward cases in which hallucinogenic drugs were almost certainly being used for spiritual reasons (the Mithras Liturgy even contains a recipe for a psychoactive drug!), yet scholars are unwilling to address it. Part of the reason surely has to do with the aforementioned counter-culture gurus Leary and McKenna tainting the entire field of research, leaving a residue of attention-seeking histrionics on anyone who ventures into that area. Yet nonetheless, facts are facts, and only a naive or dishonest person would deny that the use of drugs, the process through which they’re taken, and the variety being used all matter a great deal if one is trying to understand the experiential aspects of some historic religion or lifestyle.
More apropos to my own interests, it’s clear that the west has gotten increasingly medicated in recent dedicates, especially in the United States. The conservatives’ war on drugs has been decisively lost, and the elements within right-wing ideology that seek to monetize their usage in the name of “the free market” are now on the ascent. While there are plenty of new analyses focusing on new technological media — particularly the smart phone — and the researchers will pay lip service to Marshall McLuhan (usually with some quotation thrown into their work, typically as an epigraph preceding some chapter), these same researchers may not be taking seriously enough McLuhan’s point about just how wide-ranging of a concept media really can be.
The sociologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt are good examples of this tendency, as they each focus extensively on the smart phone as the primary cause of so much social dysfunction among young people, including what’s clearly some kind of mental health crisis currently going on in America as I’m writing this. While I share their concerns, it seems a bit hasty to emphasize the smart phone above every other factor, especially when there are international exceptions to this uniquely Anglo-Saxon growing social malaise.
From a recent critical essay on these recent smart-phone-centered discussions, Isaac Wilks writes,
A recent literature review has found no evidence for a smartphone-induced mental health crisis in Hungary, the Netherlands, and (strangely, though this is the one counterexample corroborated by Twenge) South Korea. Youth self-harm rates in Sweden and Denmark actually fell after the introduction of the smartphone. In Japan, frequent Instagram use is associated with decreased symptoms of distress among young adults, though Twitter has the opposite relationship. As the shock of the digital subsides and 2010s-style techno-pessimism grows stale, we have a chance to realize that, over the broad surface of the earth, different forms of life subsist. The world is thankfully larger than the American high school, though not overwhelmingly so.
For Wilks, the bigger problem with young people in America is and has been the country’s excessive investment in social control over young people, which involves a mixture of therapeutic techniques, obstruction of teenage social life, and prescription medication:
Most Americans under forty will remember the tendency of elementary school supervisors to counterpose authority and hold “dialogue” between students in dispute, even in cases of students banding together to confront bullies. Access to peers is often withheld […] The most direct method of demoralization is of course biochemical: around 10 percent of U.S. children are now diagnosed with ADHD, more than 90 percent of whom receive prescription stimulants.
I’m far from an expert on the subject of what’s wrong with young people (and if I’m being honest, I’m not even sure I really care — although I encourage everyone to correct me if I’m getting anything wrong here), but whenever I see studies on the topic that discuss rates of prescribed medications among the youth, the discussion stops there. The medication gets prescribed, and there’s little follow-up as to what that means or how it an informs an individual’s day-to-day experience. We seem to have plenty of quantitative data, but little qualitative analysis.
And this is interesting when you consider that the rise in prescription medication rates in America are roughly proportionate to the proliferation of digital technology in each kid’s hands. All sorts of pundits are repeating the mantra, “The medium is the message, the medium is the message,” but to them, there’s only one medium worth discussing: the screen through which you view things. In return, I’d ask: what if Adderall is the message? What if Xanax is the message? What if Ambien is the message? What if SSRIs are the message?
At times, I wonder why people are even starting to care about Marshall McLuhan again, right at the point in which most of the information-conveying media he wrote about have all taken on the same properties. Right now, there’s not much sense in bothering to distinguish between books, television, film, the telephone, and the record player, because all of them are now typically accessed through computers. They’ve been digitized. A reading tablet, smart TV, laptop, and smart phone are all the same technology. The only substantive differences between them are in their screen size, portability, and the user settings each individual chooses to calibrate them with.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of screen size and portability, as they are indeed important. And for all I know, the proposals about banning cell phones in schools might have overwhelmingly positive effects on education (this blog isn’t interested in political solutions, so I don’t care to endorse anything one way or the other). But ultimately, the same digital technology is still there.
Some people want to plumb the depths of the computer even further and get into the question of what we might charitably call “sub-media,” like social networking web sites. I’ve noticed that people who do “media ecology” want to discuss at length the inherent differences between Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and they cite McLuhan as their inspiration in doing so. I myself have gone into this sort of thing. But here’s a serious question: would McLuhan even care that much if all of these sites boil down to mere differences in software and still rely on the same physical tech? Keep in mind, I do understand that one ground for a given figure will have its own ground that converts it into the figure, and that new ground will have its own, and so on, and so on. Wheels within wheels. I get it.
But when we consider drugs, we’re really dealing with serious, measurable differences that can be seen from one to another. We’re not just endlessly pontificating over different configurations of software. Let me put it this way. Consider an individual who uses a) Adderall for reading e-books, b) marijuana for listening to music, c) alcohol for telephone/streaming conversations, d) Ambien to help with sleep at night, e) poppers for advanced hardcore jerk-off sessions, and, eventually, f) Zoloft for simply tolerating the burdensome weight of whatever his life has become.
Now, answer this question. How many media forms have I just alluded to?
The answer is seven: one computer, six drugs.
V.
I was going to conclude this with an extended discussion of how one might study drugs as media. This would be difficult, since we’re really dealing with questions of phenomenology when you think about it. I don’t think this kind of inquiry can be done well with self-reported data on questionnaires handed to a study participant by some grad student researcher. And there are other additional issues, like what happens to someone on a prescription when they’ve built up a tolerance to a drug. Does the effect cease to matter altogether? What kind of effects linger on? But I won’t dwell on such questions at length. We’ll leave them for the boffins.
The main message I’d like to leave you with is that we’re quickly headed toward a situation in which there are no major substantive differences between our information-conveying media. We still have paperback books for now, and some romantic types do collect LPs, but a quick overview of the extent to which the computer has taken over everything will confirm my point. If all these media are collapsing into one, then it seems understandable that people will start using their own media — i.e., the media of drugs — to calibrate their own perceptions and thus (at least in theory) better attune themselves to whatever the computer is feeding them at the moment, or perhaps better attune themselves to an entire lifetime they know they’ll spend before a computer. In all of this, the computer is the given.
Pay attention to every medium that plays a role in the conveyance of information — from its source all the way to the individual recipient.