Drugs lace our classroom readings

Drugs are bad. Never do them. I learned that in school. I also learned that a vast proportion of history's most influential thinkers were drug users.

John Keats, Pablo Picasso and Benjamin Franklin all smoked or ate opium; Paul Marie Verlaine and Ernest Hemingway drank absinthe; Sigmund Freud famously snorted cocaine. The list of similarly celebrated figures who used drugs goes on and on.

It would be easy to dismiss these men's drug use as recreational or therapeutic, and we must not forget how medical practices of earlier eras differed from today's. "If you picture a world without pain killers -- without aspirin, ibuprofen, or Tylenol, and without anesthesia," Undergraduate Chairman of English Michael Gamer said, "then you'll understand why people thought opium and cocaine were a big deal."

But the consistency with which our most brilliant forefathers engaged in drug use raises some intriguing questions. How large a role have illegal drugs played in forming the academic canon? What is the relationship between narcotics and creative endeavor? Without drugs, would liberal arts majors have anything to study?

In many cases, the connection between drug use and intellectual creation is straightforward. Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while tripping on acid and Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that an opium dream inspired "Kubla Khan," his most famous poem.

And in America, Allen Ginsberg declared, "I smoke marijuana every chance I get."

Some evidence suggests that the very foundations of Western thought were shaped by narcotics. The earliest evidence of cocaine use in Europe is residue from a clay pipe excavated from Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon. And, according to a theory articulated by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman and Carl Ruck in The Road to Eleusis, ancient Greeks including Plato, Socrates and Aristotle ingested a fungal precursor to LSD while participating in an annual initiation rite known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

These theories may seem far-fetched, but the notion of narcotics holding inspirational and revelatory properties should not. We are warned that drug users experience lowered inhibitions and altered states of consciousness. Assumptions, associations and constructions in the psyche are disordered and rearranged. Is it so surprising that new ideas might emerge from drug experiences?

Not in popular culture. For example, drug use among the 20th century's most innovative and popular musicians was not the exception, but the rule. It's widely known that the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur and just about everyone else who made music what it is today was stoned when they did it. With that in mind, it seems less outrageous to suggest that drugs' influence also reaches our textbooks.

Indeed, the use of drugs such as opiates that are illegal today was once more accepted and commonplace. Prior to modern medicine, psychotropic substances provided relief of anguish, both physical and psychological. And in using drugs to escape reality, our canonized minds may have stumbled upon new paradigms.

Tom Wolfe, the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, agrees. In his first-person account of the acid movement, Wolfe suggests that epiphanic experiences originate in altered mental states -- which drugs, like meditation and fasting, can bring about. In addition to the aesthetic breakthroughs associated with drug use, Wolfe posits that even major religious movement began with such revelatory experiences. It was a burning bush, after all, that first spoke to Moses.

The connection between narcotics and creativity does not alleviate any of the dangers associated with drugs, nor does this column advocate the use of illegal substances. Many great minds never touch drugs, and almost all drug users do not become great minds. Nowhere is it suggested that happiness results from the creative impulses drugs bring; indeed, Verlaine's bitter deathbed condemnation of absinthe implies the opposite.

Nonetheless, how we learn about drugs requires re-examination. The influence of drugs permeates not only contemporary popular and underground culture, but also art, philosophy, literature and other topics we study in school. I'd like to see a class with a title like "Absinthe and the American Novel."

Given the pervasive impact drugs have had on our curricula, our educators must tell us more than simply "drugs are bad."

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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