Drugs

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Drugs

Since 8000 b.c.e. and the Aztecs' ceremonial use of peyote, drugs have played an integral role in the religious history of the Americas. However, hallucinogenic drugs assumed a more visible role in the United States after World War II. Drugs penetrated mainstream society in the 1960s as the psychedelic revolution, led by such proselytizers as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, became part of the large-scale restructuring of American religion. The political and cultural radicalism of this decade led to the questioning of institutional authority at all levels of society, including that of the mainline churches. As demand increased for alternative spiritualities and experiential insights, drugs provided many with a readily available shortcut to mystical enlightenment.

When consumed under the proper conditions, marijuana, mescaline, magic mushrooms (psilocybin), and their synthetic counterpart, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), catalyze emotional states of a deeply religious character; mediating feelings of unity with the universe, deep community with peers, synesthesia, transcendence of time and space, and insight into the social construction of reality. As hallucinogens became more readily available in the 1960s, they provided an outlet and a vehicle for various forms of religious, social, and political protest against a status quo, perceived by many at the time as inhibiting individualism and limiting personal freedom.

The religious character of the psychedelic movement may be gleaned from William James's study of mysticism in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James, a psychologist and philosopher, experimented with nitrous oxide and peyote in exploring alternative states of consciousness. His dabblings reflected his preference for religion that was an "acute fever" rather than a "dull habit." James's statement on the matter would later be held up by proponents of chemical mysticism: that "rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different" (p. 388).

The assault on this screen began well before the 1960s, among musicians and writers outside the institutionalized religious sphere. Their experiments with various drugs were the historical precursors to the psychedelic movement. By the early 1920s, marijuana was already a popular drug among jazz musicians. In the 1940s, Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were experimenting with marijuana and Benzedrine. In 1953 the English essayist and novelist Aldous Huxley ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescaline at his home in Hollywood, California. He believed the experience to be confirmation of the insights he had written about in his 1945 study of world mysticism, The Perennial Philosophy. He quickly published The Doors of Perception (1954), a description of his newfound spirituality and visions of "naked existence."

Only a month before Huxley's revelation, the U.S. government authorized Operation MK-ULTRA. The CIA's drug and mind control program was complemented by a large increase in scientific studies of the therapeutic use of hallucinogens in treating alcoholism, narcotics addiction, and juvenile delinquency. It was during this period of curiosity that clinical psychologist and Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary began his research into the religious dimensions of psychedelics. In 1962 Walter Pahnke, a graduate student in religion and society at Harvard and advisee of Leary, conducted his famous "Good Friday experiment." During a religious service at Marsh Chapel of Boston University, Pahnke assembled twenty divinity students and administered psilocybin to half of them while the other half received a placebo. Nine of ten of those who had taken psilocybin reported having an intense religious experience, while only one from the control group felt similar effects. Pahnke's results led Leary to conduct further experiments. After his expulsion from Harvard in 1963, Leary quickly set up a grass-roots, nonprofit group called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and began to preach the gospel of psychedelics from a New York estate called Millbrook.

Psychedelic seeds of religious change were also being sowed on the West Coast. In 1960 Ken Kesey, a graduate student in Stanford University's creative writing program, tried LSD as part of a federally funded research program. Enamored by his experience, Kesey soon published his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and used the royalties to gather a group of "Merry Pranksters" at his residence in La Honda, California. In 1964 they bought a 1939 International Harvester bus. They renamed it FURTHUR, painted it with Day-Glo colors, pasted a sign to the rear end that read "Caution: Weird Load," and then drove cross-country to New York. Their hijinks did more than anything else to popularize LSD among the youth of America. In 1965 Kesey and his followers began their series of "acid tests" in the San Francisco area, all-night LSD parties that included strobe lights, costumes, and music by the Grateful Dead.

The momentum of psychedelic culture laid the religious groundwork for the emergence of the counterculture in the late 1960s in and around the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. Media coverage and the relatively new medium of FM radio gave voice to the psychedelic gospel. As social protest became fashionable, drugs became even more accessible and more inviting to thousands of youths, who thought their domestic situation in need of a spiritual boost. However, psychedelics soon became a form of recreation for the "Woodstock nation" rather than a means to religious enlightenment.

While the contemporary meaning of the psychedelic revolution remains a point of contention among scholars, there is no doubt that it marked a dramatic shift in American religious history. Despite the founding of various psychedelic churches such as the Church of the Awakening and the Neo-American Church, the legacy of psychedelica lies not in its institutionalization but in its legitimization of personal discovery and resistance. The experimental attitude of the counterculture affected the entire religious landscape of the United States and wrenched open an alternative space for religious belief and practice: increased interest in Eastern mysticism and literature; the growth of small religious groups and practices in the 1970s, including Hare Krishna and transcendental meditation; and the decreased liturgical hegemony of mainline churches. Most importantly, however, the widespread use of hallucinogens in the 1960s complemented the growing emphasis on individual experience in the religious life of Americans. Whether or not they had used drugs, Americans of all stripes began to re-emphasize individual experience in their religiosity. This trend would continue through the rest of the century.