In response to a recent post about Charles’ dilemma, readers brought up several issues that I’d like to address…before getting to Part 2. The issue of good vs. bad came up. Charles’ quest for his “true self” seemed to be based on an experience of goodness that could not be replicated without drugs (in his case, dissociatives like DXM and ketamine). But then he worried that what he was doing was not good…it wasn’t right or proper somehow. Readers also suggested that finding the “true self” is an achievement: it takes place over development — i.e, over time — and it requires hard work. Putting these ideas together, we’re stuck with a definitional matter that needs to be resolved before we can provide some advice for Charles.
Here goes:
Definition #1: the moral good.
Good means right, means socially acceptable, or valid, or productive, vs. bad, the opposite of those things. And this polarity further breaks down into detailed comparisons and ratings, like harm vs. help: if I’m not helping myself or others, then whatever I’m doing is not GOOD. Similarly, if I’m harming myself or others, that’s BAD. This already gets tricky: is harming the self necessarily morally bad? What about suicide in the case of terminal illness? What about slapping the side of your head to coach yourself against acting like an idiot? If you follow it to its logical conclusions, this kind of definition gets clunky and/or arbitrary and sometimes irrelevant; because it’s really just based on a simple formula: normativity. Following norms (either past or present, idealized or actual) gets to be the only reliable yardstick for being good. Sounds a bit boring. And perhaps irrelevant to things like…well, like taking drugs, which might harm the self a little, or a lot, in the short run, or the long run. But may also help, by opening doors that were previously closed. Yeah, boring but complicated (at least for a non-philosopher like me).
Definition #2: feeling good.
The other definition is that good = feeling good. Nothing moral or normative about it. Feeling good is easy to determine. It’s the most basic perception one can possibly have. Ask any two-year old. Without the complexity of “norms” to follow or defy, two-year olds just go with the straightforward definition: Good = happy. Bad = unhappy. And that perception of the world comes straight from their orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). This relatively primitive part of the prefrontal cortex is called “paralimbic” for good reason. It’s intimately connected to limbic structures like the amygdala and striatum. But it also serves as a sort of limbic structure itself. Cells in the OFC fire more rapidly when you eat something sweet. That’s a natural reinforcer (reward), built into our biology. But other cells in the OFC respond to “secondary reinforcers” like a sexy smile from someone you find attractive, or the steam rising from your foil-wrapped burger, or a green light. You can’t argue with your OFC’s perception of good. The OFC has been around for at least 100 million years, and it knows its job.
The developmental angle.
Little kids perceive good via definition #2. They just feel it. And besides, norm-following, i.e., the capacity for moral behaviour, does not come on line until about the age of 3 1/2 to 4 years, when children acquire what’s known as Theory of Mind, an important watershed in cognitive and social development. Before the onset of Theory of Mind, you can’t imagine what others might be thinking or feeling. You just think that everyone sees things the way you do. So kids younger than 3 1/2 can’t possibly be good in a moral way that requires seeing the impact of their actions on others. All they can do is follow rules to avoid punishment.
What’s so bad about feeling good?
Charles says he feels good according to definition #2. But that’s a child’s definition. Isn’t it distasteful because it’s indulgent and immature? Or is it spontaneous, and thus precious? Charles tells me that the “goodness” of getting high on dissociatives (e.g., ketamine and DXM) involves feeling wholeness, excitement, and spontaneity. Good on the inside. Plus — and here’s the special bonus, available now for the next 8 hours, so hurry before the offer expires! — pot and/or DXM and/or ketamine allow you to disengage from definition #1, to shuck off those normative demands. Because the obligation to follow, or at least to be concerned with, social norms breaks down when you’re on these drugs. And that’s because norms and standards make up a large part of the sense that’s held together by networks of cortical neurons, communicating through NMDA receptors. Recall that dissociatives are NMDA antagonists, which break up the orderliness of the cortex. So they break up your model of what’s moral. Pot can do the same through a different mechanism. Now put together that fundamental child’s feeling of goodness, e.g., via wholeness and spontaneity, with freedom from norms and societal constraints, and Charles gets to his “true self” — at least that’s how he sees it.
I think definition #2 is crucial for thinking about GOOD vs. BAD when it comes to drug/alcohol use. Yet we (most of us, including, no especially, ex-addicts) tend to slip into definition #1 instead. We get moral, and we tend to dismiss the very plain fact that drugs, booze, and other things to which we get addicted, feel good. At least for a while. Intrinsically good. Or else we wouldn’t keep going back to them again and again.
Feeling good is the guiding force behind children’s spontaneous behaviour, including their love, their eagerness, and their creativity (all mediated by the OFC, which develops a few years ahead of the dorsal prefrontal circuits — e.g, the dACC — which support norm-following). Feeling good is our principal, fundamental aim in approaching and understanding the world, before we learn morality. It’s bodily good, sensory good. It’s the good that comes from activating orbitofrontal circuits that evolved to keep us tuned into what’s valuable in life. Rather than take the high road of morality, I write quite a bit about the “goodness” of drugs in my book — even as I emphasize their dark side.
So, back to Charles’ dilemma: if you can knock out the blind pursuit of being good (morally, slavishly, obsessively) for those few hours, at the same time as just feeling good…well, that sounds pretty damn attractive.
Please add your own thoughts and impressions, and stay tuned for Part 2.
Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
Charles’ experiences and thoughts echo what I’ve heard from many users of both dissociatives and psychedelics. These people find that these chemicals open doorways that were previously locked – the “Doors of Perception,” if you like – which can be a very valuable experience both in the #1 and #2 sense of “Good.”
However, many of these same people feel that they can’t experience the world in a similar way without the drugs, and become reliant on them to get back to that place. The rest of their lives seem to turn into waiting periods, between doses. It doesn’t appear to me that they crave the drugs, the way an opiate addict experiences cravings, but their time without the drug feels less real and less meaningful than when they’re “high,” and so they return again and again to the drug.
I think that says a lot about the quality of contemporary life, and the shortfalls of our mainstream culture. But it also presents a problem for users.
But when the “goodness” of those experiences is never integrated into a person’s outward, everyday life, it seems to me that the drug experience becomes the focus and the benefits are likely lost to the isolated parallel reality of the person’s drug-induced state of mind. If those benefits can only be experienced under the influence of the chemical, and the person repeatedly seeks those benefits through use of the drug, then the #2 “good” experience turn into a self-destructive cycle that benefits no one. For someone like Charles’, this chemically-driven pursuit of “self” could become fundamentally damaging to the self he is trying to find.
In my own experience, I have struggled to retain those elements of drug-induced goodness in un-intoxicated life. I have found that I cannot fully replicate the experiences, but I can reap similar benefits through hard work. Certain chemicals showed me ways of seeing the world that I might not have found on my own, but it takes hard internal work to integrate those experiences into outward life, and I went for years without knowing how to do that; so I went back to the chemicals more often than was healthy for me.
The total experience of a drug is, in my experience, not replicable without the drug. But most of the meaningful elements of those experiences are possible to retain, if you’re prepared to work for them.
Hi Asher! I agree with almost everything you say. The good feelings that come from drugs can’t be replicated without them. We talk about parallels with things like love, sex, watching the sunset…but let’s face it: they’re not the same thing. And yet, as you say, the meaning of those good drug experiences can be recaptured — or a better word might be — regenerated — without drugs. Yet that takes work.
I was never able to feel the warm safe feeling I got from opiates without taking opiates. Being hugged, warmly, fully, without hurry, by someone I love…well that came close. Except for three main things: 1. hugs paled as a bodily sensation; 2. how long can a hug last? and 3. the hug came from someone else: it wasn’t “in me” so I couldn’t trust it in the same way as something I’d taken into my own body.
But I started meditating during the last few years of drug-taking, and I got to a place that also felt safe and whole. Not safe in the same way, as under a blanket, but safe in that the dangers inside me were…a lot less dangerous, and there was a gentle feeling of acceptance that I’d never known before.
Still, I question your assertion that, when people can only get the good stuff from drugs, then drug-taking becomes self-destructive. Is that necessarily so? What about anti-depressants? I don’t think they become self-destructive even for those who can’t beat depression on their own. I think that for drug-taking to be self-destructive, there’s more than repetition, even more than dependency, involved.
Let’s keep thinking about it.
You’ll have to excuse me, I just don’t think as well as I used to, due to all the treatments and medication I’ve received for my OCD. I can’t pursue a line of thought as ‘deeply’ as I used to. In my response on November 22, 2011, to Marc’s article (“A true self unveiled by drugs? Part I), the point I was trying to make was that the process of getting high created a vacation for me. A vacation from anxiety. You see, 24/7 anxiety and constant thinking is the norm for me. Getting high was fun, for a little while, but over a week, I would go through the pot I had and build up a tolerance, and it would take more and more to get less high. An intermittent reward system (Pavlov) that kept me remembering some of the ‘better’ highs I had experienced in the past. I hated how I felt the next morning, a very ‘burnt-out’ feeling. I was always reminded of the high I really craved, the natural high. To me, there is nothing better than a long bike ride or a few hours in the gym. The endorphin high from exercise is the best, with no side effects. No bad ones, that is.
Dave
Sounds to me like you’re thinking very clearly indeed. The wrecked feeling the next day is an important part of the story. So you get a spontaneous, delightful good feeling, followed by a very physical bad feeling. Both are tapped by definition #2, and I was mistaken, in my earlier version of this post, to think you were talking about the moral aspect — i.e., definition #1. Sorry.
In addiction, things get complicated when the bad feeling clearly outweighs the good feeling and when, as you say, the good feeling itself loses potency with repeated attempts. Then, if you continue to choose the drug, you’re choosing something whose net effect is bad. Which feels dumb and self-destructive, at least to many people — and it did to me — which then sucks in some of the moral stuff (definition #1): what kind of a person am I? I deserve to be punished! Then things become insidious, and maybe even dangerous, as per the comment above.
Marc, you say “he also said that he becomes unconcerned (unobsessed?) about whether that’s wrong or not.” I didn’t mean that. I meant in the context of OCD and obsessions, when I was high, I could let go of the shackles of my OCD. I don’t think I was commenting on whether it was wrong or not to feel carefree and/or happy when I was high. That’s a whole other matter.
Dave
Right, as I said in my last reply, I think I misinterpreted that aspect of your remarks, and I’m sorry for that. As you see, I’ve edited the current post so as to correct this error. At least your comments got me to explore “good vs bad” in a way I’ve never quite done before. So….thanks for that!
Hmm, everything I have read seems to make sense to me, and I think I understand the persuit of drug enduced “feelings”. It’s just so easy to take it, and get the feeling.
I remember my first experiance with “poppers”, nitrous oxide. I sat down with some friends at a college bar, at a round table. One of the guys had some poppers, and asked everyone if they wanted to try it. We all said sure.
He passed these vials, one by one, around the table; I was last. I watched as each guy inhaled the vial contents, their eyes glazed over, and they burst into spontanious laughter, real deep belly laughs. It was so strange, I thought. How could it be? Do each of us have a “happy trigger” or something, and can this stuff pull that trigger for each guy??? I couldn’t wait to see if I would get the same effect. Sure enough, when I inhaled it, the world seemed to disappear, like entering a tunnel, and I felt like everything (the only thing???) was hilarious, really hilarious. It lasted for a few moments, and gradually the world came back to me, and the feeling subsided. It worked just as well the second time.
But, if I wanted to feel like that, to pursue that feeling by taking that drug, I would have to dissociate from everything around me. It was only real in my own head. Isn’t that why addicts eventually become isolated? Lock me in a room so I can feel a certain way? Isn’t that the trap. When I loose my ability or desire to find humour in life as it occurs around me, instead choosing to look for it in a vial, is that “good”??? I think it is a pretty big trade off.
You bet it’s a big tradeoff! I did nitrous oxide with a bunch of guys in the Malay jungle and I described it in Chapter 11. When writing this, it all came back to me, how you zoom into another world that is entirely complete, whole, disconnected from everything else, and yet it’s where YOU are for now and it’s all that counts.
Dissociatives are particularly handy for that. But what you say reminds me of terminal-stage addiction to other drugs as well. After you sell off enough shares, so to speak, in the world we all inhabit, then you go to that other world with less and less to leave behind. And less and less attraction to coming back. So addiction ends up being an experience of extreme solitude.
Great post! I find this blog very informative. Cheers!
Thanks!!