Drug Abuse: Subculture to mainstream

The 60s and the 70s are inextricably linked with the pop-idiomatic clichés of Woodstock, flower-power, the Vietnam War, yoga and LSD; not necessarily in that order. Every second Manhattan brat would end up looking for world peace in his marijuana peace pipe, a chillum more likely, somewhere off Benares or in and around Kathmandu’s Pig Alley. The Hippie counterculture encompassed these nouveau libertarian and to a large extent eccentric, axioms of retelling of standard societal norms. Demands of racial equality, peace, sexual liberation, women’s rights challenged the pantheon of social mores of the previous generations. An increased awareness of the environment along with a questioning of the materialistic trends of their day and age, were other aspects of the Hippie movement. Societal standards and norms have evolved over the past three decades to accommodate what were once termed excesses as mere happenstances. This is a reflection of the acceptance of liberal doctrines of the 60s into mainstream democratic society. The question of drug abuse and its transcendence from a sub-cultural trait to a dominant cultural phenomenon is an ineluctable consequence of this social transmogrification.

The complex chain of legitimization of anti-optimistic (as opposed to pessimistic) ideas and sensibilities governing public behaviour and thought was strikingly apparent in the field of arts and especially rock music. Psychedelic rock embodied the spirit of the dystopian experience of the Hippie youth. The main proponents including the likes of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, band members of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles amongst others; would indulge in the gratuitous use of an entire spectrum of drugs (non-prescriptive, organic and otherwise). Jim Morrison drew inspiration from the mescaline induced cubist landscape of Aldous Huxley’s seminal ‘The Doors of Perception’ – “Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.” Huxley denigrated the classical spiritual experience as a pale monochromatic imitation of the mescaline-induced psychedelic one. Morrison and his tribe would thrive on the unchartered and unpredictable terrain of the psychedelic euphoria with some positive and some tragic consequences. The strange originality and the questioning of aesthetic boundaries was almost a necessary product of the substance abuse in conflation with the various social issues of the time. The lexicon of the 60s would learn to incorporate ‘square’ – a derogatory term for the conventional individual. Bill Clinton, while running for President of U.S.A. in 1992, would recall his brush with marijuana as a Rhodes Scholar in England as curious and mildly unpleasant, a sign of the ubiquity of substance abuse. Morrison’s liberal quoting of Huxley appropriated the English academic, as would his own death to drug-overdose familiarize the concept.

The general permeation of subversive traits through every section of societal behaviour has now given way to a more domesticated sense of hedonism. The subculture of drug abuse is no exception. It’s no longer profound or dissonant enough as it would have been in the 60s when Peter Fonda inspired Lennon to pen a song in ode to his LSD rants.