Like Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the underground chemist wh( distributed an estimated five million doses of LSD in mid-1960s Sar Erancisco, Alexander Shulgin has become the flamboyant figurehead for an invisible army of illicit drug manufacturers. The search for mind-altering drugs has split into two streams, overground and underground, but the two have continued to inform one another, and may do so more intimately in the future. Since the 1990s, dubbed by President George H. W. Bush th( ‘decade of the brain’, a ‘neurotransmitter revolution’ has expanded the scope of psychotropic medicine, and signalled the possibility of drugs that might make patients not only well, but ‘better than well’. Cutting-edge ‘smart drugs’, ‘nootropics’ and mood enhancers - from cognitive stimulants such as piracetam to attention boosters such as Modafinil - promise improved brain function and memory, even heightened levels of creativity and wellbeing.
Taking these predictions to their logical conclusion, some commentators claim that we are on the brink of a future posthuman condition where brains are chemically tuned to their optimum level of performance, all anxiety and dysfunction is medicated away and heightened consciousness becomes a permanent, even universal state. In this brave new world of neuro-enchancement, what would become of our modern concept of a ‘drug’? Perhaps the digital and networking devices in which we now cocoon ourselves might even evolve to stimulate our neurochemistry directly, without the need for illegal substances. If so, might the enhanced descendants of our iPods become ‘drugs’?
Whether or not such predictions are plausible, they reflect the feeling that the twentieth century’s carefolly constructed boundaries between ‘medical’ and ‘recreational’ cannot be permanent. Drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin edge medicine towards the neurochemistry of ecstasy and amphetamines; illicit drugs such as cannabis are losing their social stigma and making their way into the medical pharmacopeia; new disorders pathologize states that were once regarded as normal, such as anxiety or low self-esteem, opening the door to the medical use of drugs that boost confidence and happiness. The category of ‘drugs’ can never be entirely fixed, determined as it is not only by chemistry but by society. In a future where drugs evolve to stimulate the brain with ever more precision, perhaps the most enduring distinction will remain the one formulated by Dioscorides 2,000 years ago: whether a drug is medicine or poison is a question of dosage.
World History
