Research paperPsychedelic pleasures: An affective understanding of the joys of tripping
Introduction
We are currently in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. Researchers are once again exploring the medical potentials of LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), ayahuasca and other hallucinogens, more people than ever before are consuming such drugs recreationally, and even mainstream media outlets have turned serious attention to the different uses of psychedelics (Langlitz, 2013, Sessa, 2012). Yet, while the renewed scientific interest in entheogenic drugs is quite broad, certain aspects of the controversial substances are systematically overlooked. Most notably, there is almost no research examining the recreational use of psychedelics and as a consequence there is little scientific documentation of the practices and pleasures of hallucinogenic drugs as they are enacted in ‘real’, non-clinical settings. The overall intention of this article is to begin filling out these gaps in the literature by examining the practices and pleasures of psychedelic drugs as they are articulated in trip reports shared in online communities. More specifically, the article makes a contribution to the literature on psychedelics at three interrelated levels.
Firstly, I argue that a scientific engagement with recreational users of entheogens will allow us to gain a more detailed understanding of the multiformity of psychedelic experiences and a better idea of why hallucinogens are so popular recreationally and so promising therapeutically. Secondly, by conceptualizing psychedelic pleasures as affects (Deleuze, 1988), that is, as transformations of the drug using subjects’ capacities to think, feel, act and be in the world, the paper develops a more impressionable and ethnographically open understanding of the psychedelic experience and of drugged pleasures in general. And thirdly, taking the recreational practices and pleasures of drugs such as LSD and mushrooms seriously, I claim, will not only broaden our comprehension of how these drugs work in different bodies and settings, but also open up a space of transmission of knowledge that will enrich both the recreational and scientific psychedelic communities.
Broadly speaking, contemporary research into psychedelics is dominated by three overall approaches. The first body of research builds on and extends some of the pioneering work in the field by investigating the therapeutic potentials of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and MDMA (see Grinspoon and Bakalar, 1979, Grof, 2008, Krebs and Johansen, 2012 for overviews of the first wave of psychedelic therapy research). Recently, a number of clinical studies have thus once again examined the safety and medical efficacy of using psychedelics to treat a number of psychological problems and disorders, including end-of-life anxiety (LSD and psilocybin) (Gasser et al., 2014, Griffiths et al., 2016, Grob et al., 2011, Ross et al., 2016), PTSD (MDMA) (Mithoefer, Wagner, Mithoefer, Jerome, & Doblin, 2011), treatment resistent depression (psilocybin) (Carhart-Harris, Bolstridge, Day et al., 2016b, Carhart-Harris, Bolstridge, Rucker et al., 2016a), and addiction to alcohol and tobacco (psilocybin) (Bogenschutz et al., 2015; Johnson, Garcia-Romeu, Cosimano, & Griffiths, 2014). While most of these experiments are based on relatively small sample sizes, the studies indicate that entheogens posses significant yet undeveloped medical potentials. The (latent) curative benefits of psychedelics seem to lie not least in the capacities of drugs such as LSD and psilocybin to generate a range of psychologically significant feelings and experiences — for example of unity, connection, meaning, ego-loss and spirituality, that may have lasting positive effects on the conduct and mind-set of the participants. In contrast to conventional antidepressent medicines, entheogenic drugs thus allow patients to ‘address rather than suppress or side-step aversive memories and emotions’ (Carhart-Harris & Goodwin, 2017: 3). Importantly then, psychedelics do not work medicinally by creating a specific physiological effect, but by opening up a number of usually inacessible immaterial, ambivalent and affective experiential dimensions of the subject for therapeutic intervention (Grof, 2008).
Psychedelic drugs are also being interrogated in a more neurophysiological manner, with the aim either of documenting the basic psychopharmacological properties of the substances (e.g. Glennon, Titeler, & McKenney, 1984; Nichols, 2004) or, through techniques such as neuro-imaging and functional MRI scanning, gaining a better understanding of the neurological substrates and dynamics of (altered states of) consciousness. In a number of recent clinical experiments, researchers have used imaging and scanning methods to explore how the functions and dynamics of the brain are altered under the influence of drugs such as ayahusca (DMT) (Palhano-Fontes et al., 2015, Riba et al., 2004, Riba et al., 2006), DMT and ketamine (Daumann et al., 2010), psilocybin (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012, Vollenweider et al., 1997), LSD (Carhart-Harris, Kaelen et al., 2016) and psychedelics in general (Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2013). A key finding is that psychedelic drugs seem to ‘reduce the stability and integrity of well-established brain networks… and simultaneously reduce the degree of separateness or segregation between them’ (Carhart-Harris, Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2016: 4857). Along these lines, scholars have suggested a physiological explanation of the therapeutic value of psychedelics by pointing to the ways in which drugs such as LSD and psilocybin work by ‘dismantling reinforced patterns of negative thought and behavior by breaking down the stable spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity on which they rest’ (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014: 14).
Thirdly, there is a large body of work exploring the subjective and psychological effects of psychedelic drugs. In a number of studies with healthy subjects, standardized scales of altered states of consciousness such as Dietrich’s (revised) (ASC) questionnaire (Studerus, Gamma, & Vollenweider, 2010) have been emplyoed in order to map and quantify the experiences of drugs such as psilocybin (Griffiths et al., 2006, Griffiths et al., 2011; Hasler, Grimberg, Benz, Huber, & Vollenweider, 2004), LSD (Carhart-Harris, Kaelen et al., 2016, Schmid et al., 2014) and DMT (Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2005). The widely used (ASC) questionnaire (Studerus et al., 2010) operates with 11 ‘psychometric’ parameters of the psychedelic experience: Experience of unity, Spiritual experience, Blissful state, Insightfulness, Disembodiment, Impaired control and cognition, Anxiety, Complex imagery, Elementary imagery, Audio-visual synaesthesia and Changed meaning of percepts. Several of these studies reveal that participants’ overall psychological well being is increased both acutely and in the mid- and longterm (Carhart-Harris, Kaelen et al., 2016, Griffiths et al., 2006; MacLean, Johnson, & Griffiths, 2011). The phenomenology of psychedelic drugs has also been mapped through interviews with consumers of Salvia divinorum (Hutton, Kivell, & Boyle, 2016; Kelly, 2011), DMT and ayahuasca (Shanon, 2002, Strassman, 2001), psilocybin (Turton, Nutt, & Carhart-Harris, 2014), LSD (Gasser, Kirchner, & Passie, 2015; Prepeliczay, 2002), and a mix of classic hallucinogenic substances (Móró, Simon, Bárd, & Rácz, 2011).
These three overall bodies of work have generated a number of extremely valuable insights into the therapeutic, physiological and subjective effects of entheogenic drugs and have helped reestablish psychedelic research as a burgeoning and promising programme (Sessa, 2014). Yet, the medicinal and phenomenological approaches outlined above paint a specific – clinical, disembodied and de-contextualized – picture of the psychedelic experience, which obscures some central aspects of how the drugs work and why people take them.
Firstly and most generally, the dominating medical perspective on psychedelics considers mainly how these drugs may be of value to people who suffer from psychopathological disorders or to psychiatry and medicine in general. Yet, most users of entheogens are not ill, but people who consume drugs such as LSD and mushrooms because they are fun and pleasurable ways of altering the experience of reality. In spite of a growing interest in the recreational use of new and old hallucinogens (e.g. Kjellgren and Soussan, 2011, Móró et al., 2011), and in spite of a small body of research on psychedelics in settings such as trance music festivals (e.g. Saldanha, 2007, St John, 2012), (and as we will return to below on the self reports users post in online fora), there is still remarkably little research on the practices and experiences of psychedelics as they unfold outside of clinical contexts, and we thus, paradoxically, have the least amount of knowledge about the largest group of users.
This missing focus on recreational practices and experiences of hallucinogens is part of the explanation for why pleasure is also a largely disregarded topic in the study of psychedelic drugs. Yet, there are also a couple of other important explanations. As the editors of this special issue point out in the introduction, the field of alcohol and drug studies is (still) characterized by a general lack of attention to pleasure (see also Coveney and Bunton, 2003, Holt and Treolar, 2008, Hunt and Barker, 2001, Moore, 2008). Furthermore, considering the cultural history of psychedelic drugs in the West,1 it is not surprising that recreational practices in general and the notion of pleasure in particular are understudied areas (Lee and Shlain, 1992, Shortall, 2014). As Ben Sessa puts it, in order to get funding and publication, researchers into psychedelics have taken a ‘polarized swing to the extreme of the hippies’ standpoint’ and have had to ‘downplay the more “cosmic” components of their work’ and develop ‘a language of conservative banality’ (2014: 61). Yet, the lack of a focus on pleasure in the existing literature on psychedelics is also a consequence of the ways in which scientific results – and the effects of drugs – are generated in specific socio-material networks. As scholars drawing on post-structural ideas such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage (1998) and the actor-network theory of Latour (2005) have argued, the effects of drugs cannot be fixed to neither their chemical capacities nor the pharmacological workings of the brain. Rather, the experiences, sensations and impacts of psychoactive substances are contingent upon the specific assemblages, or event-networks, in which the drugs are consumed (e.g. Bøhling, 2015, Demant, 2009, Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017, Duff, 2016, Dennis, 2016, Fraser and Moore, 2011; Fraser, Moore, & Keane, 2014; Gomart and Hennion, 1999, Houborg, 2012, Keane, 2008; Kolind, Holm, Duff, & Frank, 2016; Race, 2014, Seear, 2013). The underrepresentation of pleasure in clinical research on psychedelics may thus be explained as a consequence of the specific socio-material arrangements (hospitals and clinics) and (scientific and medical) discourses through which, arguably, the effects of drugs such as LSD and mushrooms emerge differently and less pleasurably than in recreational settings such as a music festival or a beautiful garden.
Following this line of thought, what the dominating scientific construction of psychedelics as medicines glosses over is not just the large group of recreational users, but also the inherently ambivalent nature of the effects of entheogenic substances. While medical scientists do acknowledge the paradoxical and amorphous nature of psychedelic drugs (e.g. Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, Grof, 2008), the natural-scientific paradigms undergirding these studies make it difficult of properly handling this insight. Instead of attempting to pin down and universalize the psychedelic experience, we need an approach, which is sensitive to the diversity of relations, practices, discourses and forces that produce and enact psychedelic drugs in a variety of (pleasurable, medicinal, spiritual and scientific) ways in different settings and bodies (Duff, 2016). I argue that Deleuze’s notion of affect provides a suiting theoretical starting point from where to conduct such a more ethnographically open mapping of how hallucinogens work.
While it is beyond the scope of the article to provide an in-depth review of the field of ‘psychedelic writing’, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (Huxley, 1954) being one of the earliest and most well known examples2 (see Lundborg, 2012 for a detailed review), it is critical to stress the key role trip literature, trip reports and drug discourses play for the way we use, understand and experience hallucinogenic drugs. As scholars have argued in relation to alcohol, formulating and sharing stories about drinking establishes social bonds and generates a sense of community and belonging (e.g. Fjær, 2012; Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, Mistral, & Szmigin, 2009; Tutenges & Rod, 2005). In addition, because actors often use narrative scripts as templates for behavior and because of a desire to produce interesting tales of intoxication, it may also be argued that stories of alcohol and other drugs structure and motivate future events of substance use (Tutenges & Sandberg, 2013). Furthermore, intoxicated stories, trip reports and drug discourses do not just shape the practices of consumption, but also the effects and experiences of AOD. For example, as Letcher (2007) points out, before the emergence of a psychedelic discourse within which the strange effects of psilocybin could be interpreted as favourable and desirable, accidental ingestions of liberty caps (in the West) were considered as incidents of toxic poisoning and the idea that people would eat mushrooms for pleasure was unthinkable. The discourses and narratives about drugs, in other words, are key aspects of the assemblages of consumption, which shape the practices, experiences and spaces of opportunity of psychoactive substances, and during the last decades, the Internet has become one of the most important socio-technological mediums through which the meanings, uses and effects of (psychedelic) drugs can be discussed and disseminated (Walsh, 2011).
The majority of the online communities in which trip reports are shared and discussed are founded upon a harm reduction ethos and the aim of sites such as www.erowid.org, www.lycaeum.org, www.entheogen.com, is primarily to provide reliable information about (new and well known) drugs in terms of how to dose, use and reduce the damaging effects of psychoactive substances (Murguía, Tackett-Gibson, & Lessem, 2007). Especially for the constantly expanding number of designer drugs, online fora provide critical information about dosage, effects and potential harms (Berning and Hardon, 2016, Davey et al., 2012, Kjellgren and Jonsson, 2013, Soussan and Kjellgren, 2014). Yet, online communities are also platforms where the meanings, norms and pleasures of AOD can be negotiated (Kjellgren & Soussan, 2011; Van Schipstal, Mishra, Berning, & Murray, 2016). Drug websites thus function as peer-based, bottom-up technologies which facilitate the construction and diffusion of alternatives to the hegemonic narrative of prohibition (Walsh, 2011), for example that seeking pleasure through drug use is normal and can be compatible with concerns about safety and harm reduction (Barratt, Allen, & Lenton, 2014). Finally, as we will see in the analysis, trip reports offer an important (discursive) supplement to the dominating medical perspective on psychedelics because they throw light both on the pleasurable aspects of drugs such as LSD and mushrooms and on the ways in which the (pleasurable) experiences of entheogens are shaped by the contexts of use and the activities of the users.
Section snippets
Pleasure as affect
Considering the pleasures of (psychedelic) drugs is important because pleasure is one of the key motivations for the use of AOD and because it is an essential aspect of the experience of psychoactive substances. In other words, if we ignore the notion of pleasure, we severely limit our understanding both of why people engage in drug use and of what happens when they do so (Coveney and Bunton, 2003, Jay, 1999). Furthermore, a focus on pleasure can open up new ways of thinking about and recording
Analyzing trip reports
The analysis presented in the sections below examines 100 trip reports in which (pleasurable) experiences with LSD and mushrooms are described. I have chosen to zero in on LSD and mushrooms for pragmatic reasons and because these are some of the most widely used psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelic pleasures
In the analysis I examine trip reports in which recreational users describe their experiences with LSD and mushrooms. As mentioned, I will explore how these drugs generate pleasurable transformations of the users’ potentials to feel, sense and act — in relation to the dynamic contexts of use.
Conclusions: purposeless pleasures?
In this paper, I have argued that pleasure is an important and understudied aspect of psychedelic experiences and practices and I have proposed a Deleuzian understanding of psychedelic pleasures as affects. Reading and analyzing the trip reports made it clear that pleasure is a key reason why people use drugs such as LSD and mushrooms and a central part of psychedelic experiences. Yet, while the pleasures of drugs such as LSD and mushrooms, as we have seen, pivot around a number of more or less
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors of the special issue and to the two reviewers for their helpful comments, which substantially improved the paper.
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