Presently I'm thinking of mind altering substances, which as plenty of subcultures and indigenous communities have discovered across time, can offer experiential gifts and glimpses into altered consciousness, which have lasting and beneficial effects.
Whole spiritual traditions and cultures have sprung up around substances such as cannabis, peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and all the rest, while authorities like the U.S. government pen those things into a spiteful "controlled" substance list and throw people into jail or kill them over the circulation of those things.
The whole consciousness of prohibition, with its self-righteous assurance that it is clearing the ground for moral correctness, fails to detect that it is rooted in a reaction to a historically and culturally specific social artifice which has been built up around the substance, and whose structure is shaped by its own distinct interactions with that substance and the practices and meanings that form as a result. Further, the reaction mirrors such structures in its character. As such, this consciousness is imperial; it posits its own historical and limited formation as absolute and timeless.
Even the substance of alcohol, with its nationwide legality and limited restrictions, betrays a troubled social structure, which in accordance with its nature, takes the alcohol up into itself and generates practices specific to the nature of that structure.
Today alcohol is mass produced for instant, convenient, and entertaining consumption. In the modern world, alcohol can be a welcome lubricant for social and cultural activity. Like one guns it on ice, or in deep snow or sand, alcohol can give that push to engage in certain activities with a required threshold of confidence or passion, such as social interaction or music and dance, smoothing over various frictions and obstacles.
Without a doubt, alcohol can bestow great pleasures and gifts in certain circumstances. And just as one guns it on ice, or deep snow, or sand, one can either escape those barriers or one can, under prolonged and sustained spinning, lose traction or dig deeper ruts and lose control. Prolonged and intensified usage of alcohol converts from vehicle into trap.
This narrative has a tendency of positing the individual as skilled or unskilled user or abuser of a substance, whereas the environmental circumstances and social and cultural location of the individual can have just as much or greater of an influence on the outcome. Say, overworked, underpaid, and stressed individuals turning to alcohol as self-medication, and in their social alienation and daily encounters with crude commodification, experience such solutions bereft of social support and moderation, with their social afflictions deepening as the oscillating cycles of addiction and withdrawal deepen. The kind and benevolent authorities then look tenderly upon these lost souls, and think, ah we must set them right!
Much as the farmer gazes upon his crumbling and desiccated soils whose living systems are nuked with herbicides and pesticides, which are blowing away in the wind, and thinks, "this is terrible!" and decides that better herbicides and pesticides are needed, and that the eroded slopes must be buttressed with tractor work, or else the land holdings are to be expanded or sold to another sucker.
To put it more generally, the tendency of the modern industrial method is to exert energy to search out avenues of progression, and then increase energy to exploit those avenues more intensely at an ever-increasing scale, until those avenues are exhausted, and then other avenues are sought out. The whole phenomenon of substance abuse bears this pattern out.
Contrast this forceful proliferation and manufacture of alcohol products and the deepening of "substance abuse" ruts - and the concomitant prohibition backlashes - with indigenous forms of alcohol production, in which yeast spirits are carefully sought out in brewing rituals, and brews are revered and sung to, and the experiences with the brews are carefully administered and surrounded with care and awe.
To put it more generally, the tendency of the modern industrial method is to exert energy to search out avenues of progression, and then increase energy to exploit those avenues more intensely at an ever-increasing scale, until those avenues are exhausted, and then other avenues are sought out. The whole phenomenon of substance abuse bears this pattern out.
Contrast this forceful proliferation and manufacture of alcohol products and the deepening of "substance abuse" ruts - and the concomitant prohibition backlashes - with indigenous forms of alcohol production, in which yeast spirits are carefully sought out in brewing rituals, and brews are revered and sung to, and the experiences with the brews are carefully administered and surrounded with care and awe.
Not that it is the case that systems such as these can't go bad themselves, but certainly, there are other ways.
