Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers [Paperback]

An excellent analysis of the institutionalized and state-sponsored persecution of certain rule-breaking behaviour (illicit drug use)and the similarities between cultural and religious demands for specific mood-altering ceremonies and substances. This was the first book by Szasz that I read and I was impressed by depth of his philosophical and medical understanding of human behaviour. After reading this book I purchased, read and re-read the Myth of Mental Illness within 24 hours. Although Cermonial Chemistry was a delight to read, I think the Myth of Mental Illness is a timeless read and a comprehensive, logical and linguistic torpedo aimed squarley at an institutionalized war against human responsibility and the deep suspicion of the state against those who question through behaviour or language the role of the state in prescribing the rules of human conduct. Ceremonial Chemistry is an important book and a cornerstone in the debate on the inevitable de-criminalization of illicit drugs or the continued illegalization of certain foods and plants.

As Szasz amply illustrates in this, one of my favourites of his publications, the real danger is not the drugs but some of the most debased organisms in existence, namely, the odious vermin subsumed under the umbrella identity, 'drug prohibitionists', people aptly described by Szasz as 'symbolic cannibals', people who deprive other people's life of meaning and wholeness in order to give it to themselves, and making themselves feel smug and superior in the process.

Psychiatric despots, Nazis, politicians, inquisitors, drug prohibitionists etc., they are all moulded out of the same purrulent substance, and Szasz has indefatigably fulminated against these hallowed cows throughout his long career, only to realise that you simply can't reason with those who are impenetrably conceited and stupid, and that unless there is to be a transposition of the current power dynamic, those in positions of authority simply can't be held to account by virtue of their power and the self-importance this inculcates in humans.

One of the points Szasz labors in CC is that modern drug laws have little to do with pharmacological or psychopharmacological 'findings', that psychiatric-mythology and pharmacomythology are little more than a smokescreen functioning to obscure the truth, the truth being that the use of certain drugs are an ingrained part of the cultural heritage of english-speaking countries, whereas others ,and the rituals associated with their usage, represent the exotic, the foreign, and it doesn't take the most intellectually well-endowed and perspicacious of individuals to understand our insular attitudes towards foreigners and their customs. As he says, they are not the wrong chemicals, but the wrong ceremonials.

He illustrates his point through analysis of the general discourse concerning illicit drugs, each one expressive of the general superstition and crowd madness. The manichaen dichotomisation of the drugs in our pharmacopeia is revealing of this lunacy. The drugs that are a part of our cultural heritage, such as cofee, alcohol and tobacco, are sacralised through our language, where as foreign drugs, drugs that aren't legally and psychiatrically sanctioned for usage, are stigmatised as 'unholy' and 'evil'. A recent programme about cannabis had the title 'the Evil Weed', a programme whose title crystallised the notion that superstition informs our values regarding certain chemicals. Common sense is a contradiction in terms, it seems.

Szasz has always been fascinated by the recurrent patterns occurring throughout history, notwithstanding the slight changes, and that, as the french adage goes, 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'. The modern phenomenon of scapegoating is traced back to its etiological root, elucidating just how far we haven't come! In less disingenuous socieities of more primitive times, human-sacrifice was the most potent so-called therapeutic intervention. In these ceremonials of purgation and purification, unfortunates were sometimes brutally stoned to death or expelled, individual sacrifices offered up for the maintenance of the many.

As he shows in this and many other works, events in the present and indeed throughout history reveal a phenomenological affinity with scapegoating in primitive times, only in those more ingenuous ages, they did things explicitly, and without the hypocrisy rampant in the modern world. Drug 'addicts' and 'pushers' are among the most persecuted of all. Yet it is not they who are the real criminals, but their persecutors, and it is a lurid Orwellian inversion of reality to say otherwise.

Anyway, some of the most toxic substances in the entire pharmacopeia are the ones prescribed by state-salaried psychiatrists, you know, the ones denominated patients 'have the right to be treated with against their will'! Yet because they are enshrined by psychiatric doctrine, almost everyone ignores this, mesmerised as they are by the iconography of psychiatric and state authority. It is another extraordinary popular delusion that we generally think that state and psychiatric forces of obscurantism are in any position to tell us what chemicals we should and shouldn't ingest. Then again, I'm in a minority, so what does my opinion matter! I am an unperson in an age of rampant majoritarianism, an age where popularity is considered semantically interchangeable with credibilty.

One of my favourite parts in the entire book is where he elaborates on how our use of licit drugs have come to be seen as symbolic of 'maturity', whereas use of proscribed drugs are seen as 'immature', an inanity one encounters all too often. It bears testimony to the way in which language is used tactically to discredit our scapegoated individuals and substances. It also bespeaks the envy of the herd, envious of the fact that, say marijuana and LSD, (at least to the more receptive individua), can make people all the things they aren't, wiser, more grounded human beings, capable of insight into the absurdity of human society and behaviour, the vain presumption of humans and the sophistic, self-flattering reasoning of the human mind. Yet the prosaic, chauvinistic, individually egocentric, collectively ethnocentric, bourgeois-exceptionalist scapegoaters would probably diagnose it as 'being detached from reality', to salvage their self-esteem!

Another edifying, empowering read from Szasz.