Striving for a balanced, well-examined life is invaluable. Kudos to colleges that offer programs encouraging students to do so. Kudos also to the students who commit to living in a healthy way and to investigating scientific as well as philosophical reasons for doing it.
But in considering cases of drug and alcohol abuse — some depressing, some downright horrifying — colleges should try to take as nuanced a view of the urge to get high as they do of the merits of being clean and sober. And they should consider both, moreover, in a societal context. Are wellness programs paying enough attention to why so many students drink and get high in the first place?
I hope students in these wellness programs get to discuss wine and how the Greeks used it (watered down, usually) to provoke discourse. Bacchus can be the spirit of eloquent speech. The participants in Plato’s Symposium are inspired by camaraderie, by love, and by wine.
The Wellness Environment at the University of Vermont marries cognitive science to holistic self-care. The program is popular, growing, and shows preliminary signs of success. But some students resent it and find it divisive.
Native American tribes have, for what may well be thousands of years, used peyote and other hallucinogens to achieve spiritual insight. The user is carefully primed and usually guided by a shaman. The setting is ceremonial, the context one of great seriousness. The devotee often returns feeling that he has consorted with gods. I hope they talk about that in wellness programs, too.
I hope they discuss David Lenson’s book On Drugs (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), in particular his chapter on marijuana, where he makes a case for “marijuana consciousness,” a mode of being that affirms contemplation. The world as it is is enough. We can sit and look and enjoy the wonder of simple existence. Pot consciousness, according to Lenson, rescues us from the pressures of desire. It’s sufficient to perceive objects — without needing to have them. He pits pot consciousness against consumer consciousness, which he takes to be the default state of mind in the wealthy West. Marijuana can deliver us, Lenson says, if only temporarily, from our material desires. It can pluck us from time and locate us in the pure space of perception. True? I don’t know. But surely worth considering. There isn’t a page in On Drugs without valuable insights.
I hope students in these program will also read Michael Pollan’s forthcoming How to Change Your Mind (Penguin Books). He not only chronicles the history of psychedelic use in America but also goes on a few guided trips himself. He takes seriously the idea that hallucinogens can help with depression, addiction, even the fear of death.
Pollan, Lenson, the Indian shamans, and Plato may surprise students. It may not have occurred to them that drugs are for anything other than getting high. Most of us now use drugs to elevate ourselves above our circumstances for a while — or maybe to harden ourselves against them. Today, being high on weed is being “stoned” — turned to impervious rock. Or it’s getting “baked” — made solid and firm and perhaps crusted over. When students get drunk now, they often get blotto drunk, blackout drunk — they go into a zombie state.
My students are candid about why they get wasted: The pressures on them are too much. They have to get their A’s. They need some escape.
Why? I hope wellness students are asking that question, too. Why are drugs so rarely a mode of learning and growth and almost always a defense against pain or an elevation above the real?
My students are candid about why they get wasted. The pressures on them are too much. They have to get their A’s; they have to be in all the right clubs; they have to be cool online; they have to hang with the right crowd. They need some escape.
Yeah, maybe you can replace drugs with yoga, a clean diet, meditation, and all the rest. But why not ask a few questions while you’re at it? What am I doing that makes it necessary to get high — and in a way that’s not about insight but about temporary obliteration? How might I change my life so that I wouldn’t need to do this? Do I really have to be pre-med? Is taking seven courses such a good idea? Is this school the right place for me? And what about the values of the culture as a whole? What about the emphasis on success, success, success, and money, money, money?
Do students in wellness programs talk about those issues?
It’s as though you’ve got an icy walkway, and you realize that people are getting hurt. So, what do you do? Well, you put some guardrails in. You make it safer, with those courses on drugs and wellness. Good for you. I applaud that.
But how about breaking up some of that dangerous ice — the overcommitment to money and success — and seeing that beneath it is the possibility of a humane education that is not brutally competitive and money-grubbing but leisurely and challenging and designed to help our students genuinely flourish?
Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. His latest book, The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching, will be released this month by Bloomsbury Publishing.
