Re: MAPS: Justifying a Tim Leary claim

[Peter Webster <vignes@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 18:42 04/03/99 -0500, rod sandcones wrote:
>As far as personal opinion, I feel that drawing a conclusion that LSD
>fosters creativity may not be entirely accurate.  What I mean is that 
>if any person were to take LSD , that person does not necessarily
>automatically  become creative. I believe it CAN foster creativity, it
>definitely facilitates it, but it doesn't hold for every person or even
>every time.

Of course, it is perhaps our modern innacurate paradigms about "effects" of
"drugs" that lead us in the first place to feel it necessary to criticise
the idea of "creativity in a pill." We should actually be looking at these
substances as non-specific tools that allow either an individual under his
own guidance, in good circusmtances, or researchers or therapists (or
teachers!) under other circumstances, to use the tool to facilitate any
goal deemed reachable under those circumstances. We neither say that
telescopes facilitate the discovery of stars, etc., in the absence of
intentions and abilities necessary for such discovery. Neither do they do
so under all circumstances or in every instance even when we have the right
intentions but the wrong setting (downtown LA at noon?). To criticise
telescopes for not revealing stars forthwith without the necessity to use
them correctly would be absurd. We should not fall into the same error with
psychedelic drugs.

The longer I continue with the idea of psychedelics as a corrective lens
for using the always imperfect cognitive mechanisms we possess more
effectively, analogous to any other tool which corrects or improves
inherent abilites to accomplish some other exploration or goal, the more I
see the analogy as valid. But the anaolgy does not lend itself easily to
our ideas about "drug effects" garnered from medical and pharmaceutical
paradigms. It is always tricky to know to what extent our ideas are shaped
by such underlying and unexamined assumptions, even when we know the extent
to which it must be so from theory or examples in other areas.

_________________________________________________________
  Peter Webster				vignes@xxxxxxxxx
  International Journal of Drug Policy		http://www.elsevier.nl/
    Official Journal of the International Harm Reduction Association
    subscriptions:    usinfo-f@xxxxxxxxxxxx   nlinfo-f@xxxxxxxxxxx
  DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy	http://www.druglibrary.org/
  The Psychedelic Library			psd_lib@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
        http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/
        http://www.drugtext.org/psychedelics/

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