Future Highs

Anyone who has had a cup of coffee at breakfast, a martini at lunch, a joint or a line of coke after work should know that the drug industry (both legal and illegal) has plans for his future. All the customary chemical fun makers will soon be replaced by new streamlined models. In the year 2001, the man above town will select his state of consciousness from moment to moment and commute between mental levels as easily as we now commute between continents.

While laboratories from Switzerland to New Jersey efficiently moderize the ancient art of intoxication, drug designers and social scientists are constructing scenarios about the future of our mental state. The most conservative of these computer-assisted prophehecies (continued on page 256) Future Highs(continued from page 151) make the haphazard drug dabblers of the Sixties look like kids toying with Chemcraft kits.

Start with a familiar event such as a Saturday night and imagine how it could change through technological improvement. Bear in mind that every one of the fantasy highs mentioned below is based on current research.

Some night 20 years from now, the partygoer will probably start his chemical tailoring before he dresses by splashing on a little conviviality cologne after his shower. It will be an ultimately customized product, based on his own body chemistry; the scent will induce a mild feeling of emotional receptivity in both him and his date, setting the stage for friendly relations later in the evening. The airborne aphrodisiacs will come later, though his date might mix a hormone stimulant into her scent right after elation sets in.

Perhaps they'll share a joint of isomerized grass or an alcohol-substitute cocktail to kick off the festivities, but dosage levels won't seriously accelerate until dinner, when the adventurous couple try the new psychedelicatessen everybody is raving about. Their entire meal will consist of a single section of orange, transformed into a universe of novel sensations by psychochemical additives. Sense enhancers will magnify powers of taste and smell; hedonistic psychedelics will transmute the morsel of citrus into a culinary pharmacy. After-dinner antidotes will be served with the mints.

From a present point of view, this already looks like one very stoned night, but assume for the sake of the scenario that the couple want further entertainment after their mind-embellishing dining experience. The entertainment world will offer an array of awareness-elevating choices. There will be short-span auditory-appreciation inhalers for involuted music listening--listeners will smell the instrumentals and taste the lyrics. Performer and audience alike will be dosed for live concerts and records will come with optional drug packets. Mood elevators and equilibrium modifiers will amplify dancing enjoyment. Hallucinators and optical intensifiers will be dispensed according to the stage directions of the holoplay or retinal drama. The artists will furnish their patrons with aesthetic pharmaceuticals at gallery openings, poetry readings, dance recitals.

Should the daring duo include a party in their activities, they'll find that a good mix applies to highs as well as to people. Drinkers will sip safe alcohol analogs, artists will have nontoxic creativity stimulants, everybody will partake of the empathy incense, the sensualists will spice it up with neocoke and the utterly decadent will take superopiates or old-fashioned gin. Even today, a party consists of people getting high together. Whether the intoxicant of choice is alcohol, grass, prayer, dancing or massage, the principle is the same: A good party begins when people relax their inhibitions, usually through artificial means. As revelers leave the party of the future, their host will have an antidote ready for them at the door so they can travel home safely sober.

Maybe the high fliers of the future will decide to take a rain check on the psychedelic, postpone the party and confine the entertainment to an intimate evening at home. Back at their apartment, getting in an amorous mood could be a matter of mixing the right sensual stimulant with the correct atmospheric aphrodisiac. Mood technology won't stop at the bedroom door: Tactile enhancers could intensify the slightest caress and subjective-time expanders might extend a brief embrace for hours, prolong orgasm as long as they can stand it. If the experience is purely sensual, the high will focus on strictly carnal sensations, but if it feels like love, the couple could break a cosmic significance popper at the crucial moment and synchronize their brain hormones, alpha waves or whatever. Another drug will divert incipient hangovers into pleasant dreams.

Some scientist may be risking life, limb and brain damage just to bring you a better way to get high. At this moment, there are anthropologists in the Amazon jungle seeking telepathy-inducing vines and chemists in New Jersey hallucinating the shape of their next molecular euphoriant. Laser physicists are teaching astral travel in Palo Alto, psychologists are floating in tanks of salt water and therapists are swinging through the air in canvas bags. Every branch of science is getting into the intoxication race.

The more sensational protagonists of the psychedelic era--the Learys and the Keseys, the alchemists and the occultists--long ago left the orbit of orthodox science. But the study of consciousness expansion has remained very much alive. The inner-space experts of 1978 are a low-key crowd, wary of publicity, but there does exist a network of turned-on scientists, all exploring different paths to higher planes.

Somewhere in America dwells a quiet man who is the very image of the eminent scientist. He is respected in his field, but due to the taboos surrounding his specialty, he wishes to remain anonymous. Dr. G. synthesizes substances that have never before existed on this planet, mind benders of such complexity that an evolved consciousness is required to even imagine their structures.

Dr. G. was making new psychedelic drugs decades ago, when everyone thought LSD was a landing craft. It is Dr. G.'s custom to ingest his compounds and commune with the geometry of his altered states, sometimes to find harbingers of his next creation in the pattern of his hallucinations. Bizarre as it may seem, there is historical precedent for hallucinatory theorizing: The science of organic chemistry was born when a chemist named Friedrich Kekule von Stradonitz took opium during a train ride, dreamed of a snake swallowing its tail and awoke to draw the first structural diagram of the benzene ring.

Dr. G. is independent--responsible to no single university, pharmaceutical firm or Government agency--and thoroughly respectable in the eyes of the law and the opinion of the scientific community. He defends his self-dosage procedures as the epitome of informed consent.

"Mood-changing drugs can be organized into chemical families," he says, "each with its own qualitative aura. The psychological effect of any drug, including the sense of being high, can be changed by systematically altering its chemical arrangement. A carbon atom here, a free electron there, and you have the difference between insight and anxiety. Some drugs induce fear or thirst, others evoke pleasure or awe. I look for those connections between chemistry and consciousness.

"Most of the drugs we use today can be produced artificially. Many of the drugs we create in laboratories are analogs, or reconstructions of compounds that exist in nature; other creations never existed until they were synthesized."

Dr. G. is in touch with the post-Castaneda generation of anthropologists, who have turned up a psychoactive cornucopia of ritual substances: "The potions of Native American shamans contain a handful of powerful drugs that have only recently been studied under laboratory conditions. There are so many active compounds in each of those snuffs and infusions that it may take years to study them one at a time. We already have a few highly specific derivatives of natural compounds. Right now, we have drugs that are primarily visual, or auditory, or conceptual . . . but there are generally . . . but there are generally (continued on page 294)Future Highs(continued from page 256) unpleasant side effects. In the next 20 years, you'll see drugs with every conceivable specific effect. All of our senses will have a range of optional modifications. Some chemicals will affect the sense of subjective time, others will change the senses of touch, hearing, taste and smell. Many of these drugs will help us learn, or will have medical value, and some of them will undoubtedly be used for having fun."

The supernatural powers formerly reserved for sorcerers might become available to any of us who have the nerve, through relatives of the more exotic chemical families such as the carbolines and the tryptamines. Time distortion, rebirth experiences and memories of former lifetimes and epochs have all been attributed to visionary chemicals that were unknown to Western science until now. Harmaline, for example, was long known as telepathine, and Dr. G.'s time distorter is related to the snuff Columbus saw Caribs snorting in 1492.

There is one promising neo-American high that isn't borrowed from the natives--the electronic high. Direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers has been suggested as a possible future intoxicant, but very few people are likely to drill holes in their heads just to get high. More subtle and less masochistic are electronic techniques that will someday enable us to steer our highs once those new chemicals get to work on our brains.

John Criglar works with solid-state circuitry rather than with glassware and chemicals, but he is also one of the new cartographers of interior geography. Criglar started out designing radio-telescopes, invented voice-modulated synthesizers for rock groups and experimental telephones for I.T.&T., and is now a biomedical engineer at St. Joseph's hospital in San Francisco. He is a pioneer of electronic yoga, the inventor of the Myotron--a device that monitors muscle relaxation via clicks.

"Biofeedback is like a mirror in effect, though the hardware is a little more complicated," says Criglar. "Yogis have been saying for a long time that we can all learn to control our 'unconscious' bodily processes and get a permanent high as the result. We know now that our brain, heart and muscles generate faint electrical signals as a result of natural processes. Electronic devices help us sense those processes, bring them to our attention. Like a mirror, biofeedback shows us a part of ourselves we don't normally see, and that in itself is the beginning of a very pleasurable high. This is one research project that has no problem rounding up subjects, because word has spread about the excitement of playing your body like a harmonica."

Several corporation psychologists, concerned over executive hypertension, have been consulting with Criglar and his colleague Dr. Lawrence Petraki. The advent of the "businessman's high" may be a prophetic spin-off from medical biofeed-back: A major oil company has ordered a test run of 100 Myotron units for its executives.

Dr. Petraki told me. "The staff psychologists for this particular company tried to promote transcendental meditation as an alternative to Valium but had trouble persuading their executives to sign up. When they installed a biofeedback unit, management started lining up after hours to learn to relax electronically." Petraki and Criglar are working on an interface for video games in which the player can win only by learning to relax. Inner Pong, anyone?

When I set out in search of a futurologist to put the speculations in perspective, all roads led to Menlo Park, California, the Houston and Canaveral of the inner-space program. The sprawling research city known as SRI International attracted public attention when physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff investigated Uri Geller and other "gifted" psychics. Attention shaded into notoriety when New York magazine ran an account of psychic warfare predictions, allegedly obtained from unpublished SRI "scenarios."

Despite the lurid accounts and scary extrapolations, SRI scientists continue to explore psychic phenomena and altered states of consciousness. The negative publicity has made SRI personnel very cautious about speaking to outsiders, but one futurist, Dr. M., finally agreed to an interview with the words: "Since you are determined to write the article, you might as well find out that you're strolling through a mine field."

"We are entering an area more revolutionary than any political theory," he warned when I first called his office. Later, in his paper-dense cubicle at SRI, he expanded his caution: "In some ways, getting high is really what makes the world go round. We're talking about changing the nature of our beliefs about reality when we talk about getting high."

The analyst likes to phrase his theories in the form of questions: "These new drugs and old techniques--why are they surfacing now? The keys to higher consciousness are becoming available at a crucial point in human history. In every traditional culture, there were specialists known as fools, shamans or gurus, who were supposed to get high for the benefit of society. Now everybody wants to travel on inner planes and the secrets of the ages are out in paperback. Things might get very strange in the next 20 years, as more and more people get higher and higher, but I think it will be good for society in the long run.

"There are plenty of excellent how-to manuals. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali have turned on millions of people for thousands of years, and you can still find them in any bookstore. For the more scientifically minded, Robert Masters and Jean Houston's Mind Games is another good source of high-induction techniques; if it is used correctly, that book can literally transport you and your friends to other dimensions. To me, the key question is not how to get high but why we get high.

"People get high to have fun. but expanding awareness also creates a space in which new values may emerge. The link between pleasure and species survival could influence history. The more we expand our positive image of the future--what we think the world ought to be--the more probable that alternative becomes. We are all creating the future in our minds, and when we change our state of mind, we change the shape of tomorrow."

If expanded consciousness, enhanced perception, even psychic talents can be induced on a large scale, as Dr. G. and Dr. M. believe, what are some reasonable projections for future highs? One distinct possibility is that biofeedback and other self-regulation techniques could evolve into a mental steering device suitable for navigating deep inner space. When the Myotron clicker and the alpha-wave tone grow into a sound synthesizer and three-dimensional color display, then we'll be able to lift those mystical geometries out of our skulls and examine them in the light of day.

When we learn to steer our highs, we're bound to drift into unknown zones of human relations. When you learn to drive, you'll want somewhere to go. Sitting alone with your bioholo won't be too different from ordinary masturbation. Once other people are added to the experience, and once they have a way of seeing your internal states and sensing your inner thoughts, all sorts of interpersonal hoopla will break loose.

Mutual electronic biofeedback may have more powerful sexual effects than any chemical aphrodisiac. Sex is a mingling of nerve ends, and orgasms are neural more than genital events. The age-old rituals of physical penetration, the 10,000 well-known ways to rub bodies together, are physical manifestations of mental events. When the state of your mate's nervous system can be read on a screen, sexual experience might gain a dimension or two. If good lovers are people who try to be sensitive to their partner's desires, it follows logically that any way of increasing mutual awareness will expand the pleasure potential of sex.

Sooner or later, the "memory pill" will be created. It might turn out to be the most potent high of all time. Passing tests and remembering names would be handy, but how would it feel? What changes would occur in our consciousness if we suddenly had more powerful memories? According to psychologists, it would be a profound change, for memory serves to define the present, order reality and anchor us in the time stream. Something will happen to the meaning of pleasure and pain when we are able to erase or recall any experience in full sensual detail.

Memory enhancement could improve the way our senses encode experience in our brains (storage), or it could improve the way we find stored information and bring it to the surface (retrieval), or both. Think about the thousands of impressions streaming into your brain from your eyes and ears and internal senses as you drive an automobile on a freeway, and think about the automatic censor that filters out all but the most immediate and survival-related impressions. What if you could replay your day like a film, at your leisure? Have you ever remembered a dream you had ten years ago? Or experienced déjà vu?

To some degree, everything we ever experience is recorded somewhere in our brains. The world would become a thousandfold more real if we could store the entire stream of sensations and retrieve them selectively. Would the experience of total memory be ecstatic or hellish? What prodigies of art and invention would result? With chemically modified memories, the urge to get higher will probably reach psychic-escape velocity.

In a sense, the will to get high is now the moving force behind human evolution. If by some prodigious leap of mind a single human being were to gain complete control over all the molecular activity in his own body for a fraction of a second, the information blast would have more power than a supernova.

Be they sacred or taboo, awareness-expanding techniques will always be available, and they will always be vulnerable to abuse. With so many volunteers for self-experimentation, we can expect both breakthroughs and casualties. There will always be true explorers hidden among the daredevils and just plain fools willing to get high on a rumor. Some of them will burn their fuses, others will say, "Wow!" and a few of them might just stumble through the door to the next world--and come back to show us all how to get there.

"At this moment, there are anthropologists in the Amazon jungle seeking telepathy-inducing vines."

"When we learn to steer our highs, we're bound to drift into unknown zones of human relations."