When I was younger I heard a song that blew my mind, it was White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. For those of you who have heard it smile with fondness, for those who haven’t, do and it will get you passively high just listening. What blew my mind wasn’t that it was psychedelic but that it spoke openly about drug use. “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small” a reference to Alice in Wonderland to most, except when you consider the source. The source was the first band to achieve mainstream success from the San Francisco scene and pioneers of Psychedelic Rock. Their album Surrealistic Pillow is one of the key tenements of the summer of love and they were features in the soundtrack of fear and loathing in Las Vegas.
After that I was hooked (not on crack) on the sound of sixties drug inspired music. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds the famous Beatles classic about LSD, Creams White Room was based on a cocktail of drugs Pete Brown was taking and perhaps the entire Grateful dead back catalogue to name a few. This music, some would argue, did two things; it formed the bases for a generation of “Hippie” culture and often glorified the image of recreational drug use. The other is that it spread drug culture in music. Genres since the sixties seem to accept, and in some cases, promote drug use in a way that is not evident in music before this period.
Looking retrospectively through the decades that followed the 60s, with heroin in the 70s, cocaine in the 80s, pills in the 90s, and amphetamines in the 00s, the sixties could be seen as the start of a subculture of abusive drug use. But let us consider the facts; firstly drugs are a part of our everyday lives, in coffee, alcohol and even nasal sprays. Secondly, drugs and their abuse were around long before the sixties, opium in its many forms has been around since the drug was first imported. Alcohol abuse is so instilled in our culture and has been around so long that we don’t even consider it as drug abuse. Thirdly to argue that an “impressionable” mind can only make uninformed decisions is ludicrous and for that matter if they are impressionable in the first place they could gain information about drugs from any number of mediums. There are multiple references in literature to drug use and abuse long before music, Sherlock Holmes was addicted to opium.
A recent study by the surgeon general found that 60% of drug abusers suffered from underlying mental illnesses, which could be seen as the cause of their addictions. It begs the question why so much time is spent looking for external influences for drug abuse, such as music. It seems damning when you consider studies like one recently carried out by the University of Pittsburgh found that one third of all popular music made references to an explicit drug, alcohol and cigarettes. However these studies are often misinformed as to the nature of the influence of music on its audiences. For example, another study by the University of Berkley looking at the prevalence of drug mentioning in rap music over two decades found that it had increased six fold. From 1979-1997 rap music seemed to shift from actively warning against the dangers of drug abuse to promoting its use. Yet when considered against a study looking into the same period by another University of Berkley professor looking into youth and adult drug abuse the figures fall throughout this period. While it’s not absolute proof, my point is that there is no tangible proof of musical influence on drug abuse.
For those of you who still sanctimoniously profess the negative influences of music, I would also like to state that it often musicians that call the public eye to danger of drug abuse before it is understood. For example King Heroin by James Brown in 1972 told the untold story of the drug addicted, while the rest of America focused on Nixon’s “war on drugs”. Drug enforcement policy and opinion is often knee jerk and emotional, stemming greatly from a prohibition era moralistic view of the use of drugs. While drug abuse is a major problem in our society, hiding or censoring ourselves from the reality of drugs can at times have the opposite effect, as it is with case when drug abuse is ghettoised. The truth of the matter is that, mind altering drugs do exactly that they alter your mind albeit momentarily, which sometimes allows for a different experience to listening without drug use. This experience doesn’t have to be and often is not negative. It doesn’t have to lead to wider drug use or abuse, so if we’re done complaining here excuse me while I kiss the sky.
Dean Maralow
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