418
ROBERT
COiLES
bureaucracy or suburbia. There may be six million alcoholics in Amer–
ica-their bodies are ravaged to a degree that pot can never equal, and
they kill thousands while driving to the office or the split-level ranch
home, not the pads of Haight-Ashbury or the East Village-but the
martinis those alcoholics take blot things out rather than highlight them.
The drunk is fed up and tired rather than glowing with vivid, intense
and unusual visions. He wants oblivion. He leaves IBM and the Pen–
tagon reeling. Inevitably he will blame himself, become his own critic
rather than the college president's, the company president's or Lyndon
B. Johnson'S. In contrast, the pot-head or acid-head does what the say–
ing urges-he turns on, tunes in and drops out-but he is drawn
to
something, in fact to himself, for which he is called a criminal or
"sick."
So much of our psychiatric thinking accounts for flights-from
"reality," from fears, from anxieties, from desires that the person feels
to be forbidden, immoral or knows to be illegal or unconventional-that
we
think of "sick" people as evasive and escapist rather than determined
and ambitious. We fail to see what our patients want and do; we only
know what is
wrong
with them. Yet some people say that we the
doctors are crazy-in so far as we are part of this society. They are
fleeing
us,
not their memories or dreams. They openly proclaim their
sincere and convinced despair with what is going on in this country-and
work very hard not only to leave it (through drugs) but to find a
replacement for it among themselves. They are seeking as well as run–
ning, and I do not believe that as a psychiatrist I am required to call
them "abnormal" or such thinly disguised equivalents as "troubled" or
"disturbed."
In the conversations I have had with many such youths-they use
pot rather casually, and LSD much more guardedly-I find them no
more in need of psychiatric "help" than many others who also worry
about where in hell we are going, as a nation and as individual
citizens.
If
anything, drugs make many of these young men and women
more alert, more sensitive to the feelings they have and to the grim
facts of this century. I have seen some youths overwhelmed by their
awakened (drug-induced, if you will) sensibilities, but at least they are
not full of rationalizations and self-deceptions; at least they do not
whistle in the dark and become obsessed with the intricacies of the tax–
form. Anyone who has used pot or acid knows how brutally frank the
mind can become with itself when prodded. In that sense hallucinogens
do what psychoanalysis does: in each instance the mind's "ordinary" way
of dealing with the world is altered, and a greater degree of "awareness"
