Just say no to drugs (as a word).

This piece is partly a response to a book by Peter Hitchens titled The War We Never Fought. It sounds to me like possibly the worst book to be written about drugs and drug use conceivable. What it might usefully do however is bring together all our logical inconsistencies around the word drugs into one volume. It's prompted me to write why I think the word "drugs" itself starts us off on the wrong thinking track.

All substances affect our body. There is no meaningful category of substances called drugs in contrast to other substances that are not drugs. A drug is a substance which enters your body and which affects your mind and mood (a quality called psychoactive). In institutional settings people have been known to get “high” from drinking too much water. The increase in water affects their electrolyte balance and gives them a dizzy, out of sorts, experience that I imagine would liven up life a little on a hospital ward. Similarly anyone who has ever looked after a child knows any dehydration equals complete rattiness and at those times a drink of water is a powerful mood lifter. Hence even water is a drug.

Kids on drugs!

It is therefore better to think of substances as just more or less psychoactive with the understanding that how psychoactive a substance is depends on the state of a person taking it. Water is pretty psychoactive if a person is dehydrated or alternatively if a person has drunk gallons of the stuff already. Outside of those circumstances though, water is hardly psychoactive at all.

To use another example I knew a truck driver who took amphetamines. He reported just as powerful an awakening effect from magnesium (a mineral) one time but said taking it again had no effect. That makes sense because he was probably seriously low on magnesium when he first took it. His first state meant the magnesium had a strong psychoactive quality. After that however his body couldn’t use any more, so additional doses had very little effect.

All substances may be drugs, however all drugs are not the same. Magnesium is completely different to Methamphetamine. Cannabis is different to alcohol. Heroin is different to cocaine. All of these are different to water which is different to sugar and so on. This is because each of these substances has a different effect on the body. This may seem like a very obvious point but it amazes me how easily it is forgotten.

When people used the word “drugs” they may or may not be including coffee, cigarettes or alcohol. They are almost definitely not including water and magnesium. However they often are grouping together such diverse substances as MDMA (Ecstacy) or L.S.D. with Heroin and Coccaine. Sometimes they are also including petrol sniffing. That’s such a broad category that it makes discussing them fairly meaningless. Is it hard to stop a pattern of using drugs? Often if you mean Heroin but not if you mean L.S.D. Can drug use trigger a panic attack? Yes if you mean L.S.D. but not if you mean Heroin. Do people recover from the harms of using drugs? That depends on the harms and the substance and even the person. Alcohol damage to the brain is irreversible (though people can adapt) however damage to the liver can be repaired unless liver disease (Cirrhosis) has set in.

When I was working as a drug and alcohol counselor in Canada I heard another worker talk about the hypocrisy of parents freaking out if their child used crack cocaine when they would be okay with their kids using cannabis. That’s not hypocritical at all because crack cocaine is a different substance to cannabis. The two have massively different effects on the body and mind. They have different patterns of addiction and withdrawal. They belong in different subcultures of use. They have different costs; legal, and just plain financial. That’s not to say you can’t argue a parent should have the same attitude to both crack cocaine and cannabis use. You could still argue that a broad blanket policy is best – though I would disagree with you. It’s merely to say that a different attitude to the different substances is not hypocrisy. Insisting that a singular view of all “drugs” (whether affirming their use or condemning it) is the only integritous position to take is like teaching colour blindness as the right way to see colour.

That’s also a shout out to all those stoners who say that having a pipe every night is no different to having a glass of wine over dinner. They mean by that to say that if the latter is permissible (even recommended if you trust the wine industry) then cannabis use should be too. Maybe they’re right that the two substances should be treated the same, or maybe we should even encourage cannabis use over alcohol, however those arguments need to be actually made on basis of the merits and harms of their use. The fact that both substances get called drugs is not sufficient to tell us whether this is true. It is a completely useless indication of what those substances are doing. Meanwhile the “drug” that is the carbohydrates in the chip portion of the actual dinner is being overlooked entirely.

Substances also affect different people differently. Even when we are talking about a single substance it needs to be understood as different when it enters Jim compared to Jenny. That’s because it’s our own chemical factory in our brain that’s required to get us high (or low) in response to the substance. Notice for example cannabis doesn’t get your ashtray stoned as an ashtray has no brain chemistry to interact with. (South Parks Towlie is also not a real life possibility.)  The effect of the drug is really “of us” rather than the drug.

This is the same principle in operation with the varying psychoactive nature of water. It only improves your mood if you are dehydrated. However people are not just different in terms of fluid states (such as when dehydrated or not). People are also different in more fixed ways. Jim might always get sleepy on dope whereas Jenny might commonly get agitated. It therefore makes no sense to talk of who uses what substances at dinner time as if one was the same thing as another. It would be worse for some people to have a pipe and worse for others to have a glass of wine.

So if we want to define drugs meaningfully we have to recognize that;

1. Drugs are substances which affect the mind and mood of those who take them.
2. But all substances can affect our mind and mood.
3. But every different substance affects our mind and mood differently.
4. And the whole range of effects depend on us.

That leaves the word “drugs” as pretty much meaningless which is exactly why I prefer to talk about substances, as in substance use, substance abuse and so on. In particular I like to talk specifically about the affects which are at the root of our concerns over certain substances, namely addiction or dependence or tolerance, harms including the risk of overdose, intoxication and come-down or recovery, and so on.

We’re not completely in the dark about all of these concerns. Human physiology is both diverse and relatively the same. With some clarity about what we are talking about we can proceed with careful science, around specific substances and the range of responses they provoke with people depending on their prior state. We’re aided by our increasing understanding of how the brain works and the key role of certain connections and chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine.

In an ideal world I would like us to talk even more holistically about what affects our moods as well. Music, exercise, our environment, our body temperature, the company of friends are all influences on our mind and mood. In fact remembering that it’s our own bodies and brains that really produces a drugs effects should lead us to think of all inputs that affect what we produce in response as at least drug-like. Heroin only has any effect on us because of its effect on dopamine. Dopamine is therefore the real drug and laughter can give us doses of it as well.

Ultimately the question of our attitude to drugs is not a meaningful question. We should be asking instead “what is our attitude to our mind and mood?” How do we want to shape it, support it, agitate it, relax it and suffer it? A small part of that answer will be what usually gets called “drugs”, a larger part will be all substances (from chilli sauce to icecream) and the whole of it will be our life.

God: What are we talking about?





When you say God do you mean a phenomenon or an honorific? The difference has profound implications but can go unnoticed. It’s a question for both non-theists and theists; which one you don’t believe in is as interesting a question as which one you do.

In the Book of Exodus Yahweh commands the Jewish people “You shall have no other Gods but me”.  Yahweh isn’t trying to say that there is or there aren’t other Gods. The use of God in this instance is as a title of the highest esteem, an honorific. In that meaning there are obviously other Gods – the Egyptians have some as do the Persians and so on. It’s akin to Yahweh saying his people shall have no other lover but them. That doesn’t mean other possible lovers don’t exist. Yahweh is simply saying that they alone are who the Hebrews should worship as God.

By my reckoning when theists say they believe in God they are usually referring to the phenomenon of a God. The theist is describing reality, that is a series of facts, such as the world was created by a personality not just a process, it will one day be judged by that creator and so on. The notion that the personality in question is God is automatic because God is their concept that fits those facts. The theist is not generally imagining that anyone could agree with their description of reality but not call the creator and judge in question God. Instead they assume any disagreement they might have with non-theists will be about those defining facts.

When a non-theist says that they don’t believe in God they are usually using the phenomenological definition too. Hence non-theism might mean that there is no absolute creator or sustaining personality (or personalities) for the universe. Or Non-theism might mean that nothing is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. In what ever way the non-theist defines the independent reality they call God, they are saying such a reality is a fiction.

What most non-theists (at least in the west) don’t mean is that no-one should be called God. They are not trying to make a political statement like an anarchist does when they say they don’t believe in government. Most non-theists are not objecting to the honorific of God being used for the sort of thing that they don’t believe exists. To them the question is moot precisely because of such a beings non-existence. They are making a statement about reality rather than their own fidelity.

This is my observation; that most discussions about God are not using the honorific definition. This raises fascinating questions. I’d enjoy any response from non-theists or atheists; Do you have clear phenomenological criteria for what you mean by God? Are they rigid? At what point would whatever model of reality you believe in need to change before you would either begin or cease to use the word God in describing it?

Let’s imagine Raoul believes in an omniscient (all-knowing) God. If Raoul meets his God and he is told by them, “Of course I’m not all knowing. I can’t know the future because of free will,” is Raoul obliged to say that the person they are talking to is not God? Is omniscience a requirement of Raoul’s God or just a description? If the latter, why is Raoul’s God actually Raoul’s God then?

Alternatively let’s say a non-theist physicist discovers a sentience to the whole universe. One day she looks through a super microscope and the particles (in a wave in a string or whatever is down there) form the word hello. The next day the same word is written in the clouds of a distant cloud nebula. Is the physicist obliged to worship as God what they have found? Or is it possible to retain a non-theistic attitude to what meets the diagnostic criteria of God, a single consciousness spanning all space and time?

OHM, a God or not?

This is not all hypothetical either. We live in a time of all sorts of ideas in physics some of them sounding like a personality to the universe. We also live in a time when theology includes notions of a “weak” or powerless God, a god who can’t even oppose cause and effect. For that matter the idea of a God in principle, a prime mover who is now absent from the world, is part of the history of modern science. It’s almost an assumption of Newtonian physics. There are so many God-like ideas floating around some of which atheists believe in.

I sometimes wonder how we could replace the word God in our conversations with something like “the Flux”. It would require us to actually define the word a bit better, as no-one would think they already know what we mean. What if we defined it as something outside ourselves that defies objective investigation and has a positive impact on our life. We might find that a multitude of differences between non-theists and theists break down. We might find separate camps of combined theists and non-theists for the Flux or against it. We will also have disagreements on the appropriateness of reverence for the Flux. Should we submit to it or seek to control it or ignore it? Can we negotiate with it? Should we recognise any other Fluxes other than it?

All I am suggesting here is clearing up a language difficulty that no longer reflects the state of our thinking. It seems to me that it is quite possible for someone at an atheist conference to agree with the metaphysics of some theistic theologians. That is they could agree with all the statements each other make about reality, they just disagree about the use of the honorific God to describe the same thing. It’s possible to imagine a person who believes that the world is inherently indifferent and morally neutral, but who worships a broken cruciform love as a hope. The theist bestows the honorific of God on some aspect of a reality any atheist could accept. They are really a sort of theist/non-theist making a mess of these distinctions.

It is also certainly possible to imagine that the universe was created and is under some entities absolute intelligent control. You could call this a strong metaphysical theism. It is separately possible to conclude that such a force is not particularly “good” and to say on that basis they don’t deserve the honorific of God. This would mean you would have no God (using the honorific) even though you thought one existed! This would be a different type of theist/non-theist. Could such a person share a stage with someone who is a phenomenological non-theist, who straight out doesn’t believe in the existence of intelligent super beings? If not, why not? When we switch between using God as description of reality and as an honorific without noticing it, it is harder to answer these questions with any care.

Buddhism is often questioned as to whether it is atheistic or not. The original Buddha did not deny the existence of gods but said that they were not necessary for our enlightenment. This is to be non-theistic in the sense of God as an honorific but not necessarily in the sense of describing your metaphysics. The Buddha most likely believed in Gods but didn’t have one. I’m fond of that approach because it appeals to my existentialist ideals; no one can really judge you like yourself. No one else can truly give you forgiveness either. It also appeals to me for its agnostic metaphysics. I can never know for certain that God doesn’t exist but it’s not the point anyway.

However I am also often to be found sometimes sitting under the exact opposite tree. I really don’t believe in the sort of thing I would define as a God existing. I don’t believe in an uncreated omnipresent personality with a controlling moral interest in this universe. The world’s data just makes so much less sense to me with such a pilot at the helm. In that regard I am a phenomenological non-theist not just an agnostic. However I also worship and submit to something outside of myself. It is not by my criteria God but it is my god. Some days I call it the good or love or it’s just “that thing that knows that I enjoy loving and being good so I don’t have to fight it”. You know - that thing – my higher power. I can’t always find it but I know when I’m knee deep in it or miles from it. I have a god therefore in the honorific sense but not a belief in any Gods existence.

Death by Neil Gaiman, not real but a god.