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Okay. So my paternal grandfather smoked 60 a day and died from a heart attack in his 50s. Similar story for my maternal grandmother. One grandparent out of 4 made it to her 90s. Guess which one didn't smoke? Nevertheless, I think that this is completely wrong. Bear with me. https://twitter.com/yungsnaku/status/1357814127138377730
My father, who was woken up every morning by the sound of his father's hacking cough, raised me to be very anti-smoking, and I think he was in large part right. However, here's the most mind-blowing statistic I've learned in the last couple years: https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1358548025082339343?s=20
The association between nicotine use and psychosis is more general, though not as stark as in the purely schizophrenic case ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604123/). The significance of this correlation is debated, but it's clear that there's *something* going on here.
My grandfather was almost certainly bipolar II, and there's a massive genetic overlap between bipolar and schizophrenic regions of the neurological map. This overlap has even been extended to the autism spectrum ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2784305/), and there's speculative links to ADHD.
There's also a definite tendency towards traits that look like ADHD on my maternal grandmother's side. Ever since learning about the obvious self-medication going on with schizophrenia, I've been wondering: was nicotine giving them something they couldn't get from anything else?
Nicotine is incredibly psychoactive. So much so that there's a whole suite of receptors named 'nicotinic' in its honour ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic_acetylcholine_receptor). I've learned a little pharmacology of late for my own purposes, and comparing nicotine to many prescribed meds is eye opening.
It modulates dopamine in some very interesting ways, which are often explained away as mere 'addiction formation', rather than as having an effect that might be independently desired, much as many people have 'addictive personalities' rather than variant executive function.
To be quite honest this has lead me to rethink everything I've ever been told about 'self-medication', and I'm far from the only one doing this: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/06/meet-carl-hart-parent-columbia-professor-and-heroin-user
I think it's possible to think that addiction is an incredibly serious phenomenon that needs to tackled with seriousness and significant societal resources and nevertheless also that it is not the only question of neurocognitive (dys)function at issue in personal psychopharmacy.
I mean, every philosopher is taught the problem of akrasia as an initial provocation: why do our behaviours and our beliefs fail to align in such strange ways? But this gets treated as a singular locus of executive dysfunction, divorced from related issues such as anxiety.
And here I mean not the existential angst of Heidegger and his inheritors, but the relentlessly mundane drain on one's cognitive resources that is ubiquitous in the society we find ourselves in: https://deontologistics.co/2018/02/18/ofta-cognitive-economics-and-the-functional-theory-of-stress/
In contrast to Leary's praise of psychedelic self-experimentation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out), many people need to tune out and turn off, just so that they can drop in. Alcohol, nicotine, cannabinoids, and opioids are tools people reach for in such circumstances.
Are they imperfect tools? Certainly. But there are no perfect tools, only better and worse ones, and my own experience with the iterative cycle of diagnosis and prescription has shown me that it is very, very poor at optimising for individual fit, especially in the UK.
I know some people who've managed to find an SSRI that fits them pretty well, but often this is more often the end point of the process than the beginning of a sustained process of refinement. I know many others who just smoke weed regularly, and it fits them about as well.
I've also known several non-functional alcoholics who have been drawn deeper into the vortex by their inability to access medication that might have more directly helped them with issues of chronic pain, sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, and various other ailments of the soul.
Despite my disastrous history, I genuinely believe in the power of disciplined psychopharmacology to help people modulate their own cognition, even if it should probably be supplemented by disciplined psychogeography to help them mould their environments to fit this cognition.
The fractal tragedy of eternal drug war has many ramifying consequences, but I think we overlook the extent to which it has sabotaged the autonomy of those who might need narcotics, however imperfect, even before we return to the psychedelic agency of Leary and his successors.
I increasingly see the drug war not simply in terms of its obvious entanglements with race and class, but in terms of its less obvious consequences for neurodiversity. Working class women who reflexively multi-task and chain-smoke aren't the only invisible demographic hereabouts.
How many people do you think are trapped in tortuous cognitive cycles by chemical coping mechanisms that are only just good enough to let them function without falling apart? How many never get the opportunity to understand their neurodivergence, let alone explore it?
Once more, the sheer number of people I know who have or begun to seek adult ADHD diagnoses in the last two years is absolutely staggering. Some only see it when they've had kids who've been diagnosed, the signs reflecting back on themselves ('Oh that's what I do...').
I think something similar has been happening with ASD for a while, but the major difference is that there are medications available to ADHD cases that often drastically improve executive function in ways that go well beyond treating the anxiety bound up with dysfunction.
So many people whose personal autonomy could be radically enhanced, who don't qualify for help because their function doesn't deviate far enough from the norm. A veritable bonfire of potential sustained by the suffocating politics of normality and its medical-carceral complex.
Mark Fisher used to talk about the 'human security system', whose literary model are the Turing cops in @GreatDismal's Neuromancer. This is the term that comes to mind when I think of the systematic suppression of such inhuman potentials enacted in the name of liberal humanism.
'We do not know what a body can do' says Spinoza, and in the wake of '68 this thought is echoed by Deleuze & Guattari, Firestone, and everyone else who felt the only way out was to somehow synthesise the concerns of Marx and Freud. Not merely economic but cognitive liberation.
How far is this open air cognitive prison from that rallying cry? It's distance is measured not simply in the decades of labour time siphoned by neoliberal retrenchment, but in the hoard of personal destiny stolen by the drug war.
I think that this stolen potential is what Mark was revisiting in his late work on 'acid communism'. He was born in '68, and in some sense his life was defined by a foreclosed psychedelic future, as much as mine was by the era of capitalist realism I was born into in.
I keep revisiting his 'No Time' talk (), and thinking not only how resolutely anti-reactionary his stance on technological self-medication is, but just how much cultural *time* seems to have passed in the few years since he left us. A genuine acceleration.
Perhaps I'll do a talk titled 'Making Up For Lost Time', just to document the cultural explosion that seems to be happening as the online gains increasing autonomy and starts refluxing back into the 'real' world, as the current regime of human security continues to break down.
But that's a thought for another day. For now, I think it's important to see that zoomers are more culturally disconnected from their predecessors than any generation since the boomers. Millennials like myself are at best digital beatniks trying to keep up with the times.
Once more, there's real counter-culture nipping at the heels of the mainstream. The kids are alright, but only because they know the world isn't, and they're self-medicating in more intricate and self-conscious ways than we might expect:
This means both that it's worth revisiting not just the failures, but the successes of the 60s counter culture, and the ways they were channelled by the forces of political reaction. If nothing else, we should avoid becoming reactionaries ourselves. Look, before you moralise.
Trans rights remains the thin end of the inhuman wedge jutting from the future into the present, both as the locus of radical contention and reaction. But synthetic hormones are only one line of self-experimentation in the expansion of autonomy beyond the bounds of human nature.
We've gone from psychonauts experimenting with cognitive neoteny to SV devs microdosing LSD to eek out more productivity in the hope they'll eventually exit the treadmill. Time for computational cognitive prosthetics and consumer nootropics. Grey market apps and adderall.
Vaporware, vaporwave, and vapes. Smoke 'em if you got 'em guys. 
P.S. I still find it bizarre that I can now drink zero alcohol CBD beer to treat chronic pain. It’s genuinely amazing, but why the fuck is THC still illegal? The rationale is so thin you can see through it.
P.P.S. My paternal grandfather actually died when he was 49, and my maternal grandfather (also a smoker) died of a stroke at 63.
