Just say Yes

 LISTEN. Today in Happiness, after our little exam, we'll discuss what it means to Stoics to live in accordance with nature. We'll also consider the shared Stoic-Buddhist aversion to "drug-induced bliss." That's my cue to bring Michael Pollan and William James into the conversation.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience James said 

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature;

That's a remarkable observation, which he quickly tempered with the crushing corollary that 

it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.

So, much as we should wish to affirm the Yes function, we can't sanction the degradation and poisoning. 

Does the same caveat apply to all drugs? James had (pardon the pun) high hopes for nitrous oxide... (continues)