You’re Doing The Wrong Drugs

Alcohol is the Ford Pinto of antidepressants. So why do we keep taking it for that purpose?

I recently switched meds. By early February of this year it was apparent that the antidepressants I had been taking were not doing the job. I went to see my doctor and he recommended a switch from Duloxetine to Cipralex. Within two to three weeks my brain was a much more pleasant place to be. The nagging fatigue that had been plaguing me for months had subsided. My memory had improved. Everything seems to be where it should be for non-sucky daily living.

I had been on Duloxetine since 2013. Before that my go-to mood stabilizer was good, old-fashioned alcohol, an antidepressant I continued to take until the fall of 2015, and have abstained from completely since a brief relapse in the fall of 2016. Having experienced life under the influence of these three drugs, as well as some others on a more sporadic basis, I feel like I’m in a position to comment on their relative pros and cons. And having been free from booze for nearly a full year and a half now, I feel I can say this with the utmost confidence: You’re all doing the wrong drugs!

(Author’s addendum: Since posting this piece several readers have written to me to remind me that alcohol is, technically speaking, a depressant, not an antidepressant. When I described it as an “antidepressant” in the above paragraph I merely meant that it is a drug many people (my old self included) take in order to better their moods. As I explain further on in this article, alcohol is completely ill-suited for this purpose and is a terrible antidepressant. even though people use it as such on a daily basis.)

Everything we do in this life serves to alter our conscious states, a fact that Sam Harris astutely observes in his remarkable book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. It’s true. Everything we ever do, whether shifting our posture in our seat or eating specific foods or applying for a car loan, is motivated at bottom by a desire to reach a state of mental satisfaction that is marginally better than before. Drugs are perhaps the most obvious thing we do to alter the landscapes of our mind. However, perhaps as a result of our society’s demonization of certain substances and edification of others, combined with a still murky understanding of the inner workings of the brain, we still make terribly counterproductive decisions regarding the drugs we take.

Alcohol is the clearest example of a drug that we, at least in western society, look to as a panacea in spite of a preponderance of evidence that it makes many of our lives worse. The more we rely on it as a social lubricant, the more dependent on it we become — and the worse we become at communicating with one another while not under its influence. In this way, alcohol strikes me as the perfect example of what evolutionary theorist David Krakauer calls a “competitive cognitive artifact” — an “innovation” which, far from improving our overall ability to overcome adversity, actually undermines our ability to function without it.

Calculators vs. abacuses

In his writings on complexity, Krakauer frequently refers to two diametrically opposed types of cultural artifacts: “competitive” and “complementary” artifacts. Throughout history, human beings have invented objects, ideas, and institutions aimed at improving our lives. Many of these, Krakauer asserts, not only provide the advertised benefits to society but also improve us in other ways — such that if the artifact in question were to be removed, we would be left in a better state than had we never had it at all.

Krakauer’s go-to example of a “complementary” cultural artifact is the abacus, an ancient invention that still does heavy lifting in many Asian countries and is the classic example of a device that changes how your brain works for the better. By contrast, Krakauer cites the pocket calculator as an example of a “competitive” cultural artifact. Not only does it not make you better at arithmetic, but it actually makes you worse — users forget how to do long division and other mathematical functions that would be at a premium if all the world’s calculators (and cell phones) disappeared overnight.

Other examples of complementary cultural artifacts might include pens and other handwriting implements (which have been shown to play an important role in cognitive processes), musical instruments, and even human language itself. As anybody with multiple languages at their disposal can attest, the more languages you learn, the easier language learning itself becomes. Conversely, our world is replete with competitive cultural artifacts such as automobiles (which encourage us to become fat and lazy), GPS technology (which undermines our navigational aptitudes), and the internet generally, which appears not only to be spectacularly failing at making us all better informed but is arguably undermining our ability to seek truth.

This is not to say that all of our competitive cultural artifacts should be abolished — Krakauer does not make such an argument either. However, he does argue that we need to be more cognizant of what all the stuff we’ve foisted on our civilization is actually doing to us, and where necessary, to find better ways of getting the same benefits.

All of our human innovations, including the drugs we take, should, I believe, be assessed on some sort of a competitive vs. complementary utility scale. So where do our drugs lie on this scale?

Complementary Cognitive Artifacts: These are artifacts that complement human intelligence in such a way that their use amplifies and improves our ability to perform cognitive tasks and once the user has mastered the physical artifact they can use a virtual/mental equivalent to perform the same cognitive task at a similar level of skill, e.g. an abacus.

Competitive Cognitive Artifacts: These are artifacts that amplify and improve our abilities to perform cognitive tasks when we have use of the artifact but when we take away the artifact we are no better (and possibly worse) at performing the cognitive task than we were before.

Source: Dr. John Danaher, http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ca

Psilocybin is an abacus. Alcohol is a calculator.

It’s been a great many years since I last dabbled in psychedelic drugs, but I’m glad I’ve had the experience. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, I believe I’ve had truly formative experiences while under the influence of magic mushrooms or LSD. These experiences were not only spellbinding in the moment, they were ultimately useful to me creatively and spiritually. They helped reveal depths of beauty and majesty I might never otherwise have known to exist.

While part of me would love to try these drugs again, another part of me feels I don’t need to — my memories of psychedelic experiences are so vivid (and thankfully so very pleasant — I’ve never had a “bad trip”) that I find I can still go there while meditating, doing yoga, or going on a hypnotic long-distance run. When I’m in the right head space, peeling back the curtain into the vast expanse of the universe’s beauty is second nature. It’s right there, and these drugs — for better or for worse — helped me see that.

Alcohol, by contrast, is the quintessential competitive cultural artifact. It doesn’t make us “better” at anything, it consistently makes us worse by undermining many of our own natural aptitudes (and by making us dependent on it). Was your innate ability to speak your mind and creatively use language dependent on booze as a five-year-old? Hopefully not. Were you only able to pen that badly-spelled but heartfelt love note to your first crush in junior high once you’d had three wine coolers in your system? Again, most likely not. So how come you now depend on alcohol to do these things at age 35 or 40? This is not what progress looks like.

Alcohol is our society’s oldest and most popular antidepressant. It is also, arguably, our worst. Well, perhaps not the absolute worst as it’s clearly less harmful than heroin or crystal meth, but if this drug we love so much worked as advertised, we would all be much happier than we are, and the fact that we’re not strikes me as a very good argument for reassessing our relationship with booze.

The way we talk about it is revealing. We drink to relax, to “take the edge off the day.” This is usually a harmless act, but in the midst of a major anxiety attack (such as I’ve experienced on numerous occasions) that “edge” becomes a tunnel of razor wire you’re forced to crawl through on a daily basis. If your only way to combat the “edge” is to drink alcohol, it’s only a matter of time before you’ve got a major drinking problem on your hands.

Alcohol doesn’t actually take the edge off anything. It just covers you in padding so you can’t feel the edges. It doesn’t fix anything, but it does give you the illusion of a “fix” (Why do you think addicts use the word “fix”?) for just long enough to forget the problem. I’ve never been even remotely tempted to try heroin, but based on accounts I’ve read by the likes of Hubert Selby Jr. and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen (his autobiography Ministry: The Lost Gospels contains much that would be rejected by a fiction editor as completely unbelievable), it sounds exactly the same — though longer-lasting and more profound.

Aren’t antidepressants just another competitive cultural artifact?

If alcohol is clearly a competitive cultural artifact and psychedelics like magic mushrooms and LSD are compementary artifacts, where does that put antidepressants such as the Cipralex pills I take every morning alongside my other drug of choice — caffeine? Given that they are “dependence forming” — inasmuch as one comes to rely on them for mental stability — are they not simply less harmful examples of the same problem presented by alcohol?

I would argue that while antidepressants aren’t exactly complementary artifacts, they’re definitely not competitive ones either. While I have yet to meet a person with mental illness who relishes in the idea of being on meds for the rest of their life, most, myself included, would sooner be on them for an indefinite stretch of time than be thrown back into the abyss of depression. I have no idea how long I will continue to take my depression medication, and have long made peace with the fact that I may have to remain on some sort of mood stabilizer for the rest of my life. In that sense, no, it’s not a complementary artifact; if it were suddenly taken away, the results could be catastrophic.

But, clearly, the opposite end of Krakauer’s spectrum doesn’t apply either. While modern SSRIs and SNRIs are terribly blunt instruments with more than their fair share of side effects, removing them shouldn’t make a depressed person worse off than they’d be without any medication at all. Of course, these meds need to be tapered very slowly (failure to do so can result in psychosis), but anyone arguing that antidepressants make people worse across the board ignores the lived experience of those like myself and many I know whose lives have been saved by these drugs.

That said, I believe mental health drugs like Cipralex lean ever so slightly into the “complementary” side. While they don’t directly obviate their own future need, they do help people build new forms of resilience into their lives, and develop other forms of mood stabilization that may in the long run allow them to dispense with the drugs that facilitated these changes. At the very least, these meds are like training wheels on a bicycle. They allow a person to safely master their balance on a bike before the “wheels” are removed. But, for so many of us, it’s simply not worth taking the wheels off. Unless they somehow go south on me at some point, my meds do nothing to complicate my life or hinder my enjoyment of it, while the risks associated with abandoning them are obviously terrifying.

What about other drugs?

Aside from caffeine and Cipralex, the only drug I consume with any regularity is cannabis. I’d argue that marijuana belongs in the same spot on the scale as Cipralex — neither competitive nor complementary. As a west coast kid, I’ve smoked weed on and off for more than two decades. I’ve been a staunch supporter of the drug’s legalization all the while, but if I’m honest I can’t say it’s given me anything of earth-shattering consequence. I like weed, but it hasn’t made me a better person, and I would contend that I’d probably be in exactly the same place had I never touched the stuff.

Apart from those described above, the only other drug I’ve ever done is MDMA (ecstasy), which has been shown to have some of the same beneficial effects as classic psychedelics but with more serious risks, including dependence formation and neurotoxicity. I’ve deliberately steered clear of the mother of all chemically formulated competitive cultural artifacts, cocaine, which — according to all accounts I’ve heard and read — makes you feel utterly invincible and intellectually switched-on until you crash, burn, and very quickly require another bump. Ditto of course for any other fierce dependence-forming drug such as nicotine, heroin, and methamphetamine (although in the case of nicotine it’s hard to see how it constitutes even a “competitive” cultural artifact as it doesn’t even give you the illusion of competence). Then again, I’ve never been hooked on cigarettes, so perhaps I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Drugs are tools. They have the capacity to bolster us in ways that extend beyond the specifics of the job in question, or do the opposite. As a recovered alcoholic, I’ve come to the realization that we don’t always know what we’re doing when we ingest a drug, and that we can go on for years using the wrong tool for the job. I wish I’d known that sooner — it would have saved me a hell of a lot of money and mental anguish. But I’m here now, and far more clearheaded than I’ve ever been.

A growing movement in the western world to decriminalize cannabis and other drugs will give us an honest opportunity to assess the true pros and cons of all the chemicals we ingest for the purposes of altering our mental states. It will allow us to look at alcohol through the same lens we use to look at cocaine or crystal meth, and examine our relationship with it. When I look at my life, I can honestly say I would have been better off had I never begun to drink. I think this is a fairly safe thing to say. I still have some good memories of drinking, but even these have proven to be tissue-thin as I progress in my sobriety. None of them changed my life in the way that spending what felt like an eternity communing with the ecosystem of a Vancouver Island rainforest while under the influence of magic mushrooms did. I’ll take the latter any day.