Bottling Up Emotions

holidays from reality

The modern world is enthused with drugs. We take them to fuel our mornings, to heal and protect our bodies, to visit other worlds. We take them to ease our minds, to calm our thoughts, to excite our nerves, to ease our pain. We take them alone and with friends. We take them in the office without anyone knowing. We take them on recommendations and hearsay. We take them on prescription.

Society is very clearly ‘on drugs’—a multitude of drugs with a dizzyingly diverse array of effects and, remembering to read the fine print, side-effects too. It makes for a high-stakes game. In the exogenous chemical mediation of the everyday world, individuals, organizations and governments wrestle to supplant one another’s narratives and ultimately determine the material circulation of substances. 

This is especially true today for psychedelics, which have the public gaze upon them once more. A recent article by Zoe Cormier, for instance, neatly sums up psychedelia’s current critique of mainstreaming pra…