The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture (review)

"Knowing as he does . . . the chemical conditions of transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists—in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry, and parapsychology. And on their part, of course, the specialists (if any of them aspire to be genuine men of science and complete human beings) should turn, out of their respective pigeonholes, to the artist, the sibyl, the visionary, the mystic—all those, in a word, who have had the experience of the Other World and who know, in their different ways, what to do with that experience" (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, New York: Harper and Row, 1954, 156). DeGrandpre delivers a referendum on the specialist tribe to which he once belonged: pharmacologists, he maintains, are ill-equipped to "grapple with the powerful dialectic that existed between drugs, their users, and the historical and immediate contexts of use" (237).

This delightfully readable if idiosyncratic history tells the tale of how the United States became the world's most troubled drug culture. A "cult of pharmacology" sprang up on the basis of a belief in the special powers of psychoactive drugs that act directly on the brain. Cult members ignored how social context shapes relationships between people and drugs. By contrast DeGrandpre accounts for how the symbolic and social value accorded to drugs has changed as the drugs and their model users have changed. Why, he asks, are amphetamines widely prescribed to attention-deficit-disordered children, while their pharmacologically similar cousin, cocaine, is used to justify sending other young people to prison in droves? Like DeGrandpre's first book, Ritalin Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), this one is accessible reading for "Drugs and Society" courses designed to break down distinctions between licit and illicit drugs. For scholars who study the "historically contingent forces of culture and commerce" (viii) that shape which drugs get into which bodies, The Cult of Pharmacology has limitations.

Previously a translator of scientific studies, DeGrandpre left the world of behavioral pharmacology for the uncharted waters of cultural analysis. Like David Healy, another psychopharmacologist turned historian, DeGrandpre bears witness to periodic "drug dramas" (ix). The Cult of Pharmacology comprises angels and demons caught in an ideological system of "psychobabble" and "biobabble" called "molecular pharmacologicalism" (104). DeGrandpre narrates the social process by which an irrational system of differential prohibitions was institutionalized, citing commonsensical differences in the governance of alcohol, tobacco, OxyContin, heroin, Ritalin, cocaine, or methamphetamine. Cobbled together for a variety of reasons, drug control regimes turned certain drugs and drug traders into evil demons, rendering others the promethean prophets of panaceas. What DeGrandpre calls "modernization," the removal of drugs from the spiritual purview of magic and spirit to the domain of the pharmacological sciences, was a direct response to the moralizing moves of demonization, which attribute drug use to moral weakness, character deficiency, or viciousness. His ear is particularly attuned to how scientific claims echo their magico-religious forerunners. Although he casts drug science as "pseudoscience," he also uses science as the source of useful empirical contradictions to the orthodox cult of pharmacology.

Behavioral pharmacology, the corner of the drug sciences in which DeGrandpre was trained, owes much to the century-long effort to establish opiate addiction as a matter tractable to scientific research but remains somewhat amnesiac about its own history. This amnesia is exacerbated by the elusive logic of the organization of the book (for instance, part one leaps from cocaine to legal controversies surrounding consumption of antidepressants). The coherence of the book lies in the clarity of its thesis: central to scientific wisdom and rational drug policy are holdover beliefs in the magicalism of drug substances and the idea that drugs "bypass all social conditioning of the mind and by themselves transform thought and action" (104). The Cult of Pharmacology casts science as an influential...