| In November of 2020, voters in Oregon approved Measure 110, a law that significantly overhauled the state’s drug policy. Certain kinds of possession were decriminalized, and the legislation attracted attention as a potential model for reform. But, as E. Tammy Kim reports in this week’s New Yorker, Measure 110 also had unintended consequences, including a backlash among some of the Oregon residents who supported it. The neurologist and New Yorker writer Oliver Sacks was nearly eighty when he wrote about his own experiments with drugs—a more personal exercise that would teach him, he hoped, about the nature of perception and the brain. From age twenty into his thirties, Sacks tried out an array of banned substances, ranging from cannabis and amphetamines to opiates and LSD. As a burgeoning scientist, Sacks took the experiments seriously, documenting the drugs’ effects even as he experienced sensations that could be scary or transcendent. One memorable night, his thirty-second birthday, involved the injection of morphine during a solitary visit home, and Sacks was later unnerved when he discovered how much time he had lost to the resulting visions. “This shocked and sobered me, and made me see how one could spend entire days, nights, weeks, even years of one’s life in an opium stupor,” he writes. “I would make sure that my first opium experience was also my last.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment