Neither Demonology nor Romanticism by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Neither Demonology nor Romanticism: A Critical Drug Studies of Entanglement

This essay is a response to my critics, and it takes both sets of objections seriously enough to let them shape its structure. Some readers of this project find it too spiritual to count as serious sociology — a theology dressed up in footnotes. Others find its refusal of drug-war categories too sympathetic to drug use to reckon honestly with addiction, psychosis, and death — a romance with the underworld that forgets who doesn't come back from it.

I answer these objections by examining where my framework is most vulnerable: institutional responsibility, pharmacological difference, romanticized accounts of ritual, the limits of lived experience, and the clinical risks of mythic language.

The underlying argument is this: no single vocabulary — neurological, psychiatric, sociological, political, experiential, or spiritual — exhausts what happens when people alter consciousness. Each vocabulary makes certain realities visible while pushing others from view. Critical Drug Studies should not select one vocabulary as sovereign. It should examine their partial truths, their institutional uses, and the specific harms produced when any one of them claims the whole territory.

This is not relativism. Psychoactive substances have material properties, bodies have limits, and some patterns of use carry grave dangers regardless of what meaning anyone assigns them. But drug effects become human experiences only through their entanglement with expectation, biography, social relationship, political economy, cultural meaning, and law. The task is to hold pharmacology and meaning in the same frame without letting either one absorb the other.

Prohibition and Institutional Responsibility

Prohibition is not a neutral response calibrated to the pharmacological danger of particular substances. Craig Reinarman and other historians of drug scares have shown how drug problems are assembled through an interaction of real harms, media amplification, moral entrepreneurship, racial and class antagonism, institutional interests, and political opportunity. The history of crack cocaine demonstrates how the punishment attached to a substance can vastly exceed what its pharmacology alone could explain.

The historian's objection is strongest here: this does not mean every drug law originated from a unified plan of racial or class control. Drug regulation has also been shaped by paternalism, professional competition, public-health concerns, religious morality, bureaucratic momentum, and fear of poorly regulated markets. Historical actors need not share a single motive for a system to produce patterned consequences. The more defensible claim is that prohibition repeatedly converts concern about drug-related harm into coercive practices whose violence is concealed by the language of protection. The sociological task is not to invent a single hidden intention but to trace how concern becomes control, which groups bear the costs, and why punitive institutions persist despite failing to eliminate drugs. A policy may fail according to its declared objective while generating effects that make it politically and institutionally durable.

A further, harder objection follows immediately: if racialized punishment emerges through institutional processes rather than a single conspiracy, does everyone become innocent? Can legislators, physicians, journalists, police departments, and treatment systems benefit from destructive outcomes while disclaiming responsibility because harm was never their declared intention?

No. Distinguishing intention from effect is not an argument for institutional innocence. Responsibility does not end with what an actor originally intended. It also concerns what actors could reasonably know, what evidence they ignore, which consequences they continue to reproduce, and what benefits they receive from refusing reform. Contemporary institutions operate after a century of evidence concerning racial disparities, mass incarceration, contaminated supply, treatment exclusion, and preventable death. At that point, ignorance becomes difficult to separate from willful blindness — sustained not by secrecy but by ordinary bureaucratic practice: commissioning disparity studies whose findings are absorbed into public messaging rather than policy change, rotating personnel through an agency fast enough that no one holds a decision long enough to be held to it, treating each new overdose count as a reason for more of the same enforcement rather than evidence against it. An institution that repeatedly encounters proof of its harms and nevertheless protects its authority, funding, or moral legitimacy cannot escape accountability by appealing to benevolent intentions.

The distinction between motive and mechanism therefore sharpens responsibility rather than dissolving it. It prevents us from reducing history to conspiracy while allowing us to ask a harder question: when did the consequences become sufficiently visible that continuing the policy became a choice?

Science, Medicine, and Medical Authority

Critical Drug Studies should not treat science as the enemy. Pharmacology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and clinical research provide indispensable knowledge about tolerance, dependence, withdrawal, overdose, toxicity, and interactions among substances. Medication can reduce unbearable symptoms, prevent death, and make other forms of recovery possible.

But three distinct criticisms get collapsed if we are not careful. Scientific reductionism treats one level of explanation as complete. Institutional medicine can make coercive decisions even while using valid science. Individual clinicians may practice pluralistically within a reductive system. These are not the same problem, and conflating them makes the objection easy to dismiss as anti-science.

The problem is not simply that medicine knows too little about meaning. It is that medical authority can convert a partial description into decisions about confinement, credibility, treatment access, and legal competence. A neurological account can describe changes associated with repeated drug use without explaining what the drug means to the person, why use began, why it continued, or why a particular pattern became destructive in one life and manageable in another. Diagnosis can identify suffering while also erasing biography when the person disappears behind the category — and that erasure has teeth precisely because a diagnosis can determine who is held, who is believed, who is treated, and who is judged competent to decide.

My objection, then, is not to medicine but to medical monopoly: the elevation of biological description into a complete account of suffering and a complete license to decide a person's fate. Medication, psychotherapy, peer support, housing, harm reduction, ritual, and spiritual inquiry need not compete. Their coexistence is not theoretical weakness but recognition that people suffer and recover along several dimensions at once — and that authority over any one dimension should not become authority over all of them.

Drug, Set, Setting, Supply, and Political Economy

Norman Zinberg's formulation remains foundational because it refuses to locate drug effects in the molecule alone. An experience develops through the interaction of drug, psychological set, and social setting. Some cultures went further, building situated bodies of practical knowledge around this interaction — dosage conventions, preparation methods, social roles, taboos, initiation requirements, communal obligations — that helped organize particular forms of consciousness alteration. These arrangements could contain certain risks without guaranteeing safety, and they did not make traditional societies uniformly harmonious; those societies also had exclusions, hierarchies, and their own catastrophic failures of containment. None of this is nostalgia for an ancestral innocence, or license to treat "the shaman" as a generalized symbol for culturally diverse peoples whose practices arose within specific histories and cosmologies. The point is narrower: prohibition has frequently criminalized this kind of knowledge, driven it underground, or foreclosed the development of credible cultures of safer use, leaving abstinence instruction to occupy the space where honest education might have existed.

Public-health critics are right to insist on pharmacological difference, and it cannot be dropped from this formulation without falsifying it. Fentanyl is not cannabis; smoking is not injecting; known dosage is not uncertain potency. Frequency, route of administration, tolerance, physical health, adulteration, and concurrent use materially affect risk.

Supply is itself political-economic. Price, purity, availability, housing, policing, labor conditions, and access to treatment distribute drug-related danger unevenly. Capitalism does not manufacture every addiction — compulsive consumption predates industrial modernity, and many people living within capitalist societies use drugs without developing serious problems — but institutions and markets organize the conditions under which particular forms of use become sustainable, compulsive, profitable, punishable, or lethal. What gets described as "the danger of a drug" is therefore often several dangers at once: the substance, the mode of use, the vulnerability of the person, the setting, and the volatility that criminalization itself introduces into the supply. Neither pharmacological determinism nor pure social construction can hold all of that at once — which is precisely why both are insufficient on their own.

The Will to Party: Governing Intensity

The Will to Party names the human cultivation of departures from ordinary consciousness. Its object is not drugs alone but the social organization of intensity: who may pursue it, through which practices, in which settings, under whose supervision, and at what cost.

Intoxication, music, rhythm, sexuality, fasting, ordeal, collective celebration, and contemplation are not equivalent experiences. Bringing them into the same field of inquiry does not collapse their differences. It directs attention toward the practices through which people seek pleasure, relief, belonging, insight, oblivion, or temporary escape from the disciplined self.

The critical sociologist may reasonably object that this merely replaces chemical essentialism with spiritual essentialism. The objection succeeds if the Will to Party is treated as an evolutionary law or universal explanation. It is better understood as a heuristic. It does not tell us why a particular person uses a particular substance. It generates questions about how consciousness alteration is desired, organized, normalized, commercialized, medicalized, and punished.

People use drugs for curiosity, pain relief, productivity, sociability, sleep, survival, conformity, rebellion, and pleasure. No sacred motive unifies these practices. What connects them politically is that societies do not govern all alterations of consciousness equally. Some are prescribed, advertised, taxed, ritualized, or celebrated. Others become evidence of pathology or criminality. The Will to Party directs attention to that unequal government of intensity.

Situated Knowledge, Beginning with a Scene

My history with methamphetamine, crack cocaine, homelessness, outreach, and recovery does not make me representative of everyone who uses drugs. It cannot establish prevalence, compare treatments, or predict another person's trajectory. What it can do is this:

One evening, while I was homeless and using methamphetamine, an outreach worker approached me with what the system would call an offer of help. I was sitting beside my belongings, trying to arrange them so I could close my eyes without losing everything I still owned. My body was exhausted, but sleep felt dangerous. Methamphetamine was no longer giving me freedom or celebration; it was helping me remain watchful in a world where vulnerability could be punished before morning.

The worker told me there might be a shelter bed available. To accept it, however, I would have to leave immediately, abandon some of my possessions, submit to a search, and enter a setting where I did not know whether I would be safe. I tried to explain why I hesitated. The more I spoke, the more my hesitation seemed to confirm what had already been decided about me: I was intoxicated, resistant, lacking insight, and unwilling to accept assistance. The conversation gradually stopped being about what I needed. It became a test of whether I would comply with the form in which help had been offered.

I said no.

The worker may have recorded that I "refused services." That description would not have been entirely false. A bed had been offered, and I had declined it. But the phrase would have omitted almost everything that made the decision intelligible: the danger of surrendering my belongings, my uncertainty about the shelter, the practical function the drug was serving, my accumulated distrust of institutions, and the humiliating realization that asking questions about help could be interpreted as proof that I did not deserve it.

From a distance, my refusal could be understood as evidence that methamphetamine had displaced rational choice. From inside the situation, it was a constrained calculation among several dangers. The drug was one of those dangers, but it was not the only one. Homelessness had changed the meaning of sleep, property, trust, time, and safety. What appeared irrational in the case record possessed a local logic on the street.

This is what autoethnography can contribute. It cannot establish how frequently such encounters occur, nor can my decision stand for everyone who declines shelter or treatment. It can reveal what an administrative category removes in order to become administratively useful. "Refused services" transforms a relationship between unequal actors into an attribute of the person being offered help. The institution's conditions disappear; only the client's refusal remains.

That disappearance matters. When agencies interpret hesitation as pathology, they protect themselves from learning why their assistance is unacceptable, unsafe, or attached to impossible demands. The language of care then conceals a transfer of responsibility: the institution has offered something, the person has refused it, and whatever happens afterward can be narrated as the consequence of individual choice.

My experience does not prove that every refusal is rational, that every shelter is unsafe, or that intoxication never impairs judgment. It establishes a narrower point: decisions made under addiction and homelessness can be simultaneously impaired, constrained, meaningful, and responsive to real danger. Those dimensions cannot be separated by assigning the event to a single category.

Epidemiology can estimate how often people decline services. Pharmacology can describe how sleep deprivation and methamphetamine affect judgment. Administrative data can count available beds. Autoethnography can show what an offer of help asks a particular person to risk — and how easily care becomes coercive when the recipient is permitted only to accept, never to negotiate.

Carl Hart's work is instructive here because it combines pharmacological research with an insistence that controlled and beneficial drug use be made empirically visible. People encountered in prisons, emergency departments, and treatment programs cannot stand for the entire population of users. The reverse is equally important: stable users cannot stand for people living with severe dependence, psychosis, poverty, or an unpredictable opioid supply. A credible Critical Drug Studies must keep both groups in view.

Recovery Without Spiritual Mutilation

The Amethyst Path begins from a proposition neglected by many recovery systems: survival is not enough if recovery requires the permanent renunciation of vitality. People should not have to become emotionally flattened, ashamed of pleasure, or estranged from their bodies in order to become worthy of care.

This is where James Hillman becomes useful — not as a scientist of addiction but as a psychologist of image, multiplicity, fantasy, and soul. Mythic language can sometimes restore significance to experiences described only as symptoms and deficits. An underworld image may help one person understand a period of addiction without reducing that period either to moral failure or neurochemical malfunction.

The clinical critic's most serious objection concerns destabilization: metaphor can harden into ontology. Psychosis can be romanticized as revelation, addiction as initiation, and survival as proof of spiritual election. Not every descent produces wisdom; not everyone returns. Mythic interpretation must therefore remain voluntary, provisional, and subordinate to the person's safety.

The Amethyst Path is one possible ecology of recovery. It may include ritual, embodiment, creativity, nature, fellowship, medication, psychotherapy, harm reduction, and non-destructive forms of intensity. It neither requires altered states nor treats them as appropriate for everyone. Its practices should be judged by their consequences: whether they enlarge agency, relationship, safety, meaning, and the capacity to live.

This is what I mean by recovery without spiritual mutilation. The aim is not to preserve intoxication under sacred language. It is to build a life in which the desire for intensity no longer has to become a form of self-destruction.

Toward Method and Reform

Two objections remain, and they deserve more than a restatement of principle. This essay is deliberately a work of critical theory rather than an empirical research program — Dionysian Naturalism sits here as one ecology of meaning among several, not as an explanatory mechanism competing with pharmacology or political economy — and that register is a choice, not an oversight. But two harder questions follow from taking entanglement seriously, and they cannot be answered by restating that everything matters.

The first is methodological. If drug, set, setting, supply, and political economy all interact, how does one study that interaction without it collapsing into description? The answer is not to study all five at once for every question, but to specify, for a given question, which combination is doing the analytic work, and to trace it through paired methods rather than a single one. A comparative case design can hold most variables constant while varying one — the same city and shelter system before and after a shift in the fentanyl supply, for instance — to isolate what supply alone changes. An institutional ethnography can follow a category like "refused services" from the moment it is written down through its downstream use in funding reports and staffing decisions, showing exactly where the conditions of the offer disappear and only the recipient's response remains. Epidemiological data should sit alongside these case histories, not replace them, correcting for what any single account cannot establish while relying on those accounts to explain what the numbers cannot. Entanglement is not a license to skip method. It is a specification of which method answers which question — and a warning against the one method, quantitative or interpretive, that claims to answer all of them.

The second objection is institutional, and it is the more concrete of the two. Naming why "refused services" erases the conditions of an offer is not the same as saying what should replace it. A few changes follow directly from the analysis above. Intake protocols can separate the offer of a bed from the immediate surrender of property and submission to search, allowing a person to accept shelter in stages rather than all at once. Documentation systems can record the conditions attached to an offer alongside any refusal — what was asked of the person, not only what they declined — so that a pattern of refusals becomes a signal to review the offer's terms rather than the recipient's insight. Funding metrics built on beds filled or contacts made can be paired with metrics on offers successfully matched to what a person actually asked for, which would make an unsafe or humiliating offer visible as a system failure rather than an invisible success. None of this eliminates danger, urgency, or the real limits of what any shelter can accommodate. It only insists that the institution's choices remain as visible in the record as the individual's.

Neither Demonology nor Romanticism

I defend pleasure because drug discourse commonly erases it. I defend ritual because practices of consciousness alteration require cultural knowledge, not merely condemnation. I defend spiritual interpretation because clinical language does not exhaust suffering. I defend controlled users because their existence unsettles the equation of use with addiction. I defend people experiencing addiction because compulsion does not cancel dignity, complexity, or citizenship. None of this requires denying dependence, psychosis, exploitation, overdose, grief, or death.

Critical Drug Studies should be neither an apology for drugs nor another campaign against them. Its governing ethic is truthfulness without demonology, meaning without romanticism, care without coercion, and the reduction of suffering without the destruction of freedom.