Throughout the course of history, both drugs and music have been an important aspect of the human experience. Despite the fact that drugs and their use have become stigmatized, particularly in the United States, over the past century or so, both drugs and music have long been used for the purposes of individuals attempting to achieve a transcendental experience, as well as to convey the nature of that experience to other people (Fuller, 2000). Drugs and music have also long performed the function of bringing people together, either through a sense of recognition based on common interests and experience, or because of the powerful potential of expression that both mediums offer to their users (Fuller, 2000). Borrowing a phrase from Huxley, both drugs and music ultimately provide access to “‘culturally uncontaminated’ levels of thought,” and they do this not only by creating an entry point into another world, but also by contesting the reality of the world in which we live (in Fuller, 2000, p. 79).

Although many contemporary musicians, their listeners, and cultural critics recognize that there is a close relationship between drugs and music, the long history and the specific quality of that relationship often gets cheapened and obscured in the lyrics and the promotion of modern music. Unfortunately, this confusion has created the widespread misperception that some types of music—namely psychedelic 1960s and 1970s tunes, rap, and grunge rock, among others—promote maladaptive drug use. While it may in fact be the case that the lyrics, the sounds, and even the marketing material used to promote these genres seem to promote illicit drug use, a more plausible explanation is that the relationship between drugs and music is the same as it has been for centuries: music itself serves as a drug, an antidote to the pain and frustration of living in an imperfect world.

The history of the human use of drugs and music, as well as the relationship that has been forged between the two, extends far into the past, and possibly even as early as the dawn of human history itself. Throughout the world, notes Fuller (2000), many cultures that differ from one another in notable ways have all used drugs and music as a means of “altering an individual’s state of consciousness in such a way as to ‘tune’ individuals into an alternate reality” (p. 9). The use of drugs such as peyote, datura, and tobacco among Native American groups has been documented extensively, for instance (Fuller, 2000). These drugs were used—and, in some cases, are still used—in ritual practices and performances that are intended to “assist individuals in their vision quest” (Fuller, 2000, p. 9). Music, especially drumming and the use of flutes, has also been an important part of that ritualistic process, and performances typically occurred in conjunction with or in the context of drug use. African tribes have also been documented as having maintained a close and companionable relationship between drugs and music, used for many of the same reasons as the Native Americans (Fuller, 2000). The careful maintenance of the relationship between these two aspects of social life served to “provide a specific context in which the resulting ecstasies are understood to have spiritual significance” (Fuller, 2000, p. 9).

In the early days of human history, then, the relationship between music and drugs was rarely a problematic one. Neither was stigmatized; in fact, both were elevated as important components of cultural life and of specific communities, as both music and drugs—often in combination– had a meaningful role to play in the advancement and protection of social beliefs and norms (Fuller, 2000). What is important to emphasize and understand is that these early societies had a clear understanding of why and how both mediums of expression and transcendence were to be used. Furthermore, both drugs and music were administered by specific figures within the culture and the use of each was controlled, not to prevent indulgent excesses, necessarily—that idea would emerge much later in human history—but to demonstrate that these two aspects of social life were so important that they needed to be entrusted to a wise elder figure, or someone who had otherwise been trained or qualified to recognize the power of the mediums and to use them appropriately for the purpose of advancing social values and fostering community identity and cohesion (Fuller, 2000).

Although the true nature of the relationship between drugs and music has remained relatively constant across the course of human history, musical expression itself has evolved considerably, as has drug use, the latter with respect to the variety of drugs available and the increasing diversity of reasons for their use. By examining these evolutions, it is possible to arrive at an understanding of how the relationship between drugs and music has become so misunderstood. In dramatic contrast to the value that drugs and music had in early human societies, over time, both music and drugs would come to be stigmatized, and the closeness of the relationship between the two would become subject to profound suspicions and even paranoia. Music would be accused of fostering drug use and drugs would be fingered as the culprit for the emergence of musical genres that were deemed socially deviant and which seemed to threaten the very foundations of social order.

The turning point that marked a shift towards the adoption of the misguided idea that music serves as a tool for promoting illicit drug use can be traced at least as far back as the emergence of the genre of the psychedelic music of the 1960s and 1970s. Building upon daring musical and lyrical innovations of the 1950s rock and rollers, psychedelic music went leaps beyond the controversial figures of 1950s music, such as Elvis Presley, by experimenting radically with sounds, lyrics, and even the length of songs themselves (Whiteley, 1992). Before examining psychedelic music in depth, though, it is important to understand what kind of effect rock music had on the American consciousness and on social attitudes, and how this seismic shift in the understanding of music—and, by extension, drugs—would determine the trajectory of the genres that would develop in its wake. Whiteley (1992) contends that rock music can rightfully claim the title to being superior “over all previous popular musical forms,” which she supports by noting that, with rock, music had expanded beyond the boundaries of exclusive groups of listeners to include all of society (p. 1). With rock music, Whiteley (1992) asserts, music had surpassed its classical role of playing a decorative, beautifying function that edified and elevated a society as advanced and civilized, a paradigm that followed the more active and functional role that music had played in early human societies. Emerging as it did during “a period of expanded and heightened social, political and psychological awareness,” it was inevitable that music would become a tool for responding to and ventilating about social and political concerns (Whiteley, 1992, p. 1). Music had a message, and the message was that listeners should “explore the politics of consciousness, ‘love, loneliness, depersonalization, [and] the search for the truth of the person….” (Whiteley, 1992, p. 1). What made rock music a “cultural phenomenon rather than a political movement [was] that it [moved beyond] ideology to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, [and] the environment” (Whiteley, 1992, p. 1). One notices, then, the return to the notion that music was a force for transcendental experience.

The lyrics and innovative sounds of rock were disturbing to the establishment, however, and coupled with larger political and social factors—including the Red Scare—authority figures were reacting within a general atmosphere marked by fear about the future of America; naturally, they worried about the impact rock music could have on society. Such concern was compounded when the role that drugs played in rock culture was revealed. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine profoundly the issue of why musicians used drugs, common knowledge suggests that the stresses of fame and its demands have long been mitigated by drug use, both licit and illicit. By this time in American history, Prohibition had come and gone, but Americans’ profoundly ambivalent attitude about illicit drug use remained, and the idea of the future drug control strategy that would come to be known as the war on drugs was in its seedling stage. Drugs were already beginning to be linked, however speciously, with various forms of social deviance, including crime and declines in certain markers of social well-being; the combination of music considered rebellious and drugs considered dangerous was thus a powerful ideological cocktail.

Then came the 1960s and the emergence of the genre known as psychedelic music, which, in part, sprang out of the growing drug culture. Both drugs and music were, in a certain sense, reaffirming the common ties that had historically bound them together, especially that of the transcendental experience. As Whiteley (1992) points out, both drugs and popular music had been branded by 1950s authority figures as dangerous, or at least potentially so, and by the 1960s, musical artists (many of whom were also drug users) began to reclaim both drugs and music as tools of an emerging counter-culture, whose members were united in the shared quest for transcendence, particularly of the social and political problems plaguing the country: the Vietnam War, systemic and institutionalized racism, and gender discrimination, to name just a few. This counter-culture of drugs and music, writes Whiteley (1992), “was largely concerned with alternative modes of living which involved, to a great extent…exploring the imagination and self-expression” (p. 3). In short, both music and drugs could be used to manipulate reality and to help users to exist outside of reality, if only for a short time (Whiteley, 1992).

What made psychedelic music so exciting to its fans and so frightening to its critics was that it seemed to mimic the kinds of feelings and experiences that users achieved through illicit drugs. Whiteley (1992) explains that the music of the late 1960s and 1970s, especially that by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and even the Beatles, was characterized by musical styles and sounds that played with “the manipulation of timbres (blurred, bright, overlapping), upward movement (and its comparison with psychedelic flight), harmonies (lurching, oscillating), rhythms (regular, irregular), relationships (foreground, background) and collages….” (p. 4). The absence of verbal language or the strange and seemingly non-sensical word salad of lyrics were also typical of psychedelic music. Critics conflated this musical interpretation of the drug experience to be the conveyance of a message that encouraged listeners to use drugs. The fact that the major musical figures of this genre were using drugs seemed evidence enough to justify such a claim, which itself was further supported, at least by critics, by noting the overall increase in the incidence and prevalence of drug use in society at large (Whiteley, 1992).