>Jay Lemke wrote,
>
>"Soma, as Huxley well knew (read _The Doors of Perception_ or _The
Perennial
>Philosophy_), was not primarily an 'opiate of the masses' or an instrument
>of hegemonic cultural control (though that is also a means of preserving
>certain conditions over certain timescales and necessary to many features
>of culture that we value). "
>
>I think the "soma" that was initially referred to is the soma in Huxley's
>"Brave New World" which was definitely the equivalent of Prozac and other
>"mood enhancing/stabilizing" drugs. In that work, I recall that people
>would comment on someone's crankiness by saying they hadn't been taking
>their soma. The purpose wasn't perhaps "hegemonic cultural control" but
>simply preventing people from falling into troublesome existential crises
>(e.g., what's the point in living?) and thereby maintain a smoothly running
>social machine/system.
>
>In the Huxley works you mentioned, as well as in his novel "Island", he
>discussed soma specifically as form of psychedelic drug . He was a regular
>user of psychedelics and a strong advocate of their general, though
>regulated use, say on the current Swiss model. He drew on his familiarity
>with the ethnopharmacology of his day, specifically the body of work
>supporting the hypothesis that the soma mentioned repeatedly in the Hindu
>Vedas, to which Huxley was clearly alluding, represents the psychedelic
>derived from the amanita muscaria mushroom that is prominent in Siberian
>shamanism.
>
>The differences between the psychological effects of psychedelics and the
>psychological effects of prozac, lithium, or other mood stabilizers (such
as
>the soma [anti-psychedelic] that Huxley described in Brave New World) are
>profound and opposed. It seems to me to be very naive to overlook their
>social impact of their specific psychological functions. Psychedelics are
>strongly repressed in our society, not available by any prescription and
>only recently open to very limited use in highly restricted psychological
>laboratories. But following your logic they are similar. Why then is one
>repressed and the other encouraged generally, not even carrying the stigma
>of say AA membership? Some notion of the relationship of a drug's
>psychological effect and consequent impact on the power structures (you
>remember the 60s don't you?) must be included in the analysis of their use
>in society. I didn't find any of that in what you wrote. But these are
>just details.
>
>Paul H. Dillon
>
>
>