According to Earth, who runs the Vaults of Erowid with his also pseudonymous partner Fire, we ain't seen nothin' yet. "In the next fifty years, virtually everyone in developed countries will be faced with daily decisions about their psychoactive drug use," he says. He argues that the number of psychoactive chemicals in our midst is about to explode, the work not so much of underground drug designers as of pharmaceutical companies. "Imagine a thousand caffeine replacements," says Earth. "Myriad amphetamines, though less fun than ones today. Or, like Viagra, a coming class of pseudo-medicinal recreational drugs."

The signs of this emerging culture are around us. Just ask subway and train riders across the land what time it is, and they'll tell you: "It's Prilosec time!" The garish $50-million direct-to-consumer ad campaign for the "little purple pill" is a remarkable indication of the shift toward a mainstream embrace of psychoactive enhancement. Though you can't generally tell from the ads, the drug itself is indicated for nothing more interesting than heartburn. But the marketing machine presents Prilosec as a lifestyle drug, a kind of luxurious soma, floating against azure skies. Look at the connotations: the "little pill" is a microdot, the color a purple haze, and the image of the witchy New Age blonde exulting before the clock an ambiguous symbol of the slice of eternity that the greatest psychoactives promise -- Eliot's "intersection of the timeless with time," hovering over hasty commuters.

Ordinary drugs can promise such magic in part because we have so thoroughly adopted the notion that our subjective experience is largely, if not exclusively, a product of the activity of neural tissue. It's a nineteenth-century idea, of course, but now we have twenty-first-century tools to back it up, not to mention a twenty-first-century identity crisis for marketeers to exploit. The thing is, if you push this reductionist paradigm far enough, then we are always on drugs. In other words, once you start aligning the subcomponents of selfhood with different rafts of neurotransmitters, you are already on the way toward reconceiving your experience as the product of a tumultuous cocktail of chemical triggers. When you hit the treadmill or string a full-spectrum light above your desk in order to ward off depression, not to mention pop a Prozac, you are in some sense treating your own neural juices as internal drugs whose flows you want to regulate. And this makes perfect sense. After all, the brain already makes its own equivalent of opium, cocaine, and psychedelics.

So we're all druggies now. The problem is that we also live at a time when the official lies and obfuscations about psychoactives, which are necessary to justify the drug war and the multibillion-dollar industries it breeds, have the additional effect of eroding the personal responsibility necessary to weigh costs and benefits and make choices about how we dose ourselves. "Prohibition has broken people's ability to manage their own psychoactive use," says Earth. "We've created a culture that can't choose." Instead, we are offered a simpleminded and historically insupportable view of "bad" psychoactive drugs as malefic invaders whose presence in human brains and human societies is somehow aberrant. At the same time, people are being encouraged to take socially approved psychoactives (or, in the case of Ritalin, force them on their children). Rather than calling a spade a spade, however, the medical-industrial establishment coats these pills in "objective" rhetoric that elides the irreducibly subjective dimension of the drug encounter. From industry's perspective, psychoactives are not presented as avenues for modifying your own subjectivity, giving you the opportunity to explore pleasure or insight or calm, but as technical solutions to "syndromes" within the fixed machinery of the bodymind.

THE PARADOX of psychedelics -- which is partly a source of their continued subversive power, despite the fact that pop culture has already become so thoroughly trippy -- is that they simultaneously materialize and spiritualize the problem of drugs and consciousness. On the surface level, they seem to support a reductive model, especially against traditional religious accounts of subjectivity. That is, psychedelics seem to prove that some of the most exalted states of the human spirit -- cosmic communion, profound aesthetic appreciation for nature, the integration of self and other, the perception of primary pattern, the visionary eruption of archetypal phantasms, the illumination of memory -- can be triggered with a pill or a plant. But from the inside, so to speak, these very same states often seem to unambiguously support a profoundly spiritual, or at least consciousness-centered point of view, over and against a mere biological reductionism. In other words, they bring us to the edge of a spiritual materialism.

Even if you discount this subjective "evidence" as untrustworthy (a perfectly acceptable move in my book), the profound reflexivity of psychedelic drugs still makes itself known through the famed role that "set and setting" play in the phenomenology of the trip. Forty years ago, long before he went Sci-Fi, Timothy Leary was already talking about the programmability of psychedelic experience, arguing that the individual's frame of mind and the surrounding mise-en-scène contribute substantially to the experience -- a point that most later researchers only further underline. This acknowledgment profoundly changes the model of mind that emerges from the drug, because the attempt to purely mechanize the molecule -- to see it as producing a small range of dependable perceptions and behaviors -- founders on the enormous role that both culture and the psyche play in shaping the trip.

The dominant drug paradigm, in the rhetoric of drug warriors and industry pushers alike, depends on a very literalist model that ascribes agency to the drug itself. Psychoactive drugs challenge this model, functioning more like keys that open doors that you walk through. "The psychedelic drug doesn't do anything," says Shulgin. "The drug allows you to do something." At the same time, of course, the drug definitely has its own say in the matter of what gets done. But the act of introducing the thing to your synapses, and hence your life, is more like initiating a relationship than simply jacking into cyberspace through a video-game deck. Many psychonauts naturally think of drugs as allies -- even approaching traditional organic psychedelics like mushrooms and ayahuasca as if they were ensouled by ancient spirits. Many of these more explicitly "shamanic" trippers in turn denigrate synthetic, lab-produced compounds as soulless industrial chemicals.

But as the weird scientists point out, this is just mainstream literalism in reverse. The point is not the material; it's the dialogic relationship, the loop of meaning, that ties together mind and molecule. Indeed, much of the appeal of novel chemicals is that they deliver one to zones that have yet to be mapped by cultural consensus, underground or not. "I start with bottles that have no personality at all," says Shulgin. "You make a white crystal solid that you don't know and it doesn't know you. And so you begin to meet each other." In some sense, this structure of relationship, which is open to meaning and communication, applies to all psychoactives, even the most mainstream. Like all relationships, they can go terribly, terribly wrong; like most, they are mixed bags. And yet, to experience yourself as a mind arising from a brain means that you are already constantly in relation with neurochemistry. And in the years to come, when the expanding range of molecular modification may wrap our hands ever tighter around the tiller of the self, it might serve us well to keep in touch with the mind that moves through realms far outside that anxious simian serotonin buzz we experience as ordinary reality.

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.