Escohotado and the drug: "Phármakos does not mean neither remedy nor poison but the two inseparable things"

• The penultimate days "I already want to die"

• Escohotado dies The thinker of freedom

For decades, Antonio Escohotado (who died today at age 80) has been a pinoresque part of Spanish popular culture: a contradictory character, a correct-looking, rather bland older man, with wise old man ways, a paradoxical political vision and a scandalously transgressive speech. The drug was, among all the themes of his thought and research,

. This image is not fair: in Escohotado's interest in drugs, very rich intellectual traditions and information coming from very broad fields come together: the history of art, botany, theology, psychoanalysis, economics and, of course, the philosophy.

José Otega y Gasset is at the beginning of the trip. Escohotado studied Philosophy in Madrid in the post-war years, in which the tradition of the old School of Philosophy on Calle San Bernardo, truncated in the Civil War, was recovered

That culture basically spoke of

, of taking the human experience to the limit of the essential. If along that path, Julián Marías reached a thought of goodness towards the other more or less bourgeois and conventional, Escohotado, who was old enough to have been the son, reached the rupture.

In the very Orteguian

Escohotado published his first text on drugs, in 1967, when he was 26 years old and in the first steps of his academic career. It was titled

and it was, in part, the classic chronicle of the bourgeois boy who had privileged access to cosmopolitan culture and introduced it to the self-absorbed Spain of the time. Escohotado had read Huxley, was informed of what was happening in California at that time, and was bringing his news to Spain.

. Later, he would put a valuable intellectual context to this rediscovery of drunkenness: Rilke, Blake, cubist art ... The conclusion of that text was that the true value of acid consists in breaking with the "universe of symbols" that they have distanced man from the experience of reality.

As a good disciple of Ortega, Escohotado wanted to push the truth of life to the limit. The following years consisted in that: in being in life more than in the word: sexual revolution, experimentation, atypical fatherhood ... Along the way,

and Escohotado had to be a victim of that conflict. In 1983 he was arrested for drug trafficking. In 1988 he returned to prison accused of the same charge. The prosecution requested six years in prison for him. The sentence left the sentence in two years because it recognized that the crime of Escohotado had developed "

"He himself explained that he played a useful fool in a police conspiracy. Escohotado mediated a sale in which both the buyers and the sellers were policemen who led him to crime.

It didn't matter.

Escohotado, warned that the Cuenca Prison would allow him access to a computer and certain isolation conditions,

:

( Espasa, 1989), a

1,500-page

that he never stopped revising, expanding and reissuing.

What is unique

? Above all, the intertwining of historical knowledge (who used what drug at what time, with what consequences), botanical knowledge (what makes a plant have certain effects) and phenomenological knowledge (what happens when we take when we take a drug and in what difference from what happens when we take another drug). During the successive revisions of the book, Escohotado deepened his botanical knowledge, which he

. However, popular culture has remained with the phenomenological part, the personal experiences of the wise man who had tried everything and returned in one piece, more or less.

Seen today,

is more interesting for what it offers of interpretation of that history.

of Plato's

. "Psychopharmacology today exemplifies the most irreducible conflict between the blessing and the curse," Escohotado wrote in 1997. The blessing has to do with therapeutic and recreational uses, with the joy of living, knowledge and the "control of undesirable emotions" . The curse, on the other hand, is in the risk of intoxication and, above all, in the fear of society to truly live.

In summary: what Escohotado argued is that the use of soothing, euphoric or delusional plants and chemicals has been a universal part of human culture for millennia and that, until very recent times, it was treated with wise prudence and with awareness as much of the possibilities of drunkenness as well as risks of intoxication. An example: the Greek word

:

That culture, according to Escohotado, broke with the modern theocratic states, which

and private conduct, and later with the post-theocratic states, which recycled the habit of burning heretics into a system of directed law. to chase too free individuals. The persecution of drugs, according to Escohotado, had become "the equivalent today of the fratricidal religious wars, [...]

, exploited very profitably by some and suffered devastatingly by others".

The reference to "mass hysteria" seems to lead to Freud, who is quoted several times in the

Escohotado saw in the repression of that drug culture

, in which thousands of women fell into neurosis because

. Like Freud, Escohotado wanted to free the world from a system of oppression and fear that led thousands of people to illness. I wanted to get him out of the cave, to convince him that

.

The years in which Escohotado wrote

were those of the heroin epidemic and the US Government's war on drugs. What was your interpretation? That the hysteria of the repressed natural instinct had led from the drug to the substitute, fatally altered and much more toxic. It was not the drug that killed but its adulteration.

. A culture in which emotionality, refinement and also

fit

... but not social self-destruction.

Escohotado called in that book to break with the pure / impure duality and recalled that the treatment that drug addicts received in 1989 was not very different from that received by

.

Deep down, all he hoped was that his readers would live in the truth, as he had learned from Ortega.

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