Kids wear hemp baseball caps with cannabis-leaf emblems. Virtual reality emulates the effects of LSD. Rock and hip-hop artists extoll the virtues of marijuana. Dance club environments are tailor-made for trippers. After a decade of "Just Say No" rhetoric, we're in the midst of a countercultural revival that's not just saying yes to certain mind-expanding substances, but saying it loudly and proudly.

"Humans have an innate need to experience altered states of consciousness," writes Oxford anthropologist Richard Rudgley in Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society (Kodansha, 1993), and "to ignore or repress our own nature in this way is to neglect our own capacities." Rudgley examines the ways various cultures have used psychoactive substances throughout history--most often in strictly determined secular and religious contexts--and suggests that Western culture might benefit from a study of how these substances have been integrated positively into the fabric of other societies.

Rudgley's book is one of several recent critical writings that have rushed into the vacuum of drug war silence--what author David Lenson refers to as the time of "Just Say Nothing." Lenson, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, analyzes our culture's love-hate relationship with mood-altering substances from the user's point of view in On Drugs (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). He writes about the differences between "drugs of desire" (mainly cocaine, crack, and speed) and "drugs of pleasure" (mainly marijuana and hallucinogens). The former he sees as reflecting the main ideology of Western culture--consumerism--in that frequent users tend to fixate on acquiring more to the exclusion of everything else, while the latter tend to interdict the consumerist mind-set by letting users savor everyday activities and objects already at hand.

Stoners who prefer getting high on their own neurochemistry are also sharing thoughts and strategies. In Stoned Free (Loompanics Unlimited, 1995), Patrick Wells and Douglas Rushkoff run down a laundry list of familiar and offbeat techniques for altering consciousness legally. They include phosphene stimulation (i.e., rubbing your eyes), holotropic breathing, tantric sex, kundalini yoga, reading (Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and the psychedelic studies of Terence and Dennis McKenna rate high), making noise or music, and various forms of sensory deprivation. Belinda Gore's Ecstatic Body Postures: An Alternate Reality Workbook (Bear, 1995) offers a variety of shamanic posturing techniques that facilitate trance states.