Twelve years ago, on my fourteenth birthday, I decided to smoke cannabis for the first time. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision, nor one owing to peer-pressure; I had, in fact, meticulously planned the initiation for several months. By embodying every aspect of ‘60s counterculture, an effort which my progressive parents enthusiastically supported, I’d be mentally prepared for the inevitable first puff. Lying supine on the floor while listening to Purple Haze, I attempted to will myself into being high, imagining myself, joint in hand, on the grassy fields of Woodstock, much to the joy of my father, whose teenage vinyl collection I ploughed through. That year, Santa delivered both a Les Paul and a copy of The Communist Manifesto under the Christmas tree. It was my destiny to become stoned.

At fourteen, I had already picked up on the nebulous relationship between drugs and culture. Mistakenly, however, I thought that a strategy of historical immersion would prepare me for the precision-engineered lab-grown kush of the 2010s. When the fateful day arrived, my friends and I – all of us debutants – lit up our sativa-rich bud while playing dubstep from a Bluetooth speaker. It was all too ahistorical. Haunted by lost futures, I ‘greened-out’, was ridiculed by my friends, and decided, from that day on, to stick to alcohol – the perennial intoxicant of humankind. Perhaps getting high in the future would be different. As culture would evolve and take new forms, its preferred drug of choice might, too.

“As a universal pillar of social and cultural life, everywhere and throughout all time, intoxication is one of the human activities that strongly reflects the values, anxieties and structures of society.” So writes Stuart Walton, author of A Cultural History of Intoxication, who answered my questions about the future of drugs via email. “Its role as a central category of experience reflects the ways in which people seek to amend, or entirely displace, their apprehension of reality.”

Walton lends credence to my suspicion that intoxicants are underappreciated indicators of the direction society is heading. Perhaps futurists should be teaming up with chemists and horizon-scan for concentrations of novel substances in the sewage systems of major cities. For now, however, I’ll make do with interviewing cultural historians and pharmacologists.

Walton’s argument also helps explain why intoxicants aren’t merely considered physiological harms to their critics, but vices: morally questionable habits that corrupt one’s character. Aside from their varying capacity towards addiction or abuse, intoxicants display a latent rejection or at least questioning of the world as given to us – a desire to change one’s perception of reality. It stands in stark contrast to the common ideal of the pious ascetic who demonstrates their reverence for God or Nature’s creation by renouncing desire altogether.

As such, novel intoxicants have historically been associated with notions of progress. “Those who adopt them see them as agents of modernity, progress and luxury consumption; those who do not tend to consider them harmful and morally threatening,” says Mike Jay, historian and author of the book Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. He elaborates further on the cultural acceptance of drugs throughout history:

“Tea, coffee, tobacco and chocolate were all prohibited in different parts of Europe before their use became normalised and governments switched from banning to taxing them. In the 1980s cocaine was a luxury, the marker of a new moneyed elite; today it has spread through all classes of society. In the 1960s psychedelics were the emblem of a radical counterculture, now they are embraced by a broad spectrum of society as an aid to wellness and spiritual experience.”’

The tendency of novel intoxicants to start out as utopian countercultural emblems is by no means a rule, however. Walton remarks that after the idealism of the sixties receded, “punk rock ushered in a wave of youthful revolt driven by anger and disgust, nihilism more than idealism, [where] the brutally jagged stimulant, amphetamine, became the house drug.” He bookends the 20th century with MDMA, a drug which came to “represent the hopes and aspirations of people who wanted to break down social barriers.” Walton maintains that the ecstasy-fuelled rave culture of the 1990s was “the last period in the West when there was still optimism about the chances that the world was getting better, more peaceful, society more tolerant and inclusive.” MDMA captured the nineties zeitgeist.

Though intoxicants can reflect the hopes and fears of a society, they can also be downstream of a society’s demands. The 19th century temperance movement against alcohol, for example, can be contextualised as a reaction to the punctuality and precision required of industrialisation. The mild merry of agrarian society, often reliant on low ABV beer instead of water, would have led to inefficiencies in the factory. Jay highlights how novel intoxicants emerged that fitted this industrial (and now post-industrial) age in tandem with alcohol’s increasing taboo: “we live by a clock set to the rhythms of work and leisure hours. For work, we need stimulants: caffeine is ubiquitous, but the demand for stronger stimulants is met, in different cultures, by amphetamines, coca, khat, and pharmaceuticals such as Ritalin, Adderall, and modafinil.”

If it’s possible to determine a relationship between a culture and its drug of choice, can we extrapolate sociocultural trends to determine the intoxicant of the future? Or is this brand of cultural criticism only possible in hindsight, a useful narrative to make sense of the past but inadequate in its anticipatory power?

The answers are mixed. Jay doesn’t get my hopes up: “Attempts at authoritative prediction by government agencies, institutes, or pharmacologists have a poor success rate, even in the short term. In the thirty years or so I have been working in the field, neither I nor anyone else I am aware of predicted, for example, the emergence of nitrous oxide, ketamine, or novel stimulants such as mephedrone as street drugs.” Nor does he place much trust in the future relationship between culture and intoxicant. “The market for intoxicants is now mature, complex and atomized,” he says. “It is unlikely that any single drug will capture ‘the zeitgeist’ in the future in the way that, for example, LSD did with the 1960s (such characterisations are typically over-simplified in any case).”

First come the constraints. Beyond being a cause and effect of cultural norms, Jay notes that the adoption and use of drugs reflect several contingent factors, such as “local botany, patterns of trade, economics and manufacturing, regulatory regimes,” et cetera. Moreover, he argues that there are also divergent incentives concerning innovation in the market for illegal versus legal intoxicants: “The market [for illicit drugs] is driven by what has been called ‘the iron law of prohibition’, which states that in a criminal market, the profit motive ensures that drugs will always gravitate towards their most concentrated, lucrative, and dangerous forms.”

In contrast, Jay reminds me that “legal pharmaceutical intoxicants are more likely to be lucratively patentable compounds, given the huge expenses involved in drug development and licensing.” As such, he believes that “regulatory considerations are at least as important as consumer tastes and trends in determining which drugs will find a market.”

Enter Matthew Baggot, an American neuroscientist and the CEO of Tactogen, a public benefit corporation based in the San Francisco Bay Area that aims to develop novel MDMA-like drugs for medicine. Baggot first reminds me that “intoxicant” is a loaded term suggesting an inherent toxicity of psychoactive effects. He prefers “inebriant” instead.

“One consistent utopian motif in drug development has been the search for a nontoxic drug, one without hangover or withdrawal,” Baggot says. “In an important sense, this nontoxic dream drug has been the drug of the near future since the dawn of modern pharmacology.” In true Palo Alto style, he introduces the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s idea of the pharmakon – defined as both poison and cure – as a more accurate way of understanding future drugs:

“[Steigler] uses [pharmakon] to refer not only to drugs, but to all of the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures. With this lens, all technology is seen as ambivalent – simultaneously therapeutic and toxic. Each object can function as cure or poison depending on its context. Future intoxicants will succeed based on the cultural context we give them.”

As someone working in the industry, Baggot argues that international drug legalisation created in the late 20th century have effectively foreclosed, or at least radically diminished, the possibility of innovative inebriants taking off, too:

“Eventually, the psychedelic cultural exuberance, as well as real drug toxicities such as thalidomide-induced birth defects and stimulant addiction, motivated a bureaucratic regulatory apparatus. This apparatus increasingly limited prescription and nonmedical drug use. One effect of this was the creation of an interpretive system to classify new drugs based on their similarities to known ones. This international system greatly limits the possibility that truly novel future inebriants will find a legal niche.” Baggot adds that the Czech Republic has recently implemented an “innovative system” for allowing the marketing of low-risk inebriants, though he admits that “it is too early to judge the success of the effort.”

I’m bemused. Does the slow cancellation of the future now apply to drugs, too? According to these experts, the iron law of prohibition means that illicit intoxicants take their strongest form regardless of consumer wants, and regulatory constraints within the pharmaceutical industry stop the take-off of curated designer drugs that reflect the desires of the public.

But soon my worry becomes amplified. Another curious development relevant for the future of getting high is the widespread adoption of GLP-1 agonists. Though intended as an appetite-suppressing weight-loss medication, increasing evidence seems to show that drugs like Ozempic and WeGovy may also blunt the appeal of addictive behaviours more generally. This, Baggot argues, “makes them “surprisingly well suited to this desperate age where consuming less is a competitive advantage.”

In the humorous 2023 article “Ozempic is Bad for Business” written for Bloomberg, the columnist Matt Levine argued that industries from fast-food to online shopping would suffer financially in a GLP-1 saturated world. But what if Ozempic is Bad for Inebriation? One reported side-effect of the drug is anhedonia, the reduced interest in activities one typically enjoys. A condition where desire itself entirely dissipates. Might that dark libidinal death-drive seeking the danger inherent to novel intoxicants, as well as its curious utopian counterpart, then disappear, too?

Baggot assures me that there is some wiggle-room for novel forms of inebriation, though he casts doubt on the legitimacy of so called “substance stories” of the past, which may mainly be “ways we organize our understanding of today.” “History, like science fiction,” Baggot says, “is mostly about the present.” He elaborates further:

“I do think there are feedback loops by which our ongoing narrated present creates or limits zones of possibility in which people innovate in pharmacology. Important aspects of this include the economy, laws that regulate it, and people’s needs both to work and have satisfying non-work lives.” Unlike the other experts, who are more hesitant in their predictions, Baggot casts a bet on one drug that will fit the future: MDMA (again), which he expects “to be refined over time and to further increase in cultural prominence.”

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given Baggot’s company, Tactogen, develops MDMA-like drugs pending DEA approval. However, he does bolster his prediction by pointing to trends in wellness and self-improvement culture: “Talk of psychedelics has often focused on ideas like creativity, insights, and transcendence,” he says. “However, one school of psychedelic therapy emphasizes acceptance and commitment, which may be even more important for making successful life improvements. Consistent with this therapeutic approach, one of MDMA’s core effects seems to be that it facilitates acceptance instead of avoidance. I anticipate this effect to be important for humanity in the coming years.”

It’s not all ecstasy-inspired designer drugs, however. Both Baggot and Jay identify the attention economy as a sociotechnological development that could carve out possibility zones for novel drug cultures to emerge. “I think there is a separate market for substances that help us escape capitalism’s attentional black holes and coordinate group-level responses to the challenges of the moment,” Baggot says. “I would predict continuing success for intoxicants that help us to tolerate the enormity of reality, relate to each other in authentic, non-commercial ways, and take positive actions together.”

Another way to tolerate this “enormity of reality” and the crises we face isn’t by mutual connection, but sedation. Jay reminds me of “younger cohorts [who] are looking not so much to intensify experiences but to reduce anxiety by choosing sedatives such as Valium and Xanax, or dissociatives such as ketamine that numb and distance them.” As such, he thinks that this trend towards “less challenging intoxicants” may continue, or that “succeeding generations react against it.”

If my fourteen-year-old self had been ahead of the curve, he would’ve chosen a drug of the future: a cocktail of Xanax, MDMA-lite, and Ozempic before a digital detox wellness retreat. Even so, the cultural zeitgeists I had identified with drugs of the past could not have been extrapolated into the future. Atomised doomscrollers do not create a homogenous culture, unfortunately, and when they do coalesce, it’s usually to lament the slow erasure of cultural novelty altogether.

This creates an incoming intoxicants landscape that is fractured, where drugs helping people cope with reality (MDMA), detach from it (opiates), and optimise within it (stimulants, nootropics) coexist side by side. Interestingly, none of these present themselves as particularly vice-like, but rather as necessary tools for dealing with significant societal changes ahead. Perhaps drugs as the chosen vice of trend-setting youth will be replaced entirely by gambling on prediction markets, a solitary activity that fits the financialisation of everything.

One possibility for a drug in the future is the popularisation of natural intoxicants traditionally used by indigenous peoples. Drugs like khat and coca leaves might be embraced alongside the analogue and artisanal in a reaction against digitalisation and techno-utopianism. My own prediction is that after a period of ongoing decline and taboo, alcohol will be refashioned as a ’traditional’ intoxicant, too, with drunkenness recast as a protest against the attention economy and optimisation culture more broadly.

Regardless of their form, intoxicants seem here to stay, or at least if we remain subject to our biological wetware and aren’t soon wired up to experience perpetual posthuman bliss. The desire to be intoxicated is a fundamental part of the human condition, Walton says: “It is more reliable in its availability and its effects than love, or art, or transports of the soul, which is not to denigrate any of those categories of experience, only to point out that they so often don’t turn up when needed.”

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