_Soma_, in _Brave New World_, is implicitly condemned as an opiate, a mind-luller, an instrument of repression. Huxley’s negative outlook toward the drug is not, though, an expression of work-oriented Puritan morality so much as a classic liberal-humanitarian distrust of technology: the Huxley of 1932 plainly believed that mankind coddled by drugs was something less than what mankind could be. The young Huxley felt contempt for those who needed mechanical aids or who depended on anything other than the force of their own intellects. Many years later, however, a very different Huxley experienced the psychedelic marvels of mescaline and LSD, which kindled in him strong esthetic delight and something akin to spiritual ecstasy. When he next attempted the fictional construction of a utopian commonwealth, in _Island_ (1962), his outlook on mind-altering drugs was far more sympathetic. In this ideal state of the future one uses not the soporific _soma_ but the ecstasy-invoking _moksha_, a mind-expanding hallucinogen. Concerning _moksha_ one character says, “Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names—the _moksha_-medicine, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved.”[2] Huxley is really talking about LSD, and his tone is that of the acid-evangelist. ————————— [2] Huxley, Aldous. _Island._ New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962. p. 157. Drug as contemptible anodyne, drug as gateway to higher reality—those are the poles bounding the handling of drugs in science fiction. The older science fiction was preponderantly negative, as, for example, James Gunn’s _The Joy Makers_, published in 1961 but written half a decade earlier, in which a repressive government sustains itself through mandatory use of euphorics. The same theme can be found in Hartley’s _Facial Justice_ (1960), and in other works. Even when not used as an instrument of totalitarianism, drugs are often seen as dangerous self-indulgence, as in Wellman’s _Dream-Dust from Mars_ (1938), Smith’s _Hellflower_ (1953), or Pohl’s _What to Do Until the Analyst Comes_ (1956). The prototypes for the imaginary drugs described in these stories are alcohol and heroin—drugs which blur the mind and lower the consciousness.