ARTICLE
Among the resources at the end of the 'High Society' exhibition was a screen and keyboard on which visitors were invited to submit, anonymously, descriptions of their own drug experiences. They obliged in their hundreds, and the results are now collated online.
The responses offer a unique snapshot of contemporary drug use among London's residents and visitors but they are also a contribution to a fascinating and long-standing scientific problem. Most medicinal drugs can be tested on animals or tissue samples, but drugs that alter consciousness can only be described by human subjects. Can the subjective perceptions of drugged subjects count as scientific evidence? And if not, how can the effects of these drugs be properly understood?
The attempt to describe the drug experience, and the hybrid forms of science, art and literature that have been pressed into service to do so, was at the heart of the exhibition. 'High Society' showed scientists such as Sigmund Freud reaching for the language of poetic description while poets like Charles Baudelaire adopted scientific reportage visual approaches ranged from Henri Michaux's tiny pointillist abstracts inked while on mescaline to the eye-candy overload of Joshua White's psychedelic light show. The task of capturing a fleeting and subjective experience may