Modes of awareness associated with psychoactive substances

In general, psychoactive substances are used because, however temporarily, they general produce a pleasurable sense of feeling better. This may be relief from feelings of dysphoria (perhaps induced by some psychological disorder) or to aid feelings of euphoria. It may simply be to relax tensions or allay anxiety. Some drugs (in particular, alcohol) may be used to induce conviviality and fellowship. Stimulants are used for their properties of elevating mood and (in the case of hallucinogens) for intensifying of sensory awareness, in particular visual awareness, and for the inducing of transcendent experience. Depressants lead to relaxation, tranquillizing and withdrawal - they may even end in stupor or coma; and anaesthetic drugs are used to produce a high, as are solvents and other substances. Transcendent experience may arise through use of drugs other than those usually defined as hallucinogens, for instance alcohol, laudanum (opium) and nitrous oxide.

However, not all drugs invariably produce the desired effect and they may sometimes produce the reverse of the response aimed for. There is also an opposite effect as the effect of the drug wears off, with feelings of dysphoria or worse. The after effects of alcohol consumption are well known, another example is post-amphetamine depression. Over time, steadily increasing doses may be required to produce the desired effect. Eventually, neuro-physiological changes take place which diminish the pleasurable feeling zone so that higher doses are needed with reducing response and ordinary pleasurable activities are hardly registered.

The mystical state induced by some substances has been and is used in some religious rituals for direct experience of God or a superlative state of human awareness. The existence of such states has called into question the traditional division of states into "sane" and "insane". Current definitions would include a continuum, starting with the disordered and disintegrated states of insanity, then sanity, and finally a superlative state which might be labelled [unsanity]

and which may characteristically slip over into the insane.