1. Summary of his intellectual career

2. An unhappy consciousness during Franco’s regime
     From Brazil to Spain    Initial Publications  

3. Ibiza and metaphysics
     Reality and Substance    Amnesia, Whores and Wives, and an indictment/an order of committal to trial    Teaching, research and controversies  

4. General History of Drugs

5. Towards his Maturity Work
     The Spirit of Comedy    Portrait of a Libertine (Retrato del  Libertino)    Chaos and Order    Seventy weeks in the Tropics    Research about the Communist movement: The Enemies of Commerce    A History of Thought  

6. Works
    Works 

7. References

Antonio Escohotado Espinosa (Madrid, 5 July 1941) is a Spanish thinker, essayist and university professor whose work, while mainly focused on the disciples of law, philosophy and sociology, has covered a wide range of fields.

Escohotado gained public renown for his research on drugs as well as for his well-known anti-prohibitionist positions. His work's leitmotif is an affirmation of freedom as an antidote to fear or any kind of coercion which pushes human beings towards all sorts of servitudes.

Summary of his intellectual career

Escohotado has declared more than once “not having encouragement/stimulus other than self-clarification, nor having other compass than finding out how each and every thing is born and how it comes to an end”.^[1] Thus, his work has developed as a self-learning process of the wide variety of topics which he addresses applying a genealogical analysis method, a historical approach that organises information chronologically and is distrustful of taxonomies.

During the 1960s he trained as a lawyer/jurist and as a philosopher in the Ortega y Gasset and Zubiri's raciovitalista school of thought, -which based knowledge in the radical reality of life, one of whose essential components is reason itself; and it was named after the term “razón vital” (“vital reason”) coined by Ortega y Gasset influenced by the concepts of “vital reason” and “historical reason” through which he accessed Freud's knowledge and especially that of Hegel,  whose philosophy of religion was the subject of analysis in his PhD thesis The Unhappy Consciousness (1972). This work together with Reality and Substance (1985) - an incursion in the fields of logic and pure metaphysic –lays the foundations of a strong philosophical basis which has underpinned his intellectual production. With De physis a polis (From Physis to Polis) (1975), he went back to the pre-Socratic thinkers while playing a leading role in the emergence of the island of Ibiza as a counter-cultural centre by founding the Amnesia Discothèque (1976), during late-Francoist Spain when democracy was rising in its wake. Over the years, he evolved from a major focus in the abstract in his youth and at first maturity, to a growing interest in data extracted from the observation of the most concrete reality, choosing the option for “an observant science currently pushed aside by its predictive stream branch trend”.^[2]

Between then and now he devotes himself to the study and disclosure of the origin and evolution of impersonal human entities which represent complexity itself, “which aren´t volitional subjects nor are inert objects, but a third type of being – such as human understanding, family, or political economy - which result from the concurrency/coincidence of unlimited individual actions in some sort of unplanned beforehand order.”^[3] This interest for reality as an emancipatory principle from over-simplification situates Escohotado's work in the hinge between ontology and Human Sciences. According to Hume's expression–: his interdisciplinary perspective combines great diversity of knowledge and interests from a humanist position.  On the bases of logic and metaphysics, he gets deep into epistemology and science theory, deriving afterwards towards even more strictly human phenomena such as economy and political power, as well as gender myths, family and sexual customs, or the inebriety modalities of inebriation. The common momentum in all these fields is the affirmation of human freedom as an antidote against fear or against the authoritarian impositions alien to personal responsibility.^[4]

Since his militancy in secrecy during Franco's regime, his political positions have been evolving coming to a self-definition as “a liberal democrat”. Meanwhile, the idea that “any political utopia ends up being indistinguishable from whatever eugenic project, which is no more than an euphemism used for genocidal endeavours.” ^[5] matured in his work. Politically, he is a singular thinker in the Spanish outlook, and he is not always well understood since he doesn't inscribe himself in the traditional left/right axis. He focuses instead on the matter of freedom/authoritarianism, rejecting utopianism and authoritarianism from a more pragmatic and rationalist perspective. Escohotado becomes a historian for his contemporaries as well as an analyst of current affairs, social costumes and culture during the Transition through his numerous articles published first in El País and afterwards in El Mundo and Diario 16. For instance, those state crimes perpetrated by GAL (“Antiterrorist Liberation Groups”) were revealed to the public by Escohotado in editorials and essays about the sociology of political power such as Majestades, crímenes y víctimas (Majesties, Crimes and Victims)(1987) or El espíritu de la comedia (The Spirit of Comedy), which received the Anagrama Essay Award in 1992.

As author of the book Historia General de las Drogas (General History of Drugs) (1989), which has been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Check, he gained public renown in the last decades of the 20th century by defending his anti-prohibitionist positions through articles and public appearances in television debates. He practiced the bioassay by trying, classifying and describing the physical and subjective effects of more than thirty different psychoactive substances for drafting a handbook. After several editions this user's manual ended up being entitled Learning from Drugs (1990-1995). He has maintained numerous controversies in the media due to his opinions about subjects related to moral issues such as drug consumption itself, prostitution or euthanasia. Just as his followers consider him as representing independence of judgment or as cultivating freedom of thought, his detractors consider him as representing intellectual impertinence. Occasionally he has caused rejection in certain academic circles which accused him of professional intrusion. The reaction encountered after the publication of the epistemological manifesto entitled Caos y Orden (Chaos and Order), 1999 Espasa Essay Award, illustrates it.

It can be asserted that Escohotado is not only a thoughtful person but, as it can be discerned through looking at previously mentioned public controversies, he is also a person of action. Driven frequently by his temperament, he has found himself in uncomfortable or even risky situations in which scholars are rarely to be found. Examples include those during his clandestine leftist militancy, his imprisonment as a result of drug-related matters or even the police persecution suffered after the scandal caused by his TV interventions in Argentina.

Professionally he developed an intelligent work as translator encompassing more than forty titles such as those of Newton, Hobbes, Jefferson and Bakunin, among others. He disseminated in particular the works of Thomas Szasz and Erns Jünger. He has taught as a professor of Philosophy and Methodology of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology in UNED until his retirement in 2013. Presently, he is immersed in the study of the History of the Communist movement with the drafting of “The Enemies of Commerce, A Moral History of Property” (2008-2014), an exhaustive monograph in which he has published already three volumes.

An unhappy consciousness during Franco’s regime

From Brazil to Spain

The Escohotado family is a long-standing resident of Madrid's northwest mountains. Their first outstanding member was Vicente, Antonio's great grandfather, who was mayor of Galapagar as well as a participant in the Glorious Revolution in1868.^[6] His son, Escohotado's grandfather, who was also called Vicente, was one of the first inhabitants of the village in receiving a grant to study Law,^[7] and by the time he had published an extensive history of theatre in verse, La Teatrada,^[8] as well as other books about plans and songs, he moved from representative ad litem to mayor of El Escorial.^[9] His sixth son Román (1908-1970), father of Antonio Escohotado, started off by voting socialist Julián Besteiro and ended up signing the Falange Manifesto.^[10] He was Secretariat head of Dionisio Ridruejo during his short phase as a Minister of the Movement, he also directed Radio Nacional de España (National Radio of Spain) since 1941, winning the main journalism awards (including the Mariano de Cavia) and he was press officer from 1946 to 1956.^[11]

His son, Antonio, showed an early vocation for knowledge:

“From a very early age I felt attracted to the less enjoyable holdings, at least initially, of my family’s library; and I still keep a childhood notebook with the pompous title “History of Western Thought” in which I copied fragments of the homonymous work by Bertrand Russell with infantile seriousness. Back then, ten years of my life in Rio were about to come to an end.”^[12]

When the family returned to Spain, Escohotado experienced an abrupt contrast between the tropical paradise of his first childhood and the National-Catholicism's grey and severe society. This lead him to forge a rebellious spirit prompted by authoritarianism and sexual repression.

Despite having remained in a cell for a good part of the two summers required by the university militias, due to the fact that “his tent had become a venue for seminars on Marxism and disobedience”,^[13] his lack of military spirit didn't prevent him from making arrangements to join the Vietcong ^[14] armed forces in its war against the United States.  A chronic hepatitis enabled him to shorten his period of service and obliged him to reflect on his future. He decided to prepare for official entrance examinations which were compatible with his leftist political commitment – this excluded diplomacy, career to which he seemed naturally inclined due to his father's example, his languages skills and his general culture. Finally, in 1964 he entered the Official Credit Institute (Instituto de Crédito Oficial) (ICO) where he managed the service of Companies’ Merger and Concentration, for five years of economical prosperity.

Then he began publishing, in addition to teaching practical classes and seminaries in the departments of Politics and Philosophy where he developed relationships with colleagues such as Carlos Moya, Eugenio Trías and Felipe Martínez Marzoa. He also discovered some talented young men such as Savater, Azúa and Echeverría. They were joined in one way or another by the world announced by the May 1968 events in France as well as Woodstock,^[15] which was also a breeding ground for more specifically anarchistic cores such as that of Agustín García Calvo. They were all part of an improvised tribe whose reasonable wing continued their studies and education while the more radicalized one would rediscover terrorism. Others, such as Escohotado, decided to lead a life free from consumerism while embracing so-called “sexual revolution of the 70s”.

Initial Publications

He began publishing with José Ortega Spottorno, who had just re-launched a publishing house, and he was after re-publishing la Revista de Occidente magazine- both of them founded by his father Ortega y Gasset. It was there where the article “Hallucinogens and everyday world” ^[16] appeared for the first time, becoming his first incursion in this field, and containing the experiences described by Michaux and Huxley as more immediate references. His reflections resulted in the writing of a series of bioessays, which some decades later brought him to compose a first cultural history of drugs and a phenomenology of the main psychoactive substances. These initial publications disguised certain conceptual immaturity with exhibitions of scholar erudition. In them Escohotado mixes any of the issues treated with his coetaneous philosophical passion, the study of the works of Hegel and Freud, two authors which will influence him permanently.

In a similar manner he writes his PhD thesis, The moral philosophy of young Hegel. It was presented in the year 1970 much to the annoyance of part of the tribunal that received it as an apology for Marx's teacher, who was, moreover, a protestant”. In several occasions, this resulted in the absence of the proper quorum required to qualify the work.^[17] In Spain, back then, there were some still  shocked with what its introduction had announced:

“To turn into concept (Bergriff) that which the New Testament only offers as a representation (Vorstellung). As a representation, for instance, the divine nature of Jesus is proved by miracles and dogmas, while as a concept it points more towards the fact that the divine and the human belong to each other / are deeply bound together in an inseparable manner, ultimately, that’s “human rights”.

When it got published as The unhappy consciousness, essay about Hegel’s philosophy of religion (Revista de Occidente, 1972), it provoked an academic stir. It ended up been included in the list of heretic books Index, while winning the Nueva Crítica Award, a prize with a brief lifespan. Forty years later, recapitulating his research, Escohotado maintains “a distinction between spirit and positive religion”. Christianity, embodying the tearing between life and its fossil, would be reality captured in the form of fantasy and vice versa, the truth estranged of itself. That was my first contact with the divergence between intention and result”. ^[18]

The academic obstacles resulted in the earlier appearance of his subsequent book Marcuse, utopia and reason (Marcuse, utopía y razón) (Alianza Editorial), focused on examining the compatibility of Marx, Hegel and Freud, proposed by one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. It would be one of the firsts, if not the first monograph dedicated to this school in Spain, as well as his first sales success. The edition run out of copies in just a month, maybe because half of Europe had woken up those days with inscriptions on the wall such as “Marx, Mao and Marcuse” But the author opposed himself to reprint it, understanding that it was written with precipitation and in “full syndrome of self-importance”. After these initial works, Escohotado starts detaching himself more and more from utopic positions.

Ibiza and metaphysics

Thanks to an unpaid leave of absence from his post as an official which in principle would last more than two years, Eschotado launched himself in 1970 into experimenting a life without luxuries, sustained with the revenues generated from his translation work and getting by without conventional habits. In those days the island offered traditional Ibiza country houses (casas payesas) designed following ancestral techniques, without neither electricity nor water but very cheap. They were converted by their new inhabitants into a sort of monasteries, so devoted to collective life and to orgiastic traditions as those of the Middle Ages. Although only a minority had vehicles, walking or hitch hiking was sufficient for getting around to sustain a highly intense social life. Everything revolved around loving flirtation framed in a diffused plan to reinvent life with material austerity and alternative drugs.

It was precisely deep experiences with visionary substances such as LSD,^[19] as well as unceasing study, what made the author elaborate his own metaphysics treatise.^[20] The first part of the project involved a revision of the first philosophical testimonies – From Physis to Polis. The evolution of Greek thought from Tales to Socrates (De physis a polis, La evolución del pensamiento griego desde Tales a Sócrates) (Anagrama, 1975), where he tries to organise thematically the dispersed fragments of each Pre-Socratic. The results are just as disputable as those achieved by piecing the missing work of Heraclitus back together, even though the style gains in fluidity and expressive economy.

The Prologue of the book ironises about the figure of the “specialist in the field” who dedicates nine-tenths of his space to comment his colleagues’ observations, and not a single part of it to the actual commented author. The Epilogue ironises about French postmodernity, which was at its seed stage back then, called to épater (shock the bourgeoisie) with thesis such as the “Pre-Socratic artificialist position” suggested by Clèment Rosset.  Just like the specialist, decided to talk about himself in any case, the postmodernist does the proper thing by imitating intellectuals such as Lacan, Deleuze or Althusser. According to Escohotado, they are focused on disguising the inanities with a jargon of which mystery starts and ends with twisting grammar.

Reality and Substance

The second part of Escohotado's metaphysical project materialized in his work Reality and Substance (Realidad y Substancia) (1985). From Physis to Polis concludes with the simultaneous birth of the physical world as a cosmos emancipated from the resource of magic, together with that of democracy as an order sustained on civil liberties. Reality and Substance starts with the physical world as “a unity of the difference between being and thought”, where the philosopher's task is to go from “the fact to the making” analysing modalities of action.^[21]

The classic metaphysical or ontological treatise was already a genre in disuse or even considered as obsolete by many back then. It starts by defining basic discourse features in order to deduce the subsequent categories linking them from the first to the last one, and Escohotado chooses:

“(…) to reverse Hegelian logic, returning from the subject to the object, from the Idea to Nature. It is an architectural exercise, dependent on the ancient temple, which only aspires to re-establish its symmetry (…) in order to avoid the monopoly of an unsubstantial consciousness as well as the unrealism which follows from subjetivising the principle of things; in order to place time within objectivity, distinguishing it from the objectivity reduced by the subject to an inertial mass, where past and future are interchangeable (…) to be able to affirm idealism’s assertions, as well as its denials. “^[22]

Commenting on An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth by Bertrand Russell in 1944, Einstein detected “a terrible fear of metaphysics (…) and I am particularly pleased to confirm that its last chapter reconises the impossibility of managing without it. I can only criticise in this respect the bad intellectual conscience perceived in between the lines”.^[23] Escohotado abounds in this perspective with two extensive appendixes about positivism and logical empiricism, which are both gravediggers of metaphysics as well as guardians of a corporative orthodoxy.” This “bestows the mind a subordinate place” ^[24] In his opinion, “what is common in both is a pseudo-empirical attitude, which didn’t even reach the point of considering the relationship between being and thought, guided by the goal of converting science in a new religious institution, equally dogmatic and sectarian”. 

He moved on to study complex phenomena, spending twelve years dedicated to “polish the prose poetry which is metaphysics”. These years would be remembered by the author as the result of an “anachronistic stubbornness”. Its only a posteriori justification could be to create familiarity with “those few words – essence, existence, matter, cause, accident…- on which the sense of the other words rests upon”,^[25] as a sine qua non condition to be able to think for himself.

Amnesia, Whores and Wives, and an indictment/an order of committal to trial

From 1970 until 1983 Escohotado translates a bit more than 40 titles for several publishers, among them the only big anthology of Jefferson, Hobbes’ Leviathan and the Philosphiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Newton.

After receiving his widowed mother's inheritance in 1976, he came up with the idea of transforming a big and old payesian style country house into the “tribe”’s meeting place – outfitted basically with equipment and instruments to play life music. This house would end up becoming Amnesia, one of the most multitudinary and well-known discothèques in the world.^[26]

Shortly after this he published Family Stories, four myths about sex and duty (Historias de Familia, cuatro mitos sobre sexo y deber) (Anagrama,1978), his first anthropological essay. This work reviews the marital model illustrated by Mary and Joseph, in the light of the comparison with the relationships between Gilgamesh and Ishtar, Zeus and Hera or Hercules and Deainira. In this analysis of the foundational myths of genre and family, the following parade in chronological order: sacred prostitutes, amazons, spouses driven by the spitefulness to the assassination of their husbands, mothers annihilated by filial abnegation, vicious fathers, domesticated nurturing ones, and the figure of Hercules himself, the first mythological proletarian, who pays with paid work an outstanding degree of health and strength. In Escohotado's estimation, these timeless figures of the age-old consciousness become evident in the primordial tension between the two poles of the archaic family: the patriarch who devours the progeny and the matriarch who conspires to convert him into a eunuch-like at the service of their offspring.

The book was thoroughly reworked resulting in Whores and Spouses (Rameras y Esposas) (Anagrama 1993). The essay surprised firstly because of the chronicles contained in the Apocryphal Gospels – all of them being canonical texts -.  Which show the child and adolescent Jesus as a despot with magical powers used to always get away with anything. But it includes no less original parallel analysis such as the phenomenon of ritual prostitution in Mesopotamia –by which virgin women were obliged to remain on the temple's steps and to give themselves to the first man who placed a coin in their open palm. Also the conflict between decency and freedom imposed upon Roman women, as only those identified as whores enjoyed the legal age status. The others were minor individuals under guardianship by some man, from birth to tomb. The last section reviews the ancient family law, followed by a very controversial epilogue about the feminist movement.

Troubles with the local police started with the foundation of Amnesia, and culminated in 1983 with his prosecution trial for his involvement in cocaine trafficking, being accused of leading the so-called “hippie mafia”, using his own condition of writer and professor as a front. – Eschotado had returned to the National University of Distance Education in Spain (UNED) as a part-time assistant professor in 1980 -. The Diario 16 journal commented back then: “The professor of ethics is a hard drug dealer”. The scandal heated up when, two days after, El País newspaper published an opinion page written by Escohotado himself.^[27] He claimed to have been a victim of an entrapment, obliged by his own sense of friendship to take part in a drug trading operation in which both buyers and sellers were policemen. During the three months of pre-trial detention he was forced to share cell with the head of a Corsican-Marseilles group who was a criminal with an open file in Interpol on extortion and on three assassinations. In addition to that, the fact that he was also put under pressure to collaborate with one of the sides, none of which lacked double agents, made him take the decision to leave the island.

The trial stage of the criminal proceedings took place five years later, where he was convicted of “drug trafficking of factual impossibility” or “failed attempt of drug trafficking” ^[28] («tráfico de drogas en grado de tentativa imposible») Criminal Code concept which shortly after would be substituted by the case law doctrine of provoked crime (delito provocado). Instead of appealing against the judgment he opted for a one-year “humble but, nevertheless, paid holiday” ^[29] in Cuenca's penitentiary, where he remained in solitary confinement. This allowed him to work with no interruptions, just receiving mail and food through the lower hollow of the door.

Teaching, research and controversies

The five years which passed between his prosecution and his imprisonment are, by wide margin, the more creative and fertile ones in Escohotado's biography. He published practically one book a year,^[30] while writing monthly opinion pages for El Paat the time.sionerontation with the  his media presence. ís as well as increasing dramatically his media presence due to a TV confrontation with the narcotic drugs chief commissioner at the time.^[31] Escohotado organised two courses about pharmacology and civil disobedience – with speakers such as Albert Hofmann, Thomas Szasz and Alexander Shulgin among others -, which broke attendance records of assistance to the summer university courses. This unleashed a new TV trend of debates on drug prohibition in the nineties.

It was also during this time that he hardly managed to pass all suitability tests in order to become a tenured professor, in charge of the Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science subject at UNED (National University of Distance Education in Spain), where he would remain until his retirement. Following the publication of General History of Drugs (Historia general de las drogas), which, despite its 1500 pages, won extraordinary public and critical acclaim, he gained “an army of followers and only two or three detractors”.^[32]

The first text of this period is Majesties, Crimes and Victims (Majestades, crímenes y víctimas), an essay on legal sociology in which he provides an overview of a seemingly disparate bloc of crimes– illegal propaganda, homosexuality, apostasy, euthanasia, blasphemy, prostitution, magical practices, pharmacological idiosyncrasy, pornography and contraception. - Whose common denominator is “to remove the borders between morality and law, with inevitable corrupting effects for both spheres”^[33] After analysing different manifestations of each one of them, Escohotado concludes that condemning voluntarily requested services between adults, or publicly manifested prohibited thoughts actually create crimes against a solely alleged victim, where the grievance is not received by a specific flesh-and-blood person but by an auctoritas of religious origin which declares itself offended party even without participating in the incident. All these groups of behaviour derive from “the archaic unjust par excellence which is the crime of lèse-majesté or injured majesty, a challenge to the prince’s powers which secularized societies shift towards the new majestic powers, sometimes camouflaged by scientific pretexts such as the “Pharmacracy” described by Thomas Szasz.^[34]

Freedom, enshrined as a supreme political value by the democratic constitutions, is incompatible with any crime of mere challenge. Specially considering that “any crime of lèse-majesté is finally a crime of injured or lèse-humanity, which represents the slave societies inertia to be governed by a military-clerical logic.” This analysis aroused the interest of criminologists, public prosecutors and judges. In April 1989, two years after the appearance of the essay, the jurisprudence issued the first judgment of acquittal due to provoked crime (delito provocado). Since then, the Spanish judicature has been recalcitrant to confuse moral and law, and nearly all crimes of lèse-majesté - starting with blasphemy- lost validity. Escohotado has continued to draw the attention to the legal status of euthanasia (contempt of Divine Providence), and even more so about the crime of suicide assistance (contempt to the medical authority) as outstanding issues.

General History of Drugs

Main article: General History of Drugs

Opting for “the pharmacological enlightenment, which lays out this field as one more object of knowledge, where the quintessence of danger focuses on ignorance” Escohotado composed a chronicle oriented to thoroughly document the matter:

“(…) Replacing conjectures and future possibilities – what would happen if this or that drug changed its status – by a comprehensive list of examples about what happened and when. This is because, practically, there is no psychoactive drug that has ever stopped being considered both a panacea and an infernal potion, depending on collateral factors in each case. Among those factors are xenophobia, and political, economical and theological interests. The competition between pagan communions and the Christian rite of mass, for instance, started prompting the witch-hunt in Europe and America.” «Autoexposición académica» (http://www.escohotado.com/articulosdirectos/curriculum.htm)  

He lists a host of examples: wine terrified the Greco-Roman civilization, resulting in several bans on its consumption; drinking coffee was punished with mutilation and gallows in Russia and Egypt, just like Tobacco in Persia; Paraguayan mate was rejected by the Vatican as a satanic vehicle. It was enough to gather chronologically the details of the reactions to each new drug to be able to open a window which had been shuttered until then in general history.

Perhaps this work's most outstanding general concept appears in chapter one – “Magic, pharmacy and religion”-, when he draws conclusions of the analogy between phármakos, (drug) and pharmakós (scapegoat) - Greek terms originated from the Indo-European pharmak-. Then he proposes two divergent modalities of the concept of sacrifice, which is the heart of all the rites instituted to purge guilt. The first alternative formalises atonement as a mystical banquet or communion, consummating sacrifice by the collective intake of a substance, which transfigures the faithful's spirits, being experienced as an interiorization of the deity.^[35] The other one, based on the physical transference of evil/impurity, sacrifices animals or people in order to ingratiate with the deity, ultimately being the root for all type of further decontaminating “crusade”.

Another provocative aspect of the study was the recovery of the sobria ebrietas spirit, exemplary incarnated by Socrates in some Platonic Dialogues, resurgent with a liberal spirit since the 18th century. Escohotado documents the extent to which the psychoactive arsenal began again to be thought of as a resource to increase not only intuition and introspection but also self-control and work performance. Many distinguished characters such as Goethe, Goya, Wagner, Bismarck, and Freud imitated emperor Marcus Aurelius, who took opium on a regular basis on the advice of Galeno, providing an illustrative contrast with the junkie figure originated from the prohibition, who uses that very same substance or its derivatives as an alibi to declare to be a human wreck. According to the introduction:

“In order to meet the book’s title, to combine very diverse disciplines was no less required than to progressively collect widely scattered data. Even if ignored, this matter is no less relevant as a chapter in the history of religion or medicine, but it was transformed overnight into an explosive subject, such as sexuality, at the end of the 19th century. After millennia of ludic, therapeutic and sacramental use, psychotropic drugs became an outstanding techno-scientific business, which started bothering North American Puritanism and ended up moralising the whole world’s law, while threatening the economy and tempting art.”^[36]

Among the first reviews was that of Fernando Savater, in El País’ literary supplement:

“A new phenomenology of consciousness (…) A unique book in the world bibliography, not only because of its wideness and complexity but also due to its propose and depth.”

Since then, nobody questioned the data nor the conclusions presented in his work, turning, that way, into the main reference work on this matter. Shortly after, an abbreviated version was translated into diverse languages.^[37] Maybe no other book of similar extent has sold, in Spanish, about a hundred thousand copies. Encouraged for such a reception Esochotado completed the work in 1992 with an appendix dedicated to self-essay: Learning from drugs: uses and abuses, prejudices and challenges, (Aprendiendo de las drogas: usos y abusos, prejuicios y desafíos) which inaugurated a genre dedicated to “the practical theory of psychoactive substances”. This meant experimenting with such compounds, mentioning about a hundred of them and analysing closely the most common used cases- in both black and white market-, such as alcohol, heroine, hemp, ether, benzodiazepines, cocaine, LSD, Coffee, ketamine or MDMA.

He analyzes drugs as a way towards self-discovery, maturity and dialogue or even simple entraiteinment:

“Drugs prompt chemical modifications which can also induce solitude, silence, abstinence, pain, fear. Chemically, there is no way to distinguish a person who is under the effects of drugs and under the effects of yoga. Chemically, we are nothing but a set of reactions. The problem is that society tells you that, even if you are chemically the same, that one came in the good way and the other through the backdoor.”^[38]

“Deepening in the rule “Know Thyself”, which follows the Socratic principle, a principle of ethics. It's the rite of passage into adulthood of the advanced Western societies at the beginning of the 21st century. Practice shows who has good or bad taste and whether or not the person has self-control. It also shows if beneath his/her apparent education there is either a hidden authoritarian monster, who is resentful or depressed, or conversely, it has a Freudian healthy “id” (namely, the unconscious) capable of enjoying. Drugs provide the human condition with more control, more capacity to cope with life's challenges. With the banning came also the victimised alibi, which allows people to claim this great falsehood: “Oh!, I didn’t want to but I became a slave without realising and now I am a poor human wreck. I allow myself to rob my co-citizens and not to keep my word.”^[39]

Instead of classifying drugs as legal or illegal, hard or soft, or according to their respective chemical bases, the author arranges them in groups following functional terms. They are evaluated on the extent to which they meet the expected or promised level of satisfaction, and the needs are defined as “peace, verve and travel”. They are arranged by needs after having clarified the fact that many psychoactive substances fulfill several of them. The author examines each substance one by one from variables such as minimum active dose, median lethal dose, tolerance factor, subjective and objective effects, synergies, antagonisms, and withdrawal syndromes. In addition, it includes sections dedicated to the cultural framework (“main uses”), as well as the mythology linked to each one of them. The epilogue begins by saying: “The same rope used by the alpinist to climb, is also used by the suicidal man to hung himself, and by the sailor so the wind can fill the sails”. Hence the proposal stated in the last paragraph:

“The illustration notes that certain compounds, when used reasonably, may provide moments of peace, energy and mental tripping. Its goal is to make us less and less toxic, and who use them more aware of their inalienable freedom. This is the oldest human aspiration: to deepen in responsibility and knowledge.”

Towards his Maturity Work

Learning from drugs was celebrated with the song “ from my skin inwards I’m in charge” ^[40] and it outsold the historical part of his research, turning Escohotado into a media figure for a whole decade. Trapped by a cliché of libertarian, it would be very cumbersome to get rid of it later on. In this period his creative work was reduced to articles and conferences, collected in The Spirit of Comedy (El espíritu de la comedia) (1992) and Portrait of a Libertine (Retrato de un libertino) (1998).

The Spirit of Comedy

The Spirit of Comedy – 1992 Anagrama Essay Award –goes back to the sociology of political power, which is the subject addressed in Majesties, Crimes and Victims (Majestades, crímenes y víctimas), but focusing this time on the executive power. This is the period of the most violent terrorism and counter-terrorism, of Roldán and company, of the Fifth Centenary pomp and the devaluation of the peseta. The title is explained by the nature of comedy as a genre.  Molière, and much earlier Aristotle's Rhetoric, define comedy as that representation where the tragic hero and the choir are substituted by the only there recurring characters: the deceiving, the jester, and the magnate. On the bases of its practical variants, the book applies itself to the analysis of the political class, emerged from the democratic transition, distributing its material in two parts.

The first one analyses fear as an individual and social passion, carefully setting boundaries, which separate fear from pain, by using a sampling procedure. After comparing Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson's thesis, among others, he introduces the Jünger brothers’ thought, Ernst and Hans-Georg, whose meditation on the technique precedes and guides that of Heidegger. Despite having some works translated into Spanish they had not been subject of research in Spain.

The second part focuses on the political class as establishment, reflecting on the institutional horizons of parliamentary democracy and its alternative, direct democracy, which now a day is within the reach of numerous societies thanks to the technological revolution. He pays special attention to terrorism as a feedback loop, in which the interests of the terrorist and the antiterrorists always coincide. He also provides an alternative virtuous circle which opposes to that vicious circle, by analysing under what population parameters is a group able to claim the right of self-determination. For this purpose, he examines closely the Swiss model, as well as the tension between centralism, federalism and confederalism.

Both critics and readers were benevolent with the book, and his feedback loop thesis, which states that both the assassins and their repressors are feeding nationalist terrorism the loop, stimulated further studies in the area of political sociology.

Portrait of a Libertine (Retrato del  Libertino)

The texts gathered here outline altogether a contemporary theory of health, considering that our nature inevitably merges being and thinking. In other words, “corporeal is psychic and psychic is corporeal” and proposes to “accept corporeality as the immediacy of the spirit, considering it as a way to revisit beauty on a daily basis”.

His first and most extensive essay is dedicated to the Victorian anonymous My private life. Years ago, Escohotado had translated and prefaced ^[41] a two volume set abbreviated edition of the five volume set published back in the day. According to Jaime Gil de Biedma it is “the most extensive and detailed report about a male human being’s erotic experience ever to be written.” In fact, “besides offering a rich picture of the era – precisely that omitted in Dickens, Hardy and other English contemporary respectable narrators - he describes in detail carnal relations with about two thousand women”. Escohotado revisits issues dealt with in Whores and Wives (Rameras and esposas), such as the many ways to experience carnal love, passions such as domination, lust or jealousy, and equates a human institutions such as marriage and prostitution, even though the first one is sanctioned by laws and moral, and the second one is pushed to the shadows of the clandestine, showing that one is fundamentally necessary for the other one, and vice versa.

From a philosophical point of view Portrait of a Libertine, written originally in English, contains also a “chemical euphoria and human dignity”, it may be Escohotado's most conclusive work on this matter.^[42]  His essay “Notes about eugenics”- reviews the policy of denying people with terminal or chronic illnesses, or simply in recovery, the use of euphoriant type analgesics not only as palliative but as remedies, raising ignorance to the degree of genocide. In “A better way to die” (Morir mejor) he reflects on euthanasia, and on each individual’s right to choose when and how to die of his own death. The volume concludes with the similarities between Ernst Jünger and Albert Hofmann, who were two centenarian elderly at that time, proposed examples of good living and good dying.

Chaos and Order

Eschotado took up research in the strict sense of the word with Chaos and Order (Caos y orden) (Espasa, 1999), after discovering that Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry was an alternative to Euclidean idealisation, and that the dissipative structures developed by Prigogine was a reframing of the second law of thermodynamics.  He also ascertained that these were no isolated feats, if not part of a general scientific renaissance which transcends the reductionist paradigm with further progress in the ability to understand the complex”. It also enabled him to confirm the insufficiency of determinism, one of the oldest institutions:

“By virtue of which all sorts of physical systems exhibit relationships of uncertainty because they are being invented at every moment, unlike idealised entities, where some abstraction is projected as a law which determines what happens.”^[43]

Neither the Nobel Price in Chemistry received by Prigogine, nor the Fields Medal –its equivalent in mathematics- not awarded to Mandelbrot, have avoided their absence within the Spanish study programmes- where they continue being systematically ignored not only by secondary school students but also by those who get PhDs in Exact Sciences, Engineering, Physics or Chemistry-, Escohotado reaffirms:

“Dogmatism becomes ingrained in those sectors of science which are more dependent on progressive subsidy, where any testimony of non lineal processes displeases those who assert being about to have the cosmic formula for everything comprised in half a line of signs.“^[44]

Chaos and Order criticises from a number of different perspectives this “professional infallibility”, arguing that we rather start to discern reality, after centuries aiming to adapt it to some theological or atheist faith’s ideal, thanks precisely to the understanding of the self-organisation phenomena. The work compares open and closed order modalities, some re-fed by the environment, such as the thermostat, and others isolated from it such as the clock, while ironising about the confusion between these two, as if the quarter and the convent’s order could be considered to be a synonym with what is real. Dogmatic thinking tries to do so by reducing, abstracting or forgetting as necessary in each case. But, according to Escohotado, doing so implies choosing the vicious circle to the detriment of the virtuous one - as Wiener’s says in his Cybernetics-, “ignoring the environment’s signals, as the clock which is sensitive only to its mainspring, in contrast with a thermostat which is permanently re-fed.”

This Espasa Award winning essay, sold out five editions in one semester, while reaping bitter criticism from four professors of mathematics and physics, who considered it “uninformed intrusion”, “worthless” and “postmodern philosophy”, generating widespread controversy.^[45] The comprehensive preface to his edition of the Principia newtonianos (1980) was received on the same terms. Escohotado replied, among other things, that he had been denouncing the French postmodernist fraud for many years, providing a comprehensive response to each one of the criticisms.

Seventy weeks in the Tropics

The fact that he defined himself in the last chapters as a “liberal democrat” (liberal in the Spanish sense of the word) created just as much or even more scandal than disseminating the chaos theory, since many of his unconditional followers worshipped him as a symbol of the unredeemed leftism. Some of the supporters of his chronicle on the use of psychoactive substances began to wonder if there was any need for combining it with a bioassay programme, regarding it as a cynical provocation  – even as an apology of crime, as Menem and Maradona claimed^[46] – as well as an irrefutable evidence of a neurological degeneration.^[47] Since then he claims been labeled as “neoliberal” – even though he is still waiting for somebody to explain “how it differs from being liberal” ^[48] – while he has never nonetheless stopped showing his sarcasm about Murray Rothbard’s followers, whom he calls “dogmatic liberals” and “fanatics of the one hundred percent” (for their opposition to the reserve requirement which enables the banking credit). His vocation of independence could also explain the sequence of disagreements with the teacher’s professional association.^[49]

The publication of Chaos and Order also coincided with the most traumatic event in his romantic life, because he breaks a twenty year old marriage in order to form a new family, and literally escapes to the Antipodes, benefiting from a sabbatical year facilitated by the Catholic University of Bangkok with a research project on the causes of poverty and wealth. Focused on studying economic theory and history, “as a spell for preventing the complete lose of his own self-esteem”, he wrote a hybrid between diary, working notes on the Austrian School and research tourism, published as Seventy Weeks in the Tropics (Sesenta semanas en el tropico) (Espasa 2003). It is his first foray in the literary genre, and represents a very personal account, occasionally lyric and other times hilarious, while describing, with remarkable precision, the surrounding exuberance of the plant and animal life. His longing to wash away a stain of guilt, which prevents him from living any longer, turned its pages in a small essay on expiation.

Moreover, his South East Asian tour reassured him that “educated citizenry are wealthy, independently of their resources”. He looks back on his own youth reviewing his “red-communist soul” (alma roja) motivated by the wish to “find reasons and useful data for those formed since childhood on screens (…) for those who may want a concept as far away as possible from conformism and sectarism.”^[50]

Research about the Communist movement: The Enemies of Commerce

According to Escohotado with the old age he undertook the effort “of proceeding from being original to being wise and from ingenious to unbiased”,^[51] Focused in composing The Enemies of Commerce, a moral history of property, in his own view “the book of my life”. In principle, this project is confined to stating who, in which context and with what results “have they held that private property is robbery and trade is its tool”.^[52]

Nevertheless, the first thing he discovered when studying the issue was, on one side the need to go back in time to Sparta and Plato, and on the other hand to the Essenian sect - which interpreted the sixth commandment as “Thou shalt not trade”, then converted into the Ebionite creed (“poor-ist”) and eventually in the Sermon on the Mount’s expounded Manifesto. Contextualising both lines forced the author to undertake an extensive research on the slave-owning societies’ origins, which are the breeding ground for the messianic redeemer. His novelty lies in the fact that the scapegoat also assumes the Restitution-seeking or revengeful: “the last shall be first”. This foreshadows Marx’s later idea of progress through civil war as a social development law. Escohotado rewrites customary History to a large extent with a thread provided by the idea of profit as vileness and impurity, combined with the impact of economic anthropology with the institutions’ history.

To begin with, he shows to what extent the collapse of the Roman Empire is inseparable from its anti-trade spirit, as well as how the Dark Ages were in fact an evangelic poor-ism golden age. Capable of effectively abolishing the buying and selling of lands, banishing the trader and short-circuiting other market exchanges, it culminated in a society where the market of goods and services was replaced by that of captives.

The process by which the trading society rises becomes, in this way, clearer and clearer. Both rejected and supported at the same time by numerous communist sects, it culminated in the Renascence’s peasant wars. In the meantime, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation converged in their propose to leave behind the poor-ist ideal by proposing the good Christian to be foresighted and prosperous. Two centuries of accumulation followed, with the Mandeville’s Fable of the bees as a summary of its realism. Finally came the great French Revolution, a battlefield for liberals and authoritarians, followed by the Conspiracy of the Equals and its leader Babeuf, the first professional communist.

Published in 2008, the first volume was received with a practically absolute silence by the specialised critic, confirming to what extent the genealogy of leftism is still a taboo subject, even more than some drugs. The second volume, launched in 2013, had much more repercussion particularly on the Internet, which promoted it vigorously.^[53] Furthermore, the ever-increasing volume of data prevented the research work from reaching the present day, as the author pretended. Documenting the 19th century exceeded 700 pages, forcing the author to compose a third volume. According to some of his statements, “luckily the work will be concluded by the end of 2015”. Then, he joked about the fact that he seems to be destined to thoroughly record any of the variants of fear:

“The chemical euphoria prospect turns him inward- in the form of fear of oneself-, and the expropriatory programme keeps him directed outward – as a fear of the others- in both cases, with the inestimable collaboration of a fanaticism which personalises the impersonal.”^[54]

In the light of what has already been published, perhaps the most unusual achievement of this work is to relate without any discontinuity the history of terror to profit, adding to the ideological framework each economic environment’s detail as well as the evolution of parallel institutions –credit facilities, guilds and trade unions, the first great businesses, social welfare systems, banknotes acclimatization, patent law-. Additionally, he includes an analysis about the specifics of the political revolutions in North America, England, France, Spain, Germany and Russia. According to Escohotado, contemporary historians finally have at their disposal countless data organized by theme via Internet search engines. This commits historians “to take the leap from writing chronicle to something more similar to an articulated retransmission over multiple cameras”, enabling, like never before, “the exercise of a value-neutrality”. In his case, the conclusions drawn from researching the tortuous transition from servile to trading societies, led him to document what could be called as the triumph of mobility over stagnation, “stalked every step in by the vertigo of freedom and the securities of servitude”.

The second volume concludes specifying the dilemma between the messianic and democratic models of socialism. But the totalitarian era stills remains to be described, and the work intends to carry out its project -a history with a lesser degree of historical gaps, misunderstandings and biases- to Chavez and Ahmadinejad’s hug. According to the author, nothing of what he assumed to be certain survived to each chapter’s detailed study- in fact, his joy in everyday life has been having to change idea constantly and without pause, going from prejudice to judgment ^[55] – and only when the chronicle reaches the 21st century is when we find a statistical universe sufficient to draw general conclusions about the “communist spirit”.

As part of the trilogy, focused on the origin and development of the communist movement, the third and last volume of The Enemies of Commerce, launched in December 2016, confirms an unprecedented research in world literature. So far no other history of the communist phenomenon had added to the ideological debate details on its economic context, the evolution of parallel institutions such as trade unions, the large enterprise, property defended by copyright, insurance systems. If the first volume evaluated its development until the French Revolution, and the second volume analysed the events occurred until the first years of the 20th century, the third one starts with Lenin continuing until the last populist movements emerged in the 20th century in Latin America and their reflection in 21st century Europe through  political parties such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain.

The third volume brought great renown to the author’s work in practically all newspapers. In turn, in depth-interviews conducted by Federico Jiménez Losantos ^[56] and Pablo Iglesias distributed over Internet, have contributed to the dissemination of Escohotado as a leading figure already considered a wise man whose work covers in depth several of the most relevant themes for both modern-day and tomorrow’s society.

A History of Thought

Genesis and development of Scientific Analysis (Génesis y desarrollo del análisis científico) must be added to his already mentioned works. It was previously called Philosophy and Methodology of Social Sciences, which was the name of the University subject he taught at UNED (National University of Distance Education in Spain) from 1983 until 2013. Revised and broadened in several occasions, this book –available on line- constitutes a considerably large text, although lightened of notes. The author attempts to publish it after a final review, possibly under the name: Notes on the History of Thought, or Philosophy for those Dedicated to Other Things.^[57] The most outstanding aspect of this essay is that it offers a space comparable to Aristotle and Newton, to Kant and Einstein,  trying to overcome the division between the fields of Arts and Sciences consolidated since Descartes.

Works

·        Marcuse, utopía y razón (Marcuse, Utopia and Reason) (1968, Alianza Editorial).

·        La conciencia infeliz. Ensayo sobre la filosofía de la religión de Hegel (The unhappy consciousness, essay about Hegel's philosophy of religion)  (1971, Revista de Occidente).

·        De physis a polis (From Physis to Polis) (1982, Anagrama).

·        Realidad y substancia (Reality and Substance) (1986, Taurus).

·        Filosofía y metodología de las ciencias (Philosophy and Methodology in the Science) (1987).

·        Majestades, crímenes y víctimas (Majesties, Crimes and Victims) (1987, Anagrama).

·        The General History of Drugs (Graffiti Militante Press, 2012) Historia general de las drogas (3 volume set, 1989, Alianza) – Translated partially or in its totality into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Check. Online access to parts of the book cited by the author. Consultar en línea partes de la obra citadas por el autor.

·        "El libro de los venenos" (The Book of Poisons)(1990, Alianza)

·        El espíritu de la comedia (The Spirit of Comedy) (1991, (Anagrama Essay Award) (Premio Anagrama de Ensayo)).

·        Aprendiendo de las drogas: usos y abusos, prejuicios y desafíos (1995, Anagrama). (Learning from drugs: uses and abuses, prejudices and challenges) This volume was published earlier under the name: El libro de los venenos en 1990 and, in 1992, as Para una fenomenología de las drogas.

·        Rameras y esposas: cuatro mitos sobre el sexo y deber (Whores and Wives: Four Myths about Sex and Duty) (1993, Anagrama).

·        Las drogas: de ayer a mañana (Drugs: Yesterday and Today)(1994, Talasa).

·        Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age (1999, Park Street Press) - Historia elemental de las drogas (1996, Anagrama).

·        La cuestión del cáñamo: una propuesta constructiva sobre hachís y marihuana (1997, Anagrama) (The Question of Cannabis)

·        Retrato del libertino (Portrait of a Libertine) (1997, Espasa-Calpe).

·        The General History of Drugs (Graffiti Militante Press, 2012) Historia general de las drogas (includes the appendix: «Fenomenología de las drogas» (Phenomenology of drugs) (1999, Espasa-Calpe).

·        Caos y orden (Chaos and Order) (1999, Premio Espasa de Ensayo 1999).

·        Sesenta semanas en el trópico (Sixty weeks in the Tropics) (2003, Anagrama).

·        Los enemigos del comercio (The Enemies of Commerce) (2008, Espasa-Calpe). Online access to the book Consultar la obra en línea.

·        Los enemigos del comercio II (The Enemies of Commerce II) (2013 Espasa-Calpe). Online access to the book Consultar la obra en línea.

·        Frente al miedo (Facing Fear) (2015, Página Indómita). Online access to the book Consultar la obra en línea.

·        Los enemigos del comercio III  (The Enemies of Commerce III) (2017 Espasa-Calpe).

·         Wikimedia Commons has multimedia content on Antonio Escohotado.

·        Antonio Escohotado's official Facebook, Twitter  YouTube Channels.

·         Wikiquote has famouns quotes by or about Antonio Escohotado.

·        Escohotado.org (Website on Antonio Escohotado, with a selection of articles).

·        La vida de Antonio Escohotado.(Antonio Escohotado's Life)

·        EPDLP.com (El poder de la palabra).(The power of words)

·        Vídeo de Antonio Escohotado en Carta blanca Parte 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, y 8.

·        Biografía de Antonio Escohotado (Antonio Escohotado's extensive biography).

·        Entrevista a Antonio Escohotado. (Interview with Antonio Escohotado)

·        The Pharmacological Crusade: A Historical Summary .

·        Entrevista a Escohotado en Negro sobre Blanco (Interview with Antonio Escohotado in Negro sobre Blanco)

·        Reseña crítica en vídeo a Los enemigos del comercio (tomo 1) de Antonio Escohotado  (Critical review in video of The Enemies of Commerce I by Antonio Escohotado.

Antonio Escohotado Espinosa (Madrid, 5 July 1941) is a Spanish researcher and writer whose work has focused on law, philosophy and sociology, although he has also covered many other realms. He is best known for his work on drug's history and use and his antiprohibitionist positions. The leitmotiv of his work is an affirmation of freedom as an antidote against fear or coercion that pushes the human being towards all kinds of servitudes. On the professional level he has developed a huge task as a translator that covers more than forty titles, among others the works of Newton, Hobbes, Jefferson and Bakunin, has especially disseminated the work of Thomas Szasz and that of Ernst Jünger. He has worked until his retirement in 2013 as a professor of Philosophy and Methodology of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the UNED in Madrid. Recently he has been immersed in the study of the history of the communist movement with the writing of "Los enemigos del comercio" (2008-2014), an exhaustive monograph that has already ended with the publication of the third volume.

Works

Among his work, include titles such as Marcuse, utopia and reason (1969); From Physis to Polis (1973); Reality and substance (1978); Majesties, crimes and victims (1987); Philosophy and methodology of Science (1987); General history of drugs (1989-1990); The book of poisons (1990); The spirit of the comedy (1991), which received the Anagrama essay award; To a phenomenology of drugs (1992); Prostitutes and wives (four myths about sex and duty) (1993); Drugs: from the beginnings to prohibition (1994), Learning from drugs: uses and abuses, prejudices and challenges (1995) and Chaos and Order (1999)

References

• Philip Gershkovich
• Philip G. Hare
• Philip Giaccone
• Philip Giebler
• Philip Gilbert
• Philip Giordano
• Philip Giraldi
• Philip Giselaer
• Philip Glassborow
• Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread
• Philip Glazebrook
• Philip Glenister
• Philip glenister
• Philip Goad
• Philip Gogulla
• Philip Golding
• Philip Goldson
• Philip Goldson Highway
• Philip Goodhart
• Philip Goodwin
• Philip Gore, 4th Earl of Arran
• Philip Gould
• Philip Gounis
• Philip Gove
• Philip Goy