beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Thing is, I tend to think of Ethan as being more interested in lowering other people's resistance to his manipulations, rather than, or at least more often than, losing his edge by ingesting consciousness-altering drugs, and certainly rather than getting drunk.

He might take cocaine recreationally, because it's notorious for making people sharper and meaner if they don't take it to get manic and then run with the mania. But the more you do that stuff, the more likely you are to be slow and depressed when you come down- and it's costly. I can see him having friends who use it, and showing up whenever it's on offer, though.

He might also use any number of things in combination with ritual cleansing and magical meditations- notably peyote, mescaline, mushrooms, and LSD, all of which either have long ethnobotanical history as conciousness expanders, or, in the case of LSD, is a benign modern equivalent of a historic shaman's drug (ergot, which is truly evil for your body). He might also use cannabis, probably in the form of hashish (unless his partner was young and American, when it would be unprocessed marijuana) as an enhancer of sexual feeling; the kind of magic it's used for isn't likely to be what a chaos magician be involved in.

We see him drinking with Giles, and more importantly getting Giles drunk which I take as evidence that he uses alcohol in its role as the most common date rape drug.

Julia, hey, I went to college in the seventies, and am an ethnobotanist, of course I know these things