From the Talk Show to Public Figure
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Antonio Escohotado stopped being a name known in small circles and became a regular face on television. He had already appeared earlier, at the start of the decade, when heroin dominated the social conversation as a problem; but it was in these years that his figure became popular. On set he defended, with no half measures, the free circulation and free use of psychoactive substances, a position that was almost unheard of on the small screen at the time.
Those appearances had something of a repeated ritual about them: panelists with loud voices and short arguments, ambushes planned by the show’s producers—the mother of the addict who blames “the drug” for all her son’s misfortune—and, against all that, his determination to recall two ideas that stuck to him like mottos. The first, from Paracelsus: “the dose makes the poison.” The second, his own: “there are no good and bad drugs, only sensible and senseless uses of them.” For him, substances are neutral; the problem is not in the molecule but in how it is handled.
The Substance as a Test, Not an Altar
Escohotado understood drugs as something intrinsic to human experience and, above all, as a rite of passage for the young: a way of testing yourself socially and individually, as opposed to those who—he said—experience them only as a nostalgic repetition of customs inherited from the sixties. Consistent with that view, he made personal experimentation part of his method: he tried things in order to describe their effects, without settling too long on any one substance, as he confessed, out of sheer intellectualism.
Hence his rejection of those who sacralize the psychoactive and turn it into an object of worship. Against the mystical drift he proposed a scientific, skeptical, almost clinical gaze. That stance is worth reading with perspective: the idea that “the dose makes the poison” is true in pharmacology, but it does not exhaust the question. Context, the real purity of what is consumed, frequency, the psychological state of the person using, and legality—which determines the quality and risks of the market—weigh as much as the milligram. Chemical neutrality is not the same as practical harmlessness.
The Books That Brought Prestige (and Enemies)
The work of these years consolidated his reputation as an essayist. In 1991 he published El espíritu de la comedia (Anagrama), a study of the sociology of political power that won the Anagrama Essay Prize that same year. In 1997 came Retrato del libertino (Espasa-Calpe), in which he vindicates excess as a way of life, defends intoxication against censorship, takes up euthanasia, and engages with figures such as Ernst Jünger and Albert Hofmann.
In 1999 came Caos y orden (Espasa-Calpe), an epistemological manifesto well received by critics, reprinted six times in three months—an exceptional figure for an essay of that kind—and honored with the 1999 Espasa Essay Prize. The book also earned him a reprimand: four university professors of physics and philosophy of science challenged it on grounds of disciplinary rigor, and one of them even wrote to the prize jury. It was one more clash with academia, which Escohotado faulted for two vices: the inbreeding that closes positions to anyone not trained inside, and the guild zeal against the “intruder” who dares to write about territory considered the specialist’s private property.
1996: The Arrest Warrant in Argentina
His polemical spirit cost him some bigger troubles. In June 1996 he traveled to Argentina to present his Historia elemental de las drogas and take part in the debate show Memoria. There, true to form, he acknowledged having used numerous substances and having advised his children—already adults—on what they could take. What in Spain would have scandalized only a few self-righteous types set off a lightning judicial response in Buenos Aires: two prosecutors called for immediate measures, and a federal judge issued an arrest warrant for alleged apology for drug use, a ban on leaving the country, a search of his Buenos Aires residence, and seizure of the recording of the program.
The police machinery moved so fast that a squad from the Dangerous Drugs Division showed up at the studios after the broadcast to arrest him. What saved him was that the show had been taped for later airing and that he was already back in Madrid. The intervention was publicly criticized by heavyweights—among them Diego Maradona, who argued that this kind of talk pushes undecided young people toward drugs, and then-president Carlos Menem, who appealed to criminal responsibility without noticing the contradiction of invoking freedom of the press at the same time. Escohotado chose to appear voluntarily in Argentina, and the case ended in dismissal with every ruling in his favor.
Travels, Frustrated Professorships, and a Personal Reckoning
In 2003 he published Sesenta semanas en el trópico, his first work with a narrative bent, the fruit of a year in Southeast Asia. It is a book of diaries and travel shot through with reflections on economics and an explicit praise of liberalism, born—by his account—of his unease about “the question of poverty and wealth” and about the mechanisms that leave some with everything to spare and others lacking everything. What he lived in Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and Singapore feeds a text that the author himself describes as a settling of accounts with his generation and with himself.
On the academic front, in 2006 he applied for professorships in sociology and again collected seven zeros, already at the stage of evaluating his CV, despite—or perhaps because of—his long career. Far from playing the victim, he summed it up with a line that says a lot about his character: “I will retire without reaching the last rung of the profession […], but I pay the toll of independence without hesitation.” He had, after all, managed to make a living from studying, which had been his dream since childhood.
As for his relationship with substances, he kept experimenting deliberately, though no longer as the central theme of his writing: he considered that he had said what he had to say. Cannabis remained among them, as an everyday example of the “pharmacological enlightenment” he preached all his life.
A Critical Reading
Escohotado’s biography has often been told in the key of a persecuted hero, and it deserves some nuance. His defense of individual autonomy against prohibitionism remains a solid and current argument, but his view almost always stresses the freedom and will of the person using and gives less weight to the social conditions behind problematic use: precarity, psychological suffering, dependence. Accepting that “there are no good or bad drugs” does not oblige us to ignore that some patterns of use do harm, and that harm reduction—truthful information, drug checking, not mixing, not using alone when you feel low—is just as enlightened as the defense of freedom. Taking Escohotado as an intellectual reference is not the same as taking him as a code of conduct.
