Psychoactive Drugs and Moral Qualms

When the psychologist James McKeen Cattell was in graduate school, he took drugs like cannabis, opium and caffeine to investigate their effects on human psychology. This article explores Cattell’s self experiments and why he never published this work. Some might see self experimentation with drugs as pleasure seeking masquerading as science, but Cattell and other contemporary psychologists thought it was a serious endeavor that could reveal important truths about the human mind. However, Cattell’s tendency to overindulge in drugs beyond the limits he planned for his experiments did interfere with his desire to adhere to the epistemic virtues of scientific psychology, which dictated experiments should be carefully controlled and replicable. While this violation of epistemic virtue bothered Cattell, personal moral concerns about the ethics of drug taking were the primary factor that drove him to abandon his work on drugs. In the conclusion, I show how similar personal concerns among other researchers prevented drugs from becoming a major topic of research in the early days of experimental psychology, despite the fascination they held for many pioneers in the field. I examine how personal factors can be a constraining force on the practice of science, particularly in cases of self experimentation where scientists use their own bodies as tools for making knowledge.