In antiquity, cultic groups were often defined by supernatural rituals and practices connected with religious deities and frequently entailed the use of psychotropic substances. Similar practices have been carried forth by contemporary civilizations, as in the ritualistic use of peyote, which in the past has been described as cultic. While this may be viewed as reductive, research has identified certain similarities between cult membership and drug addiction, such as the potential to alter consciousness. Although this historical conceptualization bears little resemblance to the modern construction of cults as groups subject to undue influence by a charismatic leader, drug use may still carry various functions in these more modern cults. Patterns of drug use within cults varies from abstinence to coerced use of psychoactive substances to facilitate indoctrination; most lie between these extremes. Due to the wide variation of different attitudes towards drug use among cults, membership in a cult does not predict drug use by members. Thus, when evaluating a cult member, a full and detailed substance use history should be collected and information regarding their particular cult’s practices should be gathered.

In After the End, John Berger notes that “since the Second World War, a variety of ‘unspeakables’ have seldom been silent, although their utterances have often been disguised or symptomatic.” Berger refers to the traumatizing catastrophes of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, while Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden adds “the cold war…, the draft, and Vietnam” to the list of crises that signaled end times. This chapter discusses destruction and regeneration as envisioned in literary and popular writing across the political spectrum in the post-World War II decades: during the era of Cold War consensus, Nobel Laureate William Faulkner enjoyed his literary brethren to “forget” the bomb, and leading white male authors indeed wrote narratives of “personal apocalypse” that bracketed world concerns. African American canonical writers of the period were rarely so sanguine; their anti-apocalyptic writings directly targeted the nuclear threat as intensifying racial oppression at home and/or as urgently pointing white America toward national and international brotherhood.By the late 1960s, as fears of the bomb subsided, establishment writers wrote in the apocalyptic shadow of Charles Manson and the generation of frustrated, radicalized youth thought to follow in his wake.