Much more than a simple social reality, the intake of consciousness-altering substances must be understood on the long term as intrinsically linked to humanity's history. Using a comparative method, between hedonist practices in French society and neo-shamanic practices in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian High Amazon, we can double our approach of reality, and of this phenomenon in particular, in order to objectify it as accurately as possible. Through a comprehensive posture, this study interprets the latent meanings that drug-related practices convey today. In this way, three concepts which are dear to sociology are put forward: health, the sacred and deviance. Thereon, the intake of consciousness-altering substances must be understood as a prism that engages the way we look by revealing the societal workings and a possible re-enchantment of the world. The understanding of this social phenomenon leads us to better apprehend the societal whole to which it belongs, which in turn enables us to better understand the phenomenon at study in a sort of ascending spiral which, in itself, cannot know a true limit. Overcoming the status of operating concepts, health, the sacred and deviance are revealed as elementary forms of the intake of consciousness- altering substances.