On Drug Literature

Published March 6, 2007

By Elias Altman

Drugs have always captivated the human imagination: the Sumerians used opium, the Egyptians distilled alcohol and the early Turks drank coffee. These intoxicants were often employed in spiritual practices, like the Native American use of tobacco in shamanistic rites or the ethylene gas-induced trances of the Delphic Oracle.

But in modern Western society, the ritual has long since been divorced from the drug. Thus, all that remains is the potent substance itself, stripped of its once-stated purpose. People just like to “get messed up.” However, over the years, some inquisitive writers have re-approached drugs with the same sensitivity as their predecessors.

As great writers, they excavated their subject and carefully sifted through it like gold prospectors, in order to reveal nuggets of insight, personal and universal. These men struck a balance between abstaining and advocating – they sought knowledge, not a pseudo-religious experience inspired by Williams fire-escape sunset.

I am struck that these visionaries were all separately drawn to the transformative power of drugs. Their work on the subject reveals much about culture, the mind and addiction. Drugs offered another way to understand the human condition. For them, drugs served a specific purpose, just like they did all those years ago.

Thomas de Quincey was fluent in ancient Greek by the age of 15. He “could harangue an Athenian audience as well as you or I could harangue an English one,” one biographer noted. He first tried opium in his teens and used it heavily in his later life. De Quincey chronicles his opium insights as well as his devastating addition in one of the first modern memoirs, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. De Quincey was one of the last true renaissance men: a brilliant essayist, critic and intellectual-extraordinaire.

Walter Benjamin began writing essays at an early age and his style of cultural criticism is associated with the Frankfurt School. Benjamin smoked hashish a few times in his life and said that it was like “a wink from Nirvana,” but thought it unnecessary for the most important work in life. His best-known essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a prescient meditation on the nature of art, photography and film. Benjamin, an ardent leftist, died in 1940 trying to escape the Nazis.

Aldous Huxley was born into a well-known family of British intellectuals. His most famous novel, Brave New World, is a chilling dystopian tale of a Henry Ford-worshipping society that conditions the emotions of its citizens. Huxley later moved to California and tried the traditional Native American drug mescaline. He wrote about his “search for enlightenment” in the allusively titled The Doors of Perception from which Jim Morrison’s band would later take its name.

Tom Wolfe pioneered New Journalism, a technique that blends the immediacy of fiction with the facts of dispassionate reporting. He wrote numerous essays documenting the cultural phenomena of the 60s. His most influential work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test details the rise and fall of the author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they drove across the country, on drugs, in their brightly-colored bus. Wolfe described the LSD experience as a manifestation of the Greek word kairos, “the perfect moment.”

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