Writing on Drugs  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Writing on Drugs is a book on drugs and literature by Sadie Plant first published in 1999.

From the publisher:

Sadie Plant traces the history of drugs and drug use through the work of some notable writers. Rather than exploring drug use as an avenue to spiritual transcendence, Plant focuses on the way that drugs themselves make precise, recognizable interventions in consciousness, in cultural life, in politics. She argues that the use, production, and trafficking of drugs--narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens--have shaped some of the era's most fundamental philosophies and provided much of its economic wealth.

"The reasons for the laws and the motives for the wars, the nature of the pleasures and the trouble drugs can cause, the tangled webs of chemicals, the plants, the brains, machines: ambiguity surrounds them all. Drugs shape the laws and write the very rules they break, they scramble all the codes and raise the stakes of desire and necessity, euphoria and pain, normality, perversion, truth, and artifice again."

Through examinations of post-Romantic writers on drugs, including Thomas de Quincey and Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline, and Burroughs on them all, Writing on Drugs exposes this most profound and pervasive influence on contemporary culture.

Table of contents

Prelude Private Eyes 3 Artificial Paradises 32 Unconscious 54 White Lines 61 Magicians 93 Pilots 119 Ghosts 139 Dancers 174 Gray Areas 182 Trade Wars 217 Black Markets 222 Double Agents 251 Bibliography 267 Index 279

Bibliography

• Writing on Drugs (2001, Picador) ISBN 0-312-27874-8

See also

• Drugs in literature