Psychotropic Delights

Plant lets such stories stand on their own; she doesn’t bother to argue whether drugs are evil or benevolent, and for the most part remains steadfastly apolitical about her subject. Her evenhandedness ends, however, in the last third of the book, in which she tackles the many bizarre and often nonsensical laws governing the use of drugs. She is especially forthright on the criminalization of hemp: ”Even birdseed distributors argued that canaries would stop singing without marijuana seeds,“ Plant writes, but ”several large industries and wealthy industrialists stood to gain from the prohibition of a plant that had not only recreational uses but also medicinal value and a wide range of other commercial uses.“ With the propaganda assistance of William Randolph Hearst -- a close friend of President Hoover‘s drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger -- in 1937 cannabis became ”the first of many drugs to join opiates and cocaine on the wrong side of national and international law.“

Just as hashish determined the nonlinear structure of the Arabian narrative and psychoactive Syrian rue wound its way into Persian carpets, speed and acid influenced profoundly both the political aspirations and artistic impulses of America. Amphetamine sulfate lifted the country out of the depression and remained popular through the ’50s; Plant speculates that John F. Kennedy may have been on it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LSD, which the CIA tested by, among other methods, dosing unwitting businessmen in a brothel, gave rise to an entirely new culture of intellectuals mining the mysteries of creation from their souls. ”Opiates had calmed and numbed the 19th century; cocaine came online with electricity; speed had let the 20th century keep up with its own new speeds,“ writes Plant. LSD, which is chemically similar to serotonin, taught its users about the chemical and computational nature of their brains. Acid gave the world both Prozac and software.

Writing on Drugs is a trifling title for the broad sweep of this small book -- as Plant herself notes, words often fail the drug experience. But she also points out that there are other ways of writing. ”Drugs have made music in ways that are far more compelling and immediate than all the convoluted routes on which they have changed words,“ she writes, and proceeds to embark on a description of MDMA-influenced electronica that is transcendent in its evocative precision. Her detailed account of the drug‘s high is no less rich, but it stops short of a celebration. ”MDMA,“ she says, ”takes the fear of death away.“

What is true for opium, is true for marijuana, is true for Ecstasy: Whatever a substance’s addictive power or side effects, they are in one way all the same: Drugs allow humans to discover hidden parts of themselves, but without conscience and care, they can just as easily bring on self-destruction. Without them, we may not have discovered the chemicals that power our brain, the circuitry that makes us feel and think, the shadows and light that make us human. Yet under their sway, men and women have suffered miseries a drug-free world might have spared them. There is, finally, no easy response to the questions drugs raise: ”The reasons for the laws and the motives for the ways, the nature of the pleasure and the trouble drugs can cause, the tangled webs of chemicals, the plants, the brains, machines,“ Plant concludes, ”ambiguity surrounds them all.“