GOOD TRIPS, BAD TRIPS - THE USE AND ABUSE OF ILLEGAL DRUGS

As the war on drugs continues to be waged bass-ackwards, along comes Sadie
Plant's riveting "Writing on Drugs" and Charles Hayes' "Tripping: An
Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures." Both traverse the lines
between reality and expanded consciousness, detailing how psychotropics
affect the creative process and their underlying chemical and physiological
effects. But "Writing on Drugs" stands out as one of the most intriguing
and provocative books written about the subject in years.

Plant, a British academic armed with some heavy but accessible
poststructuralist theory, has written a book that will appeal even to those
who have no experience with illegal drugs. Though the title suggests that
she will take us on a literary trip from the opium munching of Thomas
DeQuincey through the ceaseless human laboratory of William S. Burroughs,
Plant has far more in mind.

Not only does she give us a precise scientific understanding of what drugs
do to the body (and what the body does to the drugs), she also presents a
chilly analysis of the power dynamics of drugs and the drug trade,
employing an excellent reading of the work of Michel Foucault. To top it
off, Plant finishes with a scathing treatment of the role of drugs in
politics and economics, from the Opium Wars to the United States'
continuing attempts to curb what she refers to as the Dragon.

The book's loose structure has the fuzzy warmth and subject-jumping
spontaneity of a good buzz. Transitions from section to section are
nonexistent, with only quotes from various writers breaking up the author's
free-flowing narrative. Like her dragon imagery, Plant's narrative seems to
chase its own tail: The end of the book is really the beginning, and vice
versa.

The users in the book are myriad. There's Edgar Allan Poe, inventing the
modern detective story while on opium, and Sigmund Freud, transfixed by the
joys of cocaine. Beside them are Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Coleridge,
Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Aldous Huxley and Burroughs.

Plant gives close readings of their texts, creating a "greatest hits" of
literary outlaws and their individual tracks to enlightenment, addiction,
sorrow, sickness and the never-ending attempt to quash the notion of linear
time and space.

But it's in the last 60 pages of the book that Plant makes her most
powerful, if perhaps not as thoroughly documented, claims about the
symbiotic relationships among capitalism, large-scale global economies and
the illegal drug trade. "As Jean-Francois Lyotard once remarked, capitalism
was 'not constituted by a slow process of birth and growth like a living
being, but by intermittent acts of vampirization: it merely seizes hold of
what was already there.' Among the first and most lucrative of these new
commodities were those that had some psychoactive effect."

Plant proceeds to trace the route of tobacco, the opium monopoly of Britain
in China, and American involvement in the Golden Triangle drug trade in
Southeast Asia and in the South American cocaine trade. She also looks at
opponents fighting the benefits of hemp and the "patchwork, short-term,
piecemeal measures, private interests, [and] tactical necessities" employed
to fight the so-called scourge of drugs.

It all makes for fascinating reading, maybe because Plant never really
takes sides. She points out the science behind the dangers and joys of
altered consciousness as she packs more information and insight into her
pages than can possibly be addressed in a brief review. "Writing on Drugs"
will tax the mind, but the rewards are well worth the trip.

On the other hand, Hayes' "Tripping" often feels as interminable as a bad
trip. Hayes' collection gathers 50 first-person accounts of being under the
influence of psychotropics, bookended with a sprawling "cultural history of
tripping" and an equally sprawling interview with the now-deceased drug
master Terrence McKenna.

Though Hayes tries to balance being a dispassionate observer of a cultural
phenomenon with being an enthusiastic champion, he leans heavily toward
drug use to expand our flat, untapped levels of consciousness. As he
breathlessly writes, "According to the best hopes of the new psychedelic
vanguard, the expanded intelligent use of these plants and chemicals will
usher in a new eon of shamanic vistas and stronger definitions true to
primordial forms: a pagan, aboriginal order in which the spirit will reign
pre-eminent."

The narratives themselves, including those by Beat chronicler Anne Waldman,
Ecstasy champion Bruce Eisner and Deadhead author Steve Silberman, are
informative, cautionary, hilarious and spooky, and often involve seeing
God, whether in the guise of a used-car salesman on television or in a
pattern of colorful paisley.

The uninitiated may recoil from stories of visions of goat-devils, the moon
as an alien flashlight, and nude escapades at Burning Man, but those in on
the book's implicit wink will find like-minded stories of drug-induced
bliss and abject terror.

The problem with "Tripping" is that there are just too many accounts,
causing the stories to blur together. A raver's contemporary forays into
Ecstasy sound similar to the "Whoops, that was 1,000 mics I just dropped"
of a '70s college kid. Hayes would have been better served, and better
edited, by shaving his book to 20 accounts -- more than enough to get the
picture of the mind on drugs.

That said, the book can be intriguing. Some of the descriptions of acid --
"a wheelbarrow to scoop the drifting sands of fleeting mental images" --
and the understandings of self that stem from tripping are believable and
occasionally triumphant. Others may cause unwelcome flashbacks.

And while a bit long-winded, the interview with McKenna has its moments.
While holding court on aliens, four-dimensionality, meme systems and
shamans and constructing his own share of overwrought metaphors, McKenna
does manage a few insights. "At an enormous historical momentum we're
slamming into omniscience. We're reaching deeper levels of understanding
space, time, matter, and energy than was ever necessary for the prosecution
of simple commerce." In a strange way, both "Writing on Drugs" and
"Tripping" evoke the "Hurry Up Please, It's Time" refrain from T.S.Eliot's
"The Waste Land Wasteland." Only in this case, it's ""Hurry up please, and
pass the tab."

Mark Luce is a writer in Lawrence, Kan.

WRITING ON DRUGS: By Sadie PlantFarrar, Straus & Giroux; 294 pages; $24.

TRIPPING: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic AdventuresEdited by Charles
HayesPenguin Compass; 448 pages; $18 paperback