IN DEFENCE OF DRUGS

Books

LSD, cocaine, opium: they are all just a bore, though good for
relaxation and socialising. How did we ever come to invest them with
such demonic properties?

Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground

Marek Kohn Granta, 208pp, L8.99

L7.10 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+L1 p&p)

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History Of LSD

Martin A Lee and Bruce Shlain Pan Books, 384pp, L9.99

L7.99 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+L1 p&p)

Before the First World War, cocaine, morphine and heroine were all
available, on prescription and at reasonable prices, from any
pharmacist. The average drug addict was a respectable middle-aged
lady, the victim of overzealous prescription or of her own
"intemperance". Addiction was a private burden rather than a social
menace. The fault lay with the doctor or the patient, not with the
drug. Most managed to use drugs without injury. Gladstone used to take
nips of laudanum before giving speeches to the Commons, and Queen
Victoria was treated with tincture of cannabis for her period pains.

Observations such as these reveal once again just how strange the
prewar world was. "Never such innocence again," wrote Larkin. One of
the achievements of good history writing is to make the past seem odd.
But in seeing the past as odd, we come, in turn, to see ourselves as
odd. From the standpoint of the 19th century, it is our own attitude
to drugs that is extraordinary. What is strange is not that Gladstone
and Queen Victoria "did drugs"; what is really strange is that we find
this strange. How did we ever come to invest this particular group of
naturally occurring chemicals with such demonic properties?

Dope Girls is the story of how a certain group of drugs became "dope",
the fiendish substance of popular legend. The story begins in 1898,
when America annexed the Philippines and - mainly as a result of
lobbying by missionary groups - prohibited opium smoking there. The
ban was subsequently extended to America itself; smokers quickly
switched to morphine, cocaine and heroine. These new drug users were
not genteel ladies of nervous disposition, but a nefarious mixture of
Chinamen, gamblers, prostitutes, pimps and sodomites. Drugs began to
acquire their modern association with criminality and vice. The
response of the American government was the Harrison Narcotics Act
1914, the first comprehensive drug regulation in the westem hemisphere.

This distinctively modern form of drug use spread to Britain during
the First World War, mainly as a consequence of the large number of
troops stationed in London and the restrictions on alcohol. Accounts
from this period have a strangely contemporary flavour; the Soho world
of nightclubs and street dealers is instantly recognisable. Cocaine
parties were fashionable among young men. "Under its influence they
become wild-eyed and feverishly excited, and babble out their
innermost secrets to each other. Cigarettes are consumed, and so it
continues from midnight to six in the morning, when quantities of
brandy are served as an antidote to dull the effect of the cocaine and
induce sleep, for sleep is impossible to the cocaine fiend."

How much drug use actually increased is uncertain but, in those
strained times, any perception of an increase evoked a hysterical
reaction. Because drugs were commonly associated with aliens, they
were easily seen as part of a foreign conspiracy to undermine the
virility of Britain's fighting force. Possession of cocaine and opium
was accordingly prohibited under the Defence of the Realm Act 1916.
This regulation was conceived by its author, Sir Malcolm Delevingne,
as "an emergency measure based upon the known evil existing among, at
any rate, a section of the troops". But, like so many other emergency
measures introduced in wartime, it was never repealed. Governments are
far readier to take on powers than to renounce them. Drug prohibition
was one more nail in the coffin of liberal England, whose "strange
death" was complete by the end of the Great War.

The history of LSD, recounted in Acid Dreams, presents a very
different face. If opium and cocaine satisfied the elemental human
desire to escape, the appeal of LSD was always more esoteric. The CIA
was initially interested in it as a "truth serum". In the late
Fifties, it leaked out to a select group of artists, writers and
psychologists. Among the more famous of its early devotees were Aldous
Huxley and Allen Ginsberg. Even in the late Sixties, at the height of
its popularity, LSD never spread far beyond the population of white,
middle-class college kids. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics didn't touch
it. Unlike opium and cocaine, it never had any seedy or exotic
connotations. The lineages of the psychedelic movement were highbrow:
de Quincy and Baudelaire were hailed as its precursors. LSD was the
demotic version of a long tradition of European bohemianism. Through
its chemical mediation, the visions of the happy few could be made
available to the masses.

Inevitably, a cheapening occurred. Timothy Leary's companion Michael
Hollingshead commented that LSD was "being sold like beer, not
champagne". The hippies were, in many ways, the antithesis of what
they claimed to be. Their literary productions strike one today not
with their freedom and boldness but, on the contrary, with their
wearisome repetitiveness. Even their pranks seem stale and clicked.
"Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem," proclaimed a Yippie
manifesto. "The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental
farm!" A new regime of boredom had descended. Far from expanding the
mind, LSD seems in most cases to have closed it.

Even when it inspired revolt against technocracy, LSD remained very
much the product of a technocratic civilisation. It was that
archetypal American invention: a labour-saving device. An art student
who tried the drug claimed that it was equal to "four years in art
school". Timothy Leary promoted it as an instrument of "hedonic
engineering". Huxley's advocacy of LSD was always tinged with despair.
He saw it as a mechanism for stimulating creativity in a society whose
natural creative energies had expired. He was afraid that, in the
wrong hands, it might lead to nothing more than a new flatness and
conformity. The author of The Doors of Perception was also the author
of Brave New World.

But whatever the follies of the psychedelic movement, the US
government was wrong to crack down on it. The best way to deal with
nonsense is to let it run its course. If it really is nonsense, it
will sooner or later be exposed as such. By outlawing LSD in 1967, the
government endowed it with a spurious fascination, and alienated the
hippies still further from conventional society. LSD manufacture was
taken over by the Cosa Nostra, which was interested less in the
exploration of inner space than in making a quick buck. Its quality
deteriorated rapidly; many people were hospitalised. Its psychiatric
use, until then popular, was soon abandoned. Like cocaine and opium
during the First World War, LSD had entered the twilight zone of vice
and crime.

Our attitude to drugs today is knowing and slightly bored. We no
longer believe that cocaine is used by black men to debauch white
girls, nor do we believe that LSD will cleanse the doors of
perception. We have outgrown such myths. People today take drugs for
the same reason that they drink: to relax, to socialise, to let their
hair down. This is a healthy development. The fascination of drugs is
ultimately empty. Knowing this allows us to concentrate on things that
really matter.