MORAL OF THE STORY

WRITING ON DRUGS By Sadie Plant Faber

In 1821, Thomas De Quincey, writing in Confessions of an English Opium
Eater, noted that demand for opium was so high among Manchester's mill
workers that city druggists stocked up for the buyers' stampede every
Saturday afternoon. Back then, society knew less and it policed less.

Now we may know and police more, yet we still have no evolved policies
on drugs that take account of the 50 per cent of young people who take
cocaine, or the hordes of teenagers who neck Ecstasy on a regular
basis. Kids are still told to "just say no".

Plant's book is a fascinating cultural quest to discover how such
blanket - and in the end blind - moral prohibition has come to the
fore in our relationship to narcotics. Initially erring on the side of
literary analysis, most of the writers she quotes, while acknowledging
that drugs can mess you up, also note how integral they are for the
creative process; for example, Burroughs once said that with opium
"comes a heightened sensitivity to impressions and sensation on the
level of dream, myth and symbol". There are also wonderful anecdotes
involving Coleridge, Baudelaire and Freud, who wrote glowingly of the
"achievements of cocaine".

Writing on Drugs becomes crunchier with the unfolding of some history.
The first legislative salvo came in 1916, when the Defence of the
Realm Act was amended to include the control of drugs. Of course,
experimentation continued, though drug-taking - as exemplified in the
writing of the Beats - became a furtive, self-consciously "other"
activity that provided release from the mundanity of everyday life.
But the uses of drugs were continually proliferating: in medicine they
were being developed to treat previously incurable conditions, while
by the early Fifties the CIA was looking into how psycho-active drugs
could be used to control and to manipulate human behaviour.

Thankfully, Plant plays the role of informed guide rather than
drug-snorting advocate. As with her incredibly illuminating first book
about women and technology, Zeroes and Ones, she balances
accessibility with intellectual rigour. In the best chapters of the
book, Dancers and Grey Areas, she weaves writers' experiences of
amazing highs with the cold, hard science of how chemicals would have
interacted with their synapses to get them tripping so creatively.

Plant concludes that "to write on drugs is to plunge into a world
where nothing is as simple and stable as it seems", though in fewer
than 250 pages she proposes a manifesto not for taking drugs, but one
which recommends we all, Government especially, recognise the
pervasiveness of drugs in our culture; the implicit message is that
our reaction to them should not be so consistently mitigated by
hysteria and moral panic.