SO WHAT'S COOL ABOUT TAKING DRUGS? THEY JUST DON'T WORK. NOT LIKE ALCOHOL

The drugs don't work, say The Verve, who prove it. Once they produced a
great, very noisy, extremely bolshy album called 'A Northen Soul'. Now they
are famous for their lead singer's cheekbones, his recovery from
narcoticism and the hideously mawkish hit record 'Urban Hymns'. The band's
signature-tune, 'Bittersweet Symphony', is now, following legal action,
officially a Jaggers-Richards composition. Seems the fact that the song's
orchestral hook was taken straight from a string-laden version of 'The Last
Time' by erstwhile Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Oops.

You see, that's what happens with drugs. They affect the memory. Ecstasy,
it seems, chemically demolishes your synapses, can put you in an instant
coma, reduces your appreciation of melody to nil and makes you forget
things. Heroin makes you foget your troubles, and if you take it long
enough, will make you forget everything. Terminally. Amphetamine Sulphate,
always the connoisseur's drug of choice, makes you remember too much until,
suddenly, you remember there are large gaps in your memory. Cannabis dulls
you down, mellows you out, makes you consume large quantities of cornflakes
at inconvenient hours of the night. Unfortunately it is virulently
carcinogenic, especially mixed, as it usually is, with tobacco.

LSD is the big one, though, for giving you insights into life and art. Many
who have taken acid will say that it changed their lives, that it was
marvellous and wonderful, and that they're extremely glad they did. But no,
they never will again, thank you. Forget it. None of them really works.
None of the drugs has helped produce any real body of worthwhile artistic
work. Ripped-off tunes, yes. Shortened careers with small blips of
brilliance, sure. But long-term, high-quality output? I think not. Not like
alcohol.

Ah, but Kerouac, some will suggest. What? One cult speedfreak book and a
library of unreadable rubbish? Aldous Huxley? Timothy Leary? Richard
Brautigan? De Quincey? Oh yes, mixing laudunum and brandy, magic mushrooms
and budgie food has certainly produced one or two literary stoaters, but
nothing truly capable of transcending the ghetto of narcotic writing.

In music, there are good drug albums - Cocteau Twins, John Martyn, at least
two of the Beatles, one Tim Buckley - but the greatest achievements are the
recovered and recovering - for example, post Velvets Lou Reed - or those to
whom drugs are an artistic irrelevance to their vanity or vision. Drink, on
the othwer hand, does work. Anthony Burgess, Philip Larkin, the Amises: I
rest my case.

All right, the lives of the great American alcoholics - Faulkner,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Neill - may have been diminished by alcohol, but
just look at their achievements while immersed in booze. It is at least
arguable that the short lives of people such as Dylan Thomas would have
been less, not more productive without drink. And the greatest Scottish
writers of the past century have been products of, or at least habitues of,
a public-house form of debate, discussion and education.

The problem with narcotics is that they are either individualistic - indeed
solipsistic - or involve a social circle the raison d'etre for which is
collective consumption, no more, no less. They can give rise to the
illusion of being cool, which is the curse of hash-smokers from teenage
Oasis fans to greying pillars of the community on a secret doobie bender.
There is nothing uplifting, enlightening or even sensible about a bunch of
people smoking dope together. There is a lot of giggling, hilarity at
statements which even the drunkest buffoon would find moronic, and a
complete disconnection between what you would like to say and what comes
bubbling out of your mouth.

Drink is legal and sociable. Unless you are a hopless drouth, you learn the
scales of consumption quickly: how much before you can no longer drive
legally; how much before you can no longer drive sensibly. How much before
you stop making sense; how much before you stop being able to stand up. And
in most cases, alcohol is conducive to discussion, argument, encounters
intellectual, emotional, sexual. Drinking is an educative process. It is
subject to rules - from weights and measures regulations on how it is sold
to accepted modes of consumption. You can watch your drinking; other people
certainly will. Drugs are your own responsibility.

But they don't work. They make you stupid, suck out your ability, narrow
your focus. It is no accident that so many serious dopeheads end up
obsessive, accomplished practitioners of one particular arcane skill, be it
useful - furniture making - or arcane and unnecessary - candle-making.
Drinkers tend to have a broader set of interests. They meet a wider range
of people. A better class.