STONED-AGE BOOK REFRESHINGLY FRANK

Each year, police make more than 700,000 marijuana-related arrests in the
United States. Some 80 percent of public school districts still teach the
Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, commonly called D.A.R.E., even
though the General Accounting Office has declared it ineffective. In 2003,
comedian Tommy Chong went to federal prison for the high crime of selling
bongs via the Internet. In such a climate, it takes courage to say anything
positive about illegal drugs (or, as the federal government moralistically
prefers to call them, illicit drugs).

So Martin Torgoff's "Can't Find My Way Home" is a brave book, simply
because it seeks to "chronicle ... the use of illicit drugs in America
without sensationalizing, apologizing, moralizing or demonizing." It's also
a generally successful effort, in many ways as pleasantly and richly
intoxicating as a double hit of Humboldt County, Calif.'s finest.

Torgoff, author of "Elvis: We Love You Tender" and a biography of the
musician John Cougar Mellencamp, ranges widely in documenting the profound
influence of drugs on postwar America. Between an encyclopedic bibliography
and dozens of interviews with folks ranging from the Doors' record producer
Paul A. Rothchild to the "acid angel" Dawn Reynolds, the reader gets a
contact high from touring a number of legendary drug-infused scenes.

Allen Ginsberg's reading of "Howl" at San Francisco's Six Gallery, a
typically debauched evening at New York's Studio 54 and "the high temple of
the Great Stoned Age" - Torgoff represents these and more in well-rendered
detail.

He also gives due weight to gloomier tales, from Charlie Parker's tormented
love affair with heroin to the suicide of High Times magazine founder Tom
Forcade.

Throughout, Torgoff drives home the point that not only have nearly half of
Americans tried at least one "illicit" drug but also that such substances
"have long since become part of a deeply personal and complicated prism of
American life.

For all its many merits, however, "Can't Find My Way Home" is, in the end,
something of a downer, a bummer - maybe even a bad trip. Torgoff smartly
acknowledges that public discussion of drugs is typically hyperbolic,
oscillating between zealots who claim that certain substances can (and
should) transform all of human society and drug warriors who unconvincingly
see a future junkie lurking in every casual marijuana smoker.

Torgoff knows better, writing "that for the vast majority of people the
truth of drugs will always lie somewhere between the extremes."

Yet his personal experience with drugs, a significant part of the book, is
nothing if not unrepresentative, veering as it does between abuse and
abstinence. Coming of age in the '60s and '70s, Torgoff frankly admits,
"The only time I ever turned down a drug was when I didn't understand the
question." Later, he discusses his involvement with 12-step programs and
writes that "in the 15th year of my sobriety. I have never been happier."
While there's no question that "the extremes" make for much more
interesting reading, it's disappointing that even a book seeking to
"demystify" drugs ultimately reinscribes a longstanding dualism about
mind-altering substances. If nothing else, it suggests that a truly
measured discussion of American drug use is yet to come.

"Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000" by
Martin Torgoff. Simon & Schuster. 545 pages. $27.95