HIGH TIMES

The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics By Richard
Davenport-Hines Norton, 576 pp., illustrated, $29.95

A Detailed History Of Intoxication. "The Pursuit Of Oblivion" Also
Chronicles The Consequences Of The US War On Drugs

"Intoxication is not unnatural or deviant.

Absolute sobriety is not a natural or primary human state." To Americans
incessantly bombarded with anti-drug propaganda, the message that the quest
to alter consciousness is an inescapable part of the human condition may
sound wildly subversive. But Richard Davenport-Hines gets the message
across in a pragmatic and persuasive manner in his excellent book "The
Pursuit of Oblivion."

As Davenport-Hines shows comprehensively, people everywhere and at all
times have resorted to drugs to reinvent themselves, to seek transcendence,
or to make their lives more bearable.

Examining the efforts of societies to ban drug use, he makes the compelling
argument that the "war on drugs," in which the United States has led much
of the world for about a century, is futile and destructive and should be
abandoned.

As this synopsis suggests, the author has set himself two tasks and, as it
happens, "The Pursuit of Oblivion" divides correspondingly into two parts.
The first chronicles the history of drug use from ancient times to today -
an ambitious project, to say the least.

Davenport-Hines surveys pharmacology, medical practices, fashion,
literature, wars, colonial and trade policies, crime, and punishment. And
he covers all kinds of drugs: narcotics, hypnotics, stimulants, inebriants,
and hallucinogens.

It would take a less erudite and entertaining historian than Davenport-
Hines to make a dull story out of the history of drugs, and he fills his
book with fascinating lore and intelligent interpretation. But there is too
much to tell: The material resists the author's attempts-to make a
narrative of it. Switching from Paris to Shanghai to Edinburgh, from opium
to cocaine to marijuana, and from use to trafficking to policy, he is
forced time and again to resort to arbitrary transitions after the model of
"Another new and less destructive substance was amyl nitrite." Also, his
devotion to minutiae can make for difficult reading.

He provides the birth and death dates, if he knows them, for almost every
person he mentions, even if only in passing - a habit that threatens to
overburden an already encyclopedic account.

Only when the author takes on the criminalization of drugs in America and
the United Kingdom - his second task - does a coherent story emerge from
the mass of detail. "Takes on" is the correct term here. Davenport- Hines's
position - which he bolsters with overwhelming evidence and penetrating
analysis - is that the war on drugs has turned "licit, if dangerous,
medicines into the world's most lucrative and tightly organized black
market" and worsened the lives of many drug users.

Davenport-Hines pulls no punches with America's series of ignorant and
intolerant drug czars, starting with Harry Anslinger, who ran the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Tireless at spreading lies and
suppressing truths about the pathology of drug addiction and the dangers of
drugs, Anslinger helped create the climate of paranoia about drugs that has
persisted in America for the past 50 years.

As Davenport-Hines shows, US drug policy has generally functioned as a
business incentive.

He points out that "the late twentieth-century cocaine boom was chiefly the
creation of the presidential drugs wars." He laments America's efforts to
export its drug policy abroad, efforts that have borne their bitter fruit
in Europe (even though several European countries have had firsthand
evidence of the superiority of more enlightened policies) and in the Third
World, where the promotion of US tactics amounts to "neocolonialism," in
Davenport-Hines's apt term.

The author's ferocity toward the advocates of prohibition is agreeably
balanced with sarcastic wit. Here is his dry assessment of Sir William
Willcox, the British Home Office's medical adviser in the 1920s: "He was
temperamentally unsympathetic to those who yearned for deep sleep." On
President Nixon's Operation Intercept, a high-profile effort to deter the
importing of marijuana from Mexico to the United States, he notes:
"Reactions were overwhelmingly favorable, except among people with some
grasp of the subject." A book by Anslinger describing the sordid underworld
of drug users "brims with senile prurience."

As resolute an opponent of drug prohibition as Davenport-Hines is, he is
also no fan of hedonism.

For him, the modern culture of self- absorption is infantile and
irresponsible. He criticizes the Beats for their "Peter Pan complex" and
"their extravagances of feeling and behavior," which merely amount to "a
prolongation of adolescence." Similarly, he treats the rebellion of
Baudelaire, Flaubert, and other 19th-century French intellectuals as
"childish" and "theatrical," although, in a magnanimous spirit, he concedes
that "neither the motives nor the achievements of these creative young
Frenchmen were invariably contemptible."

When he comes to the counterculture of the late 1960s, Davenport-Hines is,
at his most tolerant, facetious.

Commenting on the hysterical propaganda US authorities used to try to deter
people from using LSD, he suggests that "teasing people who pompously
claimed transcendent experience would have been more effective." He even
takes potshots at Michel Foucault (author of the acclaimed if overrated
"The History of Sexuality "), whose experiences on LSD, according to
Davenport-Hines, "made him maudlin and even more self-absorbed."

Davenport-Hines has little patience with what he calls "the therapeutic
hegemony" in the West today and keeps up a running critique of psychiatry
throughout the book - starting with Sigmund Freud, that "indomitably
ambitious young Viennese" who was lured by the hope of instant fame into
hastily endorsing cocaine as a multipurpose panacea. In the United Kingdom
since the 1960s, the entrenchment of psychiatrists in a central role in the
treatment of addiction has had, as Davenport-Hines documents, disastrous
consequences. He is scathing about British psychiatrists' attempts to
arrogate the authority to intervene in childrearing and social policy.

The author's tone is measured and controlled throughout, and his marshaling
of evidence inexorable. The war on drugs continues - despite proof that, in
Davenport-Hines's words, "preventive and treatment programs are
overwhelmingly more effective than the hugely expensive tactics of drug
prohibition and supply eradication." In detailing the massive failure of
these tactics, Davenport-Hines has done an important service. "The Pursuit
of Oblivion" lays the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to drug policy.

Chris Fujiwara is working on a biography of film director Otto Preminger
for Faber & Faber. He lives in Somerville.