The Drug Experience

Book excerpt: Here for the first time in one volume, a collection of drug-dreams, raptures and ravings, experiments and excesses--voyages "out of this world" charted by Hashish, Heroin, Cocaine, Opium, Mescaline, Peyote, LSD and many other drugs. Almost forty accounts in the first person--some as classical as Baudelaire, De Quincey and Havelock Ellis; others as contemporary as Alexander King, Mezz Mezzerow and Jean Cocteau--record the transfiguring or shattering experiences of those who dared to alter their consciousness, to reorder their perceptions through drugs. Motives vary: to kill pain, to kill boredom; to commune with the gods, to become a god. The setting too vary--a Greenwich Village "pad," to a Comanche tent on the Great Plains, a laboratory overlooking the Hudson River, a Paris night club for sensualists and a bandstand at a Chicago jazz session. But the mocking link is there--between the primitive and the scientific, the soulseekers and the sick, the sacred and the sensual. Featuring previously unpublished material, this anthology also includes personal reports from Theophile Gautier, Billie Holiday, William Burroughs, Barney Ross, Fitzhugh Ludlow--reports from a painter and a prizefighter, patients and doctors, human guinea-pigs and anthropologists, from the world of jazz, the Orient, the asylum. There is a cult-priest possessed by his gods, a schizophrenic restored to the possession of his sanity, a hipster flying high through the smoke of marihuana; all of them sharing the search for a new reality and the escape from the old one--through the use of mind-body drugs.--From jacket flap