Drugs

Why do some drugs have such strange effects? What do they do to our brains, our moods and our personalities? What happens when their use takes hold across entire cultures? Such questions lead the library-builder into an alluring hinterland of slightly disreputable scholarship.

How, for example, do these drugs alter our state of consciousness? On the basic psychology, Andrew Weil's engagingly sane The Natural Mind is an excellent primer. Intoxication by UCLA professor Ronald Siegel is an appropriately mind-expanding entree to the clinical research literature, exploring animal responses to drugs - chimpanzees to cannabis, goats to coffee beans, tropical fish to LSD - and arguing that intoxication is a drive as hard- wired as sex and hunger. Such researches have a long pedigree, attested by works such as the 19th century French doctor J J Moreau de Tours' Hashish and Mental Illness, which proposes that all psychiatrists should ingest large doses of hashish in order to understand their patients better.

Then there's the anthropology of drugs and their use in traditional cultures, where the sober reality is often as implausible as the trickster yarns of Carlos Castaneda. Plants of the Gods by Richard Schultes, the doyen of Harvard ethnobotany, and Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is an authoritative and well- illustrated coffee-table introduction to hallucinogenic plant use around the world, particularly in Central and South America. The similarly titled Flesh of the Gods, edited by Peter Furst, is a classic collection of field reports of drug rituals, from the peyote- eating Huichol of the Mexican desert to the narcotic ecstasies of the West African Bwiti cult. There are many fine book-length narratives of this kind, such as The Shaman and the Jaguar, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff's account of the Tukano people of the Amazon, whose culture revolves around snuffing large doses of DMT and shapeshifting into jaguars.

Beyond these familiar categories, drug studies have a tendency to morph into curious and improvised hybrids. Pharmacology is spliced with philosophy and memoir in the doorstopping chemistry cookbooks of designer drug guru Alexander Shulgin ( PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story), and with poetry and alchemy in the florid monographs of Dale Pendell ( Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons and Herb-craft). Cultural histories such as Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens' biography of LSD, or Alethea Hayter's Opium and the Romantic Imagination, reconfigure familiar episodes into surprising new narratives. Polemics such as Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry or David Lenson's On Drugs elevate the war on drugs to a hallucinatory metaphor of a society bent on consuming itself.

Mike Jay is the author of 'Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the 19th Century' (Dedalus Press)

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