by Howard Marks
At the time of my experiment I was lying in a narrow room with a corpse in the next bed, with god, a vulture and a dog as witnesses and wishing that Marguerite was here. Marguerite. I wish to tell Marguerite that the reason I did not make love to her that time in Hong Kong was not because I did not want her but because I had reason to believe that in the late, low hours of the week before, I had contracted a low infestation. I did not know Marguerite well enough to give her crabs – you understand? Marguerite had alabaster skin, triumphant hair and an unmuddied soul, and a swinging little ass into the bargain.
I have opened my eyes again, to shut off all that blue. Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that – an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem. But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks; the bureau budges; they back and fill, about to charge. From above, the bulb socket descends like a falling spider, leaving the bulb behind.
B. caapi, which is named for the caapi of certain Brazilian Indians, is also the camorampi of the Camps, the natema of the Jivaro, the ayahuasca or haya-huasca of the Quechua-speaking peoples, the yage of Ecuador, the soga de muerte of most Spanish South Americans, names variously translated at ‘Vine of the Devil,’ ‘Vine of the Soul,’ ‘Vine of Death’: the Spanish term means literally ‘vine rope of death,’ the soga referring to the jungle lianas used commonly as canoe lines, lashings, ropes, etc. In addition to certain medical properties, the vine can induce visions, telepathic states, metaphysical contemplation and transmigration; these conditions are used by the Indians for the reception of warnings, prophecies and good counsel. Among many tribes one purpose of the dream state is identification of an unknown enemy, and the use of it is thus related to the Jivaro practice of taking tsantsas, or shrunken heads . . .
I am cut off, I feel both silly and depressed; it is the solitude, not solitude but isolation . . . Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?
I am trying to reach out to you, but I do not know who you are, I cannot see you. I only feel your presence in this room. Perhaps . . . I wonder . . . are you inside me? And if so . . . Now listen carefully: there is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago. Are you in touch with it: can you tell me – did you see? – the man with the blue arrow –
Or are you the figure in the center of the street? So you came here, after all! Can you hear me? I said, CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN-YOU-HEAR-ME!
I cannot reach him through the sound and silence, distant sound and deepest silence, like a thick glass barrier between the world of the living and myself, as if I were wandering on an earth which had suddenly died, or in a Purgatory, myself already dead.
There is something that you have to understand.
Now look what’s happening – can you see? It’s Him, the Dead Man. Resurrection. Rising out of bed. Not suspecting that I am already dead, he will attempt to kill me.
He stops: StopshoutinforChristasake!
Here he comes, intent on the kill. He has broken the glass wall. He drags me across the room. He has a costume, he is all dressed up like a soldier of fortune, he is very hip; but see the rosy cheeks behind that beard? An enormous child!
‘You are an Enormous Child!’
Nevermindmejustlookinthemirra! Whatareyousomekindofaddictorwhat? Gowanlookatyaself!
See the pale face in the glass! The face is rigid, and the eyes are dark and huge. Over the left eye drifts a dark shadow, like a hand. There you are, I see you now, and the bearded man, your warder. He knew his lucidity could not last, and because he had taken too much, he dreaded going under again, and he started to ask Wolfie for help. ‘Hey,’ he said. But he could not ask, he had never asked in all his life, and even if he asked, what could poor Wolfie do? There were no sedatives in Madre de Dios; sedation was superfluous in a graveyard. He pushed away and tottered toward the window, where he fell across the sill. The dog and the vulture were gone. The light was tightening in the way it always did before the sudden jungle night, and down the center of the street a solitary figure walked away. The bottle stood open upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.
He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold. He felt very cold. On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing. It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, and the spots were growing. And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently. The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark.
NowlistenI’mgonnatellGuzmanzweflytomorrowawright? AwrightLewis? IsaidA WRIGHTLEWIS?
He looked at the man and the man’s head, fringed with hair; the head shrank before his eyes and became a tsantsa. He could not look, and turned away. A figure crossed his line of vision, moving toward the door. The door opened and light came in. The voice said Thisisnowheremanl’vehadenough.
Don’t go . . . I need . . . Don’t go. I need . . . But he could not hear his own voice, and he could not have said just what he needed. From over the man’s head the large white eyes of the moth observed him; they pinned him, like incoming beams. The music crashed, the wave . . . The door was dark again. He pushed himself to his feet and stared out of the window. The dark was rolling from the forest all around, and the sky was so wild as the sun set that it hurt his eyes. He reeled and fell, then thrashed to his feet and fell again, across the bed, and was sacked down into the darkness as the music burnt the walls and overwhelmed him.
His body diffused and drifted through cathedral vaults of color, whirling and shimmering and bursting forth, drifting high among the arches, down the clerestories, shadowed by explosions of stained glass. In the dark chapels of the church was a stair to windy dungeons, to colors rich and somber, now, and shapes emerging; the shapes lowered, rose in threat and fell away again. Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain. A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face. Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone. Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness.
He opened his eyes, gasping for breath; he drifted downward. Once the abyss opened out into air and sunlight but there were papier-mâché angels, and again he broke off chords of music from the air like bits of cake: the Paradise was false and he went on. A spider appeared, reared high over his head, then seized, shredded and consumed him. Voided, he lay inert in a great trough, with molten metal rising all about him in a blinding light. SO THIS WAS BRIMSTONE. The missionary’s pasty face peered down at him over the rim: This is a proud day for the mission, Lewis, and a proud day for your people. We all count on you.
Eyes. Eyes. He struggled to free himself, but the stake held in his heart, the hole in his heart; even breathing hurt him, even breathing. He clawed at his own chest to ease it. If only he could get that pain out, then his heart would bleed his life away, but gently.
A roar of trapped insects, flies and bees, and he among them: mad drone and bugging and brush of hairy, viscous legs scraping toward remote slits of air and light, of acrid insect smell, of flat inconscient insect eyes, unblinking, bright as jewels, too mindless to know fear, oh Christ, how mindless. Humans . . . A human mob, pounding its way into the bar, in search of – what? It did not know. It had no idea what it was hunting, but was hunting out of instinct, with myriad flat insect eyes, trampling everything underfoot; he shook with fear. Like a rat he was; a famine rat of broken cities, a quaking gut-shrunk rat, scurrying through the wainscoting of falling houses. His skeleton flew apart, reassembled in rat’s skeleton; his spine arched, his tiny forefeet and long furtive hand, the loose-skinned gassy belly; he poised, alert, hunched on his knees upon the bed, hands dangling at his navel; long nose twitching. In the mirror across the room he sa
w the hair sprout on his face and the face protrude.
He found his way across the room and stared so closely into the glass that his nose touched it; he watched the face wrinkle and turn old; he saw his own raw skull again and groaned. Then another mask, a new expression, hard and sly and cold. As he watched, it softened and turned young and wide-eyed, gentle; the muscles in his stomach eased, and he recognized the self of boyhood mornings. He was touched by this last face and grinned at it in embarrassment; but just as he grinned, self-consciousness returned to poison him; and the boyish face turned hard again and mean, and the lips drew back upon sharp teeth and the eyes glittered, and the whole body tensed with an anger of such murderous black violence that he recoiled from his own hate, falling back again across the bed. A huge dead dog had its teeth locked in his throat; and the metal bar dragged at his chest again, and when he closed his eyes the Rage descended, a huge and multilimbed galoot in hobnailed boots and spurs, eyes bulging, teeth grinding, cigars exploding in its mouth and flames shooting from its ears, bearing a club spiked with rusty nails, wearing brass knuckles and outsize six-guns; in its blind snot-flying rage, it blew its own head off by mistake: This thing came stomping down out of his mind, and he gasped, Look at that guy, that guy is so mad, he blew his own head off by mistake! His body relaxed and he howled with laughter, lying now with his back on the floor and his feet on the bed, and as he laughed, the gnawed and painful stake which had pierced his chest as long as he could remember cracked and opened like an ancient husk and turned to dust, and he could breathe again.
Here was Rage again, exploded now, hung up like an old scarecrow, like a big broken toy with one loose eye and loose old parts and springs and stuffing every whichy-way-all hung up on itself, poor critter. Rage danced somewhat sheepishly to guitar and wind, as if to say: Well, just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a dance or two . . .
Lucidity. He sighed. He lay there all laughed out and loose, loose as a dead snake slung on a rail, lay there drunk with gentleness and pleasure. Be a good boy, Lewis, do not hate so much.
Oh good old Wolfie, Wolfie would die laughing. The thought of the Old Wolf laughing, dying of laughing, set him off again, but this time, even as he laughed, an apprehension came.
He crawled to the corner of the room, where he crouched low, watching both door and window. The noises were surrounding him, there was something happening to him, something happening and he felt too tired now to deal with it. If he could only stop his laughing, but he could not; his laughter grew louder and louder, and when he tried to stop he could not close his mouth. It stretched wider and wider, until he swallowed the ceiling light, the room, the window and the night; the world rushed down into the cavernous void inside him, leaving him alone in space, pinwheeling wildly like a jagged fragment spun out from a planet.
A terrific wind blew, and his ears rang with the bells of blueblack space; the wind sealed his throat, his flesh turned cold, his screams were but squeaks snapped out and away by the passage of night spheres. Nor could he hear, there was no one to hear, there was no one where he had gone – what’s happening, what-is-happening . . .
He had flung himself away from life, from the very last ties, had strayed to the cold windy reaches of insanity. This perception was so clear and final that he moaned; he would not find his way back. You’ve gone too far this time, you’ve gone too far . . .
As he whirled into oblivion, his body cooled and became numb; inert, like a log seized up and borne out skyward by a cyclone; he struggled to reach out, catch hold, grasp, grip, hang on, but he could not. He could not, he was made of wood, and there was nothing to hang on to, not even his own thought – thought shredding, drifting out of reach, like blowing spiderwebs. He was gone, g-o-n-e, gone, G-O-N-E, gone – and around again. The howling was in his head, and all about lay depthless silence. His screaming was ripped away before it left his mouth, and the mouth itself was far away, a huge papered hoop blown through and tattered by the gales. The air rushed past, too fast to breathe; his lungs sucked tight, shriveled like prunes, collapsed. He died.
Death came as a huge bounteous quiet, in the bosom of a high white cloud. The wood of his body softened, the knots loosened; he opened up, lay back, exhausted, mouth slack, eyes wide like the bald eyes of a corpse. He glimpsed a hard light lucid region of his mind like a lone comet, wandering far out across the long night of the universe.
At the end of his long night of uproar and hallucinations, Lewis Moon had a dream. He dreamed that he walked homeward up the bed of an empty river and out onto a blasted land of rusted earth and bones and blackened stumps and stunted metal, a countryside of war. In the sky of a far distance he saw a bird appear and vanish; but no matter how far he walked, the world was one mighty industrial ruin, a maze of gutted factories and poisoned ground under the gray sky. He came finally to a signpost, and the signpost had caught a fragile ray of rising sun. He ran toward it, stumbled, fell and ran again. The signpost pointed eastward, back toward the sun, and it read: NOWHERE.
Very tired, he turned back along his road, crossing the dead prairie. Though he had not noticed them on his outward journey, he now passed a series of signs all pointing eastward. Each was illuminated by a ray of sun, and each bore the same inscription: NOWHERE.
The terrible silence of the world made him move faster, and soon he saw, on the eastern horizon, the dark blur of a forest. He ran and trotted weakly, bewildered by the crashing of his feet upon the cinders. Another sign, and then another, pointed toward the wood.
As he drew near, the wood became a jungle, a maelstrom of pale boles and thickened fleshy leaves, shining and rubbery, of high, dark passages, and hanging forms, of parasites and strangler figs and obscene fruited shapes. But even here there was no sound, no sign of movement, not even a wind to stir the heavy leaves, sway the lianas; there was only the mighty hush of a dead universe.
He started forward, stopped, started again. Too frightened to go on, he turned around and saw what lay behind him; then he sat down on the road, and this time he wept.
When at last he lifted his eyes, he saw a signpost at the jungle edge; it was obscured by weeds and leaves and the tentacles of a liana, and at first he thought that its inscription was identical to all the rest. But this sign did not point anywhere, and as he drew near and stared at it he saw that its inscription was quite different. It read: NOW HERE.
Astonished, he ventured on into the darkness of the jungle. Soon he came to a kind of clearing cut off from the sky by a canopy of trees, a soft round space like an amphitheater, diffused with sepia light. Everything was soft and brownish, and the ground itself quaked beneath his feet, giving off a smell of fungus and decay. In the center of the clearing he strayed into a quagmire; very quickly he sank, too tired to struggle. But as he passed into the earth and the warm smells of its darkness, he was still breathing without effort, and soon he dropped gently into a kind of earthen vault. Though closed off from the sky, this cave was suffused by the same soft brownish light as in the clearing far above. Here was a second sign, which read: NOW HERE.
The passage through the soil had cleaned him of his clothes, and he was naked; as he stood there, small black spots appeared in pairs upon his skin. He pressed at them and discovered to his horror that the black spots were the tips of snail horns; at each touch a naked snail slid out through his skin and dropped to the cave floor. His hands flew wildly about his body, and the snails slid out and fell, until finally the earth at his bare feet was strewn with slimy writhings. Now, from the darkness near the wall, numbers of salamanders crept forward; each salamander grasped a snail behind its head and writhed in silent struggle with it, the soft bodies twitching back and forth in rhythm.
He backed toward one side of the room and fell into a tunnel. He ran along the tunnel, no longer afraid, for there was light ahead. He ran like a boy.
The tunnel emerged like a swallow’s nest from the side of a high bank. Far below he saw a jungle clearing in a huge sunlight of the w
orld’s first morning, and in the clearing the Indians awaited him. Naked, he leaped into the radiant air, and fell toward them.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord, 1991
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Vintage, in particular Susan Sandon for first suggesting I work on an anthology, Caroline Michel for having the faith that I would do so, and Arzu Tahsin for patiently enduring my demands and idiosyncrasies. Much of my own writing has relied on my columns for Loaded, and I am grateful for their permission to do this. I would also like to thank Crofton Black, Caroline Brown, Jamie Byng, Mike Jay, and Golly Marks for invaluable assistance in research, editing, and proofreading; Joe McNally, Paul Sieveking, James Oliver, Andy McConnell, The British Library, New York Public Library, Drugscope, Fitzhugh Ludlow Hypertext Collection, Schaffer Library for Drug Policy, Erowid Vaults and Lycaeum.org for the tracking down and loan of rare books. My greatest thanks have to be reserved for Mary Carson, the finest, most tenacious, and best researcher any writer could wish to have.
* * *
The editors and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission from the following to reprint stories or extracts from works in copyright. Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permissions with reference to copyright material. We apologise if inadvertently any sources remain unacknowledged.
STEVEN ABRAMS: from The Book of Grass: An Anthology on Indian Hemp, edited by George Andrews and Simon Vinkenoog (Peter Owen, 1967), reprinted by permission of Peter Owen Ltd, London; M. AGEYEV: from Novel With Cocaine (Penguin Classics, 1999); LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: from ‘Perilous Play’ in Tales of Hashish by Andrew C. Kimmens (William Morrow, 1977); SHANA ALEXANDER: from The Pizza Connection (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); NELSON ALGREN: from The Man With The Golden Arm (Doubleday, 1949), reprinted by permission of Donadio & Olson, Literary Representatives; JOHN ALLEGRO: from The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (Abacus, 1970); STEWART LEE ALLEN: from The Devil’s Cup (Canongate Books, 2000), reprinted by permission of Canongate Books and Soho Press Inc.; ANONYMOUS: ‘Beware my friend . . .’ (poem found on the wall of a Jamaican café in Shepherd’s Bush, London); ‘Confessions of a middle-aged Ecstasy eater’ from The Guardian (14 July 2001); ‘The African Fang Legends’ from White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader, edited by John Miller and Randall Koral (Chronicle Books, 1995); HARRY ANSLINGER: from The Murderers (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961); ANTONIL: from Mama Coca (Hassle Free Press, 1978); HARRY ASHER: ‘They Split my Personality’ from Saturday Review (1 June 1963); BRIAN BARRITT: from The Road of Excess (PSI Publishing, 1998), reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher; WILLIAM BARTON: from ‘From A Dissertation on the Chymical Properties and Exhilarating Effects of Nitrous Oxide Gas’ in Mindscapes: An Anthology of Drug Writings, edited by Antonio Melechi (Mono, 1998); CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: ‘Be You Drunken!’ from The Idler’s Companion (1869); ‘The Playground of the Seraphim’, translated by Aleister Crowley, from The Equinox, Number 3 (1910); JACK BEECHING: from The Chinese Opium Wars (Harcourt Trade Publishers, 1977); CHARLIE BEER: ‘Dave the Doorman’, published by permission of the author; BEZ: from Freaky Dancin’ (Pan Books, 1989); ROBERT BINGHAM: from Lightning on the Sun (Canongate Books, 2001), reprinted by permission of the publisher; VICTOR BORCKIS: from With William Burroughs (Fourth Estate, 1997); JOHN G. BOURKE: from Scatological Rites of All Nations (1891), reprinted in Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader, edited by Mike Jay (Penguin Books, 1999); T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE: from Budding Prospects (Granta Books, 1984); GARNETT BRENNAN: ‘Marijuana Witchhunt’ from Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Experience, edited by Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz (Quill Books, 1982), (c) Evergreen Review, 1967; WILLIAM BURROUGHS: from Junky (Penguin Books, 1977), and The Naked Lunch (Grove Press, 1959); JAMES M. CAMPBELL: from ‘On the Religion of Hemp’ (Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–4); MORDECAI COOKE: from The Seven Sisters of Sleep (James Blackwood, 1860); ALEISTER CROWLEY: from Diary of a Drug Fiend (Samuel Weiser, 1970), and Magick: Part III: Magick in Theory and Practice (Samuel Weiser, 1991); GEZA CSATH: ‘The Surgeon’ (1910) from The Magician’s Garden and Other Stories, translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers (Columbia University Press, 1980); DAILY MIRROR: an article on marihuana; RENE DAUMAL: from A Fundamental Experiment, translated by Roger Shattuck (Hanuman Books, 1991); ROBERT DAVIES: from Perfection She Dances (Mainstream Publishing, 2001), reprinted by permission of the publisher; MILES DAVIS: from The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1989); HENRI DE MONFRIED: from Hashish (Penguin Books, 1946); CHARLES DICKENS: from The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870, unfinished); ALEXANDRE DUMAS: from The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), in Tales of Hashish by Andrew C. Kimmens (William Morrow, 1976); ISABELLE EBERHARDT: from The Oblivion Seekers (City Lights Books, 1972), (Peter Owen Publishers, 1988); JOHNNY EDGECOMBE: from Calypso Train, published by permission of the author; MOHAMMED EL GUINDY: ‘Opium as an International Problem’, an address given at the Second International Opium Conference (1924), from Schaffer Library for Drug Policy, California; HAVELOCK ELLIS: from ‘Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise’ (1898), reprinted in The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature (Volume 1), edited by Peter Haining (Peter Owen, 1975), reprinted by permission of Peter Owen Ltd, London; THE EQUINOX: ‘Testing Cannabis on Dogs’ from The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism, Volume 1, Number 1 (1909); ANTONIO ESCOHOTADO: from A Brief History of Drugs (Park Street Press, 1999), reprinted by permission of the publisher; DAVID EVANS: a speech in the House of Commons on drugs, from Hansard (17 January 1997); LANRE FEHINTOLA: from Charlie Says . . . don’t get high on your own supply: an urban memoir (Scribner Books, 2000); MARIA GOLIA: from Nile-Eyes, (c) Maria Golia, 2000, published by permission of the author; STEPHEN JAY GOULD: from Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar. Revised & Expanded Edition (Yale University Press, 1997), reprinted by permission of the publisher; NIALL GRIFFITHS: from Sheepshagger (Jonathan Cape, 2001), reprinted by permission of the author; LESTER GRINSPOON: from The Trial of Kerry Wiley (Harvard Medical School); (with James B. Bakalar) from Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine. Revised & Expanded Edition (Yale University Press, 1997), (c) 1997 by Yale University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; CHARLIE HALL: ‘The Box’ from Disco Biscuits, edited by Sarah Champion (Sceptre, 1997); JAMES HAWES: from Dead Long Enough (Vintage, 2001), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; HIGH ARCHIVES: ‘China Proposes Death to Drug Addicts – After 1937’ from Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an English Eccentric GEORGE IVES, edited by Paul Sieveking (Penguin Books, 1981), (c) Jay Landesman, reprinted by permission of Jay Landesman; JIM HOGSHIRE: from Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History and Consumption (Feral House, 1999); MICHAEL HOLLINGS-HEAD: from The Man who Turned on the World (Blond & Briggs/New English Library, 1973); JOHN HOPKINS: from Tangier Buzzless Flies (Atheneum, 1972); HASSAN MOHAMMED IBN-CHIRAZI: from ‘A Treatise on Hemp’ (1300), reprinted in Tales of Hashish by Andrew C. Kimmens (William Morrow, 1976); JAMES GREY JACKSON: from An Account of the Empire of Marocco (Frank Cass, 1968); KING JAMES I: from Counterblast to Tobacco (1604); WILLIAM JAMES: from The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902); MIKE JAY: from Blue Tide: The Search for Soma (Autonomedia, 1999), reprinted by permission of the author; PHILIP JENKINS: from Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs (New York University Press, 1999) reprinted by permission of the publisher; RODERICK KALBERER: from The Scam (Coronet, 1995), reprinted by permission of the author and Hodder Headline Plc; H. H. KANE: from The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp (1888), from Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library Hypertext Collection, San Francisco; JULIAN KEELING: from Drugstore Cowboy (The Idler, 1996), reprinted by permission of the publisher; JONATHAN KELLY: ‘I Talk To Cows, You Know’, published by permission of the author; CARL KERENYI: from Dionysos (Princeton University Press, 1976), (c) 1967 by Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; MAREK KOHN: fr
om Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Lawrence & Wishart, 1992); GEORGE LANE: from Early Mongol Rule in 13th century Iran: a Persian Renaissance (Curzon Press; forthcoming late 2002) reprinted by permission of the publisher; PETER LAURIE: from Drugs (Pelican Books, 1967); JAMES LEE: from Underworld of the East (Sampson, Low, Marston & Company, 1935); MRS FRANK LESLIE: from ‘California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate’ (April, May, June 1877), from Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library Hypertext Collection; JOHN LIGHTFOOT: from The Spanish Connection (Blake Publishing, 1992), reprinted by permission of the publisher; MEDLAR LUCAN & DURIAN GRAY: from The Decadent Gardener (Dedalus Books, 1998), reprinted by permission of the publisher; ROBERT LUND: ‘Mikey’s Tale’ (10 September 1997), reprinted by permission of the author; ZOE LUND: ‘Cul de sac’ from Mobiles reprinted by permission of Robert Lund; PETER MCDERMOTT: ‘Immaculate Injection’, published by permission of the author; TERENCE MCKENNA: from Food of the Gods (Rider Books, 1992); HANS MAIER: from Der Kokainismus (1926), reprinted in Cocaine by Dominic Streatfield (Virgin Books, 2001); PETER MATTHIESSEN: from At Play in the Fields of the Lord, © 1966, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.; CHRISTOPHER MAYHEW: ‘An Excursion out of Time’ from The Observer (28 October 1956), reprinted by permission of the publisher; JAMES MILLS: from The Underground Empire (Doubleday, 1974); SUSAN NADLER: from ‘The Butterfly Convention’ in Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings and the Drug Experience, edited by Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz (Quill Books, 1982), © 1976 by Susan Nadler; JEREMY NARBY: from The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (Gollancz, 1998); R. K. NEWMAN: ‘Opium Smoking in Late Imperial China: A Reconsideration’ from Modern Asian Sudies, 29:4 (1995), © Cambridge University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; CHARLES NICHOLL: from The Fruit Palace (Heinemann, 1985), reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates; FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: from Twilight of the Idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1990); WILLIAM NOVAK: from High Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), © 1980 by William Novak, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc; BRIDGET O’CONNOR: ‘Heavy Petting’ from Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-based writing, edited by Toni Davidson (Serpent’s Tail, 1998); JASON PARKINSON: ‘Acid. The Journey through Living Room Walls’, and ‘Skateboards and Methadone’, published by permission of the author; JOHN BAPTISTA PORTA: from ‘Women are Made to cast Off Their Clothes and Go Naked’ in Wildest Dreams: An Anthology of Drug-Related Literature, edited by Richard Rudgley (Little, Brown & Company, 1999) reprinted by permission of Richard Rudgley; DAWN F. ROONEY: from Betel Chewing Traditions in South-East Asia (Oxford University Press, 1993); HARVEY ROTTENBERG: from ‘Planted, Burnt, and Busted’ from Getting Busted, edited by Ross Firestone (Penguin Books, 1972); KEVIN RUSHBY: from Eating the Flowers of Paradise (Flamingo, 1999); ROBERT SABBAG: from Smokescreen (Canongate Books; forthcoming February 2002), and Snowblind (Canongate Books, 1998), reprinted by permission of the publisher; KEVIN SAMPSON: from Outlaws (Jonathan Cape, 2001), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd on behalf of the author; R. E. SCHULTES & R. RAFFAUF: from Vine of the Soul (Synergetic Press, 1992); ALEXANDER & ANN SHULGIN: from Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story (Transform Press, 1991), and Tihkal: The Continuation (Transform Press, 1997), reprinted by permission of the authors; RONALD K. SIEGEL: from Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (E. P. Dutton, 1989); TIM MACKINTOSH SMITH: from Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (Picador, 1999); TIM SOUTHWELL: from Getting Away With It (Ebury Press, 2001), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); DOMINIC STREATFIELD: from Cocaine (Virgin Books, 2001), reprinted by permission of the publisher; ROBERT SVOBODA: from Aghora, At the Left Hand of God (Brotherhood of Life, 1986), reprinted by permission of the publisher; THOMAS SZASZ: from Ceremonial Chemistry (Anchor/Doubleday, 1974); BAYARD TAYLOR: from ‘Hasheesh’ in White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader, edited by John Miller and Randall Koral (Chronicle Books, 1995); DEREK TAYLOR: from It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (Simon & Schuster, 1987) reprinted by permission of Transworld publishers; HUNTER S. THOMPSON: from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Paladin, 1972); OLAF TYARANSEN: from The Story of O (Hot Press Books, 2000), reprinted by permission of the publisher; UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT: Decision in the Case of Terrell Don Hutto v Roger Trenton Davis (11 January 1982); STUART WALTON: from Out Of It (Hamish Hamilton, 2001); EDWARD HUNTINGTON WILLIAMS: ‘Negro Cocaine “Fiends” New Southern Menace’ in New York Times (8 February 1914), from Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, California; ELIZABETH WURTZEL: from Prozac Nation (Quartet Books, 1996), reprinted by permission of the publisher.