Tags: drug culture | modernism | pop culture

Stuart Walton is a wine expert who has been thinking about, studying and doing drugs for most of his life, and this book is a lecture-series-esque compendium of his knowledge and conclusions...

He sketches the long history of drugs in western civilization, debunks the myths associated with this history, makes an argument against the current prohibition, and offers brief and useful explanations of what specific drugs do to the human body.

This is a comprehensive and literate history. Walton is a talented writer with a classical education, and treats his subject with a respect and honesty that he finds all too lacking in books about drugs by people who don't like or consume (or admit to consuming) powders and pills.

His discussions of the class specific approaches to intoxication in mid to late Victorian society - when aristocratic women were swept up in a morphine tea party fad, openly gathering at 4 p. m in society drawing rooms with gold stash boxes and precious jewel studded syringes - is particularly juicy.

The Victorian era was a time when most modern drugs were invented or re-synthesized by various German firms and were available on the market. Amphetamine was stumbled upon in 1887; modern heroin born in 1874 and first used as a cure for morphine addiction; while MDA (precursor to ecstasy) was originally developed as an appetite suppressant in 1912. Out of it is crammed with drug factoids, some trite and well-known - i.e. Freud was a coke freak - others less so. Did you know that every single combatant in every single major army during WWII was jacked up to the eyeballs on four-star speed?

That Pervetin - known to young Czechs as "pico" - was developed by the Nazis to keep Luftwaffe pilots awake for days, half of whom ended up in sanatoriums after extended use? That the American Civil War created tens of thousands of morphine addicted veterans, as the Vietnam War was to do 100 years later? That the word "heroin" comes from the German word heroisch meaning heroically strong?

That no secular government until the dawn of the 20th century had ever tried to comprehensively ban drugs? Walton ends his history of/paean to intoxication with a thoughtful polemic against the misguided and self-appointed morality fascists of the contemporary drug debate, concluding simply and rightly that access to myriad forms of intoxication is both a fundamental human right and a biological imperative that has defined history for thousands of years.

Walton believes it is our own choice if we wish to obliterate our ego or play with our serotonin levels, and thus "law reform is urgently needed - to cut crime, make drugs safer, reduce the risk of illness and infection, and restore a sense of civic dignity to those who wish to use a wider range of intoxicants than just booze and fags."

Amen.