Matters of Substance [antikvár]

I buy a railway ticket on a summer afternoon and am temporarily mesmerized by the tattoos on the clerk's arms, revealed by his rolled-up sleeves. He says, 'Thirty years ago, you remember where we met, the hospital, I was a junkie. A wonderful family now, I didn't look back ever.' Life keeps crossing its own path, I think to myself. And I go off down the platform in a blur of rejoicing. Drugs, licit and illicit, are used by many people without damage done at all. Drugs can also be dangerous, and in sum the harm they do today to the health, welfare and productivity of the world's people is appalling, and increases. This book will examine the history of human relationships with the vast array of mind-acting drugs that have at one time or another been used as medicines, in religious ritual or for the magical getting of wisdom, for fun and frolic, or for numbed oblivion. Drugs can properly only be understood in their historical, social and cultural context - they have no meaning in thin air. I will explore what multiple sciences can contribute to explanation of compulsive personal appetite for drugs, and why drug epidemics can so often run like fire across dry grass. In the light of the history and the science, this book will make proposals for a more effective and rational public response to the drug problem - a handling that at present too often seems to involve a patching together of ad hoe remedies done in the dark. But the conclusions emerging from this analysis cannot be a set of simplistic answers to what are great perplexities. This is not a book that will crusade for an even bloodier and more punitive war on drugs, and neither will it press as miracle cure the legalization of all drugs. Around 1880 one of my Victorian great-uncles was shipped off to America because of his scandalous drinking, but I doubt whether