Drugs in Literature?

[libernaut]

Anyone have any classic or excellent examples of Drugs in Literature?

I'm thinking Aldous Huxley is a great example. He started writing books long before his drug use and then started writing books about that and books that were influenced by it. Even his early work had great commentary on drugs, ie. Soma, in BNW.

Another book that comes to mind is tortilla flat by john steinbeck where they are always drunk. There is also countless beat generation examples...

Of course there are the extreme examples, such as Hunter S. Thompson, where it was a primary focus or catalyst in many ways. Or say Terrence Mckenna and books like Food Of The Gods.

Then theres DeQuincy and Crowley in the English tradition.

Just curious if you've read any "drug" lit or lit with drugs in it and what you thought of it?

What kind of drugs were in the book?

What was it's view on the drugs? Positive? Negative? In between?

What is your veiw on Drugs and Literature?

[dwdean]

Dorian Gray goes for a bit of opium in Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
the view, in my understanding, was that drugs masked the pain caused by grief. the drugs are therefore seen as negative, weak, and cowardly. i would say that the use of drugs in literature varies depending on the author. Wilde did not make an obscene and out-of-place drug reference. it merely fit his character. therefore, i hold that drugs have their place in classical literature as do affairs, sex, alcohol, murder, and the like...

[libernaut]

I recall that scene. Didn't it take place in the beginning as well with the secondary characters? yes it was in a sort of passing, and seemed somewhat recreational in the opening scene but did ring of grief when Gray used it right? I read this last year and it is not exactly fresh but i do remember the opium use was slight and well placed. and you are right in that it does have its place, it simply a part of the human condition as with those other things you've mentioned.

[kiki1982]

It was somewhere at the docks, on a lonely night for him, late in life, before he dies.

And I read that 2 years ago... ;)

I think it is worth noting that opium was both used as a drug, for painkilling after operations and such, and as a regular pleasure drug. It was more modern anyway than mere tobacco.
Like laudanum and cocaine/morfine really.
But that also had as adverse effect that many people who had it once prescribed as a drug for pains then got adicted to it and thus slid down the slippery slope. Particularly people who had the wrong friends...

Cocaine was very popular for sniffing purposes in the twenties.

The British also got the whole of China smoking opium in the 19th century, I believe, with the express aim of keeping them at bay. Heard that somewhere in a documentary some time.

Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd has a maltster in it that has quite a prominent place in the story. Also his Mayor of Casterbridge starts with the poignant effects of alcohol intoxication. His Tess too, but that's really too short.

Maybe Waugh's Brideshead Revisited as something in it, particularly towards the end in Morocco. Not sure though.

I must read very meek books ;).

[Lokasenna]

Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater leaps immediately to mind...

[dfloyd]

for a modern novel on drug addiction, try The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. The movie with Frank Sinatra is a classic film.

[DocHeart]

Complicity, the 90s noir story by my alumnus Iain M. Banks. The hero uses every drug available, and the ones that aren't he mixes up in his medicine cabinet.

It's also a fine mystery novel, one of Banks' best, in my view.

Regards

[lowradiation]

Can think of plenty of books written on the subject of drugs/by people influenced by them.

Fear and Loathing, Trainspotting, Naked Lunch...

Or am I missing the point?

[Aubergine]

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is definitely a definitive one.

Its views can probably be described by this excerpt from the afterword:


Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car...It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years...There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time.

[JohnnyBueller]

Dorian Gray goes for a bit of opium in Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
the view, in my understanding, was that drugs masked the pain caused by grief. the drugs are therefore seen as negative, weak, and cowardly. i would say that the use of drugs in literature varies depending on the author. Wilde did not make an obscene and out-of-place drug reference. it merely fit his character. therefore, i hold that drugs have their place in classical literature as do affairs, sex, alcohol, murder, and the like...
Yes. The Opium in "Dorian Gray" is seen as a very negative thing, in my opinion. Dorian uses it to forget some of the horrible things he's done that keep haunting him, to achieve a "stand-by" position, where he knows he's alive, but no remorse is there to attack him. It is also used as a resource to show the bad influence Dorian was, since he met an old friend in the "Opium-House" and sees how this old friend threw his life away after Gray introduced him to this life of extreme pleasures. This friend says something like no one wants to talk to him anymore, but that he doesn't care because as long as he has opium, he's happy. That sounds pretty 21st century to me.

[dwdean]

does anyone find that scientific study and drugs carry similar effects in literature? addictive, consuming, leading to one's downfall... evident in frankenstein (sci), dorian gray (drugs), jekyll and hyde (sci leads to drugs).

[larryF]

William S. Burroughs' 'Junkie: The Definitive Text of Junk'
Very awesome literary view of the opiate addict.

[kasie]

.....The British also got the whole of China smoking opium in the 19th century, I believe, with the express aim of keeping them at bay. Heard that somewhere in a documentary some time.....

If you are interested in this period of history, Amitar Ghosh is writing a trilogy, the Ibis trilogy, set in the period. The first volume, Sea of Poppies, came out a couple of years ago. It's a compelling read - he shows the action from the pov of all the nations involved, not just castigating the British but showing the Indian involvement, where the poppies were grown and the drug processed, the Chinese addicts, as well as a motley crew thrown together on one of the trading ships, the Ibis. It's a leisurely read with lots of detail - as he is writing a trilogy, he has lots of space to do this - and the characters are well-drawn and compelling. Volume two, River of Smoke, has just been published - it's on my next Amazon order list and I'm looking forward to reading it.

[endgame]

les fleurs du mal by baudelaire.these "flowers" stand for every kind of drug. i think it's one of the most important works which talks about drugs and their consequent effects. there's also "naked lunch" by borroughs. he always used them to go over human limits, that's why he always talks about them .

[libernaut]

Oh I love Burroughs, Junkie is one of my favorite books. Definitely shows what it is like to be one.

[WyattGwyon]

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System are chock full of drug abuse.

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano is a classic of alcohol abuse.

[Panglossian]

Miserable Miracle - Henri Michaux

- the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

[Outlaw]

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey

[Victorian142]

I wrote my undergrad dissertation of the use of addiction in Victorian literature. Such a brilliant topic to look into, especially when so little was known about it as a mental condition. I loved De Quincey's Confessions, Coleridge was also a great case study with Kubla Khan. Im currently writing a chapter on the uses and effects of science in Jekyll and Hyde and their contribution to urban gothic literature. The psychology behind drugs and science in literature is fascinating too.

[PoeticPassions]

just meandered upon this... http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2011/07/17/best-books-on-booze.html

:)

[Melysnl]

The Acid House and Fear and Loathing are two of the funniest drug themed books I've ever read.

I can tell that Tim O'Brian was smoking something when he wrote The Things They Carried.

[TheChilly]

Oh I love Burroughs, Junkie is one of my favorite books. Definitely shows what it is like to be one.

I only read "Naked Lunch"... and still didn't know if most of the book's vignettes were a figment of the author/protagonist's imagination or as part of a narcotic-fueled haze.

[Silas Thorne]

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe anyone?

[Arrowni]

Michaux did Mescaline, which is a book that he wrote describing the effects of drugs on himself and this drug bleeds into his poetry. Very intense, very interesting. His book is called Le miserable miracle.

[mal4mac]

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling - it's about a half-caste in India who becomes addicted to opium and ends up losing his job and living almost full-time in a stinking Opium den run by a ruthless Chinese family - they let him (just about) live because they take control of his pension 'cause he cares about nothing but opium.

Kipling does better than Wilde I think - the drug taker needn't be doing anything as melodramatic as masking the pain caused by grief, he can simply drift into going to the opium den for a night out and then he's slowly drawn in by the drug until there is nothing else. Burroughs gets this across as well, but Kipling does it in five pages! I just double checked, it seemed more like thirty! I've never encountered a writer who could tell deep stories so quickly.

I did like Burroughs' Junkie, my previous favourite 'drug literature', now the Kipling story matches it and provides an earlier, complementary view of Opium addiction. Did Kipling ever take Opium? I'm keeping well away... :)

I didn't like Naked Lunch at all, I think he was definitely drug addled by then...

Aside - the Kipling story opens the Penguin collection "The Man Who Would be King" (remember the film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine?) The story it's based on is only thirty pages long! Kipling not only tells great stories he doesn't waste any time in telling them.

I'm about ten stories through this forty story collection - and every one is a winner so far. I wish I'd ignored Kipling's bad press and read him earlier...

I used to be a bit of a Huxley fan, but I'm tired of his mystico-drugism (and mystico-everything actually...) It encouraged too many people to drop acid in the sixties - look at all those ridiculous pop stars, proof that Huxley's paens to pharmaceuticals were rubbish. Even worse - most of his novels are lame, preachy, long drawn out, and his characters very wooden. (Brave New World isn't bad...)

Don't do drugs, do Kipling! Now he's really way out, man...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8XH3R95xE

[TheChilly]

Almost forgot about "Requiem For A Dream" by Hubert Selby Jr...

[Ser Nevarc]

I wrote a critical essay recently on drugs in Victorian English poetry. I analyzed Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters". Let me know if you want me to post it.

[Alexander III]

I wrote a critical essay recently on drugs in Victorian English poetry. I analyzed Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters". Let me know if you want me to post it.

I would be interested in reading it if you felt it ok to post it :)

[Paulclem]

Carlos Casteneda wrote in the 60s and 70s about mystical experiences with Mescaline in a series of books about a man of knowledge - a Yaqui indian. They are interesting books, though there has been some controversy over the claimed biographical content.

Iain M Banks in his Culture books describes the casual use of recreational drugs as just part of the scene. The whole of the Culture is organised, protected and provided for by super intelligent AIs who monitor individuals.

In some of the books he posits the idea that we could be modified to include glands in bodies that will secrete the types of drugs appropriate for situations - adrenaline, narcotics, etc etc.

[Ser Nevarc]

I would be interested in reading it if you felt it ok to post it :)

Of course! I'll put it here, but are there maximum post sizes?

[PeterL]

In some of the books he posits the idea that we could be modified to include glands in bodies that will secrete the types of drugs appropriate for situations - adrenaline, narcotics, etc etc.

I recently read that human do secrete some intoxicating compounds, including some of the components of marijuana. That's in addition to endorphins which are opiumlike in structure and effect.

[E.A Rumfield]

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon is about a hippie private eye trying to find his girlfriend and himself in a changing world. The novel has several psychedelic experiences and the main character uses them to try to find clues. Often he is accompanied by a spirit guide. He also smokes a lot of weed.

Also in his novels Charles Bukowski writes a lot about drugs besides just drinking. In one passage in Women, he is staying with a women and she gives him mescaline and he paints some bizarre ****.

In Ask The Dust by John Fante there is an interesting portrayal of the 1930's marihuana user.

Huxley is a great example. In Islands the natives use something they call moska medicine which is a kind of hallucinogenic mushroom.

DMT is a highly potent hallucinogenic found in South America in a certain tree root. The locals drink the prepared substance and the experience is long and intense. Participants often see gods or spirits or aliens. Extracted DMT is a powder available that can be smoked the effects are shorter lasting. DMT is also the chemical released when we die or likely when we dream. It is also the chemical likely responsible for our waking state.

[kev67]

Depends what you call literature, but Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh is a lot about drugs.

Stephen Maturin in Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin books first becomes addicted to laudanum and later starts chewing cocoa leaves.

Come to think of it, doesn't Sherlock Holmes use drugs.

[E.A Rumfield]

Sherlock Holmes used to inject cocaine just like Freud.