Out of this world
Alberto Manguel
THE PURSUIT OF OBLIVION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF NARCOTICS, 1500-2000 by Richard Davenport-Hines Weidenfeld. £20, pp. 466, ISBN 0297643754 Some time in the 1830s, Helen Gladstone, sister of the more famous William Lwart, desperate because her parents would not approve of her inamorata, sought relief in both 'the horrible drug' of opium and in what Marx was later to call 'the opium of the people'. She took up laudanum, converted to Roman Catholicism, and escaped to Baden-Baden, far from the reproachful eyes of her family. Dutifully, Gladstone tried to dissuade her from her addiction by reading out loud from a history of the Christian martyrs in Japan. Alas, this excellent literature did nothing to ease Helen's cravings; rather, it set her against books of devotion, so much so that afterwards, back home, she began using works by Protestant divines from her family library as toilet paper. The disconsolate Gladstone discovered the books ('as she doubtless wanted', notes Richard Davenport-Hines) in the water closet, 'some torn up, the borders or outer coverings of some remaining — under circumstances which admit of no doubt as to the shameful use to which they were put'. Later, when the family stopped trying to dissuade her from her addiction, Helen settled down comfortably as a Roman Catholic and 'renounced laudanum for long periods'.
The Pursuit of Oblivion is not concerned with every kind of addiction. Immoderate cravings for cigarettes, booze, sex, Mills & Boon novels, chocolate. Pokemon figures, religious paraphernalia or video games lie outside the scope of this fat, compassionate and convincing volume. As DavenportHines states in his prologue, 'This book is a history of drug-taking and therefore a history of emotional extremes.' Narcotics that relieve pain, hvpnotics that induce stupor, stimulants that cause excitement, inebriants that confuse the senses, hallucinogens that change our perceptions: the choice is vast and the effects as varied as its users:
monarchs, prime ministers, great writers and composers, wounded soldiers, overworked physicians, oppressed housewives, exhausted labourers, high-powered businessmen, playboys, sex workers, pop stars, seedy losers, stressed adolescents, defiant schoolchildren, the victims of the ghetto, and happy young people on a spree.
Why do we take drugs? Partly because of our ancient longing for what Blake called 'an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five', because of our desire to cleanse (Blake again) the 'doors of perception', because of our yearning for a happiness which, we like to think, was ours before the apple in the Garden. And yet not all drugs are sought for the sake of extraordinary experiences. Sometimes it is the contrary, the search for ordinary solace in our lives of quiet desperation', that prompts the use. Davenport-Hines quotes from a 1966 study on the 'white-collar
The thousands of solitary amphetamine abusers take drugs to avoid deviance — so they can be fashionably slim, or bright and alert and functional, or so they can muster the guoi que with which to face the tedium of housework or some other dull job — and the last thing they want is membership in a group defined solely by one clear form of rulebreaking,
As Davenport-Hines shows, no addiction is innocent. The question asked by the poet Anne Sexton (who committed suicide in 1974) is of the essence: 'Can you be addicted in a calm way that doesn't hurt anyone?' The apparent answer is no. Not every intoxication leads to addiction. In itself, 'intoxication is not unnatural or deviant. Absolute sobriety is not a natural or primary human state', Davenport-Hines boldly states. But in the confusing official propaganda against addiction, drugs that are harmless and drugs that are not appear equally and hypocritically condemned, making huge profits for the drug lords ($400 billion in trade annually, according to recent UN estimates) and circumscribing drug-taking to a vicious circle (c'est Ic cas de le dire) of something temptingly forbidden and legally inescapable. As Davenport-Hines makes it clear, prohibition is not the solution: banning drugs creates lucrative opportunities for criminals, and the punishment of users serves no redemptive purpose whatsoever,
What then? A solution (or a compromise) may lie in a measured and reasonable governmental approach, factual and well balanced, relying on regulation and education rather than outlawing and browbeating (as the case of Helen Gladstone illustrates); and, we most add, conducted in what Davenport-Hines calls 'a temper of pragmatic scepticism'. However, in the present climate of universal paranoia I will not be holding my breath.
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