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'Can't Find My Way Home': Higher and Higher
[ New York Times-Book Review, By HAL ESPEN, June 6, 2004]
Much of ''Can't Find My Way Home'' is driven by a desire to understand how substances like marijuana, heroin, peyote, cocaine, LSD and amphetamines escaped their original milieu -- whether pharmaceutical or ethnographic -- and infiltrated American life, first the fringes and then the mainstream. Torgoff ladles out familiar dollops of counterculture history -- he explores the history of the Beats, the links between jazz and heroin, the careers of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, Haight-Ashbury and the hippie movement, Warhol and the Factory. And along the way he lucidly traces the daisy chain of influence and bohemian proselytizing that brought dope out of the lower depths, with the result that a middle-class boy like Martin Torgoff found himself unaccountably transformed, along with so many others, into a dope fiend.

It's fascinating to hear, for example, how an addict and charming scoundrel named Herbert Huncke -- the man who became a key emissary from the drug demimonde for Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac -- had himself been drawn to heroin by tales of Shanghai opium dens, ''posh layouts with cushions on the floor and naked or half-naked men and women laying about,'' as he tells Torgoff. ''It was called 'lying on the hip,' and that's where the word hip comes from, of course.'' The etymology may be questionable, but similar bright shards of archaeological lore help to make up for the author's sometimes tedious reprising of material familiar from earlier works, notably Tom Wolfe's ''Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.''

>>The book winds up with a sympathetic account of the decriminalization movement, whose key insight -- ''the vast majority of American illegal drug users do so responsibly'' -- is a far cry from the revolutionary claims and pirate swagger of the long-gone drug culture. Meanwhile, the standoff continues: the permanent scandal of drug use for pleasure and oblivion versus the ''pharmacological Calvinism'' of a legal system that puts nonviolent users and violent drug criminals alike in prison.

In recent years neuroscience has learned just enough about the fantastically complex chemical, electrical and genetic functions of the human brain to teach us how little we know about consciousness and how to alter it or expand it, and why some of us become enslaved by addictions while others go free. In studying brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, we've just begun to discern why highs are so often paid for with lows. Until we know more, our experiments with illicit drugs will continue on the margins, and crazy compendiums like Torgoff's will hold us in their sway. And the truth will still sound very much like something the novelist and skeptical former Merry Prankster Robert Stone tells Torgoff: ''I never felt that drugs were a good thing, but they were something that was wild and open and free.''

posted by moshido 1:18 PM