The drugs I have been dealt

Opium is the religion of the masses

., CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

By João Ruy Faustino

Drugs are a seemingly inescapable part of contemporary bourgeois culture. Between regimes of decriminalisation and legalisation, drugs have become a commonplace – banal, even – part of our lives. Like many aspects of the current ideology which pervades a particular social strata, the permissiveness towards drugs is seen as a commendable attitude. Deserving of pats on the back, feelings of relief and rejoicing. However, drugs cannot, or should not, be treated spontaneously as such it seems. The liberality with which they are considered nowadays can only be applauded in a defensive way. Only when someone (or no one, ideologies are constantly fighting imaginary enemies) attacks drugs from time to time – even if tamely.

Pointing out this phenomenon – this characteristic of modern society – is not done in order to merely ‘sting’ those who are ‘chill’ with narcotics. What is genuinely interesting in our current predicament is what lies at that second layer – the true spirit of a resolute ‘drug culture’. Thus, proceed with no shame, and walk through a fascinating world. One which can only be fully appreciated if absorbed in a passive way. Choose your drug of preference, read (the books are more advisable), and contemplate…

Opium

Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1822)

Suspiria de Profundis, Thomas De Quincey (1854)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

Opiary, Àlvaro de Campos (1915)

It seems that opium’s real effect is experienced in the dreams of whoever consumes it by smoking it, drinking it, or eating it. From a short story included in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes one would have the idea that opium consumption would be something – if not illegal – inevitably taboo in Victorian England. Indeed, there comes to mind the description of these undercrofts in shady parts of London, where members of the aristocracy would mix with the plebes to consume opium and experience hallucinations in their slumber. However, Alethea Hayter’s introduction to the Confessions starts by pointing out how that was far from being the case:

A truthful Confessions of an English Heroin Addict, written today by a typical user of the drug, would present a world of pallid queues at all-night chemists, (...), of pushers slipping packets into waiting hands in amusement arcades and public lavatories. 

(...)

A century and a half ago, when Thomas de Quincey wrote his Confessions, the situation of an opium addict was very different. He was breaking no law, public opinion was not against him or focused on him, supplies of the drug were cheap and easy to buy, and its dangers – though nearly as great then as now – were not understood.

– Alethea Hayter, in Introduction to Confessions Of An English Opium Eater

Then, as now, drugs were seen with a commonplaceness and believed to have medicinal qualities.

What is to be most admired about the work, is de Quincey’s colossal effort to present the plight of his addiction and the noxiousness of the drug with an admirable clarity – and by this it is not meant that the text is easy, just that it allows the reader to be possessed by revelation. The book is written in an incomparable style: a mix of prose and poetry, novel and essay…¹

It is an unfinished work, and not only because of the unfinished (and published posthumously) sequel to the book Suspiria de Profundis – which promised to be the author's magnum opus. The Confessions contains a hefty amount of footnotes, corrections, additions, editor’s notes, and a plethora of other addendums that might make it unpleasant to read. Thomas de Quincey wrote the Confessions on a tight deadline and divided it in two separate parts while struggling with his addiction. He had to significantly increase his daily doses of opium in order to even complete the work, estranging himself from his wife in the process. It was inevitable, regarding the circumstances, that he felt like he had much to add and correct in the years after its publication. But isn’t this what it feels like to have something special, and that we feel like we might’ve mistreated?

One cannot mention opium without quoting some verses by Àlvaro de Campos, one of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa:

It’s before the opium that my soul is sick

Feeling the life weaken and turn pale

And I will look for the opium that consoles

An Orient to orient of the Orient.

(…)

To the numb touch of morphine

I lose myself in throbbing clarities

And a night full of glimmer

Dawns the moon like my Fate.

(…)

That’s why I take opium. It’s a medicine.

I am a convalescent of the Moment.

I live on the ground floor of thought

And seeing the Life pass brings me tedium.

(…)

I write these lines. It seems impossible.

That even having talent I can badly feel it!

Fact is that if life is a farm

Where a sensible soul annoys.

(…)

Let life go to the devil and we take it!

I don’t even read the book on my bedside table.

The Orient grosses me. It’s a belt

That we roll and then ceases to be beautiful.

I indulge in opium by force. If I want it

That I engage once again one of these lives

You can’t demand it. Honest souls

With times to sleep and to eat,

(...)

Well! I got tired anyway.

I wanted a stronger opium to go from here to there

For dreams that would exhaust me

And nail me in some sludge.

– Fernando Pessoa, in Opiary²

Acid

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse (1927)

There’s no need to repeat what has already been said. What wasn’t mentioned was precisely this component: The admiration that Hesse appeared to have towards psychotropics is not a motif in any way central to understanding the author - however it is a trace that should not be ignored. 

This fascination is the pretext that the German author used to ‘ruin’ what should and could be his masterpiece: Steppenwolf. Yes, a character named Pablo takes Harry Haller (the Steppenwolf of the title) on a spiritual, acid-induced trip that squanders the urban environment that Hesse described with an eloquence that nearly matched his odes to the countryside. How tragic is it that one of the greats of literature was eluded by the figure of the drug dealer:

It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. Hermine told me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love.

– Hermann Hesse, in Steppenwolf

One gets a sense that the way the experience is presented just dull, with even the way it is detailed being problematic:

“(...) You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all.”

– Hermann Hesse, in Steppenwolf

It’s as if Hesse didn’t take his path of bildungsroman seriously after all… by taking such a subterfuge. 

And the most tragic thing is that: This is what he is most remembered for. Those American college graduates from the sixties… they were certainly brave, and that’s about the best thing I can say about them.

Weed

On The Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)

From this author’s understanding, this is the most cowardly of all narcotics. It advertises itself as ‘safe’ and as a ‘drug’ at the same time – but isn’t that a contradiction in terms? 

How can one similarly escape from noticing how folks advertise the thing by claiming that –  by itself – the substance fosters creativity?! They say: ‘Just look at the amount of artists that were users of the drug and check it for yourself…’ 

In fact, this is not only a feature of the advertisement strategy of cannabis, but of all narcotics.

Because the experience in and of itself is so pointless and detrimental, one has to desperately tie it to holy concepts such as ‘art’ and ‘creativity’. Where to even begin? By laughing, perhaps. Is this another one of those serial misinterpretations of Freud? or something else entirely? 

The most righteous justification to indulge in this particular substance is Peace and Love – and that’s saying something. There’s much to enjoy in the end of the trip, in the end of the road, in the end of the road trip of On The Road – it is exactly that final trip that occurs by a road in Mexico where Dean and Sal make love and smoke the peace joint with those poor Mexicans.

No! No! There’s no love at all. Love has been ripped off from Kerouac’s works, didn’t you know? Yes, yes – he only describes the prostitution of (probably underage) girls in that chapter. Free love? they just paid for it. How is one supposed to believe in it now?

‘Hey, man, I told you in Texas I’d get you a girl – all right, stretch your bones and wake up, boy; we’ve got girls waiting for us.’

‘What? What?’ he cried, leaping up, haggard. ‘Where? Where?’

‘This boy Victor’s going to show us where.’

‘Well, lessgo, lessgo!’ Dean leaped out of the car and clasped Victor’s hand. There was a group of other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy straw hats. ‘Man,’ said Dean to me, ‘ain’t this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It’s so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got girls? Where? A donde?’ he cried in Spanish. ‘Dig that, Sal, I’m speaking Spanish.’

‘Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got ma-ree-wa-na?’

– Jack Kerouac, in On The Road

They also say that weed makes you laugh… it seems to be true indeed:

Then the strangest thing happened. Everybody became so high that usual formalities were dispensed with and the things of immediate interest were concentrated on, and now it was the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of skins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world.

– Jack Kerouac, in On The Road

Heroin (et al)

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (1959)

People always say that one should never, under any circumstance, do anything subcutaneous: Never inject something. And not only because needles are scary.

The opening of Naked Lunch is what is truly worth reading from the book. Not only of course, but the famous introductory note is a literary achievement as a standalone piece of writing. There’s a reason why heroin is the strongest drug mentioned here – William S. Burroughs’ ‘testimony’ is a punch like no other:

The Sickness is drug addiction and I was an addict for fifteen years. When I say addict I mean an addict to junk ( generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to palfium. I have used junk in many forms: morphine, heroin, delaudid, eukodal, pantopon, diocodid, diosane, opium, demerol, dolophine, palfium. I have smoked junk, eaten it,sniffed it, injected it in vein-slan-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Bannisteria Caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drug of the hallucinogen group. . . . There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. The action of these drugs is physiologically opposite to the action of junk.

– William S. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch

The title of the Portuguese edition is ‘Hallucinations From A Junkie’, with only its subtitle referring to ‘Naked Lunch’. According to an online portal this was because the censors from the PIDE-DGS wanted to discourage the use of drugs and people from buying the book. Haha.

What is true is that from the Confessions to Naked Lunch, all of these works have seemingly encouraged the use of drugs despite some depicting substance abuse in a unfavourable light. And those that depict drugs in a good light are wholly silly. Leave it to someone else if this development is a testament to the quality of these men’s work, or if it reflects something deeper in art. Is depiction synonymous with flattery? Or fetishisation one could even say...

Praise in Choice. — The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of praising.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science

It seems like something truly inescapable. Only if one chooses to go the way of Hubert Selby Jr. – in Requiem For A Dream and Last Exit to Brooklyn – will one be successful in depicting drug use as something scary and definitely not worth the allure. However, despite never – and that’s certainly an impressive trait – condemning his characters, and much less drug abuse, Hubert Selby Jr.’s works are not about drugs: they’re about the characters and the dark voids they fall on. And so, drug culture will remain, or at least continue, with its impressive streak in representation in art and literature. Just keep saying ‘No.’

This article has been edited for clarity — 03/07/2024

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Notes from a news junkie

A good piece.

A nice piece.

A simply superb piece.

1. I would never take opium, not only because it is a drug that – alas – is extremely noxious, but because I fear the banality of the dreams I would have. One should read the final parts of the Confessions and The Daughter of Lebanon to see the eloquence and genius that de Quincey possessed even in delirium. I am not capable of that. I did not have the education and the trauma required for it. And I should be grateful but am not.

2. Firstly, my apologies for the cheap translation of Pessoa. I couldn’t find the full poem translated in English online and did not have much time to invest in the translation.

Secondly, here are the verses in Portuguese:

É antes do ópio que a minh’alma é doente.
Sentir a vida convalesce e estiola
E eu vou buscar ao ópio que consola
Um Oriente ao oriente do Oriente.

(...)

Ao toque adormecido da morfina
Perco-me em transparências latejantes
E numa noite cheia de brilhantes
Ergue-se a lua como a minha Sina.

(...)

Por isso eu tomo ópio. É um remédio.
Sou um convalescente do Momento.
Moro no rés-do-chão do pensamento
E ver passar a Vida faz-me tédio.

(...)

Escrevo estas linhas. Parece impossível
Que mesmo ao ter talento eu mal o sinta!
O facto é que esta vida é uma quinta
Onde se aborrece uma alma sensível.

(...)

Leve o diabo a vida e a gente tê-la!
Nem leio o livro à minha cabeceira.
Enoja-me o Oriente. É uma esteira
Que a gente enrola e deixa de ser bela.

Caio no ópio por força. Lá querer
Que eu leve a limpo uma vida destas
Não se pode exigir. Almas honestas
Com horas pra dormir e pra comer,

(...)

Ora! Eu cansava-me do mesmo modo.
Queria outro ópio mais forte pra ir de ali
Para sonhos que dessem cabo de mim
E pregassem comigo nalgum lodo.