Taking potshots at America's war on drugs

Can't Find My Way Home

America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

Martin Torgoff

Simon & Schuster: 560 pp., $27.95

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It's been said that truth is often the first casualty of war, and the much ballyhooed war on drugs is no exception. When he was Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates declared that casual drug users were guilty of "treason" and should be "taken out and shot." A Republican congressman from South Carolina pegged narcotics as "a threat worse than any nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield." And First Lady Nancy Reagan called marijuana inhalers and other illicit-drug takers "accomplices to murder." What haven't they been smoking?

In "Can't Find My Way Home," a sprawling, high-spirited and often outlandish cultural history of illegal drug use in postwar America, Martin Torgoff vows to tell the truth about the forbidden pharmacological fruit. His ambitious chronicle packs considerable punch as an antidote to official policies based on "myths, fears, exaggerations and lies." But the author is also candid about his own struggles with substance abuse, and he doesn't shy away from depicting the misery of addiction as he traces how illicit drugs migrated from the criminal underground and avant garde fringe to mainstream society.

With considerable aplomb, "Can't Find My Way Home" recounts the travails of Charlie Parker and other heroin-jabbing jazz musicians, who were lionized by their Beat contemporaries. Raging against the ghostly reserve of the 1950s, these insurgent artists embraced mind-bending chemicals as catalysts for creative expression. Allen Ginsberg's howl of poetic protest and Jack Kerouac's exuberant bebop yarns linked reefer and hallucinogens to a tiny groundswell of nonconformity that would grow into a mass rebellion during the next decade.

Much of Torgoff's book is a tour de force through the stoned 1960s when messianic delusions were nearly as plentiful as tabs of black market acid. LSD was so powerful and so far out that some devotees believed its molecular structure contained nothing less than the key to world peace. But not everyone was enamored of the psychedelic experience. The so-called beautiful people who clustered at Andy Warhol's Factory in downtown New York were partial to injections of opiates and amphetamines. "Paranoia was really our drug of choice.... Once I started to shoot up, I never wanted to come down," a Warhol acolyte confessed. The consequences were predictably malignant.