Writing on Drugs

Writing on Drugs Sadie Plant Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 Copyright © 1999 by Sadie Plant All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Ltd., Great Britain First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux First edition, 2000 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plant, Sadie, 1964- Writing on drugs / Sadie Plant, p, cm. Originally published: London : Faber and Faber, 1999. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-374-29334-1 1. Drug abuse—Social aspects. 2. Drug abuse in literature. I. Title. HV5801.P595 2000 394.1 '4—dc2i 00-020822 Writing on Drugs is dedicated to the man who wore a white shirt and a blue sarong W ith thanks to Derek Johns and Jon Riley, and all the friends who have contributed to the writing of this book. Very special thanks to Hilda and Philip Plant. Contents Prelude, ix Private Eyes, 3 Artificial Paradises, 32 Unconscious, 54 White Lines, 61 Magicians, 93 Pilots, 119 Ghosts, 139 Dancers, 174 Gray Areas, 182 Trade Wars, 217 Black Markets, 222 Double Agents, 251 Bibliography, 267 Index, 279 Prelude The man wore a white shirt and a blue sarong. He would have sold you anything: emeralds, Toyotas, Marlboros, teak. He smiled: "The best of everything. It all comes from Khun Sa." Across the street the border guards, smoking in the shade, feet up on their motorbikes, watched the deal being done. "Be cool," he said. "They're OK. The whole town trades. They won't say anything to you." So you gave the man his dollars, went back to the house, and sat on the veranda through the late afternoon. Chasing I lie dragon as the sun went down, high above the outskirts of ! lie border town. You feel it now, a slow smooth rush as the day cooled off into the dusk. The whole world paused in that moment: the mists peeling off the mountains, wood smoke curling from die settlement below. Even the river's placid flow, the color of die earth, shallow, slow. And then the pace picked up, you breathed again. The j ·,ιΐΙ den Buddha settled in the mountainside, and the temple hell began its strange uneven chime. You tuned in to the •.minds of kids and laughter, cowbells in the hills, the clatter « » I Coca-Cola crates and two-stroke engines in the town. I he rhythm tightened when the darkness fell. Tree frogs .mil cicadas started singing as the mountain shadows crept .h lo ss the valley and the sky. The house felt like a hide, I >.idied in candlelight, wrapped in the blanket of the blue- I 'lack world outside, a dark night broken only by the lights of μ hides on the road, strips of fluorescence, a smattering of 1.1 is. Everything was gentle, effortless, and calm. I nter still came music from the Burmese side. The disco nu\es of another world. " Sugar bah bah bah bah bah bah oh I tniiai Honey bah bah bah bah bah bah You are my candy girl and i/iwi got me wantin' you , . ." IX PRELUDE Chains of mountains, chains of thought, events . you ran with the dragon to the delta, out to sea, and into the arms of the whole wide world. You chased it to the makeshift facto ries, out to the poppy fields, the fertile soil, the harvest and its workers, the women and the kids, the seasons and the cycles of demand and supply. Brown sugar, black gold, warm white light: you watched the whole thing crystallize, running through its repertoire, its stories and songs, the art and design of its influence. You stalked it through a maze of waterways and ports, streetcar tracks and highways, hotel rooms and squalid squats, city squares and alleyways and off into a maze of deals and rackets and temptations, a long and tangled tale of prohibitions and desires. You saw the insights it had given and the lies it had told, the pain it had driven and the plea sures it had sold. It gave you its plots and its characters, the maps of its memories, its charts and diagrams, its tales of ad venture in the far-off Western lands. It boasted of its wars and the battles it had won, the fortunes it had made, the damage it had done. It kept running. Dragons never tire. It blazed its trails across your darkness, etching its tracks onto that black mountain side. It kept running through your mind, tempting, escaping, daring you to chase it just a little more. You kept running through the story, running its story through your mind. It danced ahead, it laughed at you, it knew you would fail. You heard it all, and still became the dragon's tail. X Writing on Drugs Private Eyes I begin to write, almost without realizing it, without thinking, busy transmitting these words I don't rec ognize, although they are highly significant: "Too much! Too much! You're giving me too much!" Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves A vast literature on drugs has assembled itself in the last two hundred years. It begins with the late eighteenth century's ex plorations of opium, wends its way through cannabis, coca, .nid cocaine, and later finds itself entangled with a wide vari ety of plant hallucinogens and synthetic drugs. Like their writings and their writers, these substances could hardly be more diverse. Some of them are ancient, others very new. Some are synthesized in laboratories, and some grow wild. Some are widely used as medicines, a few are fatal in large doses, some have no toxicity at all. In the twentieth cen tury, the vast majority of these substances find themselves controlled by some of the world's oldest international agree ments and its most extensive national laws. But they do have their own common ground as well. Whether they are organic or synthetic, old or new, stimulating, narcotic, or hallucino genic, all these drugs have some specific psychoactive effect: they all shift perceptions, affect moods, change behavior, and alter states of mind. And all of them have exerted an influence that extends far beyond their users. The laws and wars on drugs eue symptomatic of the ways in which these substances provoke the same extreme reactions in cultures, economies— social, political, legal—and even military systems. Their ef fects on the human nervous system seem to repeat themselves wherever they occur. When drugs change their users, they change everything. 3 WRITING ON DRUGS Drugs snatch us out of everyday reality, blur our per ception, alter our sensations, and, in a word, put the entire universe in a state of suspension. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current Every drug has its own character, its unique claims to fame. The coca bush gets its name from the Aymara word khoka, meaning simply "tree"; the word hashish is derived from the Arabic word for herb, or grass, as if it were the herb par excel lence; and the Mexican psilocybin mushroom is known as teo- nanactl, which translates as "flesh of the gods." But there is something about opium, with all its varied properties and his tories, that allows this drug to set the scene. 'O f all drugs," wrote Jean Cocteau, "opium is the drug." Opium is extracted from the opium poppy. Papaver som niferum, which is cultivated and harvested today with the same techniques that have been recorded over thousands of years. Once the poppies have flowered, the seed heads are scored with a knife and left to bleed a sticky substance from their wounds. The seed heads are scored in the afternoons, with a three- or four-bladed knife, and the next day the latex is collected with a flat blade. The process is repeated several times until the seedpod's supply of opium has been ex hausted. The poppy head yields a number of potent psychoactive al kaloids that have allowed opium to play a very special role in the story of the human use of drugs. It is widely acknowl edged to be one of tire world's oldest, most powerful, and most effective medicines, and while the earliest uses of opium may have been purely medicinal, plenty of circumstantial evi dence suggests that its use as an intoxicant is as old as the hills in which it grows. Evidence of its use has been found in several regions of the world: it can be traced to Neolithic set tlements on the shorelines of Swiss lakes, the eastern Medi terranean, and the Black Sea coast. It was cultivated in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, and later known in Egypt, 4 PRIVATE EVES where traces of it have been found in tombs dating back to the fifteenth century B.c. Opium was used in ancient Greece, where Plotinus was said to be a regular user of a drug to which Homer is thought to refer in the Odyssey when he de scribes "a medicine to banish grief." Opium was also known in Rome, where it acquired an association with Morpheus, the i-.od of dreams, who later gave his name to morphine. Its Chi nese use is lost in the mists of time. Arab merchants were probably the first large-scale distribu- lors of the drug, selling it for centuries across Asia and the Middle East, and by the sixteenth century, opium was widely 11 <ided and used in Turkey, Persia, and India. Western interest m the drug was growing fast as well.

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