Travelers into Drug-Land: a Review of The Drug Experience (1961)

I first bought David Ebin’s The Drug Experience thinking it was a how-to guide to the subject and, too late, realized my mistake. Actually, it’s an anthology, featuring—as the book jacket promises—the firsthand accounts “of addicts, writers, scientists, and others” or (in Ebin’s words) “of travellers into drug-land”. I’d missed this crucial bit of fine print, having been mesmerized by the psychedelic lettering on the cover but, swallowing my bitter disappointment, I decided to read the book anyway. And, luckily, I enjoyed it.

"Bathroom Tiles on LSD" by Romina Killpack (Creative Commons)

In his introduction, Ebin notes that the anthology’s creation was prompted by scientific research on drugs that had been done in the preceding decade. But the book feels anything but dry and clinical—many of the excerpts are laced with pulpy sensationalism, featuring lurid descriptions of drug-pushers in their seedy haunts, of psychedelic madness and euphoria. Even the most ‘scientific’ work included in the anthology, a report on Paul Moser’s LSD research, includes the kind of trippy surrealism that rarely appears in a clinical report:

The surface of the ceiling broke up into intersecting planes, which somehow seemed to suggest certain abstract thoughts on the nature of “reality” itself, though what these were I do not remember.

Structurally, the collection is divided into six sections, with Ebin giving hemp, opium, peyote, mushrooms, and LSD each their own distinct section, while heroin, cocaine, and all other oft-abused drugs are—somewhat bafflingly—lumped together under the general heading of “Opiates, Addicts, and Cures”. There are between two and nine excerpted works in each section, and much of the value of the anthology lies in how varied these excerpts are, with a wide mixture of fiction and non-fiction. The pieces included range chronologically from Thomas De Quincey’s fevered accounts of the opium-induced dreams he suffered in 1818, to Allen Ginsberg’s reflections after experimenting with peyote in 1960. It’s fascinating to find parallels between the writings. For instance, one finds this succinct description of opiate abuse in Aleister Crowley’s The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922):

And then, worst of all, it broke on me one day, when I was struggling hard against the temptation to indulge, that the period between doses, however prolonged it might be, were [sic] being regarded merely in that light. In other words, it was a negative thing.

And then turn a few pages to find William S. Burroughs providing his assessment of that same process in an article written in 1960, nearly forty years later:

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use.

It’s somber insights like these into the universality of addiction that make this anthology such a valuable read for anybody with an interest in drugs, academic or recreational!

Billie Holiday, 1947 (Library of Congress)

Unfortunately, while The Drug Experience covers a wide chunk of history, it still offers a limited perspective, with few writers included who aren’t white men. Even the traditional use of peyote by the Indigenous Menominee tribe is presented to the reader filtered and diluted through the writings of anthropologist J. S. Slotkin. Ironically, then, it’s singer Billie Holiday who provides—in my opinion—the single strongest piece in the anthology, as Ebin samples the final chapter of her excellently-written autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. It’s an incredible narrative, focusing on Holiday’s arrest on a narcotics charge and her determination to overcome her own addiction, and I’d say that The Drug Experience is worth a read for those five pages alone.

However, if you do want to read it, you might have some difficulty finding a copy. While the collection was originally put out by The Orion House Press, trying to trace its publishing history is a bit like investigating a string of gruesome murders. Diligent sleuthing has yielded these facts: the plucky little publishing house merged with Grossman Publishers a mere four years after The Drug Experience first hit shelves, and Grossman itself was absorbed, amoeba-like, by Viking Press just three years after that. And all this, only for Viking Press, too, to be consumed by Penguin Books in 1975. From these facts, I draw two conclusions: one, that the life expectancy of a New York publishing house must have been pretty grim in the twentieth century and two, that The Drug Experience is no longer in print.

But that’s alright! Because you don’t really want a brand-new copy of The Drug Experience, anyway. That would spoil the fun. Instead, it’s best to find a copy at the library, at a second-hand bookstore, at a thrift store, or—ideally—discarded in a dumpster somewhere. You want the edition that’s dog-eared, dilapidated, book jacket shredded around the edges, yellowed pages perfumed with a reek reminiscent of expired salad dressing, the print so small and cramped that you have to squint to read it. Only then, thrilled, exhausted, your head spinning from bookbinders’ glue, are you truly ready for The Drug Experience.