Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, Anaïs Nin, and Aldous Huxley are just some of the notable authors included in this one-of-a-kind volume of writings on the drug experience. Stretching back 120 years to the days of legal use, The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960 includes essays on hashish use by a New York physician (1910) and a clergyman's son (1857(); accounts of opium extravagances by artists and journalists in the first decades of this century; reports on ritual peyote use by an ethnologist in 1896 and of mushrooms by a banker in 1953; the journals of experimenting scientists and poets alike on the ingestion f newly synthesized hallucinogens such as mescaline and LSD in the 1930s and 40s. Writings by Antonin Artaud, John (Fire) Lame Deer, Dr. Albert Hofmann, Sigmund Freud, Boxcar Bertha, Gerard de Nerval, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, and many more demonstrate surprisingly wide-ranging perspectives on this subject. No down-and-out apologies of reformed junkies, no hyperbolic heroics of crime-busing drug czars, these neglected records of drug use are thoughtful and provocative excursions into the material and spiritual realms of existence arising from the user of intoxicating substances.