The Heroin User’s Handbook, by Francis Moraes, bills itself as neither “glorifying nor demonizing the drug.” The words “Don’t Try Heroin” are printed in bold across the middle of the very first page. But the last page of the book lists the “Ten Commandments of Responsible Heroin Use” and the pages in between are completely crammed with ... [ read more ]
The Food and Drug Administration continues to maintain that a patient has a better chance of being struck by lightning than of taking bad medicine. But Eban makes a convincing case that while Bush and Co. keep talking about the hazards of U.S. citizens’ buying prescription drugs at cheaper prices from foreign markets, such as Canada, the FDA can’t credibly guarantee the safety of the U.S. drug supply. [ read more ]
Addicted is a collection of short essays about substance abuse, written by Canadian authors. The stories flow, but at times it’s like swallowing shards of glass, especially when the writers hit raw nerves. Frequently, their images conjure up memories of similar incidents that happened, both to the self and others. The editors, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, ... [ read more ]
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung collects about 350 pages of vintage essays by Lester Bangs, whose rock-critic career lasted from 1969 to his death in 1982. Musically, this coincides with heavy metal, glam rock, progressive rock, and punk. Psychotic Reactions contains essays on all of these, but discusses everyone else too, including John Coltrane, Barry White, Elvis Presley, Kraftwerk, Tangerine ... [ read more ]
Lidsky and Schneider provide a splash of cold water on the marketing-driven world of smart drugs. The book is organized into two major sections: introductory material and an alphabetically-organized reference section. The introduction is a readable, non-technical, and short overview of smart drugs and the problems of memory and age-related cognitive decline. The reference section has entries ... [ read more ]
Stephen Gaskin’s Haight Ashbury Flashbacks is a mind-blowing “diary” of his days as a teacher at San Francisco State College during the Summer of Love. Gaskin would go on to help found The Farm, an influential commune that has survived for decades in Tennessee, but this book documents his formulative, pre-guru years, as he and his fellow teachers, teaching ... [ read more ]
Barbara Hodgson’s Opium: A Potrait of the Heavenly Demon is bound in a deep purple cloth hardcover and filled with glossy pages. The book deals with a wide variety of art and literature concerning the opium dens and smoking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She focuses on North America, Europe, India, and China, with brief ... [ read more ]
Psychedelic my ass.
With a title like Psychedelic Decadence, I had high hopes. The summaries for this book promised to cover many of my favorite topics: horror movies, psychedelia, David Bowie, comic books, biker gangs, vintage porn… what more could I possibly ask for? Substance would have been good. Grammar would have been nice, too. And I ... [ read more ]
New York Times review
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Metro (Silicon Valley weekly) review
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Psychonauts love to read trip reports. This is probably rooted in the same mental circuitry that fosters that connectedness and fraternity that is so evident when two or more experienced folks get in the same room together for more than, say, five minutes. The talk turns to tripping, and the stories start to flow. People who’ve walked ... [ read more ]