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I could hear the election returns and then Nixon's victory speech filtering down to me as I sat, huddled in the darkened basement of our house. It was November 4, l968, the night Richard Nixon was elected President. My sister placed a wet towel under the basement door so that my parents wouldn't be able to smell what was about to transpire.

"Here," she said, placing a hookah pipe in my hands.

I was sixteen years old at the time, a high school junior; Carole was four years older, lately a burgeoning hippie around our town on the north shore of Long Island where I had lived my entire life. We were sitting cross-legged on an old Persian rug down in that black-lighted sanctuary of hers, exactly as I had observed her sitting with her beaded, longhaired, leather-fringed friends over recent months. I was goggle-eyed at the exotic illegality of it all. A sense of fear overwhelmed me as I took the pipe, but mixed with the delectation that comes from being about to do something forbidden. My sister could tell that I was waffling at the last minute, and just to make sure that I would get totally and unequivocally blasted that very first time, she delivered long and highly detailed instructions about how to inhale, and exactly how long to hold the smoke in my lungs before I was permitted to exhale. Never one to do things half way, she then shaved off little pieces off a black gooey little ball she produced from tin foil, and mixed it in with the bowl of leafy green substance.

"This is hash," she explained patiently. "Hashish. It's just like pot, only a little stronger. You put 'em together, and it's called an Indian mixture.” She struck a kitchen match, smiling, and held it to the bowl. It was obvious that she intended to monitor this operation very closely. “Don't worry, it'll only intensify the effect."

How right she was. Thirty minutes and innumerable bowls passed. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I could feel the beginnings of a warm tingly feeling spreading up the back of my neck. Carole peered into my eyes and smiled knowingly. "What do you feel? Do you feel different? Are you stoned?"

"I don't know," I stammered. "I'm not sure."

I wasn't certain of what I was feeling, except that with her flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones and long dark hair parted in the middle, my sister had turned into a beautiful squaw right before my eyes. Lights began whirling across my field of vision in phasar-like traces, like square dancers at some demented psychedelic hoe-down. I must have looked like I was seeing a ghost, because all she could do was laugh at me.

"Oh, yeah, you don’t know if you’re stoned? Well, let me tell you, then, you're wrecked. Come on over here and I'll prove it to you." She led me over to her little stereo, like a lamb to slaughter. "Here, put your head right between those speakers. That's right, closer."

I did as I was told, and she put on "Blue Jay Way," from the Magical Mystery Tour album. To this day, more than thirty years later, I still find it difficult to find the words to describe the feeling that came over me as my head filled with the swelling dirge-like organ as the song faded in, except to say that I felt the music and the lyrics--

There's a fog upon LA…

--to the very roots of my soul. It wasn’t only the music, but rather what the music seemed to connect me to, as if the times had suddenly come rushing to life inside my head, unfurling in a tapestry so rich and multi-hued that it contained not only the times but a story of my own life that I could now begin to dream.

And so it all began for me, those solitary afternoons of exhilarating experimentation and self-discovery down in the basement after school, my head between those tiny speakers. When it came to an end twenty years later, I was thirty-seven, hitting rock bottom on drugs and alcohol, and facing the desperate realization that my very survival was in question. How had I gotten there? The idea for this book began with that very question. As I began a new sober life, I realized that the experience of my nadir on drugs had surely marked me, coloring much of my life, but recovery had no more produced easy answers about drugs than their use had. Instead, I was forced to wrestle uneasily with the meanings and consequences of the drugs I had taken, no more willing or able to deny the self-expansion of my experiences than I could discount the state of self-deception where they finally led me. If anything, I was more mistrustful than ever of the ideologies regarding both the use and prohibition of drugs. I was every bit as uncomfortable with the mea culpa of the reformed recovering drug addict, for example, as I was with the loftiest justifications of the recreational drug user, or the most well-intentioned “Be Smart Don’t Start” sloganeering of the anti-drug zealot.

Despite these ambivalent feelings, I began this book as an attempt to document and understand how the marijuana that had so altered my life had found its way into a typical middle class suburban basement on the north shore of Long Island in November of 1968. The proposal that led to signing the original contract with Grove Press in the summer of 1991 began with the exact anecdote above: the first time I ever got stoned. I decided to begin with the story of my family and closest friends in our hometown of Glen Cove, New York, circa 1968-1970--merely an opening vignette to be set against a much larger backdrop. The real story was how America had gone from being a nation where, from the 1940s to the 1950s, only a tiny minority had used illicit drugs to one in which, by the 1970s, one in four had. The real story was how drugs had profoundly altered the cultural landscape of this country.

It was a story with a clear linear narrative. The roots of the baby boom counterculture that I was a part of were to be found in bebop jazz and the Beat Generation, two subcultures that had commingled beginning in the 1940s and continuing up through the 1950s. Drug using musicians like Charlie Parker had been heroes to the young aspiring writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who, in turn, incorporated the use of drugs into their own evolution of an aesthetic literary sensibility that would shape a generation. The Beats were the forerunners of the hippies, who became models for a baby-boom counterculture that revolved around music and adopted drugs as the staple of a new alternative lifestyle. At the same time, drugs were making their way into many different dimensions of the American experience--the war in Vietnam, the mass media, Hollywood, the business world--and from there into the workplace, middle class communities, and schools. This rapid proliferation gave rise to something unprecedented in the history of western civilization: a modern mass consumption culture that set about using and abusing the most extensive pharmacopoeia ever to converge in a single place. Moreover, in addition to a linear narrative, there was also a definite arc to this story. When the psychedelic age gave way to the mass cocaine culture of the 70s and 80s, the meanings and contexts of drug use began to change; by the coming of crack and the rapid escalation of the war on drugs in the mid-1980s, the atmosphere around drugs had turned toxic. And yet with MDMA and the appearance of the rave culture of the 1990s, it was just as clear that the drug culture was going to continue with successive generations. As a culture, had we learned anything from our past experiences with drugs, or were we destined to keep making the same mistakes over and over again through successive generations?

This was the story I wanted to tell, and the challenges of trying to do it in a single book were enormous. Although there had been books written about many aspects of this story—on the psychedelic revolution, say, or the disco cocaine culture of Studio 54--few had ever succeeded in weaving it all together in a clear and compelling way. The story of illicit drugs was a winding and murky tale that had been shaped by laws, manipulated by politics and bureaucracies, fueled by black market capitalism, and forged in the collective imagination of national dream and nightmare. It was a story told at different times by the saxophone, the typewriter, the electric guitar, the movie camera, and the gun. And as the study of drugs is so uniquely multidisciplinary, I knew that the story could not be told without an understanding of how the use of illicit drugs had intersected with myriad factors: bohemianism, multiculturalism, libertarianism, spirituality, post-modernism, jazz, poetry, literature, rock and roll, political radicalism, mass communications, popular culture, medicine, chemistry, psychology, anthropology, law, law enforcement, politics, business, technology, to name but a few. Any such book would thus have to take into account all of the prevailing scenes, trends, events, and fashions of the last forty-five years as they intersected with the use of drugs, and in order to tell the story properly I was going to have to assemble a very large cast of characters: jazz musicians, gangsters, hipsters, visionary poets, psychedelic philosophers, Merry Pranksters, Diggers, hippies, Yippies, folkies, rockers, Vietnam vets, New Age holy men, underground superstars, junkies, gonzo journalists, punks, politicians, disco queens, hustlers, smugglers, growers, yuppies, cyberpunks, ravers, rappers, gangbangers, renegade scholars and scientists, and recovering addicts. Lastly, in order to make the book credible and comprehensive, I knew that it would have to include as many of the key individuals who were a part of the evolution of the drug experience in American popular culture that I could get to cooperate, from Timothy Leary to Grace Slick, from Allen Ginsberg to Terrence McKenna. Little did I realize I was setting out on a journey that would consume the next twelve years of my life.

What compounded the challenge was the toxic atmosphere that surrounded drug use. By the early 1990s, the drug war had taken firm hold and many people were apprehensive about talking to me. I had to win their trust. Oliver Stone, for example, would not give me an interview until he had interviewed me, in order to check me out. Many people were concerned about reputations and public images; others had committed crimes and would only cooperate if I guaranteed them absolute anonymity. Others encountered in the rooms of 12-Step recovery fellowships insisted on remaining anonymous to each other as well as to the public, requiring that I change certain details as well as provide pseudonyms. I was determined to respect their anonymity and accommodate them, but at the same time write a true-life chronicle about drug use in America. The guideline I decided to employ here was that any experience regarding drugs rendered in the book—whether about their use, their impact on individuals, or society--would have to be portrayed in the authentic set and setting that was described to me, in a way that was unequivocally genuine.

The style of the book presented its own set of challenges. The blending of autobiography, journalism, oral history, and narrative cultural history is never an easy task, and I wanted to do it as seamlessly as possible. There was also the difficult question of tone. Except for the personal writing at the beginning and end of the book, I had determined to remain absolutely neutral and let the people and stories speak for themselves—a risky approach with a subject so perennially charged with sensationalism, ideology, and moral condemnation. I was determined that the book would be neither an apology for the drug culture nor a moralistic condemnation of it, and that drugs would be neither romanticized nor demonized. The intention was to present as many experiences and perspectives as possible within this vast tapestry and let readers draw their own conclusions. The whole point of the book was to provoke an honest and open discourse on this subject. As I got deeper into the project, I came to believe that, in the end, such a dialogue might very well turn out to be the most effective form of drug education we’ve found so far.

Aside from these issues of the book’s content and style, there were additional personal and editorial reasons as to why the book took so long to complete. Early in the research, I decided that the period of the 1930s—the period of the Reefer Madness hysteria and the evolution of the Marijuana Tax Act—was both fascinating and essential, which only enlarged an already immense canvas (this whole section would later be cut from the book). Then when I began writing, the story took on a life of its own. I simply couldn’t contain it. Call me a victim of my own passion for the subject. It was frightening, like when you first tap into a keg of beer, and the pressurized carbonation makes the liquid spurt wildly. I would set out to write a twenty-page chapter and before I knew it, there were a hundred pages. Each chapter, each part of the book, was like a book unto itself. Before I knew it I had 1,300 pages and was barely through a third of the story! I was really writing a trilogy. That’s when I knew I was in trouble, even though I also realized that the book contained some of the best work I’d ever done in my life. I ran out of money, and then my father—the man who really inspired the book--died suddenly. I went into a depression that lasted a year, during which I could hardly work. When I emerged from that darkness, I found myself with no money, and a giant footstool of a manuscript that I couldn’t figure out how to cut, gathering dust on my shelf, where it languished for years. I continued to work on it as I did other things, refusing to let it die.

I was lucky, blessed with an agent, Russell Galen, who stood by me the whole time I struggled. We began resubmitting the book to other publishers; it was rejected everywhere because while I had succeeded in cutting it somewhat, the manuscript was still immense. And then one day as I was driving down the coast of California on Highway 101 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, it all came to me, how to cut the book. I edited and rewrote the whole thing in my head over the course of the next hundred miles. When I got home, it took a week to get the manuscript in shape; three weeks later, I had a new deal with Simon & Schuster. By this time the economic environment of publishing had changed and there was serious resistance from retailers to the kind of large-scale work I had planned; when it was all said and done, I still had to cut 70,000 words that contained important stories and writing I loved (see Outtakes). Although the finished book is leaner than I’d ever imagined, I’m delighted to say that it fulfills my original vision.

© Copyright 2004 Martin Torgoff. All rights reserved.