Promotional Information

Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant is fascinating look at an ignored aspect of our history and culture, a 'comprehensive account of how drugs have come to shape the modern world.' (The Face)

About the Author

Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham and studied at the University of Manchester, where she gained her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She has been a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997. Having spent much of the 1990s in the academic world, she now works independently and writes full-time.

Reviews

'A fascinating cultural quest to discover how such blanket - and in the end blind - moral prohibition has come to the fore in our relationship to narcotics... she balances accessibility with intellectual rigour... she weaves writers' experiences of amazing highs with the cold, hard science of how chemicals would have interacted with their synapses to get them tripping.' Tim Teeman, The Times 'It is something of a relief to turn to the poised clarity with which Plant anatomises our species' varied relationships with stuff that makes your head go funny.' Charles Shaar Murray, Independent 'A comprehensive account of how drugs have come to shape the modern world.' The Face

'A fascinating cultural quest to discover how such blanket - and in the end blind - moral prohibition has come to the fore in our relationship to narcotics... she balances accessibility with intellectual rigour... she weaves writers' experiences of amazing highs with the cold, hard science of how chemicals would have interacted with their synapses to get them tripping.' Tim Teeman, The Times 'It is something of a relief to turn to the poised clarity with which Plant anatomises our species' varied relationships with stuff that makes your head go funny.' Charles Shaar Murray, Independent 'A comprehensive account of how drugs have come to shape the modern world.' The Face

Plant's fast-paced primer demonstrates how narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens have inspired and influenced writers through the ages. Beginning with opium's influence on De Quincey, Coleridge and Poe, and moving on to cannabis and hashish (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Flaubert), cocaine (Stevenson, Freud, Doyle) and speed and LSD (Kerouac, Burroughs, Leary), she misses nary a literary toke, snort, or shot. Along the way, Plant (Zeros + Ones), a British cultural studies scholar, presents a great deal of hard, cold fact. She reveals, for example, when and where methamphetamine was synthesized (Japan, 1919); when it was banned in the U.S. (the 1950s); and what its current medicinal uses are (treating attention deficit disorder). Her painstaking research also reveals, for instance, that the word "assassin" was derived from an 11th-century movement (Ism ilism) whose adherents were so fond of hashish that they were called hashishiyya. Such tidbits accrue into fascinating social histories and provide colorful background material, though they can also distract from the key point, namely that drugs are central to modern culture. The final sections, on the 1960s, are the book's best. Here we find writers, poets and philosophers reflecting on what Herbert Marcuse called a "revolution in perception," a necessary and complementary aspect of the "social liberation" then being experienced in the body politic. Plant ends her journey with a thoughtfully postmodern turn, suggesting that to write under the influence of drugs "is to plunge into a world where nothing is as simple or as stable as it seems." (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.