Barechested and with his trousers around his ankles, a man waddles desperately out of a warehouse party in Oakland, California and onto the freeway outside. It's the small hours, the wee squinting hours when the city can only think of a very few things at a time, its powers of concentration dwindled to the weak sodium of the streetlights. The man is flailing, ranting, the cars zip bleakly by. A bouncer leaves his post and encourages the man to get out of the traffic, somehow attracts him to the side of the road and there attempts an ambitious mind-meld, seeking to invoke steadiness with unblinking eye contact, slow deliberate speech and hands laid on the shoulders. The man listens for a moment, nodding, then unaccountably rears back and bops the bouncer a madman's blow, a real staggerer, beamed in from a collapsing star, horribly immortal and self-appalling. The bouncer doesn't quite fall over. More bouncers get involved, hurrying out to beat the man up—the brief quality of bouncer-mercy having been exhausted—and after a flurry of blows one of them is observed walking back to the warehouse door and shaking out his right hand splay-fingered, as if he's burned it. One of his knuckles is torn but the the bouncer is grinning: "Fucker cut me but I took a couple of his teeth out." This, however, is not the important detail. The important detail is what the man said to the bouncer just before the bouncer took his teeth out. Plaintive, infinitely quizzical, he asked, "Why won't you worship me?"

What was needed at this point, in that weak, deranged light, was an interlocutor: someone to explain Drugs to Reality, and vice versa. The drug, whatever it was, was a god perplexed. The bouncer, whoever he was, was mere irritable flesh. Would Sadie Plant have been up to the job? Her Writing On Drugs is an attempt to productively complicate the relationship of drugs to the psyche, to society, to technology, by seeking out connections—"chemical continuities." The results can be dazzling. Here she is on [the subject of] speed, the 20th Century war-drug, and its eerie consonance with technological acceleration: "Speed, then known as 'blitz,' made the Luftwaffe's pilots as high as the new speeds at which their planes could fly[...] As the fastest-ever moving targets, the Luftwaffe also provided the impetus for the Allied development of the anti-aircraft systems from which modern cybernetics emerged. Speed was overtaking itself." Plant's sense of drugs as presences, "meta-messengers," ghostwriters of their own story, agents of their own discovery, is urgent and poetic. As their effects were researched, she makes clear, new sciences—literally, new parts of the brain—were summoned into being. By drugs. It is all, as we reviewers like to say, "richly suggestive."

So why am I itching to give this book a kicking? What's pissing me off here? It is, I think, the notion that not only are drugs and reality spliced, twined, and waltzing down the centuries in an adoring Siamese embrace, they are actually (have I got this right?) the SAME THING. Reality, it seems, is merely a degree of drugs, just one in a series of contingent and chemically-determined "scanning patterns" (William S. Burroughs, more of him later), which can be altered at any time. "We are all on the drugs our bodies produce," Plant observes at one point, a statement so stupefyingly banal it might almost be mistaken it for revelation. And revelation's what it's all about here, revelation is the fetish: drugs have led man to God, witches to Hecate, Holmes to the criminal, Freud to the Unconscious, and drugs will lead us into the post-human future wherein the "wetware" of our brains will be chemically engineered to endure the excess of hi-speed information blah blah blah. Drugs are Consumerism made perfect, and the Free Market run mad; they have written books, started wars, built and broken empires. I'm doing Plant a considerable injustice with this cock-eyed summary, but while that is my privilege as a reviewer it is also—which is more interesting—a product of the low spirit of antagonism which her book arouses in me, this muffled bile which began moving in me as soon as I saw the title.

There is a little G.K. Chesterton living inside me, a little chunk of reaction, about the size of one of my larger organs, and he began to huff and puff as I read Writing On Drugs. "Scanning pattern"! My brain dulled, fattening its cells against invasion. I experienced a chauvinistic reverence for the Normal, the bedrock, the common ground. I began to think about babies. A baby works hard at getting itself together, doesn't it, at shaping up for life. Dutifully and diligently it puts in the hours, the weeks, of staring, cooing, waving, wallowing, its little limbs contending with incapacity in that good-natured babyish way. Finally it achieves dignity—homo erectus!—it gets its head to sit straight on its shoulders. And for what? To grow up and do a heap of mescaline? To blow its own mind back to crazy disconnected babyhood? Huff, puff!  Lifting a cup of hot tea off a yellowing tabletop in a cafe off rainy, trafficky Piccadilly Circus, taking a slurp, and then resting your hand on the heart-shaped patch of warmed Formica that the cup has left behind, feeling the calm merciful pressure of heat on your skin—well now, that makes a lot of sense to me. More sense, for instance, than "I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the REAL pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I wouldn't be able to survive it. I would die." (Michel Foucault) What is this "pleasure" whereof Foucault speaks—this sense that mortal life has to spit and squeal like a fat-stain on the griddle of eternity if it's to be any fun? Whatever happened to the simple ecstasy of ordinary consciousness, the major and the minor, the God-given chemical balance? I believe there is such a thing.

On the other hand, you've got to respect old Antonin Artaud, down there doing peyote with the Tarahumara, going toe-to-toe with an "invincible organic hostility" and being "hoisted on and off my horse like a broken robot." "Coleridge was a weakling!" declared the none-too-robust Artaud (clearly, the word he was looking for was lightweight). Yes, this rabid psychonaut with a face like a tribal carving took STC to task for lacking the courage of his "mucus," for spunking his genius in frilly opium dreams—a viewpoint Artaud shares with Ted Hughes, who saw Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" not as a tantalising fragment snatched out of druggy bliss, but as a complete and systemic portrait of the poet's never-to-be-resolved psychological crisis: a diagram of the singing, destroying gulf that lay between his Christian intellect and his daemonic heart. A map of himself. Opium-enhanced, perhaps, but bloodily rooted.

There is something a touch inhuman about Writing On Drugs. Plant's language bears the scars of academe—there is a preponderance of "sites" ("the body as the site of pleasure and power") and of things being "deployed"—and she is unfortunately zealous in her invocations of the lords of drugthink: Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land of Warwick University's Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, and other seers whose prose smells like burned fingernails.  Drugthink, the conceptual exaltation of altered states, is really its own brand of bollocks, with something truly vicarious and creepy about it—perhaps that "jealousy of ghostly beings moving among us" which so troubled De Quincey, although he never dreamed these beings would eventually be born as twentieth-century intellectuals. Drugthink is dying to become fiction—specifically, a novel by William Gibson—but it lacks the imagination, or the gumption, to make the mutant leap into Art. So it footles obsessively with its favourite facts, its beloved true-life scenarios. Drug thinkers, for example, love the Vietnam War—they call it "a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence," and write about soldiers being "wasted" and "bombed out" until the words are stuck together with the drool of the salivating theoretician. Plant is not above this sort of stuff: "The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden did battle with Suez on Benzedrine, and John F. Kennedy sped his way through the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Perhaps [here we go] speed even manufactured the crises it was supposed to solve: think of Kennedy, Eden, even Churchill, all making gross errors of judgement on the drug. And Hitler, racking his brains with all that speed running through his veins..." This is, literally, drug-babble, but we can also hear in it the clunk-click of an ideology, the thing that makes everything fit together so nicely: let's call it pharmaceutical determinism. There's a nastily programmatic side to Plant's vision of people on drugs—they are always enacting the drug, never themselves. The truly modern way to do drugs, as far as I can tell, is just to pile 'em in, one on top of the other—acid and heroin at a Phish concert, coke and Ketamine at a rave—none of your purist bio-engineering. There may be enlightenments galore in the resulting meltdown, but they will not be as neat as Plant might like. Those fellows who used to take Ecstasy before looking for fights at football matches; no one told them they were having their wetware enhanced.

Burroughs is another god to Plant's project, shuffling greyly through the book, a muttering papery presence, an endless resource. There is an irritating deference toward him—his quotations, in bold type, are gospel—which sent me back to the Barry Hannah story "Two Things, Dimly, Were Going At Each Other"

The old man off forty years of morphine was fascinated by guns[...] Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to 'see a death' in the big city. He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in  his fictions[...] Physically he was a coward, and as he aged in the big city his paranoia had a field day and became quite adorable to Coots cultists, who were always at him for interviews. His prose was no hoax. He wrote beautifully, especially when he was telling a straight clean story—especially something 'linear.' But too much of this Thirties stuff annoyed him and he was apt to launch off into his 'genius'—spiteful incoherence, cut-up blather, free-floating time-pirates corn-holing each other, etc.

That, to me, today (September 13th, 2000), is a sane way to look at William Burroughs.

But perhaps I am being more of a Philistine and a fathead than is necessary here, chopping things up on the butcher's block of sanity. Perhaps I should be more open to this stuff. Plant makes much (profitably) of the role of the detective—the system-maker, the addict—for example. But conspicuously missing from Plant's roll-call of wacky private dicks (Dupin, Holmes, Freud) is G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, quite as psychedelic as any of the previous but significantly unmedicated. Chesterton, of course, considered drugs to be morbid in the extreme, and lambasted their supposed perceptual benefits in his essay on Experience: "The whole theory rests on a ridiculous confusion, by which it is supposed that certain primary principles or relations will become interesting when they are damaged, but are bound to be depressing when they are intact." Nonetheless, the first Father Brown story, "The Blue Cross," achieves itself precisely by damaging those primary relations, as the potato-faced little priest leaves a trail of chaotic markers across North London, little rips in the fabric—a smashed window, a bowl of soup dashed against a restaurant wall—as clues for the great and subtle Inspector Valentin (a Frenchman) to follow. "All we can do," explains Valentin to a flatfooted London bobby, "is keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing."