Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication

Don't expect Stuart Walton to be signing copies of Out of It at your local PTA anytime soon. Walton's thesis is that intoxication is an historical constant, a biological necessity and an intrinsic good. The record speaks clearly to Walton. Look anywhere -- Greeks, Romans, polytheists, monotheists, north/south, tribal/advanced -- and you'll find consumers in search of the altered state. What drives this imperative? The answer, Walton claims, is rarely acknowledged but straightforward nontheless: "drugs make us feel different" by altering the typical void of the ordinary life. The options are multiple -- opiates, inhalants, stimulants, hallucinogns. For each class Walton provides a readable account of their composition, effects, prevalence and mode of use. Despite Walton's claim about the ubiquity of drugs, most readers visiting Walton-land will be visiting a strange land, or at least sizeable parts of it, for the first time. The range of stories contained in these pages (a Vancouver CEO buying industrial quantities of LSD, Eton students toying with asphyxiation blackouts, any number of Guiness-book drinkers) find a voice on Walton's pages. This book has a rambling, discursive quality, but Walton can turn a phrase, and his argument will turn more than a few heads. The value of disciplined moderation, commended to us from Plato through Aquinas as the hallmark of the well-tuned soul, as the life "worth living," finds no champion in Walton's world. Absent as well, are those "victims" of the victimless crime of intoxication, those about whom MADD are so passionate. Walton won't change the minds of his readers, but he will open them. Walton is wrong, but worth hearing.

Out Of It: A Cultural History Of Intoxication by cultural historian and journalist Stuart Walton is a review and survey of the use of intoxicants down through human history and which ranged from alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco, to opiates, amphetamines, hallucinogens, and "designer drugs". From Stone Age rituals; to intoxication in the Greek and Roman eras; to contemporary recreational usage and strict anti-drug laws, Out Of It studies the history, causes, effects, and attitudes concerning these chemical substances with a distinct eye for the logic (and illogic) behind the generational shifts in social mores, customs, and prohibitions.

Shibboleths need their forthright debunkers, and the drug war has needed a lively, over-educated Brit to take it apart, down its noxious, anti-human core. As a non-illicit drug user, too scared by the overt repressions of my religious and social heritages to have been more than a lightweight and now non-indulger, I needed to read the book, to check my immoral condemnations of sensation seekers. Walton gets writing back to an exercise of fun, ranging across the whole of antiquity with the erudition of a fusty Oxford don, but has evidently been to the places better designer drugs can take the individual partaker. Here's to his courage, his perspicacity, and may we see the error of our ways in, oh, about 100 years, when responsible, safe use of temporary mind-altering concoctions might be a social virtue.