Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/13

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Throughout Crowley's novel we find emphasis upon the magical exotic aspects of drugs, in addition to the romantic search for some form of transcendence. But Crowley clearly had little interest in aesthetics. In the novel, his persona King Lamus says:

Crowley's work marks the appearance in English drug literature of two leit-motifs which continue to be prominent up to the contemporary period: first, the strong association of drugs with sexuality and, second, the use of drugs as a mode of personal development or exploration. This latter element of Crowley's writing connects with the Romantic notion that reality could be found within the drug experience—a notion quite clearly reaffirmed in the books of the contemporary author Carlos Castaneda, especially in.

From the viewpoint of the 'thirties, the Crash of 1929 and the resultant Depression were penance for the decadence of the 1920's. In these circumstances, drug usage was viewed not as exoticism but as degeneracy. Somerset Maugham's (1932), while not lacking in Maugham's wit, is imbued with a sense of social consciousness which continues to emerge periodically in all drug literature after. In, an English doctor grows despondent and takes to the practice of opium smoking as a way of detaching himself from the woes of the Depression. He eventually retreats from all of his social obligations as a doctor and becomes an expensive nursemaid to a rich man in the Malay Archipelago.

With the advent of World War II, there was a frenzy for government research in pharmaceuticals. At the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofman took the first "acid trip" in 1943 when he accidentally ingested some d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate 25. Throughout Europe and the Pacific, U. S. soldiers became