Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/19

 culture more fully than traditional novels or short stories. Nonfiction writers such as Tom Wolfe, Carlos Castaneda (, , and ), and Timothy Leary provide insights into the drug experience that interrelate with those visions from fiction in a manner that might usefully be examined. Related fiction without drug content, such the writings of Herman Hesse, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Henry Miller, should be included in any extensive examination of the drug culture. Related phenomena in demonology, mystic philosophies, radical politics, and even such obscure fields as herbal medicine deserve notice.

Although several of these elements have been studied in isolation, I suspect that only a large, coordinated research effort examining this huge mass of information will yield the full view of drug use in the American culture of real significance. Also, since drug use has often been simplified as the confrontation between scientific materialism and mystical hallucinations, it is appropriate that this interface of reality and illusion be the focal point rather than the line of demarcation for drug studies.

The second hindrance in this study is of a different nature, the weakness of traditional literary research sources for drug study. None of the major bibliographical sources—the, the , or the —contain a subcategory for fiction pertaining to narcotics. A surprising number of the books included in my bibliography are not available through large public or college libraries. (I refer to "availability" in two senses: often the books are not included in the library catalogue, or more frequently they are catalogued but "permanently" missing from the shelves.) College course reading lists, library recommendation lists, and other non-scientific or non-technical bibliographies rarely include material outside the narrow parameters of standard data that have been sifted for over a decade. Periodicals with drug information, even those as popular as, are often unavailable and rarely indexed. The aforementioned short-lived and  are not available outside of the Library of Congress and a few dirty book stores, to my knowledge.

Despite the abundance of scientific and sociological data relating to drug use, there appears to be an implicit taboo about drug data in the arts and in the mainstream culture. (I have received more helpful information about juvenile drug literature from high school teachers than from any of the sophisticated library sources.) This taboo, coupled with the diffuse nature of the influence of contemporary drug culture, demands some resourceful and imaginative exploration on the part of interested researchers. But as an explorer who has