Martin Torgoff - Cant Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

T HIS BOOK is not a formal history but rather a journey through the experience and culture of illicit drugs in this country during the second half of the twentieth century, from roughly 1945 to the present. I conceived of this book as a collection of scenes from the world of illicit drugs, scenes that have had a significant impact on the American experience. In essence, this is the story of how the American Century turned into the Great Stoned Age, how the use of illicit drugs moved from the criminal underground and the avant garde fringe to mainstream America. Roughly one in four Americans has used illegal drugs, and this is the story of what has happened to their lives and to the world around us.

Cant Find My Way Home traces the impact on American society of numerous substances currently classified as schedule one drugs: narcotics, amphetamines, cocaine, psychedelics, MDMA (ecstasy), and marijuana. The story is told by people who have used those substances in various cultural settings, from the Beat Generation and the bebop jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, the amphetamine and pop-art underground of New York during the 1960s, the war in Vietnam, the gay sexual culture of the 1970s that used amyl nitrate, the cocaine culture of the 1970s and 1980s, crack and the inner cities of America during the 1980s, and the rave cyberculture of the 1990s.

This book will not make everybody happy, nor is it intended to. The political and religious right will not appreciate any book about drugs that is not dogmatically antidrug, that shows any permissiveness about drug use. The last thing that proponents of a drug-free America want to hear is that drugs have become as American as apple pie, which they arguably have. On the other hand, those who use drugs may find the parts of the book about addiction and recovery anathema to their notions of acceptable personal or recreational use. Those people often believe that they can use drugs safely and responsibly, that their use of drugs should be nobodys business but their own as long as they do no harm to others, and that the very notion of addiction has little or nothing to do with them. Finally, for those individuals in the recovery community who have experienced the lash of addiction and have crawled back to new lives as clean and sober members of society, the parts of the book that have to do with ecstatic drug experiences and consciousness expansion may seem wrongheaded or a form of denialcertainly the wrong message for young people, an inevitable percentage of whom are headed for drug-abuse problems.

This is the sort of book Id be very interested in reading but not something I really want to talk about, responded Judy Collins when I asked her for an interviewneither a surprising nor an uncommon reaction in this time of drug-sniffing dogs at airports and drug-tip hotlines. The writer Ishmael Reed was eager to talk about drug issues as they related to the African American community but refused to discuss his own use of drugsI have nothing to gain from talking about that. Such is the toxic and paranoid atmosphere that surrounds this subject. In order to allow people to feel safe sharing their experiences, I provided pseudonyms for some of those who are not public figures, sometimes changing certain details while preserving the substance of their experiences. In some cases, this was done in order to protect the anonymity of individuals I encountered in 12-step recovery fellowships. But aside from the changing of names and certain personal details, there is no experience about drugs in the book that did not actually occur in the set and setting it is rendered in, and nothing about the drug culture that has been invented. My intention has always been to write a true-life chronicle of the use of illicit drugs in America without sensationalizing, apologizing, moralizing, or demonizingsimply to tell the truth and let readers draw their own conclusions. To the hundreds of people, then, both well known and pseudonymous, who have shared their lives so intimately with me over the many years it has taken to write this book, I am humbly grateful.

In January of 1993, I found myself standing on a street corner in Compton, California, immersed in the story of rock cocaine and the Crips and the Bloods. Seeing a strange white guy hanging out in their neighborhood, various gang members were certain that I had to be a television reporter or an undercover cop. When I told one of them that I was neither but a writer gathering material for a book on drugs in America, he looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed, You got you a long book!

How right he was. Its been twelve years since I started this book, thirty-five since I began living it. The book became my life and my life became the book; the journey of it has been long and at times hard, but while it has often felt as though it would never end, Ive found my way home.

I learned in writing this book that as a society we face enormously difficult and complex problems concerning the use of illicit drugs. But in addition, we have to grapple with cultural amnesia and distortions that are the products of the ideological agendas that have so long shaped the debates and policies regarding illegal drugs. I have come to believe that only through the most rigorously honest appraisal of this subject will we ever be able to make sense of the past and begin to find solutions to the problems that currently confront us regarding drugs. As Ram Dass observed at the end of an interview, If your book is going to have the richness it deserves, it needs to raise as many questions as it tries to answer. I hope this book does exactly that. My most heartfelt wish has always been that it might serve to promote an honest and open discourse on this subjecta dialogue through which we can begin, perhaps, to find our way home as a nation.

Martin Torgoff