Covered and Bound January 21, 2008

Literature and Drugs
How literature looks at drugs, is usually in the context of (broadly speaking) human relationship to drug use. This literary study, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs by Marcus Boon asks, why literature and drugs came to be associated and shows the different literary experimentation with drugs and how the writers on drugs describing their experiences, almost sound and act as scientist?
Opium use was widespread in 19th Century European and American societies and in this study Marcus Boon does not limit himself, in terms of time frame and the diversity of the works covered. In the prologue Marcus Boon says, "I have written this book not from the point of view of literature, or from the point of view of science, but the way an ethnographer would, studying how society came to believe certain things. Literature and drugs are two dynamically developing domain of human activity that have coevolved alongside and interpenetrated with many other such domains, human or not. As Such, this is a history of books that were written and published, but equally of the lives of those who wrote them, the substances they took, how those substances became available, what those substances were. The histories of religion, literature, and science all intersect in the production of the artifact know as the writer on drugs."