The Drug Experience; First-person accounts of addicts, writers, scientists and others

New York: The Orion Press, 1961. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xi, [1], 385, [3] pages. Footnotes. References. DJ has some wear and soiling and is in a plastic sleeve. Name and address of previous owner stamped on fep. The previous owner was E. Kurt Rottler of York, PA. This is believed to be the same E. Kurt Rottler whose bequest funds The Rottler Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts that is annually made through the York Art Association. Rottler was a devoted member and President of the Board of Directors of the York Art Association from 1965 through 1970. This work covers Hemp, Opium, Peyote, Mushrooms and LSD. Among the first-person account contributors are: Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Billie Holiday, Havelock Ellis, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg. Derived from a Kirkus review: This is the first collection of "the writings of travelers into drug-land", a documentation of sensation when under the influence of "hallucinogens", formerly known as phantastics, and it ranges from snuff (which one experimenter claims is the strongest) to LSD, with hemp and opium providing the largest body of evidence. The editor has provided comments on each contributor, as well as the drug used, and many great writers have recorded this experience, with its special excitation and iridescence, the spiraling vertigo of euphoria which often plunges into horror, in words. There's the opulence of Gautier's world of hashish; Baudelaire's "accursed sweetmeat" and the exaggerated perceptions induced: De Quincey and Havelock Ellis, Huxley and Cocteau ("It is rare for an addict to forsake opium. Opium forsakes him, ruining everything"); jazz artists Mezz Mezzerow (who found no bad after effects "outside of a 20 month jail sentence") and Billie Holiday; Allen Ginsberg and Alexander King; the account of the banker, Wasson, who discovered hallucinogenic mushrooms; a medical doctors' symposium; etc., etc. including a section on cures and the attendant agony.... This does represent some of the truest and best writing this flowering of evil has produced.