Blowing our minds

Martin Torgoff, author of "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000," talks about America's complicated and schizophrenic history with drugs.

By Larry Smith

Jun 14, 2004 | Free association: drugs.

What comes to mind?

Getting high in your dorm room after finals? John Belushi in a hotel room, slumped over from a deadly mix of coke and heroin? A drive-by in South Central Los Angeles? A messy group hug at a warehouse rave? Medical marijuana? Mandatory minimums?

In "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000," Martin Torgoff argues that the story of drugs in America is all these images and ideas -- and much, much more. Mixing oral history, autobiography and a large dose of firsthand sources from High Times to Foreign Policy, the book moves across time and culture, starring one drug after another, from marijuana to MDMA.

Torgoff, 51, a New York journalist and biographer of Elvis and John Cougar Mellencamp, refers to his own drug use and abuse throughout the book. Now married with a baby, Torgoff started smoking pot at 16 in 1968 -- the night Nixon was elected president. "I remember because as I was getting stoned, I heard the election returns coming down through the ceiling," he says. "That was the beginning of my run." It was a run that would take him from pot to psychedelics to coke and alcohol -- and finally into recovery at 37, in 1989.

Besides using his own story, he fuels the book with a polyphonic spree of supporting characters, among them storied beats Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac; psychedelic superheroes Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna; fallen jazz great Charlie Parker; tragic rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison; cult figures Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy. The result is a sweeping epic that bounces between orgiastic nostalgia trip and cautionary tale -- and, at times, like the drugs themselves, can assault the senses.

Torgoff spoke with Salon about his own decade-long journey researching and writing "Can't Find My Way Home," the polarizing pull of drug laws, and the discoveries each generation makes by lighting up.

Drug stories aren't rare in the card catalog of America literature. Why write your book?

When my friends and I first starting doing drugs in the late '60s, we were making not just a statement about the experience of the substance, but a statement about lifestyle, politics, spiritual values, communitarian values. If you smoked marijuana, you were against the war in Vietnam, and you listened to a certain kind of music -- the psychedelic music, the Beatles. But it also had to do with a life philosophy. In the beginning it was all about opening to things -- to yourself, to the world of the senses, a kind of creative potential. It made you see and feel things differently. There was a philosophy around it of peace and brotherhood -- all the clichés.

But by 1973, suddenly the pharmacopoeia opened wide. Although most of us had tried coke before we left school, it really hit the scene by '77-'78, and followed us right into the arena of work and careers as we got older and had more discretionary income. The values it promulgated were antithetical to pot and psychedelics -- you'd never think of staying up three days in a row smoking weed. It became the preferred substance of lawyers and stockbrokers, and that pretty much sums it up. It promoted an ego-driven culture of greed, exclusion, conspicuous consumption and corruption. Perhaps the closest thing to a Republican drug of choice.

Next Page: How did we go from pot and psychedelics to coke and Quaaludes?

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