Twelve years in the writing, Torgoff's magnum opus is an anecdotal history of the movement of the DEA's schedule-one drugs (narcotics, amphetamines, cocaine, psychedelics, MDMA, and marijuana) from the underground toward the mainstream. From the 1940s to the present, from jazz musicians hooked on heroin to ravers rolling on ecstasy, this lively inquiry often gets the straight dope from the users themselves. (Torgoff was one, too; though he writes only fleetingly about himself, he's in his fourteenth year of sobriety.) Most of this has been examined elsewhere, and his criteria force him to leave out the schedule-two methamphetamine that is ravaging small-town America, but this is nonetheless useful and absorbing reading. Witholding judgment, he quotes those who use drugs to expand their consciousness, or those who see inequalities in the prosecution of drug use, with a respect equal to those who've become addicted and sought recovery. There may still be little consensus in public opinion regarding drugs, but Torgoff's belief in straight talk and informed decision making is a tonic. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Martin Torgoff has been a contributing editor at Interview and a producer for CNN "World Beat." He is a documentary filmmaker and the author of several books, including the bestselling Elvis: We Love You Tender and American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp, which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.
Martin Torgoff has been a contributing editor at Interview and a producer for CNN "World Beat."
From The Washington Post
Each year, police make more than 700,000 marijuana-related arrests in the United States. Some 80 percent of public school districts still teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program even though the General Accounting Office has declared it ineffective. In 2003, comedian Tommy Chong went to federal prison for the high crime of selling bongs via the Internet. In such a climate, it takes courage to say anything positive about illegal drugs (or, as the federal government moralistically prefers to call them, illicit drugs). So Martin Torgoff's Can't Find My Way Home is a brave book, simply because it seeks to "chronicle . . . the use of illicit drugs in America without sensationalizing, apologizing, moralizing or demonizing." It's also a generally successful effort, in many ways as pleasantly and richly intoxicating as a double hit of Humboldt County, Calif.'s finest.
Torgoff, author of Elvis: We Love You Tender and a biography of the musician John Cougar Mellencamp, ranges widely in documenting the profound influence of drugs on postwar America. Between an encyclopedic bibliography and dozens of original interviews with folks ranging from the Doors' record producer Paul A. Rothchild to National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) founder Keith Stroup to the "acid angel" Dawn Reynolds, the reader gets a contact high from touring a number of legendary drug-infused scenes. Allen Ginsberg's reading of "Howl" at San Francisco's Six Gallery; a typically debauched evening at New York's Studio 54, "the high temple of the Great Stoned Age"; the seminal '90s Ecstasy event A Rave Called Sharon -- Torgoff represents all these and more in well-rendered detail. He also gives due weight to gloomier tales, ranging from Charlie Parker's tormented love affair with heroin to '60s clown Wavy Gravy's showdown with Charles Manson at a California commune to the suicide of High Times magazine founder Tom Forcade.
Throughout, Torgoff drives home the point that not only have nearly half of Americans tried at least one "illicit" drug but also that such substances "have long since become part of a deeply personal and complicated prism of American life. . . . From politics to the arts, drugs have shaped the American cultural landscape . . . [and] entered the mainstream of American social experience."
While documenting everything from Timothy Leary's proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing "the individual's right to seek an expanded consciousness" to the origins of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, Torgoff also mounts a convincing criticism of the "pharmacological Calvinism" that underwrites the war on drugs -- the roughly $40-billion-a-year law enforcement effort that has intensified the violence, crime and substance abuse patterns associated with black markets. As an alternative to prohibition, he champions "harm reduction" measures espoused by contemporary drug policy reformers such as former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, medical marijuana activist Dennis Peron and Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton University professor who now heads the Drug Policy Alliance. Nadelmann emerges as perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for new drug laws that "hold people responsible for their actions, but don't punish them for what they put into their bodies."
For all its many merits, however, Can't Find My Way Home is, in the end, something of a downer, a bummer -- maybe even a bad trip. Torgoff smartly acknowledges that public discussion of drugs is typically hyperbolic, oscillating between zealots who claim that certain substances can (and should) transform all of human society and drug warriors who unconvincingly see a future junkie lurking in every casual marijuana smoker. Torgoff knows better, writing "that for the vast majority of people the truth of drugs will always lie somewhere between the extremes."
Yet his personal experience with drugs, a significant part of the book, is nothing if not unrepresentative, veering as it does between abuse and abstinence. Coming of age in the '60s and '70s, Torgoff frankly admits, "The only time I ever turned down a drug was when I didn't understand the question." Later, he discusses his involvement with 12-step programs and writes that "in the fifteenth year of my sobriety . . . I have never been happier." While there's no question that "the extremes" make for much more interesting reading, it's disappointing that even a book seeking to "demystify" drugs ultimately reinscribes a longstanding dualism about mind-altering substances. If nothing else, it suggests that a truly measured discussion of American drug use is yet to come.
Reviewed by Nick Gillespie
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
