Through examinations of post-Romantic writers on drugs, including Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline, and Burroughs on them all, Writing on Drugs exposes this most profound and pervasive influence on contemporary culture. Author Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham, England, and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Manchester. She has been a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She lives in Birmingham. It vibrates somewhere between an engaging facticity and a contact high.
Plant plays the role of informed guide rather than drug-snorting advocate.
Plant is at her most dazzlingly effective when sketching the twisty little mazes which link drugs with politics and commerce. A vast literature on drugs has assembled itself in the last two hundred years. It begins with the late eighteenth century's explorations of opium, wends its way through cannabis, coca, and cocaine, and later finds itself entangled with a wide variety of plant hallucinogens and synthetic drugs. Like their writings and their writers, these substances could hardly be more diverse. Some of them are ancient, others very new.