People in Search of Dreams

Colin Machines, whose zesty novel about London's teenage subgroups , The Absolute Beginners, was hailed by one reviewer as 'worth five hundred pamphlets, reports or summer school proceedings on the subject of British youth', believes there are positive as well as negative aspects to drug taking. In this article he outlines his views. Besides alcoholics, I have known intimately those who take pills, smoke reefers, swallow LSD, inhale opium, sniff cocaine, and inject themselves with heroin. All these persons seem to me to have in common tem-peramental characteristics that are both negative and positive. The negative aspect is that they are all trying to escape from something: from themselves, from sorrows or depression, from the pressures of urban existence. The positive aspect is that they are all trying to realise a dream: that is to say, I think a comparison is possible between an alcoholic or drug addict and a gambler, a racing motorist, an artist, even a mystic. What I mean is that, in a debased form, such addictions* are an assertion that mankind is not a mere clod fettered to the soil, but a being who can take wing, soar, and rise above the limits of the commonplace and ordinary in our lives. Making a distinction I think it is most important to make a marked distinction between addictions that are absolutely compulsive and grow to dominate a whole life, and those which can be abandoned by the addict more or less at will. In the former category are the 'white' drugs? cocaine, heroin, morphine, opium and so forth, from which the addict can only be freed by total, and often painful, abstention. In the other cases?alcohol, pep pills, reefers or LSD?the consumer may take these or not as he wishes, without the habit necessarily, and in all cases, becoming compulsive. This is not to deny that there are alcoholics, just as there are compulsive swallowers of pep pills, but the point is that the compulsion comes here from the consumer's temperament , and is not absolute, as in the case of the 'white' drugs. This seems a distinction which I believe our laws ought to recognise, but which at present they do not. It seems to me really rather unjust that a man may, legally, drink eight double whiskies and then, after causing a lot of trouble, receive a mild admonishment and fine, whereas someone who uses …