HUMAN HISTORY ON DRUGS

Shakespeare gets baked here.

Kelly opens by professing that he’s obsessed by the past—and that, being on the autism spectrum, “I develop an almost physical compulsion to know everything there is to know on a subject.” This lively book is proof positive, a whole warren of rabbit holes that lead to unexpected vignettes about the mind-altering habits of the likes of George Washington (laudanum), Queen Victoria (ganja), Elvis Presley (the whole medicine cabinet), and Adolf Hitler (“coked out of his mind”). Kelly reaches deep into the past, reckoning that people have enjoyed various means of bending reality since there have been people: One early case is Marcus Aurelius, the brilliant Roman emperor whose Meditations Kelly likens to “The Art of the Deal [if it] had been written by Jesus Christ instead of Donald Trump” and whose chronic pain was relieved by goodly doses of opium prescribed by his physician, none other than the famed medical encyclopedist Galen. Young Judy Garland was prescribed mounds of pills at the behest of studio executives who “preferred to get her addicted to drugs and ruin her life than give her a reasonable work schedule.” The Beatles, of course, famously got so ripped that, as the comedian Bill Hicks used to quip, they let Ringo sing—but, Kelly notes, even though they were fairly open about their drug use (John Lennon: “I’ve always needed a drug to survive”), they also denied being proselytes, about which Kelly brightly remarks that if simply mentioning drugs brings down the (silver) hammer, “well, then, frankly, I’m in a lot of trouble.” And Shakespeare? As Kelly notes, “pipes with cannabis residue” have been found in the Bard’s garden—and besides, “his plays are filled with characters who ingest all manner of fantastical pharmaceutical concoctions.”

Entertaining time travel through the doors of perception.