Recommendations?

What's your favorite drug book that other people may not have read? I, for one, have never actually read The Doors of Perception -- is it worth it?

My favorite drug books are Theophile Gautier's Le Club Des Haschischins and Walter Benjamin's On Hashish. The Doors of Perception is fine.

And Baudelaire. Artificial Paradises is a good read.

A friend recommends Varieties of Anomalous Experience.

oh, I love Benjamin! I will have to read that.

For beginners, I'd recommend White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader for a good collection of fictional and nonfictional 'trips'. It includes such authors' writings as de Quincey, Freud, Burroughs, Leary, etc.

Also, Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant gives a great non-biased take on the writers behind such literature.

What I like about the above books is that they both steer clear of 'new age mysticism' themes, which can veer towards incomprehensibility, if I may so opine. They are grounded into reality and take temporary flights above it.

William S. Burroughs's books are a pretty enlightening look at various drug states. I have a collection that puts Junky, Naked Lunch, and Queer, together, which is an interesting introduction to his writing.

- BTRIPP

Junky is a fascinating drug narrative. Queer is one of my favorite books of all time, but I've mentally catagorized it as a queer narrative rather than a drug narrative (for obvious reasons), but I guess it does have elements of both.

To abductee: I admit that I have some trouble with what you call "new age mysticism", but I am interested in that approach to drug experience as well as the more grounded ones. Terrence McKenna's Food of the Gods puts forth some very interesting (and fairly comprehensible) theories about the historical relationship between religion and drugs. I'm not saying I buy it all, but it's definitely food for thought (sorry).

Any thoughts about The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge? I have it, but I haven't read it yet.

Oh, there's also John Allegro's remarkable Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ... he was the lone "renegade" from the original Dead Sea Scrolls team and spent most of the rest of his life attempting to "debunk" Christianity (which he considered to have been simply a "mushroom cult" that wrapped itself in a pastiche of surrounding cultures' myths).

- BTRIPP

Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aliester Crowley and Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick are good drug-related books, but my favorite will always be Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing more irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge..."

Black Elk Speaks and anything by Carlos Castaneda

also naked lunch by burroughs and desolation angels by kerouac

Some of the best psychedelic literature is available for free on the Web, including DeQuincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which I have yet to read, McKenna, and Huxley.

I liked Moksha, a collection of Huxley's psychedelic writings. I also enjoy browsing the Psychedelics Encyclopedia.

I keep seeing the book of Ginsberg and Burroughs letters to one another called The Yage Letters but I am hoping to find a used copy.

I'll second Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant, although I liked Breaking Open the Head by Pinchbeck much better. He discusses his personal experiences and how they relate to shamanism. He's also a very good writer.

If your looking for just a collection of drug experiences I would recommend Tripping by Charles Hayes. Another classic not mentioned so far is Pihkal by Shulgin. He is a biochemist by training. He develops new drugs, tries them on himself, and then records the effects. A big book but only the first half is his experiences. The second half is chemical recipes.

For a more historical read check out Blue Tide: The Search for Soma. It discusses possible botanical sources for Soma, a drug referenced in the Hindu Rig Veda.

Mikhail Bulgakov's short story 'Morphin', and "The Cocain Romance" by Mihail Ageev. ( Literally, it is 'A Novel with Cociane in it", but the Russian word for 'novel' is 'roman', which word has also connotations of love affair. Ageev was, apparently, a pseudonym. Real authorship has been ascribed to Nabokov, but unconvincingly. A few years ago, a cultish drug writer made a splash in Russia, writing about lives of junkies there in a slang of that underworld. His pen name, Bayan Shiryanov, is roughly tranlsated as Bard Needlefreaked.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K.Dick

Here is a list of some of my personal favourites, in no particular order (some of which have already been mentioned):

Thomas De Quincey; Confessions of an English Opium Eater: an important text since it was the first major narrative to explore the nature of addiction, and in a prose style that matched/surpassed the effects of the drug itself.

Baudelaire; Artificial Paradises

Coleridge

Aldous Huxley; Doors of Perception, Brave New World

M. Ageyev; Novel with Cocaine

Will Self; almost his whole oeuvre

Philip K. Dick; A Scanner Darkly among many others

Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary
Castaneda was a bit of a fraud so not sure if we want to include him?

Denis Johnson; Jesus's Son

William S. Burroughs; nearly all his work

Michael Hornburg; Bongwater

Irvine Welsh; Trainspotting and many of his novels and short stories.

Jay McInerney; Bright Lights, Big City

Bret Easton Ellis; Less Than Zero and most of his other novels/stories

Anthony Burgess; A Clockwork Orange milk-plus anyone? (see Vellocet or synthmesc)

Ian Watson; The Embedding for more of a SF look.

Paddy Chayefsky; Altered States
(This Group's Namesake?)

*These are just the ones that spring to mind and from looking at some of my book shelves. I will add other rarer/earlier ones as I recall them, and there are also some critical studies and historical texts worth looking at we might want to add to the discussion.

I recommend my own book: I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Memoir of a Psychedelic Year. Reviewed numerous times on LT, amazon.com, barnes&noble.com, etc. Available via the Internet.