Phantastica, Louis Lewin's epochal survey of psychoactive drugs used around the world, made its English-language appearance in 1931. Sometime that year-either in London where his first play The World of Light was produced, or on the French Riviera where he was writing Brave New World-Aldous Huxley came upon this "unpromising-looking treasure" and "read it from cover to cover with a passionate and growing interest." It appears likely that Lewin's treatise served to introduce Huxley to the history of drugs and their effects, although 22 years would pass before he made the first experiment upon himself, with mescalin -and paid tribute to Lewin in the first line of the book resulting from that experiment. (There is no evidence to support Francis King's assertion that Aleister Crowley introduced Huxley to mescalin in Ber1in in the 1920S.) Huxley's earliest printed text on drug-taking touches on themes he would return to again and again in his later work: the widespread and pervasive use of drugs, their importance in religious ceremony, man's predilection for occasional vacations from the everyday world, the problem of addiction, the failure of prohibition, and drugs of the future.

THE OTHER DAY I discovered, dusty and neglected on one of the upper shelves of the local book shop, a ponderous work by a German pharmacologist. The price was not high; I paid and carried home the unpromising-looking treasure. It was a thick book, dense with matter and, in manner, a model of all that literary style should not be.

Strictly, an unreadable book. Nevertheless, I read it from cover to cover with a passionate and growing interest. For this book was a kind of encyclopedia of drugs. Opium and its modern derivatives, morphia and heroin; cocaine and the Mexican peyotl; the hashish of India and the near East; the agaric of Siberia; the kawa of Polynesia; the betel of the East Indies; the now universal alcohol; the ether, the chloral, the veronal of the contemporary West-not one was omitted. By the time I had reached the last page, I knew something about the history, the geographical distribution, the mode of preparation and the physiological and psychological effects of all the delicious poisons, by means of which men have constructed, in the midst of an unfriendly world, their brief and precarious paradises.

The story of drug-taking constitutes one of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant chapters in the natural history of human beings. Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday oust of spacer out of time, in the eternity of sleep or ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary phantasy. "Anywhere, anywhere out of the world."

Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues. And so on. The devotional exercises of the later mystics are all designed to produce the drug's miraculous effects by purely psychological means. How many of the current ideas of eternity, of heaven, of supernatural states are ultimately derived from the experiences of drug-takers?

Primitive man explored the pharmaceutical avenues of escape from the world with a truly astonishing thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered. Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilised descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him.

All existing drugs are treacherous and harmful. The heaven into which they usher their victims soon turns into a hell of sickness and moral degradation. They kill, first the soul, then, in a few years, the body. What is the remedy? "Prohibition," answer all contemporary governments in chorus. But the results of prohibition are not, encouraging. Men and women feel such an urgent need to take occasional holidays from reality, that they will do almost anything to procure the means of escape. The only justification for prohibition would be success; but it is not and, in the nature of things, cannot be successful. The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine or cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity.

From Moksha writings on psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
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