3. High Road to Xanadu

 

“Weave a circle round him thrice” raves Coleridge in the last few lines of his poem Kubla Kahn, “And close your eyes with holy dread/ For he on honey-dew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of paradise.” Coleridge is talking about himself. This, he is saying, is the impression he would make on anyone who saw him while he was all fired up by the excitements of Kubla Kahn’s pleasure dome in Xanadu, where there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, and the earth breathed in fast thick pants. Even to modern ears, however, the fast thick pants are the only discord in the poem, which is indeed as fabulous as it was meant to be, a ride on a rocket sled into the lyrical sublime. 

 

Coleridge, by his own account, was high on opium when he wrote it. He was in the early stages of an oil-burning habit which would rule him for the rest of his life. Opium, in the liquid form of laudanum, was legally available at the time, but it’s a miracle that anybody else got any, because Coleridge was drinking it at the rate of two quarts a week. Since, in his last years, he managed to write Biographia Literaria, which T.S. Eliot later hailed as the work of the greatest literary critic in the English language, the question of whether drugs ruined Coleridge, or else helped him to express his genius, is not easily answered.

 

But one thing we can say for sure. Even more than his contemporary Thomas De Quincy, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Coleridge was the one who established the romantic connection between getting wasted on drugs and yet being granted the entrée to a deeper reality than the rest of us get to see. Later on, in France, Baudelaire and Rimbaud followed Coleridge down the same road, but even if they thought they were opening up a French autoroute, they were in fact only extending a British motorway, the road to Xanadu. Here in the 21st century, we tend to think that the drug problem started in the 20th century, forgetting that it acquired its most insidious element in the 19th Century, with the notion that the world of drugs might be more exciting than the real world. That notion has bedevilled the whole discussion ever since. What do you do if people actually want this stuff?

 

The discussion never ends and probably never will, but it’s been especially hot news in the last week or so after the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, fired the chairman of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuseof Drugs, Professor David Nutt, for talking out of turn. I won’t go into details, because the newspapers have been going into nothing else for day after day, but broadly we can say that this particular brouhaha would never have arisen if the government had not put itself into a position of asking for advice that it might not want to take.

 

If the government is still there after the next election, it might eventually want to take the advice which Professor Nutt was apparently all set to offer, which is that cannabis is not so bad after all. The government might even eventually want to legalise cannabis, or at least follow the example of California, where you can buy it for medical purposes. But suppose one or more of the panel offered the advice that a much more powerful drug, namely heroin, would be less destructive to society if it were made legal?

 

It’s not impossible to imagine that advice being given, and given by an expert, because there was a time within living memory when heroin, in Britain, was legal. Heroin wasn’t criminalised until 1968, and when I arrived in London in the early sixties you could still see the famous midnight queue at Boots in Piccadilly, where the addicts gathered to get tomorrow’s allowance of their prescribed heroin pills. The point was that there weren’t many addicts. There weren’t many in the whole country.

 

After the drug was banned, however, it became more popular. The gangsters got in on the act, and whole thing escalated until now you not only have thousands of adults shooting up with needles, you have children shooting each other with guns. The reasons for this disaster have been analysed to shreds, but one factor hard to rule out is that it makes a story. Drugs aren’t humdrum. There is danger, special kit, a racy vocabulary, a ritual. That was already true for Sherlock Holmes, whose creator, the physician Arthur Conan Doyle, for some reason equipped the world’s greatest detective not just with a super brain but with a taste for the needle.

 

Way back before World War I, there was an element of the young upper crust that fooled with morphine. It was legal and available, but the fact that older people frowned upon it made it look glamorous to the bright young things. If you read the diaries of Duff Cooper, you find Lady Diana Manners and her glittering friends getting off on the stuff all the time. Nowadays, however, when the stuff is banned, even the less privileged look glamorous if they are sticking needles in themselves. Nobody would make a movie like Trainspotting if the characters were just holding down jobs and going to the supermarket. With exotic powders in the picture, the drug world can so easily be made to seem more intense than the real world.

 

In America cocaine was banned in 1914 and heroin in 1925. Traffic in the banned drugs quickly became a major theme for crime fiction. In some of the pre-war crime movies, and in almost all of the post-war ones, drugs are fuel for the action. It’s been said of modern Hollywood that it’s a factory where people high on cocaine make movies about people high on heroin, but somebody must have his head screwed on because people want to see the movie even when it makes drugs looks awful.

 

Back in 1955 The Man With the Golden Arm should have finished off heroin’s career as a desirable product: Frank Sinatra got so strung out he could barely react to Kim Novak. Fast forward to the 1983 version of Scarface, and you can see Al Pacino destroy his criminal career with a nose-dive into a pile of cocaine bigger than his head. But no amount of didactic condemnation from the big screen has ever slowed the trade down, and on the small screen it’s doubtful if even that magnificent series The Wire has done much to persuade the corner boys that they would be better off trying to improve their grades. 

 

The Wire is a test case. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about how the whole black inner city of Baltimore is turned into a war-zone by drugs. It’s a tremendous piece of work, The Wire. It’s got everything, including a precision of language that you have to call poetic. And it’s got an unpalatable message: the war on drugs can’t be won.

 

To coincide with the last episode, the creators of The Wire published an article in Time magazine which recommended that nobody should be jailed for a drug crime unless violence was involved. If the work of art they had created was true, and it seemed terribly true, then this advice was in conformity to the facts. To the minds behind The Wire, legalisation is the only answer.

 

But in addition to that article they have also published a couple of books, and one of the books, called The Corner, has a couple of pages that don’t quite fit with the rest. Almost every character in the book is sucked into the system. But there is one character who volunteers for it. He makes only a fleeting appearance, but I can’t get him out of my mind. His name is Gary McCullough and he has brains, energy and a gift for organization. He assembles all the necessary equipment for busting out of the free-fire zone he was born into. But he tries a taste of the stuff and he is lost. His previous life was exciting, but not as exciting as this.

 

Here, I’m afraid, is a way through to a further fact that we might still be faced with even if the whole vast mess of drug crime could be made to go away. Decriminalise all the drugs, put things back the way they were before the roof fell in, and you might still be stuck with people for whom real life simply isn’t thrilling enough, even when they are otherwise quite good at it. I think they’re wrong, but it isn’t easy to make a case. Western Civilization is up against it in that respect. Now that religious faith is so weak a force, how do you convince people that ordinary life is worth the effort?

 

It’s not just a matter of persuading the young in America’s black inner cities that it’s worth going to school even if it leads only to some boring everyday job such as the Presidency of the United States. It’s a matter of persuading young people in all the liberal democracies that the real world has a glamour of its own. Charlie Parker, the wonderful saxophonist who ruined himself with drugs, tried to tell his fellow musicians that they were fooling themselves if they thought they could play better when they were high.