Intoxication

Volume VI, Number 1 | winter 2012

Purchase

Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs by Anthony van Dyck.

Preamble

Alms for Oblivion

By Lewis H. Lapham

“One should always be drunk,” proclaimed poet Charles Baudelaire. But the question remains, drunk with what?

Dionysos and his Thiasus, from the circle of the Antimenes Painter.

Essay

Fabled Powers

By Sven Birkerts

For an artist, a day of successful inspiration is also a day a systematic intoxication.

Map

Indigenous Intoxicants

Getting high, around the world.

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Miscellany

In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.

Voices In Time

1890 | Yasnaya Polyana

Drowning the Conscience

Leo Tolstoy considers the moral implications of smoking.More

Voices In Time

c. 1867 | Paris

Mission Statement

“One should always be drunk.”More

Voices In Time

1931 | Seattle

Tipped Off

Will you please have the Chinese bootlegger’s place raided?More

Charts & Graphs

Annual prevalence of intoxicant use as a percentage of the population ages 15 to 64.

Gross Domestic Consumption

User and pushers from around the world.

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Black and white image of American writer Herman Melville.

Photograph of American writer William S. Burroughs.

Portrait of English physician John Elliotson.

Contributors

Portrait of English lyrical poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Portrait bust of Greek historian Xenophon.

Black and white photograph of French writer and film director Marguerite Duras.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

—Edmund Burke, 1795