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

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in a letter in the last year of his life.

Voices In Time

c. 3760 BC | Eden

Ye Shall Be As Gods

The temptation of Eve.More

Voices In Time

c. 1900 | Dublin

Darker Than the Swoon of Sin

James Joyce on the prowl in Dublin.More

Voices In Time

1997 | Connecticut

Bleeding a Poppy

Michael Pollan at the intersection of law and gardening.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.

View

Portrait of Chinese scholar and official Lin Zexu.

Depiction of chief of the Miami tribe Little Turtle.

Black and white photograph of Irish poet and writer W. B. Yeats.

Photograph of American professional baseball player Dock Ellis.

Contributors

Image of American lawyer and autobiographer Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Photograph of American comedian and film star Harpo Marx.

Black and white image of Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger.

The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it; we should refuse no occasion nor omit any opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580