MAPS: Drug War History

[Donald Peter Dulchinos <dpd@xxxxxxxx>]

Readers of this list may be interested in a glimpse of the early history
of the drug war in my new book, Pioneer of Inner Space.

Twenty-one-year-old Fitz Hugh Ludlow became the best-selling author of The
Hasheesh Eater in the years before the Civil War.  His best-seller related
his visionary experiences with large, oral doses of hashish, along with
his religious, philosophical and medial reflections on the altered states
they produced.   He became a celebrated figure in the Bohemian circles of
New York City, along with such friends as Walt Whitman, and was a popular
short-story writer, drama and music critic and a journalist.  

Ludlow's journey to the West Coaswt on the Overland Stagecoach in 1863 was
a bold leap into the unknown, and his dispatches to the East were devoured
by an eager public.  In the company of renowned painter Albert Bierstadt
(who later married Ludlow's ex-wife), he talked politics with Mormon
leader Brigham Young and traded witticisms with Mark Twain in California,
whom he encouraged to seek a wider audience in the East.  Ludlow later
wrote perhaps the first great novel on the theme of alcohol abuse, and
then became a leading expert in the treatment of opium addiction after the
Civil War.  

"The most long-awaited of any 19th-century American biography. Through a
wealth of newly discovered data, Dulchinos describes the circumstances
that led to the making of the 'American DeQuincey'. Fitz Hugh Ludlow has
at last found his biographer." 
- Michael Horowitz, founder, Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library


more info at www.well.com/user/dpd/fitz.html

Don Dulchinos



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