passage from the Diary:
Man has a right to spiritual ambition. He has evolved to what he is, through making dangerous experiments. Heroin certainly helps me to obtain a new spiritual outlook on the world. I have no right to assume that the ruin of bodily health is injurious; and "whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whoever loseth his life for My sake shall find it." (Crowley, p. 253.)
Throughout Crowley's novel we find emphasis upon the magical exotic aspects of drugs, in addition to the romantic search for some form of transcendence. But Crowley clearly had little interest in aesthetics. In the novel, his persona King Lamus says:
What is modern fiction from Hardy and Dostoevski to the purveyors of garbage to servant girls, but an account of the complications set up by the exaggerated importance attached by themselves or their neighbors to the sexual appetites of two or more bimanous monkeys. (Crowley, p. 138.)
Crowley's work marks the appearance in English drug literature of two leit-motifs which continue to be prominent up to the contemporary period: first, the strong association of drugs with sexuality and, second, the use of drugs as a mode of personal development or exploration. This latter element of Crowley's writing connects with the Romantic notion that reality could be found within the drug experience—a notion quite clearly reaffirmed in the books of the contemporary author Carlos Castaneda, especially in A Separate Reality.
From the viewpoint of the 'thirties, the Crash of 1929 and the resultant Depression were penance for the decadence of the 1920's. In these circumstances, drug usage was viewed not as exoticism but as degeneracy. Somerset Maugham's Narrow Corner (1932), while not lacking in Maugham's wit, is imbued with a sense of social consciousness which continues to emerge periodically in all drug literature after. In Narrow Corner, an English doctor grows despondent and takes to the practice of opium smoking as a way of detaching himself from the woes of the Depression. He eventually retreats from all of his social obligations as a doctor and becomes an expensive nursemaid to a rich man in the Malay Archipelago.
With the advent of World War II, there was a frenzy for government research in pharmaceuticals. At the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofman took the first "acid trip" in 1943 when he accidentally ingested some d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate 25. Throughout Europe and the Pacific, U. S. soldiers became
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