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Hello, throughout history people have taken drugs to alter their perceptions and change their moods.

The attractions lie in the promise of instant pleasure, the possibility of heightened perception, or simulated oblivion.

Nietzsche said that no art could exist without intoxication.

He believed that a dream-like state was an essential precondition to superior vision and

understanding.

Scientists such as Humphrey Davy experimented with drugs, so did Freud.

But artists and writers from the Quincy to Coleridge to Huxley have found drugs to be both a creative

and a destructive force in their lives and work.

Coleridge said in his poem about opium,

Fantastic Passions, Maddening Brawl and shame and terror overall.

The world of drugs is a world of ambivalence and paradox.

It's a world of clarity and confusion,

stimulation and stupefaction, medicine and poison, vitality and death.

Can drugs really stimulate creativity?

That's what we're going to talk about. What's the impact of drugs on the mind?

Are we talking about the special relationship where medicine becomes a positive stimulant for some scientists and artists.

With me to discuss the history of drugs of Richard Davenport Hines, historian and author of the

pursuit of oblivion, a social history of drugs.

Sadie Plant, writer and author of writing on drugs, and Mike Jay, historian

and author of Empress of Dreams drugs in the 19th century. Mike Jaye, just to begin with what could be called the most common drug in this country,

...