Introduction

Abstract

This book has matured during more than thirty years of contemplation on what is often called ‘the drug problem’. My curiosity about narcotics was aroused while I was in elementary school in New York City in the early 1950s. My parents warned me not to accept sweets from strangers as they might contain heroin and I would then be a slave to drugs for the rest of my life. I remember wondering what this mystical power was which could devastate my life. However, it was in 1967 that I first started reflecting on the subject more systematically. ‘Flower power’ was on the rise in the US and psychedelics had started to spread all over the western world. As a part of my degree in anthropology and sociology I wrote a paper comparing the use of peyote in some American Indian tribes with what I then considered to be ‘hallucinogen cults’ among some middle-class young Americans. Thereafter I turned my attention to narcotics consumption here in Sweden.