Brian Merchant, writing for Vice, tracks the history of stories about drugs. Beginning as early as the Epic of Gilgamesh “humans have been taking drugs in fiction, usually as a vessel for exploring ideas about science, social order, or human nature.” “Our drug fiction has proven remarkably capable of both reflecting and dissecting the anxieties about the present in which it is written—we can learn a lot about the fears and aspirations of a given period by its characters’ bad trips—and even of predicting the future.”
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