Books like Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits

I first read this while I was still in High School, I believe, and I would have given it at least one more star at the time. An older and more experienced person reads it today with sort of a tolerant smile, and occasional nods at how right or wrong Wilson's predictions have been, but it still has some interest.This was Wilson's first published book, through Playboy Press, at a time when writing and editing for Playboy was his full-time job. It wasn't especially successful, nor even as controversial as his later books, in spite of the eye-grabbing title. It has the hallmarks of a "first book:" Wilson hasn't quite found his voice, he's not sure how far he should go in pushing some of his more outre theories, and it lacks a lot of his familiar jargon. It's clear enough that he has a good opinion of Tim Leary, for example, but their close personal friendship is in no way represented. That's not to say that it comes across as "conservative," especially considering the generally anti-drug climate of the publishing world of the early 1970s, but it does seem stilted in places.Wilson's essential argument is that sex is something good that humans do, and it can be even better with judicious use of mind-altering chemicals. He's especially interested in those which introduce a "spiritual" level to the experience. He's not a fan of drugs, like amphetamines and heroin, which are dangerous and often lead to bad sexual experiences. He doesn't tell anyone what they should or should not do, and there's a good deal of cautionary information about the possible legal consequences of getting caught with controlled substances. Nevertheless, it's pretty clear that he thinks legislating people's brain chemistry is a form of totalitarian thought-control.If nothing else, the book is interesting because that argument is so rarely made with any coherence or intelligence. Also, some of his historical and anthropological data about different cultures' attitudes toward getting high and having orgasms is interesting, although it is not well-organized or reliably sourced (the lack of an index also makes it harder to track down specifics). Actually, I think his case studies or "interludes" are some of the most interesting insights into late-60s and early-70s drug culture. Each of these could have been a book unto itself. The book has dated in some respects. There are no entries in his glossary for "angel dust," "freebasing," "crack," or "ice." His observation that heroin is the most feared drug sounds odd in a world where methamphetamine has taken on that title. The entry for MMDA (XTC) obviously comes from a time when not many people were using it. Of course, the most outlandish predictions are those of the chemical futurists, who thought that by the year 2000 we would have a wide array of consciousness-altering drugs at our disposal for things like memory enhancement and alertness. Instead, what we have is an array of government-approved "anti-depressants" and other behavior modification drugs that do not address consciousness per se. Wilson's more pessimistic predictions about future legislation, alas, have tended to be more accurate.