Drugs. "Artificial paradise"? This is what De Quincey said about drugs, this is what Baudelaire, Verlaine, Edgar Allan Poe thought about drugs... An ideal means of “expanding consciousness”? This was the foundation of Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary, the culture of beatniks and hippies... The thrill of “advanced” people? This is what rock musicians believed - from Sid Vicious to Kurt Cobain... Almost all of them died from drugs - or “on drugs”. Here is a book about drugs. About the history of their use. About how exactly they change the human body. About their many varieties - from the “lightest” to the “heaviest”. And about much, much more...