Diary of a Drug Fiend

48 The Diary of a Drug Fiend that this is the case; and this is annihilated by cocaine. Let me emphasise once more the absence of any reaction. There is where the infernal subtlety of the drug comes in. If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call “the morning after the night before.” Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back. We have drunk alcohol since the beginning of time; and it is in our racial consciousness that although ‘“‘a hair of the dog” will put one right after a spree, it won't do to choke oneself with hair. But with cocaine, all this caution is utterly abrogated. Nobody would be really much the worse for a night with the drug, provided that he had the sense to spend the next day in a Turkish bath, and build up with food and a double allowance of sleep. But cocaine insists upon one’s living upon one’s capital, and assures one that the fund is inexhaustible. As I said, it is a local anesthetic. It deadens any feelng which might arouse what physiologists call inhibition. One becomes absolutely reckless. One is bounding with health and bubbling with high spirits. It is a blind excitement of so sublime a character that it is impossible to worry about anything. And yet, this excitement is singularly calm and profound. There is nothing of the suggestion of coarseness which we associate with ordinary drunkenness. The very idea of coarseness or commonness is abolished. It is like the vision of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles in which he was told, ‘ There is nothing common or unclean.” As Blake said, ‘‘ Everything that lives is holy.” Every act is a sacrament. Incidents which in the ordinary way would check one or annoy one, become merely material for joyous laughter. It is just as when you drop a tiny lump of sugar into champagne, it bubbles afresh. Well, this is a digression. But that is just what