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