Larry Smith

Pain Killer: A ‘Wonder’ Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death is Meier’s page-turning expose of OxyContin and America’s pain industry. He details how OxyContin went from the almost exclusive domain of cancer patients to a mass-prescribed miracle weapon in a new war on pain; in turn it became a billion-dollar baby for its makers, Purdue Pharma — and one of the fastest growing drugs of abuse in recent history.

Pain Killer tells a story that goes back decades and spins itself around the globe from young abusers in rural Virginia to the opium poppy growing industry on the island of Tasmania. Meier grounds a complex topic in colorful characters that provide his book with a true narrative. There’s Dr. Art Van Zee, a small-town physician who witnesses Oxy savage his community. There’s Lindsay Myers, a well-heeled cheerleading teenager who’s handed a pill in a friend’s car one day and is soon munching the drug like Junior Mints at a matinee. There’s Purdue Pharma, a relatively unknown drug company that marketed the drug to doctors with unprecedented aggression. There’s the FDA, an agency whose staggering screw-up led to a mislabeling of the drug as less easily abused than other prescription narcotics because of its slow release mechanism. And there are the well-meaning doctors who took the FDA’s approval and ran with it.

Salon recently sat down with Meier at a Manhattan cafi to talk about the history of OxyContin, new allegations against the drug’s maker Purdue Pharma, and a certain larger than life talk show host who was addicted to Oxy.

You describe the OxyContin epidemic as the “perfect medical storm.” What’s the Cliff’s Notes version of that storm?

Essentially, it’s a classic story of what happens when doctors’ good intentions and the drug industry’s quest for profit force medical practice to run far ahead of scientific fact or reality. The result is often a catastrophe. And that’s what happened here.

Why is it that OxyContin abuse hit the teen community hardest?

The old saw within the tobacco industry was that if kids weren’t hooked on cigarettes by the time they were 18, you’ve lost them. Prescription drugs were never marketed to kids, but they are still getting to them. Every generation of kids experiments, but today’s teens are messing with a class of drugs that have far greater consequences and potential to addict than when I was a teenager.

The general consensus among addiction specialists is that people who become addicted during their teenage years face a lifetime of risk of continued addiction. At a meeting in early 2000, a New York state drug regulator named John Eadie reported that he was seeing data revealing skyrocketing rates of young people experimenting with prescription narcotics. Eadie said, “Look, we’re facing the possibility that we are going to create a new generation of lifelong legal narcotics users and it’s unfolding right before us — and we need urgent action to avoid a calamity.” But his warning went unheeded.

Unheeded by whom, exactly?

By everybody. His colleagues. The pharmaceutical companies. The government. You name it.

Why did OxyContin abuse spread so rapidly compared with that of other narcotics like Percocet?

Because of its purity. All the previous painkillers were a combination of oxycodone, and either aspirin or acetaminophen. OxyContin is pure oxycodone, so you can take one Oxy and it’s like getting heroin that’s been stomped on. It’s a huge bang for your buck.

Clearly OxyContin has been a boon for many people — cancer patients and others with long-term pain — most of who dont ever abuse it.

You see a pattern with painkillers like OxyContin, antidepressants, and other drugs. And that pattern is that drugs that do have value in a specific setting see their use broadened without any scientific basis to justify that taking place. Two recent examples include the broadening use of Ritalin and antidepressants in children. How and why a drug’s use expands is a fascinating story. It tells us a lot about the ways that doctors operate, drug companies operate, and what are society’s anxieties, demands, and expectations. Treatments become popular without scientific evidence to back their popularity. Why? Because it’s in someone’s vested interest to make it that way. And it’s not simply the vested interest of the drug company at times, it may be the vested interest of the insurance company who doesn’t want to pay for what may be a better but more expensive treatment.

What was the tipping point in the Oxy epidemic?

OxyContin is a Schedule II narcotic. That is supposed to be the most tightly controlled, tightly regulated drug you can prescribe. By industry agreement, narcotics manufacturers have agreed not to advertise directly to consumers; rather, they advertise to the medical profession — to people who are going to write the prescriptions The most significant thing they did was took the most powerful narcotic that was available to a doctor, a drug only previously marketed to cancer specialists and pain specialists — doctors who really knew how to use and control the use of these drugs — and marketed it to the average doc on the corner, into the breadbasket of general medicine. Once this drug was in a huge number of doctors’ offices if was an easy jump out of those offices and onto the streets and into the hands of teenagers. Feigning pain is simple, and lots of well-meaning doctors got conned.

How did OxyContin move from a medication that doctors prescribed only to the most severely in pain to such a common treatment?

With the exception of a few doctors who are running pill mills, the doctors who are prescribing this drug wanted to help their patients. But now here comes a marketing campaign [from the drug's makers] that says all the stuff you’ve heard about the dangers of narcotics is a myth; and not only are some of the myths you’ve heard not true, but this drug is safer than any narcotic you can use because it’s a new time-released drug, and the government has allowed us to make this claim that time-released drugs are less prone to abuse than so-called traditional immediate-release drugs. And doctors are also being told you’ve been ignoring this epidemic of untreated pain. And here’s the magical answer — a drug that is safer to use than every other competing drug on the market. It’s a very tempting combination.

One reviewer of your book described Purdue as a “well-intentioned drug company.” Do you agree with that?

The measure of any drug company is not how they react when things are going well, but how they react when there’s evidence that there’s a problem. How quickly do they step up to the plate? The book is fairly clear that, at least from my perspective, Purdue falls dramatically short on that account. Purdue had taken some earlier steps, but I believe that it was only when the spotlight of publicity was on them that they took bigger actions: sending letters to doctors across the country alerting them to the growing abuse of the drug; voluntarily dropping the claim that the drug was less prone to abuse.

It seems inconceivable that Purdue couldn’t have anticipated the potential for abuse.

I’d look at the situation with the cigarette companies before them. It took the public a long time and lots of litigation to understand what really happened inside these companies. It’s classic in the annals of corporate behavior — the cigarette companies, asbestos companies, etcetera. At this point in time we don’t know anywhere close to the full story as to what happened inside Purdue. This company has hired the best PR teams and legal defense team available, the same companies that defended the cigarette companies. But interestingly, just a few weeks ago a federal judge in New York ruled that Purdue had effectively lied to the government to extend its patent [by claiming that patients didn't need as much of the drug to get an adequate pain-killing effect] and keep generics out of the market. So this house of cards is starting to crumble a little bit. Time has its way of yielding the truth.

Despite the controversy, Pharma is still raking it in.

This is a company that rode this drug like a rocket ship; OxyContin accounts for somewhere between 70-80 percent of its income — and brings in about 1.5 billion dollars a year. If they lose the patent protection, they go back to being some little backwater drug company without a blockbuster drug, without hope of achieving this dream as enunciated by their president of ‘breaking into the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world sometime in the next decade.’ So they’re going to do whatever they can to squeeze as much life and profit out of this drug. Many other companies would do exactly the same thing.

You were one of the first people to write about Oxy abuse. Overall, how did the media handle the story?

The media by and large did very well. Local papers in Virginia, Maine, and places like that were reporting on this story very aggressively in 2000 and I’m proud of what the Times did on the story. It was after our first major story appeared in 2001 that the FDA contacted the company and began inquiring about the problem; And the DEA also stepped up its efforts to police the abuse and proper prescribing of the drug. We certainly wanted this drug to keep getting to the people who legitimately needed it, but without this attention, what do you think would have happened? You think this company would have voluntarily taken this label off? Would the FDA have done anything? They would have done nothing. They approved this label on the basis of zero scientific information — it’s a scandal. As this story plays out more and more, there are probably still going to be more shocks that come down the line.

Art Van Zee, a small-time doctor in rural Virginia, is sort of your Erin Brockovich figure, one of the first physicians to report the problem. But ultimately, he’s still frustrated by Purdue’s and the government’s lack of responsiveness.

Art was swimming against the tide. He took a draconian position: that the drug should be taken off the market. That’s understandable given the chaos he was seeing all around him — teenagers and young people in his town were having their lives destroyed by abuse of this drug. And he had very few allies. The medical profession wasn’t his ally. The pharmaceutical industry certainly wasn’t his ally. The FDA was not going to be his ally. The real question is why there are so few doctors like Art Van Zee? Why weren’t there other doctors in these affected areas who were also out beating the drum? Art represents the best of what you want your community doctor to be.

Sadly, he’s kind of a relic.

We live in a time where doctors aren’t engaged in their communities. The house call doesn’t exist, except in impoverished places. The reason why there weren’t more Art Van Zees [raising the issue of OxyContin abuse] is because there weren’t that many doctors who feel a responsibility to the public health of the place they live. But Art Van Zee was seeing a lifetime of work being destroyed right in front of him.

The drug had a huge burst of publicity when Rush Limbaugh publicly admitted he was addicted to OxyContin and checked himself into rehab. How does the celebrity factor change the story?

The celebrity addiction thing is kind of like a soap bubble that blows up quickly and doesn’t leave much of a trace — they come, they go, they come, they go, and there’s no real change that results from it. Rush Limbaugh could be different, depending on what he chooses to do. In the past he’s been outspoken about having people sent to jail for illegally using drugs. I don’t see any purpose in having people sent to jail for what is seen by at least a good portion of the medical community to be a medical problem, the problem of addiction.

Thousands of more people die of Advil-related problems per year than OxyContin. Why not go after the Ibuprofen industry?

You don’t have 18-year-olds dying of Advil overdoses. I’m not discounting that Advil or Tylenol is involved in deaths. Anyone can walk into a drugstore and buy Advil and self-medicate with it; OxyContin is doctor prescribed. You’re talking about two very different types of problems. To try to draw an analogy between them as Purdue has done and narcotics advocates have done is misleading and does not do justice to either problem.

What about the argument that there’s going to be a certain amount of abuse with any new drug?

A lot of people have the view that there’s acceptable collateral damage — and it’s a very unfortunate view. We know that substance abuse exists in 8 to 12 percent in society. So somewhere around 10 percent of the people walking into a doctor’s office for treatment may turn around and abuse the drug they’re being given: that’s a frightening situation.

A lot of the people abusing these drugs are kids — they enter the world of addiction through youthful experimentation. I’d hardly define them as criminals. If we see these kids as acceptable collateral damage of treating medical conditions then we’re in a problematic situation as a society because there are many drugs like OxyContin coming down the pipeline. If we don’t set up safeguards to prevent them from spilling over into the hands of people who abuse them or even just youthfully experiment with them, it’s going to be a tragic situation.

And the solution is…?

The psychological landscape has to change. Everytime we’ve had a problem with prescription narcotics — either in not giving them to people who needed them or giving too many of them out and having them wind up in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them — the issue has been seen in black and white. Yet these drugs have good stuff about them, and real bad stuff about them as well. The medical profession can’t have the attitude that there will always be people who are going to misuse them.

Good question. If I did turn 42 and despaired about not being a dad, a logical solution would be to find a younger woman who wants kids — there always seem to be a lot of them around. But I’d prefer to avoid that situation. This woman is the love of my life. She took long enough to find. I’d prefer to live out my life with her. Here’s the deal. We don’t know if we want to have children. I’m about 65 percent for procreation; she’s about 70 percent against. As we both slip into our mid-thirties, my own personal daddy dilemma has quietly taken on an urgency that I frankly didn’t expect. I know that if I’m cutting out of work early to go to a soccer game, I really don’t want to be the oldest guy passing out the orange slices, or worse yet, have my ass kicked by some young dad during a bout of sideline rage. We don’t need to breed tomorrow, but we can’t wait another eight years either. I think in decades, she thinks in days — and now, more so than her, I think it’s time to figure this stuff out.

You know that illustration with a stylish woman talking on the phone, saying, “Oh my God, I forgot to have children”? I don’t want to look up in 2015 and realize I’m a version of that woman (albeit one wearing a worn Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt). That noise I’m beginning to hear is the sound of my sociological clock ticking.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

From as early as I can remember, I’ve been told I would make a good father. My mother repeated this mantra often. For her it was a statement of fact, backed up by the care and interest I took in my little sister. (As a four year old I would declare, “Don’t you drop that baby on the floor” whenever someone held her; this delighted my mom and made my dad quite nervous.) If she and my father have raised me right, the idea of starting a family should be an attractive option. They’ve done their part to continue the great cycle of life. The pattern continues with me. So it was decreed. Or at least presumed. That was the plan. The Smith family name would continue.

We may have the most common surname in the U.S., but our stock is special. The first Smith was my grandfather Morris, who died three years ago after an excellent run that began in the tiny Russian town of Minsk and ended 91 years later in a tony suburb of Philadelphia. Upon arrival, his family was anointed “Smith,” a loose translation of the family name of Blacksmith, an irony not lost on the generations of Smith family men more comfortable at the racetrack than the metal shop. Morris became known to one and all as Smitty, a nickname you don’t hear nearly enough anymore. Smitty had two boys, my dad, Louis and his brother, Uncle Ralph. Lou had two girls and me. Ralph got married to Kathy, with whom he shares a blissful, travel-full, kid-free existence. This makes me the only living male in my family still realistically likely to father children. “It’s up to you,” the first Smith said wistfully ten years ago at my sister’s wedding, as my then-girlfriend looked on in horror. But a funny thing happened on the way to the birthing class: I started dating a woman who could imagine a life for herself that did not involve children. We were still young and the pregnancy craze among our friends was still years away, but the germ of an idea was planted. Maybe I didn’t need to spread my seed. Taking a pass on parenthood was an option. Who knew?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

She knew.

I met Piper in a dive breakfast joint in San Francisco nearly a decade ago. She was a girl who was used to being chased and good at rarely being caught. I eventually tricked her into dating me and have held on tight ever since. We’ve moved from the West Coast to Boston and finally New York, surviving deaths in the family, layoffs, landlords, legal troubles, terrorism, and all the other things that they if don’t kill ya make ya stronger. Now eight years into this thing, we’ve found ourselves with good jobs, great friends, and 10,000 songs on our iPod. The only things to keep alive are a couple of plants and a couple of cats. It’s the perfect bohemian yuppie existence. Why mess with a good thing?

For an I-don’t-want-to-grow-up guy in his twenties — which is to say, myself and most everyone I knew when I met her — Piper was a dream girl. The Vows column of the New York Times might say: “A child actress who grew up in Brookline, Mass., friends say Miss Kerman exhibits the same comfortable ease munching on chicken wings and watching the game with the guys as she does preparing complicated Indian meals and discussing the latest article in the Atlantic Monthly with her Seven Sisters college alums. She loves wide-open spaces and horseback riding, yet has performed decorating miracles in her tiny New York City apartment. She’s as at home in an organic garden in Berkeley as she is at a sample sale at Barney’s. She has never considered diamonds to be a girl’s best friend and was shocked when he presented her with seven gold rings and asked her to be his life partner. Although her many years of babysitting have afforded her a winning way with children (not to mention the ability to change a diaper with one hand in eight seconds), what Miss Kerman really hopes for, she says, is a puppy.”

Good deal, right? When all your fiancie demands is a baby Bulldog, your buddies declare her Woman of the Year. What more could a dude want than a partner who isn’t pressuring him to get married and make babies? A lot, actually.

Part of it is guy posturing. Many of my pals talk a good game about how their wives finally put the clamp down and demanded they do the deed, but deep down they’re all glad the women forced the issue. They knew the day was coming; most of us want it to come, even if few of us ever feel the time is exactly right. No man really believes that he will ever be prepared to take another’s life in his hands, a time described by one friend as “when all hell breaks loose.”

Do I want all hell to break loose? Do I want, as another expecting father I know predicts, “life as we know it to end”? Like I said, about 65 percent of me thinks so. Besides all the good press, it’s a big life experience, arguably the biggest. You don’t go to DisneyWorld without riding Space Mountain, right? But here’s the rub: I don’t know if I want to have kids — and yet it’s up to me to convince my free-wheeling, sassy better half that it’s what she wants as well. Ask around — I have — despite all the progress we’ve made in rejiggering gender roles, Piper and I are a rare breed. Which leaves the ball bouncing perilously, nervously in my court. Can I know for sure? And if I can, how? When? I’m much more happy than not with the life I’ve created for myself, but I’m far from content. Everything about my 36 years on earth has pointed to career being the source of salvation, so I keep thinking I’ll be satisfied when that’s at the place I want it to be. But will it ever be? Won’t the bar keep being raised? Isn’t that what careerists do? Would a child make me see what’s really important? You’re a Cuervo Gold-slugging ass, lost and lonely, or worse … until a child enters your life. Maybe. In all honesty, I can’t say for sure that a child would do more for my contentment quotient than any number of professional goals. Hell, anyone can make a baby — but only I can bring a really original new magazine into the world.

There’s simply no way to know for sure. I see now that it would be easier if, like my other friends, I didn’t have any choice. Guys don’t have the same biological experience as women. Their partners get pregnant. They get scared. They get a grip. They turn to baby-loving mush. Digital photos ensue.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

To Smith or not to Smith? Seemingly the oldest question in the book, and yet completely new territory for a Smith like me. My grandfather and father didn’t even think to ask these questions. Their lives had expected plans and paths. Not so long ago, if you didn’t have children you were possibly gay, probably odd, perhaps infertile. My grandfather and father’s American dream was the same: a better life for the next generation. That there would even be a next generation wasn’t a question.

I picked Piper not because she’s a fertile vessel and a future supermom, but because there is no one else I’ve ever met who I want to be around so much of the time. She’s a strong woman who looks hot with a tool belt and is by far the best candidate in our home to figure out the re-fi (not to mention the Wi-Fi). Finding a partner in this modern world is no small matter. OK, so it took a little while — we got engaged after seven years — but I can say without further hesitation or equivocation that this is the woman for me.

Much to the astonishment and admiration of my pals who have felt the heat to get a family started, until recently, Piper and I actually hadn’t spent much time talking about what I — and my mother and my sisters and my cousin’s wife and all my dead grandparents — always thought was my inevitable segue from late-night Seinfelds to mornings with SpongeBob until very recently. Kind of amazing that a couple with 70 years of combined living hasn’t taken a stand on the most natural thing available to us, procreating the species.

Not really. First of all, I’m a guy, which means I’m quite comfortable avoiding all gray matters until I absolutely have to deal with them — an MO that has worked just fine to date. More importantly, Piper has always made it clear that her dream was never for a man to whoosh her off her feet, shove a rock on her finger, and start making babies. She’s the child of divorce, which doesn’t make her any different than half the people born in the late sixties, but it does make her think a little harder before starting a family. I’m not the child of divorce — in fact there have been few divorces in my family — but it seems obvious to me that the high divorce rate counters the prevailing notion of family unit as Holy Grail. Despite the social pressure to procreate, studies show that people with children are exactly as happy as people without children. Happiness comes in many varieties.

That’s Piper’s point. I can see it. Maybe kids don’t complete us — or at least aren’t the only road to a full life. This isn’t a political statement. This isn’t a “we’re too hip to be conventional” sentiment. But it is an opinion that bugs people. We know plenty of couples that have gotten married, had children, and are now strangely defensive about their own choices (though I think that has more to do with the ‘burbs than the babies). We have other friends who desperately want children, but haven’t found the right partner and somehow resent the idea that we’ve found each other and yet still might actually pass on parenthood.

Piper believes that we — or at least she — can be plenty happy if it’s just us. Time was, you had to have children — more hands on the farm and all that. Those days, and that necessity, are long gone. Our fortress can stand on four legs. It’s a logical, yet relatively unspoken idea, especially coming from a woman. In fact, more and more women feel this way — but the reality remains that we’re talking about very recent history versus the way things have been for the last 40,000 years or so. Piper has no problem saying: I love kids, but maybe I don’t need to have one of my own.

When the rest of the world demands to know why you don’t want kids, Piper’s response is that people should know why they want them, not why they don’t. And if you want them, can you handle it? Are you ready? More specifically, she wants to know, am I ready? Am I, in her words, “emotionally prepared”?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Although my fiancee’s official party platform states that she desires no kids, this “emotionally ready” bit is interesting. She’ll consider kids, she’s said for a few years now, once she’s convinced I have a more nuanced grasp of what I’ll be getting myself into. But as the years go by, the “emotionally ready” gap closes (if slowly). I’m older and calmer and — yeah — wiser than I used to be. I’m smart enough to know just how much I have to learn. I’m experienced enough to realize that people rise with the celebration or calamity they’re confronted with. Nobody is ready for landing the winning lottery ticket or surviving a tsunami, but when it happens, you just deal. Into this sociological stew comes the math: Piper’s being 30 percent in favor of something is a long way north of zero. The womb, it appears, is ajar.

In the end, I know I’m just a chicken. I’m as afraid not to have children as I am to have them. I’ve got a nagging feeling that life could be passing on by, a worry that my experiences are not, when this Smith’s smoke clears, going to equal total fulfillment. I don’t want to be the guy who is so focused on his career and pursuit of what I have traditionally found to be pleasure that the rest of my life happens passively in the background. But when is it ever a good time to mess with a good thing if you’ve got it? And given that if we do have kids, it will kind of have been my idea, there’s no way I’m going to not be majorly involved in raising the thing. I’m all for taking over traditionally female responsibilities like play dates and poopy diapers, but shifting my career into neutral, or worse, reverse? I want to be Zen about the future and invoke the poetry of Joseph Campbell who writes, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Problem is, I’m not sure if I need to abandon my original plan (a family) or the alluring new plan Piper puts forth (an infinite table for two).

There are reams of data available on women’s choices, and next to none on men’s. In one of the few official looks at male decision-making on having babies, a University of Montana study called “Men’s Experience of Making the Decision to Have Their First Child” found that men talked mainly about their fears of what they would lose if they had a child: freedom, independence, and intimacy, for starters. “I was really struck at how little difference there was in how they talked about these potential losses, whether the man was 18 or 40,” says study co-author Dr. Andrew Peterson. So there you have it: when we think about fatherhood, we don’t think about what we’ll gain, but what we’ll lose. That’s one sad statement. One that sounds awfully familiar.

It gets worse. Keep drilling down and a cost-benefit analysis of children doesn’t yield a net gain. Kids are expensive, a constant cause of worry, and — if all goes well — will be completely crushed when you croak. “It’s hard to understand why you would ever do this,” says a new mom who went through a similar soul search before the rabbit died last year. “Then you see your child stand up for the first time, and…” Yes, yes, and it’s the Greatest Thing Ever. I’m sure I’m at once too cynical and thinking too hard. But how will I find closure to such a huge choice when, after weighing outside factors — family, history, biology, economics, my pals and peers, Piper’s commitment — I still find myself in a very real internal struggle? I keep waiting for the magic moment to happen. Trouble is, this moment ain’t arriving via Ofoto, one of many Web sites I’m alerted to by my rapidly spawning friends eager to share the latest drippingly adorable candids of their kids. It won’t come from the many preachings of my older sister (two young boys, one newborn girl, and one hopes a vasectomy to be named later), who enjoys cornering Piper at family gatherings and declaring, “I just want you to know if you have a child out of wedlock, that’s OK.” It’s not arriving on the plane in which I write this, trying to drown out the truly awesome shrieks of the two-year-old a few rows behind me. Maybe the eureka moment will arrive if Piper decides it’s something she wants to do (or at least moves her percentage north of 50 percent). She may joke about that mythical 27-year-old waiting to procreate with me, but when I toss it back at her wanting to know what she’ll do if I decide I must pursue a daddy destiny, she sighs and admits, “Oh, you’ll probably convince me to do it.”

But I don’t want to if she’s not totally on board.

I’d probably love having kids. The question is: can I live without them? I’ve done a pretty good job of living without them so far. Trouble is, no matter how much the world changes, despite all the technological progress we’ve made, when it comes to kids, there’s still exactly one way to find out.

Coming tomorrow: Salon checks in with Larry and Piper. One year later, are they closer to solving their “Daddy dilemma”?

Can’t turn back time, so what’s an insomniac to do? I’ve asked friends, consulted docs, and surfed the Web: The causes and fixes are commonly, eagerly spouted. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day (impossible). Avoid caffeine in the afternoon (working on it). No alcohol for six hours before you go to sleep (get real). Make your bedroom a sanctuary for restfulness (not easy when your desk is planted 10 feet from your bed). I’ve tried to put myself to sleep by going through the alphabet and remembering all the women I’ve kissed letter by letter (Note to self: search for a set of triplets named Quinn, Ula, and Xena). I’ve tried Ambien and even more potent sleeping pills. Failures, all.

With slumber so elusive, it was time for plan B: To do better with less sleep. Would Provigil come to my rescue?

Provigil, the ask-your-doctor-about-it ready name for a drug called modafinil, has been on the market since 1998, produced by the drug giant Cephalon. It was invented by French researchers as an antidote to narcolepsy, which six years and skyrocketing sales later — $290 million in 2003, up from $207 million in 2002 –remains its intended use. But who’s kidding whom? One analyst from Bank of America Securities has estimated that fewer than 20 percent of Provigil’s users medically drool in the middle of dinner. The rest of us just walked off the red-eye and have a big presentation, need to stay up all night to finish a project, or are fighting a war in Iraq.

Even though Cephalon does not have approval to market the drug for any use besides narcolepsy, physicians have been prescribing Provigil for fatigue (as well as depression), finding that it peps up people without the side effects of stimulants such as Ritalin, Dexedrine and Adderall. As it doesn’t give you an instant high, and can’t be chopped up and snorted like Oxycontin, Provigil hasn’t surfaced on the streets. Nor does it seem to have turned into a party drug for bored teens.

The science behind Provigil remains cloudy. “We’re not sure exactly where it’s working in the brain, but it would seem to work in the histamine system, so it’s very effective for keeping you awake,” says Dr. Joyce Walsleben, director of the New York University Sleep Disorder Center. Unlike amphetamines, which take more of a wandering tour of the brain, including the motor areas (which is why people get all twitchy and have irregular heartbeats), modafinil’s effect is subtle; many people report barely noticing it’s there. That’s huge, poising Provigil to be a Viagra-like blockbuster: a medicine that has an intended use for a real medical condition but that also sounds pretty good to the drug leisure class. And unlike Viagra, Provigil has resulted in no deaths, and few users report major side effects.

“Should people just use it because they’ll feel better and stay awake?” ponders Walsleben. “That’s a question for society to answer. Is Provigil better than drinking six cups of coffee and getting an ulcer? Is it better to fall asleep and drive into a tree?”

And is it better to take a pill than have your boss wonder every day why you’re so tired and why you haven’t edited the story that’s been sitting on your desk for a month? Exactly. So I called my cousin, Dr. Brad Manin, a Philadelphia internist and the resident doc in the family, to see if he could hook me up with vitamin P. “Are you nuts?” he said, even more appalled than usual at my continual (fruitless) attempts to pry narcotics from his stingy hand. “That shit messes with your brain. Look at all the people who are sorry they took Vioxx. It will be years before we know what Provigil’s real side effects are.”

I don’t have that kind of time. My own doctor, a much more reasonable man, understood my predicament and gave me a prescription for the standard dose of 200 mg. When my healthcare provider refused to approve it, I forked over $261.56 for 30 white pills the size of a large vitamin. “You really going to pay out of pocket for that?” asked an incredulous employee at my local Duane Reade drugstore. “I’ve paid a lot more for a lot less,” I said. He seemed to understand. Off we go.

You can take Provigil morning or afternoon — one of its greatest qualities is that it doesn’t interfere with your ability to fall asleep at night — and with or without food. It has a half-life — the amount of time before half of the drug’s peak plasma level is eliminated by the body — of around 15 hours, so it’s typically only taken once a day. My plan: Swallow the drug in the early afternoon, swapping better living through chemistry for my usual caffeine fix. I figured I’d give it a five-day trial but was prepared to love this drug for a lifetime.

I ingest my first pill on a Monday around 2 p.m. Within a half hour, I am, as advertised, totally alert. I am also happily hyper and I talk. A lot. When a chemical gets into your brain, boy, do you know it. This initial Provigil rush feels like the goody-two-shoes cousin of MDMA, a creamy icing of energy squashing my blahs away. OK, maybe knowing I was taking a wake-up pill automatically made me feel better, but I swear — the rush was real. Luckily, rather than want to, say, stroke my co-workers’ hair, I feel the need to share the smallest details of a story I’m editing on the new Mustang to anyone who has the misfortune of coming by my office. I’ve never been this excited about a muscle car.

An hour later, my eyes feel like they are popping out of my head. My hands want to move fast — I’m pounding on my keyboard like I’ve just walked in on it sleeping with my girlfriend. I’m edgy and awake, but at the same time I feel sort of frozen, as if I were a big bee buzzing in a tiny, tense hive. I’ve never made the acquaintance of the drug ketamine, but I can’t help but wonder: Is this what a K-hole feels like? And here comes downside No. 1: Like Ecstasy, Provigil causes me to clench my jaw and grind my teeth. Yuck.

Jaw aside, 24 hours into the five-day test drive, I’m feeling pretty good. At least I’m awake.

But I can’t get my head around what this drug is doing to me. It’s not exactly like ephedra (better for a physical, not mental, boost), and it’s much more powerful than NoDoz and its “Let’s stay up all night and write a comparative-lit paper” kin, Dexedrine. It’s not like coffee — a potion I’ve drunk so much of that I have started to hate everyone associated with it, with the possible exception of the nice lady at the bodega who’s the only one open at 5 a.m. when I can’t sleep. Like many other stimulants Provigil gives you an initial rush, but once you’re up, you stay up and never come crashing down. Which is probably why people love it.

By the third day of feeling awake and full of plans to accomplish big things, the pile of unfinished work on my desk suggests that in reality I’m not getting much done. I’m more skittish than focused. All revved up with no place to go, I make this scary observation: Provigil reminds me of cocaine. Checking the Physicians’ Desk Reference, I learn that when Provigil was given to monkeys who were already trained to self-administer coke, they happily inhaled Provigil, not realizing the difference, a behavior that is called “reinforcing.” I can see how this could get addictive.

Four days and 96 hours into the experiment, I wake up with the shakes and shivers. Am I sick? Is it in my head? Is it the Provigil’s fault? I take Advil, drink green tea, chug NyQuil, and sleep till noon. I just can’t see munching Provigil today.

Later, I feel better. I have dinner plans with a friend. I want to feel focused and zippy, not like a cloudy, sick guy. I have an idea … Provigil. The plan was to use it only to be a tiger at work, but it’s a small leap to see it as pick-me-up party drug in lieu of a disco nap. Here we go. I’m up up up and away. I drink, but sloooowly, as if I just can’t get to the bottom of my glass of red wine. The outer world moves at a happy, mellow speed, but my heart begins to race. The wine kicks the drug in a bit more, like a trainer providing a push that helps you bench-press that extra 25 pounds. I like that feeling. Provigil is giving me a catchy beat. I’m back, baby, I’m back!

That night, I fall asleep easily. When I wake up five hours later at 5:35 a.m., I pop a controlled substance called Temazepan that doctors give to people who laugh at Ambien (and my insurance company was kind enough to cover). For a split second it occurs to me that perhaps I shouldn’t be mixing so many medicines, but the urge to see (at the very least) a “9″ on my alarm clock bests the fear. I stay down till a whopping 10 a.m. Even though I am running way late for work, I feel ggggreat!

I celebrate with two cups of coffee and a mango banana protein smoothie for breakfast. I eat broccoli rabe and fennel and sausage pasta for lunch. I’m fattening myself up for the kill. Provigil for an afternoon snack? Bring. It. On.

And so I do. Which brings on downside No. 2: More than halfway though my adventures with Provigil, I’m beginning to notice some unpleasant adventures with my digestive system. Now, I reckon, would be a good time to look into the possible side effects of a pill I’ve put into my body for four days. Turning to Cephalon’s handy FAQ, I discover that I may experience headache, nausea, nervousness, stuffy nose, diarrhea, back pain, anxiety, trouble sleeping, dizziness and upset stomach. True, I’ve got a knot the size of a grapefruit in my back, but more pressingly, I really have to go to the bathroom.

The Physicians’ Desk Reference reports that in clinical trials in the United States, 5 percent of some 369 patients who received Provigil discontinued its use because of a bad experience, the most frequently given reasons being headaches, nausea, depression and nervousness. Five percent is not an insignificant number, as I’m slowly learning.

I decide to check in with my favorite online repository of drug information, the Vaults of Erowid, which offers information on illegal and legal drugs, as well as the Experience Vaults, which are like the Amazon.com customer reviews of drugs, but much more entertaining. Provigil customers are largely satisfied, especially when they compare it to other common stimulants. “I was just alert, with no unwelcome desire to go curl up and snooze unless I wanted to — and I could if I wanted to,” wrote Benjy. “With speed, the reinforcing event is the horrible eternity when sleep’s no option but the sparkle is gone — that’s what makes people blow another line at 4 AM. Provigil isn’t like that; it doesn’t make me think I’m Jean Fucking Baudrillard, and it doesn’t make another hit seem quite so compelling. All it does is make me alert, anytime I want. Like coffee without the corpse breath.”

Many others users write of similarly positive results, so I am wondering if my increasingly negative reaction to Provigil is about my own physical and mental constitution or just bad karma for using a drug in a way it’s not supposed to be used. It’s nice to cut down on corpse breath, but I am really grinding my teeth. I am too hyper, too often, madly jumping from one project to another, making lists with even more zeal than normal. During a staff meeting in which I know I am going to be grilled on topics I am extremely familiar with, I feel like I am going to have a heart attack. Or at least a panic attack. Are my fingers tingling or shaking or not actually moving at all? I’m going a little crazy.

But I vow to keep taking it. If some 95 percent of its users dig it, then dammit, I will too. There’s a saying in my office that I don’t think anyone understands but everyone sort of likes: Go with your weakness.

The next day I take it earlier in the day than usual. Almost instantly, I want to start pulling at my hair. At the office, I zig and zag among my co-workers, though I can’t tell if I appear alive and charming, or nervous and annoying. I know for sure that I look pasty. I also know I haven’t touched the big story I wake up each morning vowing to conquer.

And then there’s this strange feeling: I can, for the first time, understand how people who are heavily medicated feel crazy and out of control and even suicidal.

I’m not going to kill myself, but somehow this drug in my body makes that all seem less scary, less completely and totally out of the question. I don’t know exactly how (nor, apparently, do the makers of the drug), but my brain chemistry has been altered, and I don’t like where it’s headed. I’ve had enough.

When I wake up the next day after a fitful night’s sleep I say, without a smirk for possibly the first time ever, thank God it’s Friday, the fifth and final day of my test drive. I take my final Provigil with ruby red orange juice at 2:38 p.m. My insides instantly fill with butterflies. At 2:46 my hands feel more tingly than twitchy, not so bad at all. The rush feels like an eight-year-old’s first downhill slide on the log flume ride at an amusement park — fast, cold and just a little scary. Am I going to miss it? Maybe. But this shit isn’t good for me. And even if it is, I can’t afford it. I vow to get more exercise, drink less coffee, and meet a woman named Ula.

That night I remove my computer from my room, tuck myself into bed with a cup of decaf green tea, a good book, and no impending panic of another day on a drug that I’ve loved to hate. To my right is a beside light — damn that Edison. I read a few pages, then flip the switch and doze off into the unknown.

The second time I experienced In Loco Bongus I thought: This is getting weird (and also: What am I going to do with two bongs?). This time my co-worker walked into my office, closed the door, and sheepishly explained that while he and his glass two-footer had had some great times together, his son was getting older, he had a second on the way, and he didn’t want anyone under 4 feet to stumble across it accidentally. “I don’t want my boy to think it’s OK to be a pothead,” he explained. “Well, that’s not true, I don’t want him to think it’s OK to be a full-blown hazed-out pothead.” Which is why he switched to a much smaller, more easily stashed pipe.

According to the 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than a third of Americans over the age of 12 have tried marijuana at some point in their life — that’s 80 million people who actually admit it, and I suspect there are a couple more who don’t. Many of these millions can look at their offspring with a straight face and explain that while they once experimented with drugs during the folly of their youth, now they don’t — and neither should you, little man.

That must be nice for them. I don’t know many of these people.

The people I have spent the last decade working and playing with have inhaled more than a few puffs and taken a variety of trips down Alice’s rabbit hole. Yet some way, somehow they have turned into able and impressive members of the republic. These are people with good jobs, who engage in charitable pursuits and who rarely cut in line at Whole Foods. We’ve taken some of our old vices with us into adulthood without burning down the house or checking into rehab. We’ve done a good job prolonging our adolescence, but now we’re facing adulthood’s ultimate gut check: children. And when it comes to kids, we have a drug problem.

What to tell the children about past — and, in many cases, current — drug use ain’t easy. Should we practice what we preach? Should we lie? Where do you draw the line between being a hypocrite and protecting your kids? Are we worse parents if we get high in front of our kids than if we have a couple of stiff drinks? How do we reconcile our own experiences with drugs — ones that have been overwhelmingly positive — with the very real possibility that our kids could run into trouble with what are in fact potent substances?

Before you write nasty letters to the editor denouncing my friends and me for advocating drug use, let’s be clear: Scores of people have had their lives and the lives of those around them destroyed by drugs. No one I know believes that all drugs are good nor wishes a nation of junkies on anyone. Drugs are not for all people, all drugs are not for all drug users, and no illicit drugs are good for children. Among my close friends, there’s a general feeling that there are “good” drugs and “bad” drugs. The good ones are empathetic and eye-opening (MDMA, marijuana, hallucinogens). The bad ones are ego-driven and destructive (coke, speed, heroin). Both types can destroy you — it’s just that they haven’t in our case. In a topic that doesn’t deal much in grays, this is a nuanced and certainly unpopular point of view. So it’s no surprise, if a bit disappointing, that most of the people I talked to asked to have their names changed.

“I’m not nervous at all about talking to my sons about sex,” says my friend Rob, a 32-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and two small boys, aged 1 and 5. “But I’m scared shitless to talk to them about drugs.” Rob smokes as much as two to three times a week, but never when his children are awake. He thinks the worst thing for him to have heard when he was a kid would have been that smoking pot is acceptable. “I would have been off to the races,” he says. That’s why Rob is hesitant to be completely honest with his own children about his drug use. “I probably won’t be fully open about my drug use until my sons are in their 20s, post-college maybe. I feel like I have to give him guidance before that, but I’m not going to tell him about the time I dropped two hits of E and two tabs of acid and had my brain melt while I watched the Breeders and the Beastie Boys at Lollapalooza. I can’t say, ‘Make sure you don’t melt your brain like daddy!’”

“My push for parents is always to be open and honest,” says Marsha Rosenbaum, who leads workshops for parents on how to handle drug use among their kids as director of the Safety First project of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Kids have amazing bullshit detectors and are probably going to know that we aren’t telling the truth. To the parents who stopped using drugs, I say tell them your story and tell them the real story.”

Drug story hour’s a tough one, but many of my friends want to tell their children about all of their experiences — the good and the bad and the hazy in betweens — eventually. Knowing whom to tell what when is the hard part. Rob says he knows exactly what he’ll say to his kids when they’re 25; he just has no idea what to tell them when they’re 10.

“My husband and I won’t hide our pot use from our daughter because it’s just such a natural part of our lives,” says Carla, a 35-year-old communications specialist in Oakland, Calif., and mother of an 8-month-old girl. “But while she’s growing up will we tell her Mommy and Daddy loved having sex on coke in a hotel room when she was staying with Grandma? Will we tell a teenage girl that the occasional line of K [Ketamine] is a blast? Absolutely not. The important thing is to explain that drugs are for adults who are old enough to handle them, and that they will have a chance to experiment soon enough in life if that’s what they want to do.”

Allie, a 33-year-old legal aid attorney in Washington, D.C., who has been known to enjoy a large cocktail of substances over the years, is planning a family now and suspects she’ll take a somewhat less tolerant — perhaps hypocritical — approach. “I won’t tell them about my own use until they’re old enough not to be influenced by it, which I think is 16 to 18 depending on the kid, because I won’t tolerate any drug use from them,” she says. “It just seems like they’ll have so many sources in their lives justifying drug use — from friends to hormones to boredom to the Internet — that they will also need to have something on the other side balancing it.”

I myself don’t have kids. I may very well someday, and as I get older I can increasingly understand the temptation to just out and out lie to them about a variety of parts of my life, especially my drug use. I mean, do I really want to tell Larry Jr. that daddy had a mind-altering moment on mushrooms at Joshua Tree when he was 23, but my dear, my dear boy, if I ever find mushrooms in your backpack you’ll be grounded from now until your freshman year in college?

“I would be much more concerned if my kids thought I was a hypocrite than if they thought I was a pothead,” says my friend Alan, a professor of English at Indiana University and soon-to-be father of twins. Alan’s been thinking a lot about what he’s going to tell his children about his daily pot use, a habit he suspects won’t be so compatible with the daily rigors of daddyhood. “I’ll tell them that I smoke, I like it, but that it’s not for everyone,” he says. “I will tell them that I did certain drugs for adventure and exploration, but never to counter self-esteem and an inability to tolerate reality. I will tell them if they decide to try drugs, I hope they tell me and I’ll demand that they be safe.”

Safe is actually less subjective than it may sound. “Just as you can’t use a chain saw or drive until you are a certain age, you shouldn’t use drugs until you are old enough to be able to handle it,” says Mitch Earleywine, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence.” Earleywine says new studies reveal that cannabis can interfere with the brain’s development before the age of 17. It stands to reason that a compelling case can be made for telling your kids to hold off until after high school graduation, even if you didn’t.

A current Office of National Drug Control Policy anti-drug campaign seeks to help confused adults reconcile their past use with whatever version of “just say no” they’re trying to work out as they raise kids. Called Hypocrite,” it reads: “So you smoke pot. And now your kid’s trying it and you feel like you can’t say anything. Get over it. Smoking pot can affect the brain and lead to other risky behaviors. So you have to set the rules and expect your kid to live drug free no matter how hypocritical it makes you feel.”

“In the focus groups we asked parents to identify some of the barriers that existed in talking to kids about drugs — and their own experience with drugs came up as one of those barriers,” says Jennifer DeVallance, a spokesperson for the ONDCP. “These ads are saying: You need to step up to the plate, regardless of what your experience was.”

Unlike the folks in the government’s focus group, most of my friends don’t think their own past makes them hypocrites, but rather better informed parents. Jill, an interior designer who lives outside of Nashville, Tenn., with her teenage son, says that she’s not so worried about her son’s experimentation because she has so much experience with drugs herself. “If you never did drugs as a teen, or any other time in your life, I suspect all you can think about is your kid behaving like he or she is a character in ‘Reefer Madness’ or that he’s going to become Robert Downey Jr.,” she says. Jill has resigned herself to the fact that her son does drugs, but she is tough with him about his use. “We talked about what some people can handle and others can’t.” She explained to him that in her mind, pot is on par with alcohol: Both get you high, both should be taken in moderation and both can have devastating effects on your life if you overindulge. “Once I knew about his use, I told him what I had done,” she says. “Not everything all at once. I didn’t want my former experiments to encourage him, and it was more information than he needed at one sitting.”

“If you didn’t think your drug use was a big mistake, don’t tell them that it was a big mistake, which is what the government wants you to say,” says Rosenbaum. “Tell them that they were probably attracted to it for the same reasons that you were. And if you quit, tell them why.”

Delia, a 47-year-old physical therapist in Manhattan with a 13-year-old daughter, agrees. “I will tell her drugs were fun and seductive,” she says, “but ultimately they were a mistake.” Knowing that Delia had a pretty wild ride in the late ’60s and ’70s, I ask her if she plans to tell her daughter the whole story. Her answer is an unflinching no. “I can’t ever tell her everything I did, especially that I tried heroin,” she says. “I tried it once and liked it so much that I knew it could destroy me. A survival instinct kicked in, one I don’t know would kick in for her. But I can’t tell her the entire truth of my use because I don’t want to influence her.”

And there’s the riddle: There’s no more influential person in a child’s life than a parent. Therefore, in one way or another, every parent I talked to felt that to a certain degree they had to lie to their kids about drugs. Yet almost in the same breath, few want to mask what for at least a certain period in their life was a very real, important and joyful part of who they were and are as people.

“My goal as a parent,” says Carla, “is to give her the tools to know what she can handle and what’s too much. I don’t want her to say no to drugs, because they can be freakin’ fun. It’s not a popular perspective, but it’s true. Fun is a big part of my life, and drugs are a part of fun.”

“But you know what?” she says with a pregnant pause, “my perspective today could change a lot in 10 years.”

If so, I fear I’ll be getting another bong in the mail.

Torgoff, 51, a New York journalist and biographer of Elvis and John Cougar Mellencamp, refers to his own drug use and abuse throughout the book. Now married with a baby, Torgoff started smoking pot at 16 in 1968 — the night Nixon was elected president. “I remember because as I was getting stoned, I heard the election returns coming down through the ceiling,” he says. “That was the beginning of my run.” It was a run that would take him from pot to psychedelics to coke and alcohol — and finally into recovery at 37, in 1989.

Besides using his own story, he fuels the book with a polyphonic spree of supporting characters, among them storied beats Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac; psychedelic superheroes Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna; fallen jazz great Charlie Parker; tragic rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison; cult figures Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy. The result is a sweeping epic that bounces between orgiastic nostalgia trip and cautionary tale — and, at times, like the drugs themselves, can assault the senses.

Torgoff spoke with Salon about his own decade-long journey researching and writing “Can’t Find My Way Home,” the polarizing pull of drug laws, and the discoveries each generation makes by lighting up.

Drug stories aren’t rare in the card catalog of America literature. Why write your book?

When my friends and I first starting doing drugs in the late ’60s, we were making not just a statement about the experience of the substance, but a statement about lifestyle, politics, spiritual values, communitarian values. If you smoked marijuana, you were against the war in Vietnam, and you listened to a certain kind of music — the psychedelic music, the Beatles. But it also had to do with a life philosophy. In the beginning it was all about opening to things — to yourself, to the world of the senses, a kind of creative potential. It made you see and feel things differently. There was a philosophy around it of peace and brotherhood — all the clichés.

But by 1973, suddenly the pharmacopoeia opened wide. Although most of us had tried coke before we left school, it really hit the scene by ’77-’78, and followed us right into the arena of work and careers as we got older and had more discretionary income. The values it promulgated were antithetical to pot and psychedelics — you’d never think of staying up three days in a row smoking weed. It became the preferred substance of lawyers and stockbrokers, and that pretty much sums it up. It promoted an ego-driven culture of greed, exclusion, conspicuous consumption and corruption. Perhaps the closest thing to a Republican drug of choice.

When I stopped doing drugs in 1989, I had a tangled web of feelings about them. I was uncomfortable with recreational drug use, but also equally uncomfortable with the creed of abstinence. And then I was uncomfortable with the “be smart don’t start” anti-drug phenomenon. I wanted to go back to the sources to see how all the attitudes about drugs — both for and against — formed in this country. I wanted to know how we went from marijuana and psychedelics, drugs that opened things and appealed to your senses — to coke and Quaaludes, drugs that numbed you and were really about ego, in which your pleasure centers lie to you and tell you that you’re experiencing pleasure. I wanted to understand how all of this affected my life, my generation, and the whole culture at large.

There’s a lot of wisdom accrued over generations that hasn’t been passed on. I call it the “Temple of Accumulated Error” in the book, which is a phrase I ripped off directly from my friend Wavy Gravy. There are several generations now that have amassed significant life experience with illicit substances — underground folk wisdom about what they really do, how they can help us, how they can distort and damage us. I think our culture has far more to learn from people who have actually taken drugs than from those making and enforcing the policies that prohibit them. And I’m talking about everyone from the most horrific addicts to the most responsible kind of casual users, and everything in between. To me it’s a no-brainer. Bill Bennett can’t teach you anything about drugs, except to tell you that you’re a bad person for using them.

Your book journeys from the beats smoking dope all the way to the ravers taking Ecstasy. The transitions from one drug to the next in culture make a lot of sense. So do you buy the so-called gateway theory?

Nixon always said it: “Marijuana is a halfway house to something else.” Of course, that something else was supposed to be heroin, and since the 1950s that’s what parents had been telling their children. I don’t think anyone would deny that there are a large number of heroin addicts who started out on marijuana, so in that sense it’s true, but it’s also true that a lot started out on alcohol and nobody is calling that a gateway drug. But here’s the big picture of it: 60 to 70 million Americans have admitted to trying an illegal drug at one time or another, almost one in four. Given that some 20- to 30 million of them were regularly smoking pot at one time, and given that there were never any more than between 300,000 to 700,000 heroin addicts (a very high estimate) at any given time, just do the math. Even if all of those heroin addicts actually did start out uniquely with marijuana, it’s a small percentage. In fact the gateway theory is a perfect example of what U.C.-Santa Cruz sociologist Craig Reinarman calls “the routinization of caricature”: how we take worst-case scenarios and anecdotes about drugs and make them seem routine, part of an “epidemic.”

Hence, the drug laws.

I think drug enforcement is the closest thing this country has ever come to actual fascism. When I look at the erosion of civil liberties that gained speed in the ’80s, I see tremendous injustice. It’s been a long time now since the actual facts mattered about drugs in this country. You tell the same lie over and over again for so many years and fewer and fewer people will be apt to stand up and say: “This is a big lie.”

And that big lie is?

The big lie is that all these drugs are the same and should all be classified as one sort of evil. We have 60 million Christian conservatives in this country, the most activist wing of the conservative party, who truly believe all drugs are the tools of Satan.

If we really don’t start talking about drugs honestly, we’re never going to get anywhere with drug policy reform in this country. The right wing likes all drugs to be lumped into evil substances, with no differences among them.

What were the most memorable moments in the decade you spent working on “Can’t Find My Way Home?”

Two moments stand out in particular: I had a wonderful conversation with Ram Dass that really brought the psychedelic experience to life. It gave me such insight into the excitement that these guys felt. They felt it could reengineer human behavior and thought and literally remake society. They thought they could use it to access mystical experience and wisdom, be used as a spiritual tool to provide conscious and tangible contact with the Godhead. They really did believe that they were on the verge of something as revolutionary as the papers of Sigmund Freud.

The other time that comes to mind is standing on the front porch of Silvia Nunn’s home in South Central L.A. Sylvia Nunn blew my mind. A 30-year-old Blood deep into rock cocaine — she was an example of a full lifetime in the gang culture. She spoke with an honesty and truth about her life that was both chilling and moving — drugs, homicide, getting shot, suicide attempts, the deaths of family members, the vicious cycle of drugs and crime and vengeance — and how desperate she was to escape it. She broke my heart, and it was her humanity that did it — this wasn’t some media caricature of a gang-banger but a gifted person with incredible intelligence, heart and goodness — who was obviously trapped in the life. The whole reality of her life was brought home one night when we were chatting on the front porch of her family’s home around sunset and she casually informed me that it was “drive-by time” — her way of telling me that I could die at that very moment just by being there on the porch with her.

What parts of drug history have been well documented in the last 60 years and which haven’t?

The media coverage of drugs in this country has been pitiful. The phrase I use is “sensationalized superficiality,” since the coverage suffers from both of those things and has since the 1930s. Still, for every aspect of drug culture since World War II, there have been a small handful of works that have rendered it powerfully. Dizzy Gillespie’s autobiography “To Be or Not to Bop” about his relationship with Charlie Parker and what was going on in the black community with drugs at that point, and Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” were tremendous tools for me.

The psychedelic era has been the best covered. There was a time in the late ’60s when some young knowledgeable journalists starting writing about both drugs and culture — a whole crop of people at Rolling Stone who could write about drugs and culture from real experience — David Dalton, David Felton, Joe Ezsterhas, Greil Marcus, Hunter S. Thompson. Then there have been lesser-known works like Marco Vassi’s “The Stoned Apocalypse” — it’s an amazing glimpse at how the psychedelic culture evolved into a strange sexual spiritual New Age cult on the West Coast. Once you come to the end of the ’60s and ’70s, the cocaine and Studio 54 era, it gets spotty.

Lenny Bruce believed that pot would be legal because of all the law students smoking pot in the ’60s. Law students still smoke weed, but marijuana is still illegal. What happened?

Somewhere along the line the left abandoned the drug issue. They had to, since they were so vulnerable, as it was with the right-wing critique of the welfare state and liberal approach to the Cold War. By the 1980s, with coke and crack, drug culture was getting very toxic. So the Democrats were extremely vulnerable about drugs and jettisoned the whole progressive drug policy — they gave up on harm reduction, education and decriminalization — and marched in lock step with Republicans in the drug war. And the right wing was able to exploit it masterfully. There’s no more crystal-clear example of the revenge of the right wing for the 1960s than the drug war.

During the famous 1967 Be-In, Allen Ginsberg looked out at 30,000 tripping people and whispered to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “What if we’re all wrong?” Do you look at some of the drug cultures today and wonder the same thing?

The answer to that question probably won’t become apparent for another three to five years when you guys have come out the other end and really start digesting the experiences you’ve gone through. For many of us who took psychedelics back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was like being in a whirlwind, and we didn’t get real perspective into the glories and follies of our experiences until years later, when we could look back much more objectively on how they may have changed us or changed the culture.

When you first did drugs with your friends, you write, “We thought we could solve the ancient and infinitely complex mysteries of man and his place in the universe simply by lighting up a joint and listening to the Beatles.” Does every generation need its own version of that scene?

Every generation wants that experience, and I don’t know that that’s going to stop. One of things that’s the ultimate folly of the whole agenda of prohibition is this idea that drug use can be unlearned by culture — that it can be eradicated. It’s now deeply embedded in the cultural psychology of this country.

There’s something to be said about how that generation in the ’90s was trying to find its own identity, to write its own story when it came to drugs. There was a continuum that went from psychedelic culture of the ’60s to the MDMA culture of the ’90s. It had to do with mostly the different nature of the substances. LSD was a wild roller coaster ride — like ripping your soul out and throwing it down on the kitchen table and staring at it for six hours in its bloodiest state.

Ecstasy is a totally different thing, but it had a value and power in shaping the sensibility of a generation. It was the antithesis of the self-interested cocaine culture of the ’80s. For one thing, it was about being with other people and really empathizing with them. The thing that always struck me about the raves were the love-flushed faces and beatific grins, and the hugging and affirmation between people. Except for certain dimensions of the recovery self-help culture, I really hadn’t seen anything like that since the be-ins and happenings of my youth. And then when I heard the tenets of the rave movement — Peace, Love, Unity and Respect — I began to realize that there was something going on that was much greater than just people taking drugs.

When the parts of the hip-hop community embrace marijuana as a peaceful alternative to crack, you get the feeling we’ve come full circle from the time of the jazz hipsters getting high.

That’s why the whole cannabis aspect of hip-hop has been really interesting to see. The war on drugs was really a war on marijuana. The result was suddenly marijuana was like $200, $300, even $400 an ounce — and that’s not affordable for kids in the ghetto. If pot was decriminalized and made affordable, would people still use meth, a drug which is so fucking bad for you? Sure. But I just can’t believe it would be the same problem. The question is: Are you going to allow them substances that are more benign?

Would the war on drugs have happened without Reagan?

Yes, but not in the same way. There have been anti-drug zealots since Harry Anslinger, but Reagan was a unique figurehead — and let’s not forget Nancy. He came to Washington convinced that his election gave him the mandate to roll back drug use right along with communism and the size of the federal government. And I don’t think anyone was as capable as Reagan of exploiting the drug war for political gain. He likened the drug war to the American crusade of the Second World War! Think of it: equating those who smoked some pot with the evils of fascism. Reagan led the charge, but he was followed by a whole cadre of true believers, from Ed Meese to Rudy Giuliani. But it all reached an ideological crescendo with Bennett. If Reagan was the figurehead, I consider Bennett the Torquemada of the drug war — its Grand Inquisitor. There was an element of harsh cultural vengeance in Bennett’s reign as drug czar against the whole legacy of the 1960s and 1970s that was unparalleled. He was another unique character — as singular in his own way as Kesey or Leary — and very much a counter-reaction to them.

Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance says that the War on Drugs has been founded on myths, fears, exaggerations and lies. Can it be repaired?

Unfortunately, I don’t think it can in our lifetime. Drugs are still too polarized for people to look at them rationally. They need to be denuded of all of the cultural associations of the last 50 years. We really need to look at how people use them, abuse them, how they’ve changed the country, and what can be done. It may be that we have to wait until this generation that lived through the explosive time of the ’60s and ’70s — when drugs use went from a tiny fraction of the country to one in four — are dead to really look at this issue differently.

Any kind of reform will be marginal, incremental and certainly hard-fought. Look at how slowly the overturning of the Rockefeller laws is going. There’s no one who wants to get up on the floor of Congress and say that punishing first-time, nonviolent offenders this harshly is barbaric. Nadelmann says that nothing will happen until Republicans start to see the wisdom of reform in ways that work with their sensibility. It won’t be the Jerry Browns and Mario Cuomos that get the drug laws reformed. It’s the George Shultzes coming out and saying he’s for decriminalization and other changes that will lead to drug law reform in America.

What will you tell your son about drugs when he gets older?

I will tell him that I prefer him to not smoke pot until he’s out of high school. His brain is still growing, for one, and there are aspects of marijuana and adolescent life that are problematic. I smoked pot when I was 16 for the first time and it rocked my world. So I will try to instill a sense of humility and respect for how powerful this stuff can be, which is what we sort of blithely disregarded.

Drugs can change you a lot. There are things about a change of perception that are miraculous, and that’s an enormously powerful thing. I’d try to teach him that drugs have aspects that are entirely useful, but also can be extremely damaging. Will I be happy if he goes against me? No, I won’t. But I won’t be surprised.

I’m someone who went down the path of recovery, yet am a libertarian about drugs. I was both helped and harmed by them. I didn’t want to romanticize drugs with this book, and I just as certainly didn’t want to demonize them. I just wanted to tell the truth about them as clearly and as nonjudgmentally as possible.

“Bastard” tries to break down and make at least a little sense of a new moment in men’s lives, a moment that Kevin Canty aptly describes in his unflinching essay, “The Dog in Me,” as one where “something’s come loose, something’s come unglued … we no longer feel quite comfortable in our roles, no longer quite fit the people we imagine ourselves to be.” “Bastard” explores a time of feminism and equality, a bright new democratic future … in which Canty and so many of us are wondering why we still seem to be paying for everything.

That question and others are poked and prodded by the likes of Vince Passaro (on why men lie), Toure (on why men cheat), David Gates (on why men log), Anthony Swofford (on why men must be alone), and Anthony Giardina (on why men don’t need to go to every goddamn school play), and 22 other men who write with candor and crankiness, heart and humor.

On the eve of his book tour (and a few hours before his monthly poker game), “Bastard” editor Daniel Jones took some time to talk about what we talk about when we try (really hard) to talk about the lives of men today.

Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Bastards.”

My wife’s book, “The Bitch in the House,” gave smart women a forum to explain their frustrations about modern marriage, about the kind of marriage many of us thought was going to be like walking into a bright new world of equality and happiness and hasn’t quite turned out that way. Not surprisingly, among their frustrations were the men in their lives, who didn’t seem quite up to the task of marriage. I knew some of these men. In fact, I was one of them myself.

To be honest, I was wary about wading into the fray, and I had doubts about whether men would talk honestly about their marriages, sex lives, weaknesses, etc. But the guys I queried early on jumped right on board, and the women in my life kept goading me into taking it on. And once I started reading the most recent academic literature about what’s going on with men these days, I was hooked. It was fascinating. Suddenly I knew what the book needed to address and I really wanted to be the one to do it.

It seemed important to me that men be able to weigh in on these issues, both for themselves and for women. Because chief among the women’s frustrations with their men was this question of, What is he thinking? Sometimes, of course, this is phrased as a rhetorical question, but in a larger context it’s not so rhetorical. Women really do want to know. And they’re generally not going to get good answers out of their husbands because it’s too loaded. In fact, I doubt many of the men in “The Bastard on the Couch” would ever sit down and articulate their feelings to their wives quite the way they have here either, because their own relationships are also too loaded for such a thing, and who can come up with an articulate explanation or defense of how they’re feeling in the middle of a fight? Not me.

Me neither. And while you can probably spit and hit a book club reading “Bitch” in Amherst, San Francisco or Manhattan, I can’t see “Bastard” readers sitting around deconstructing it.

I do think guys’ thinking has evolved in that tackling these issues takes up more of their brain time, and I know from working with the men in the book that the problems of modern marriage and parenthood are on their minds constantly. But most men I know still don’t talk about this stuff with other men. Although it occurs to me that almost every man who’s asked me about the book at a dinner party or wherever has almost immediately begun to unload to me about the intimacies of his marriage, so who knows?

Men want to figure this stuff out. But they’re on the defensive so much that they’re a little hamstrung. In Vince Passaro’s essay “Why Men Lie (and Always Will),” he talks about the moral high ground women always seem to occupy in relationships, and how men are always working from a deficit of one kind or another — the man’s never doing enough, his life isn’t as hard, he’s been privileged for most of world history while women haven’t, et cetera. So this position isn’t really a place where you’re going to feel comfortable airing your frustrations with your marriage or your sex life. Compounding this is a man’s sense that it’s somehow not polite to criticize his wife in public. After all, he’s got to live with her, and she’s angry enough already. For whatever reason, most women I know don’t share this inhibition. They tend to fire away. And I don’t even think their husbands mind that much because they know it’s better for them in the long run for their wives to blow off the steam in little bursts than hold it in until they explode.

Both “Bitch” and “Bastard” spend a lot of time looking at the notion of the “egalitarian marriage” — which definitely doesn’t seem to be working. Where did it go wrong?

Men and women get married these days and often have this idea of egalitarianism as a goal. They probably met in college or grad school and have equal skills. They come at the marriage equally armed for combat, knowing they can walk away from it and both leave equally. Add to that that all the old rules are stereotypes. If you’re both lawyers and your wife does all the shopping and cooking there’s a stigma attached to it, even if she enjoys it. You find yourself trying to not do certain things even if you naturally want to do them. Whenever my wife and I have responsibilities where they fall along sexist lines — she likes to cook, I like to muck around in the yard — we’re sort of embarrassed for it. I think this silently goes on in almost every marriage. It’s almost comical what we’re avoiding in order to embrace full equality in a marriage now.

Then full equality isn’t good and/or possible for a marriage?

Many of us walked into our modern relationships thinking that full equality was progress, that it was going to make our marriages so much better than what came before. We didn’t realize that it might tax a marriage in ways that it didn’t used to. I’m still optimistic that men and women believe this to be a better model — nobody I know wants to go back to the ’50s — because now at least each partner is able to pursue equally the things they want to pursue in terms of raising a family and having a full career. The tricky part is the negotiation of how much each person gets to devote to career, how much to family, how much to domestic drudgery.

But at least men and women are now coming to this negotiation more equally armed for battle. I feel in some ways we’re a transitional generation — we’re trying to work out a new way of being married, but most of us haven’t had any role models for it, so we’re sort of grasping in the dark. Maybe the next generation will pull back some and find a more reasonable middle ground. But I think marriage is still holding up — at least holding up as well as it used to.

It’s still a good problem to have in the scheme of things. You have to figure some critics will write off “Bastards” as bourgeois bitching and moaning.

Sure. The double-edged sword of this whole debate is that it’s a situation born out of privilege. If you have two people in a relationship who are both educated, wanting to pursue separate careers, then how do they dare complain? What do you do then, not talk about it? But these are issues that touch a lot of people’s lives.

Is it harder or easier to be a man today than it was 20 years ago? Or 50 years ago?

That’s a tough question. Male and female roles were clearer in the old days, but did that make it better for men? On the one hand, I don’t want to think of myself as living in a time when it’s harder for men than previous generations. After all, how self-pitying would that sound considering how privileged we are? I haven’t fought in a war, haven’t suffered through a potato famine or God knows what else. So I have to believe overall that men’s lives are easier, though I also wonder if they aren’t less rewarding in some ways. Men of the “greatest generation” … everyone depended on them, right? And aren’t men today less depended upon? The answer has got to be yes, at least on average. And it can’t be quite as rewarding for a man to come home at the end of a long work day and realize his wife doesn’t depend on him as much as wives used to. Sure, the money he brings home is great, but she’s bringing home the same money, so what’s the big deal?

Has the notion of masculinity changed in the past few decades?

Masculinity has always been associated with power, and it’s this power that men are losing in relationships, in marriage, and in the workplace. Manny Howard writes a wonderfully soul-searching essay (“Embracing the Little Steering Wheel”) about how his wife outearns him by 20 times and how he’s OK with this. He really is OK with it, but then at a certain point he wonders if he really is OK with it, because what kind of a man is he, he wonders, when his wife, who controls the purse strings, is also able to call many of the shots in their marriage? This inequality is what makes his marriage work, he senses, where his previous marriage failed because he and his wife were so equal and competitive. But how does this inequity affect his sense of manhood? he wonders. It’s all wrapped up in power, and he knows it.

Where do “Bitch” and “Bastard” most closely meet and differ?

Where they meet is that neither of the men nor women here want to go back into the traditional marriage of the past, and they both embrace this new egalitarian ideal of marriage.

Where they differ the most is that many of the women were obsessed with their mother as a role model. It was very concrete common thread in Cathi’s book. Women are racing away from what their own mothers were — they want to do more than what their mothers did. Men aren’t as wrapped up in who their fathers were and holding that up as a yardstick as how good a man they are. It’s a stark, stark difference. The more common thread in a lot of the pieces was: Am I being a man? Is it acceptable for a man to be outearned by his wife and for her to call the shots?

And a lot of guys are struggling with what kind of father they are supposed to be. I thought Anthony Giardina’s piece, “A Short History of the (Over)involved Father,” really worked because he wasn’t afraid to remind men that just because they have a kid doesn’t mean the rest of their essence is stripped away. So much of being a parent these days is feeling like you’re “supposed” to be doing this or that. You’re supposed to be involved in everything your kids do and hover over them asking questions about how much fun they’re having and what would they like to do next. It’s all about “quality time.” Tony’s essay traces how this notion is embraced by the popular culture — particularly mainstream movies — that preach how family is more important than work, how work is the evil thing that takes parents away from their beloved children during the day, and how if you would just quit your job and go home to your kids everything would be great. But Tony argues that that’s a ridiculous notion to embrace — chiefly because our kids probably don’t want us hovering over them all the time anyway — and also a damaging view of adulthood to present to our children. It’s a liberating read that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom, or at least the conventional pressure.

And seeing your father being ambitious — a guy whose work is as important to him as his family — really isn’t such a bad message. Your parents are your first measuring stick for success. To see your parents overly doting and embracing your life as a child more than their own as an adult is a backward message. When I was young, I saw my father go off into this mysterious and enchanting world of work. To have your father sitting around the house and showing up at all my school events would not inspire children to go out and be successful working adults. It’s good for my children to see their parents with ambition; it doesn’t mean their childhood is getting cut short or gypped.

Was there a topic you would have liked “Bastard” to address but didn’t?

I would have liked another angle on Eric Bartels’ essay, “The Problem With My Anger,” which is a piece that answers a lot of what’s in “Bitch.” There’s this dilemma of some many 30ish and 40ish fathers with young children and working wives. They are working full time, they are trying to do the modern things that a man is supposed to do now — helping out with school, maybe doing most of the cooking — and still what they meet with is never-ending criticism from their wives. The “Anger” piece dealt with it, but as I sought out essays and edited the book there was a lot of hesitancy for men to really lay it out. After all, it’s uncouth to be openly critical about your marriage in public.

I’ve given “Bastard” to a couple of guys who I figured wouldn’t find it on their own. They all said they expected to read one or maybe two pieces, then started reading and couldn’t put it down. That gives me a certain degree of hope. Yet ultimately there’s something sad about the tone of “Bastard” as compared to what’s the more intense tone of “Bitch.”

The tone of “Bitch” is definitely more aggressive. It’s about women going after what they want, making great strides and finding great frustration along the way. But at least they are on the move and going out and grabbing what they want. Men, on the other hand, are often on the losing side of this new power equation in many relationships, and there’s something about the men that is more reactionary and on the defensive. They are on the whole very decent guys, trying to please and to do the right thing, but often they wind up feeling frustrated, resented, unneeded. Still, it’s refreshing to see among the men here that these aren’t men who opt to leave their families because of these conflicts.

It used to be the men leaving for their freedom or whatever, and maybe because they were the ones with the skills and financial independence to make it on their own. But in “Bastard” it’s often the women who are doing the leaving and the men who are left holding the bag. As one writer, Robert Skates, says in his essay about his divorce, “I both like and admire my ex-wife. But God help any fool who gets caught standing between that woman and what she wants.”

How did writing these books affect your own marriage? Are you like the most enlightened couple ever at this point?

The sappy but true answer is that working on these books has made our marriage stronger. We’ve learned a lot, we’ve gone from being solitary writers to almost daily collaborators, and we talk constantly about the problems of modern marriage, either with others or ourselves. The only downside, for me, has been that I made the mistake of suggesting in my introduction that men may need to be more charming “if we want to keep ourselves in the game”; Cathi seized on this, of course, and throws it back at me whenever we’re arguing about something. “You’re the one who said men need to be more charming,” she says. “So be more charming.”