Ecstasy, the drug of choice for clubbers and the flared-trousered everywhere, began life in Mercks German laboratories in 1912, and its patented name betrayed its synthetic roots: methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). Its value was uncertain and its use limited, and it seldom made an appearance at the inter-war Berlin cabarets. It had a brief life as a CIA truth drug in the 1940s, and was promoted gleefully by Alexander Shulgin, who experimented with it in Californian therapy sessions.
The drug promoted the release of serotonin from nerve endings, removed all inhibitions and induced great feelings of fulfilment, and as with most mildly euphoric amphetamines it went particularly well with loud and repetitive music. This feature was noted by various club promoters in New York and Texas in the mid-1980s, and its destiny was sealed. It was relatively easy and cheap to make, it was easily concealed and digested, its side-effects appeared to be limited to dehydration, mild nausea and next-day depression, and for a decade it became painfully hip as the rave scene spread from disused warehouses in the US to the airfields of Hampshire and the beaches of Ibiza.
As Richard Davenport-Hines shows in this encyclopaedic book, ecstasy took the typical journey from the medical labs to the counterculture, and provoked familiar responses from the media and legal establishment. By the time the moral majority got hold of it, the drug's trajectory was as good as over, while attempts to curtail its use were over-reactive and fruitless; the drug waned in popularity as much for social reasons - trends in music, fashion, the diluting of the drug through greed - as for the British police's hilarious pursuit of blissed-out ravers around the M25.
Every generation discovers its own drugs, and that is their appeal. Davenport-Hines' survey only goes some way to fulfilling its claims of being a global history, for its main interest lies in the west, or at least in the west's hunger to synthesise and consume drugs from the east. Three hundred years are covered in the book's first 35 pages, but the meat is to be found from the Victorians onwards, a grim but compulsive journey from Gladstone's consumption of morphine before a big speech to the furore surrounding use of Rohypnol as a "date-rape" drug (it was designed by Roche as a sleeping pill, but as Davenport-Hines points out, disarmingly, it also made some people "feel more tactile in a slightly drowsy way, and a few people horny".)
You'll find almost everything you ever wanted to know about drugs in this work, except how to get hold of them. The dustjacket blurb calls the author "one of this generation's master storytellers". Sadly, there's limited evidence of it in this volume, as his narrative is subsumed by academic tics (he brackets the birth and death dates of almost everyone he mentions), and by a largely thematic approach - trafficking, law enforcement, the British scene, designer drugs and so on. Nonetheless this is a full and often fascinating account, which reflects staggeringly large amounts of time spent in libraries and a fair bit with internet search engines, and the result is really a racy drugs reader, with a five-minute dip invariably rewarded with a jaw-dropping celebrity anecdote. As one would expect, doped poets, wasted authors and smacked musicians litter the pages, but I was taken aback by the amount of abusing politicians (take a bow Hitler, JFK, Anthony Eden and thousands of members of the British armed forces, who all found that methedrine and benzedrine helped them through wars and crises).
The trend continues, it appears. I enjoyed an entry in Alan Clark's diaries, in which he wrote of how a Conservative colleague whispered to him during agricultural questions in the House of Commons about an aphrodisiac he had just discovered. "I liked the sound of this, and after Prime Minister's Questions I drove him to his flat and he brought down a 'phial'. It has to be kept in the fridge ..."
In an unusual adjectival display, the author refers to Clark (1928-99) as "the unpleasant English politician". In the main, however, Davenport-Hines keeps his editorial voice muted, preferring irony and poignancy over approval or condemnation (and he's no sucker for the romantic beautiful-but-damned myth of either Coleridge or Janis Joplin). He is particularly strong when exposing the ludicrousness of many attempts to control drug use, although he keeps his own recommendations to the last few pages. His principal conclusion is that a radical shift is needed: having tried draconian punishment we might try decriminalisation, and not only for marijuana.
His vogueish alternatives also include the commercial sale of drugs under strict governmental control, and truthful rather than scary education for children (including the refreshing admission that people take drugs because they enjoy their effects). The classic example is Holland, of course, where the separation of cannabis and heroin suppliers has resulted in fewer heroin users per head of population than in the UK or France.
There is an element of the well-meaning circuit-court judge about some of his comments, a problem that faces any social historian commenting upon something of which he obviously has limited direct experience. Even when tackling recent events his understanding springs primarily from published sources rather than original interviews. It could be, for instance, that ecstasy's common nickname, "Adam", derives from being "supposedly . . . a catharsis for the rebirth of the innocent 'inner child' from Eden sought in therapeutic encounters" - but even those whose memory has been eroded by too many loved-up dawns could have told him that Adam is a close-but-no-scholarship anagram of MDMA.
Since the book was written there has been another abuse of a medical drug - OxyContin, an opium-derived painkiller that has addicted thousands of urban poor in the US - and the significance of drug money in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been highlighted by terrible events. In 1980 it was estimated that 60 per cent of heroin in the US came from Afghanistan, and the use of drug profits to finance the resistance against Soviet forces was conducted with CIA approval. It remains to be seen whether the current war on terrorism will prove any more effective than successive US presidents' war on drugs.
The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000 by Richard Davenport-Hines, Weidenfeld £20, 466 pages