Book Review: Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age by Martin Torgoff 4.5/5

Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 by Martin Torgoff, 545 pp.

Drugs have become an inevitable part of life for many Americans. Our drug fueled society has created a revolving door where back alley trenchcoaters and grinning pharmaceutical companies Irish jig all the way to the bank as rehab centers later pick up the pieces and collect their reward. Add this to the bejillions of tax payers’ dollars the government spends on the War on Drugs, and we’re talking about more than enough coins to fill Scrooge’s money vault. Money aside, just considering the lives lost to mind altering substances, and the hypocrisies surrounding how different drugs are viewed and punished, clearly, drugs are a force that cannot be ignored.

In Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, author Martin Torgoff explains how society has gotten to this point by taking readers on a magic carpet ride through the drug cultures of the last half century. Mixing his own drug raveled accounts with experiences of drug aficionados/celebrities and policy makers, he provides readers with a “true-life chronicle of the use of illicit drugs in America without sensationalizing, apologizing, moralizing, or demonizing.” As he states in the book’s preface, his intention was to provide readers with the objective truth and let them draw their own conclusions, and he does this to perfection.

I decided to read this book after seeing Torgoff appear on the documentary “The Drug Years”, which VH1 shows about as regularly as MTV airs NEXT. So, if you happen to see it come on, I highly recommend it. The documentary and Can’t Find My Way Home follow similar lines as both describe the many different drug cultures that turned the Great American Century into “The Great Stoned Age:” The Beat Generation and the bebop jazz scene of the 1940s and ‘50s, the clashing West Coast psychedelic scene and New York Andy Warhol amphetamine underground of the ‘60s, the use of amyl nitrate by the gay sexual culture of the 1970s, cocaine in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the impact of crack in the nation’s inner-cities in the 1980s and the ecstasy fueled rave cyberculture of the 1990’s.

Clearly, Torgoff embarked on a huge undertaking, so it is no surprise that this book took him 12 years to finish. His objectivity is superb as he provides sources from both sides of the reformists/prohibitionists drug spectrum like LSD guru Timothy Leary who wanted an amendment added to the constitution which gave individuals the right to seek an expanded consciousness, and former Head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy William Bennett who “told Larry King that the beheading of drug dealers was ‘morally plausible.’”

Also, the many whacked out tales told by the drug vets and VIPs. will keep the pages turning: Party girl Suzie Ryan on a cocaine high getting it on with her husband Richard Stoltz in front of his business associates, Woodstock MC Wavy Gravy discussing his encounter with Charles Manson and Jimmy Carter’s progressive drug policy czar Dr. Peter Bourne snorting coke at a Christmas party put together by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, just to name a few examples.

While Can’t Find My Way Home was as satisfying as a puff of Columbian cannabis, it made for a long read as it took me several weeks to digest the vast amount of information that Torgoff provides. I recommend this book to cultural history enthusiasts and people who want an outside of the box look at the history of America during the last half century. Also, anybody who wants insight on today’s drug culture will have a much clearer picture after finishing this work.