Drugs

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of drugs. Throughout history people have taken them to alter their perceptions and change their moods. The attractions lie in the promise of instant pleasure and the possibility of heightened perceptions. Nietzsche said that no art could exist without intoxication and believed that a dream-like state was an essential precondition to superior vision and understanding. But artists and writers from De Quincey to Coleridge to Huxley have found drugs to be both a creative and a destructive force in their lives and work. Coleridge said in his poem about opium: Fantastic Passions! Maddening Brawl! And shame and terror over all! The world of drugs is a topsy-turvy world of ambivalence and paradox: a world of clarity and confusion; stimulation and stupefaction; medicine and poison; vitality and death.Can drugs really stimulate creativity? What is the impact of drugs on the body? And what role have narcotics and stimulants played in the history of medicine?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Richard Davenport-Hines No other episodes
  Historian
• Sadie Plant No other episodes
  
• Mike Jay No other episodes
  Historian

Related episodes

• Psychoanalysis and Literature
  
  9 Nov, 2000 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• The Opium Wars
  
  12 Apr, 2007 950 History of Asia
• The Brain
  
  8 May, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• The Decadent Movement
  
  18 Nov, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures
• Anaesthetics
  
  29 Mar, 2007 610 Medicine and health
• Dreams
  
  4 Mar, 2004 150 Psychology
• Originality
  
  20 Mar, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Imagination
  
  28 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology
• Memory
  
  29 May, 2003 150 Psychology
• The Artist
  
  28 Mar, 2002 700 Arts
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts
• Consciousness
  
  25 Nov, 1999 120 Epistemology
• Nature
  
  10 Jul, 2003 100 Philosophy
• Nihilism
  
  16 Nov, 2000 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Science’s Revelations
  
  29 Oct, 1998 500 Science
• History’s relevance in the 20th century
  
  3 Dec, 1998 900 History
• Schopenhauer
  
  29 Oct, 2009 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Cynicism
  
  20 Oct, 2005 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Animal Experiments and Rights
  
  18 Mar, 1999 170 Ethics
• William Morris
  
  5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts

---

Programme ID: p00548fh

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548fh

Auto-category: 615.78 (Drugs and their effects)