Diary of a Drug Fiend

Aleister Crowley · 1922

Premise

A young war hero and his new wife fall into a binge of cocaine and heroin that carries them from euphoria to squalor, until a magician takes them to his community in Italy and cures them not by forbidding the drugs but by teaching them to discover their true purpose; the novel argues that addiction is a symptom of a life without direction, and that the cure is will, not prohibition.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

Drugs promise a heightened life and deliver its opposite.
Addiction feeds on a life without purpose. The drug fills the place of a missing aim.
Prohibition cuts the supply but does not cure the craving. It drives users into squalor and crime.
The cure lies in discovering one's true will, the work a person is meant to do.
Mastery of a drug, rather than abstinence imposed from outside, is the goal.
A novel can serve as propaganda for its author's philosophy.

The honeymoon

Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who founded the religious philosophy he called Thelema, published The Diary of a Drug Fiend, his first novel, in 1922. He prefaced it with the claim that "This is a true story. It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities."

Its narrator is Sir Peter Pendragon, a pilot in the First World War who has inherited a fortune from his uncle. On a night out in London he meets Louise Laleham, a follower of a mysterious occultist named Basil King Lamus. They are drawn to each other at once, marry almost immediately and begin a honeymoon fueled by cocaine and then heroin.

At first the drugs seem to open a new world. Peter describes the euphoria, the energy and the sense of limitless possibility in rapturous detail. The couple travel to Paris in a haze of pleasure.

The mechanism is that the first experiences of a drug feel like a revelation, which makes the user believe the drug is the source of a better life.

Implication: be suspicious of anything that seems to offer a shortcut to a heightened life, since its promise is how it captures you.

The descent

The euphoria fades. The couple need more of the drugs to feel the same effects and suffer when they go without. Their days narrow to the pursuit of supply. They quarrel, lose interest in everything else and degrade physically and morally.

Back in England, they find that new laws have cut off their easy access to the drugs. Rather than freeing them, the scarcity drives them down. In the account of the novel, they sink from comfort to a squalid room in Soho, consumed by the search for drugs.

The mechanism is that dependence turns the drug from a source of pleasure into a source of relief, and the user's life reorganizes around avoiding withdrawal.

Implication: the clearest sign of dependence is when a substance stops adding pleasure and starts only relieving pain.

Prohibition

Crowley uses the couple's descent to make an argument about drug laws. The laws cut their supply but do nothing to address why they use. They drive the couple into a world of dealers, deception and squalor without curing their craving.

In the novel's view, the problem is not the drug but the person's relationship to it. A person who uses a drug to fill an emptiness will keep doing so whatever the law says.

The mechanism is that prohibition addresses supply while leaving untouched the demand that drives it, so users pay higher costs without being cured.

Implication: when judging a drug policy, ask whether it addresses why people use, or only how they obtain.

King Lamus

At their lowest point, Lamus finds them and takes them to his community, the Abbey of Thelema at Telepylus, in Italy. Lamus is calm, commanding and wise, and the abbey is a place of discipline and freedom together.

Lamus does not simply take their drugs away. The couple are made to cure themselves, learning to master their craving through their own will, under the community's guidance and practices.

Lamus is an idealized self-portrait of Crowley, and the abbey is a flattering version of the real Abbey of Thelema he founded at Cefalù, in Sicily, in 1920.

The mechanism, as the novel presents it, is that a person who chooses not to use, with the drug in reach, has gained a strength that a person kept from it by force has not.

Implication: compare cures based on removing temptation with those based on building the strength to refuse it, and ask which lasts.

True will

The center of the cure is the idea of the true will, the core of Crowley's philosophy, summed up in its principle "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." In Crowley's teaching, this does not mean doing whatever one likes, but discovering and following one's true purpose.

Peter and Louise come to see that they turned to drugs because their lives lacked direction. Peter discovers that his true will lies in engineering and aviation. With a purpose to pursue, the drugs lose their hold.

The mechanism is that a person absorbed in meaningful work has less room and less need for a substance that fills emptiness.

Implication: if you are trying to break a habit, look for what it is replacing. Something must fill the place it held.

Where it falls short

It is propaganda for Thelema. Lamus is Crowley's idealized self-portrait and the abbey a flattering version of Cefalù, whose real history included the death of a young follower, Raoul Loveday, in 1923 and Crowley's expulsion from Italy the same year.
Its cure was not its author's. Crowley was himself addicted to heroin, and the novel claims a mastery he did not achieve.
It was received as a melodrama. The Sunday Express attacked it as a book that should be burned, and even critics who credited its warning found it monotonous and morbid; Time called it a penny-dreadful.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — another story of a drug that releases a hidden self and then takes control.
Brave New World — a society that keeps its citizens content with a drug.
Less Than Zero — a later portrait of drugs filling empty lives.