Martin Torgoff and the Great Stoned Age
By Charles M. Young

When Martin Torgoff quit alcohol and drugs in 1989, he took on an unusual early sobriety project: writing a complete history of illegal drug use in the United States. After 1,300 pages, he was barely past the waves of anti-drug hysteria that swept the country in the early 20th century and led to certain familiar substances being outlawed for the next hundred years. T: 12 Questions for Peter Tork

Time to re-evaluate. Time to lop off the first half of the 20th century, and stick with what he knew best from his own lived experience as a Baby Boomer born in 1952. Starting over with the Beats and jazz cats, he organized his mountain of research by allotting one chapter per drug scene. And after ten years of writing, he even finished the book, “Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age 1945-2000,” which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. It was unique. There had been plenty of memoirs, plenty of anthropological explications of particular drug cultures, plenty of journalistic investigations, but nothing where the author talked to pretty much everyone who was anybody and hadn’t died of an overdose. T: The Together Interview: Jerrold Mundis

The book got good reviews, sold okay but not great. Like any good freelance writer, Torgoff decided to recycle his material, taking it to VH-1 where in 2006 he produced an acclaimed four-part documentary, The Drug Years, which eventually attracted over 150 million viewers in repeated showings.

Thus did Martin Torgoff go from rock biographer (“Elvis: We Love You Tender” and “American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp”) to the world’s leading chronicler of a phenomenon that is almost always presented in the mass media as an ever present “war,” not as an integral part of our culture with a long history. He is, all rolled into one: the Howard Zinn of zonk, the Herodotus of heroin, the Plutarch of pot, the Arthur Schlesinger of ’shrooms, and the Doris Kearns Goodwin of goofballs. He also just started his own production company, Prodigious Media, and lives in the Bronx with his wife and son.

Charles Young: You’re working on a new documentary about crack – why?
Martin Torgoff: VH-1 greenlighted the project because their audience is skewing younger and more African American and they thought this topic would interest them. I didn’t have room for more than one chapter on crack in my book, and it seemed to demand further examination. Crack is a drug that was mostly marketed in the inner cities starting in the mid-’80s as Hip Hop emerged and became the art form that documented the scene in a way that was much more valid and truthful than anything in the mainstream media. Many of the major Hip Hop artists, like 50 Cent and Jayzee, started out as teenage crack dealers. In my book I looked at the gang subculture of South Central Los Angeles, which fascinated me. Of all the drug phenomena in America, crack was the most demonized as the great destructive drug plague of our time. It was rife with hysteria and racism and media agendas and political manipulations.

CY: The crack scene was more demonized than the Beats of the ’50s, the hippies of the ’60s, and the gays of the ’70s?
MT: All of those subcultures were indeed demonized. The mechanism of demonization goes back to when opiates and reefer and cocaine were first made illegal in the early part of the last century. Each particular drug was always tied to a group that was scapegoated and harassed as a source of social evil, which was then used as the reason to outlaw the drug. At first the groups were Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants, then blacks and Latinos and migrant workers. People who did drugs together became friends and listened to music together, possibly leading to interracial friendships and even sex, which was the ultimate threat. So there’s a long tradition of propaganda claims that certain drugs always led to madness and addiction, without much evidence.

I would say that the targeting of blacks through the crack hysteria was especially brutal and worse than what Beats and hippies endured. Remember the “crack baby” hysteria? No evidence at all for it, and it was directed at black people, not hippies. A couple of months ago, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which was 25 years in the making. It used to be that if you were a crack addict and you scored enough to smoke for one day, it was enough to get you a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in the penitentiary. You would need 100 times that amount of powder cocaine to get that same sentence. They managed in this bill to reduce the cocaine-crack differential down to 18-1 from 100-1. It’s still unfair but a big step in the right direction.

CY: I didn’t hear anything about it.
MT: That’s the point. Nobody heard about it. You would think Obama would have touted this as a major accomplishment. It involved a bipartisan coalition in Congress, and many worthy drug reform groups had been lobbying for the change for years. Instead, no video was allowed at the signing. There was exactly one photographer in the room. There was almost no mention in the press. That’s how quiet they wanted to keep it. An African American president signing a law redressing one of the great inequities in our criminal justice system, and it’s too controversial for him to take any credit. That’s how politically dangerous it is to be rational about crack.

So in the documentary we’re looking at that, and we’re looking at how the “epidemic” was perceived by the artists who became prominent in Hip Hop. It’s the one form of black music that completely passed me by, probably because I used to live at 81st and Amsterdam and the boom boxes were so loud in those years that I couldn’t appreciate it. I can listen now with an open mind and get over my musical prejudice.

CY: Why did you start your book with the Beats and the jazz cats?
MT: I met a guy named Herbert Huncke, who was a character both in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He gave William Burroughs his first shot of narcotics. It just seemed like an interesting place to start the story.

CY: I loved the quotes you dug up from Norman Podhoretz, father of today’s neocons, who accused the Beats of wanting to “kill” the true intellectuals and being a “conspiracy to overthrow civilization.” In a way, he was right.
MT: All the Beats were revolutionaries – revolutionary in the way that they wrote, in their values, in their willingness to experiment with drugs and sex. They perceived “civilization” as stultifying, and Podhoretz did them a great service with the sanctimonious vitriol of his attacks, because it attracted so many other people who were really interested in overthrowing what Podhoretz thought of as civilization. It happens again and again. You try to demonize something and you bring attention to it. As the Beats became a huge cultural force in the ’50s with the demonization of pot, so did Hip Hop become a huge cultural force in the ’80s with the demonization of crack.

The Beats themselves had a mixed experience with drugs. Kerouac was the tragedy, because he was taken down so dramatically by alcoholism. Burroughs was a classic example of how our assumptions about drugs can be wrong, because he was an octogenarian heroin user. Ginsberg was the only political revolutionary among them, a towering cultural figure up there with Muhammad Ali in his influence. He never experienced any addiction in his life. He used drugs moderately and responsibly, for his own recreational and aesthetic purposes. “If I can do it, why can’t middle class American college students?” – that was Allen.

CY: Contemporary college students have a different set of problems in a culture that has become even more corporate.
MT: That makes sense. There’s an allure to addiction, a romanticism. Probably some of us did set out to become addicts. I certainly didn’t. It was the farthest thing from my mind. My dad was part of that ’30s-’40s generation and he believed that if you smoked pot, you were going to become a heroin addict, so you should never smoke pot. I set out to be the living refutation of that theory. I prided myself that I never stuck a needle in my arm, but that didn’t stop me from drinking too much and snorting huge amounts of cocaine. I was disposed in some way toward addiction and alcoholism, but I had no awareness of it. It’s something you see in hindsight. It wasn’t like I wanted to be a junkie because Jim Morrison did heroin.

CY: I’ve talked to a lot of musicians who started doing heroin because Keith Richards or Sid Vicious were junkies. It seemed like the route to coolness.
MT: In the ’30s and ’40s, it was like that in jazz with heroin. An entire generation of brilliant musicians – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, whoever – started doing heroin because they idolized Charlie Parker and he was a junkie. I didn’t write about the punk scene and heroin in my book, but I prepared to. I did an interesting interview with Richard Hell, who at one time was completely unable to function because of his heroin addiction, then went into recovery. He compared his addiction to the Australian aborigines doing a “walkabout.” That’s when an individual decides it’s time to go away, wander the world, follow his wisdom path. And he learns things that he needs to take back and share with his group. Those of us who are lucky enough to survive the addiction walkabout can share our insights.

CY: Have you seen the recent cover story in The Atlantic that argues the Baby Boom doesn’t measure up to the WW2 generation because of our drug addled self-indulgence and therefore we should give up Social Security to pay off the national debt?
MT: I don’t buy that at all. I think the Baby Boom accomplished incredible things: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement, feminism. We found our way to a more diversified spiritual path that’s gone beyond the standard religions. At the same time, I’m still struggling with my adolescence, and I’m pushing 60. I became a father rather late, at the age of 50. When I look at my son in the second grade, I know he’s going to have his own path. I would prefer that he stay away from everything at least until the age of 18, and then he can make his own choices. But he’s a very headstrong and bold child, so I’m probably in for it. When I think about the crap I gave my father, I’m karmically going to be paid back a hundred fold.

One thing I realized in the course of writing my book is that nothing ever goes away. Drugs just come and go in waves. It’s a multi-generational experience now that is deeply embedded in our culture. The idea of expecting drugs to disappear somehow by demonizing them, or just saying no, is absurd. And there’s so much damn money being made. It’s just sad to me that anyone could get killed because of marijuana, with all the criminal syndicates and the undercover cops and all. Keep it away from kids as much as possible, keep it away from airline pilots. Other than that what’s the worst that can happen if it’s legalized? Somebody eats too many corn chips while watching television?

CY: What’s the next big drug scene?
MT: The trend right now is prescription drug abuse on a huge scale. This generation coming up now, they’ve seen crack and meth and the revival of ’60s culture with the rave scene. They’re turned off to that. What they’re interested in is the medicine cabinet. It’s addictive prescription drugs, anything mind altering like opiates and tranquilizers. It’s followed them to college and into their careers, and it will accompany them to their rehabs.

CY: If you could wave a magic wand, how would you change American drug policy?
MT: Decriminalize marijuana. Change drug education to a policy of total honesty, just being candid about every aspect of the experience. I also think it’s possible to look at families and see which kids might be predisposed to have problems. You could make a special effort there beyond “Just say no” and DARE. Stop the demonization of drugs, because it gives them the allure of the forbidden. Real drug education would strip away the romanticism and just say, “Here it is, and this is what it can do, and this is how you recognize when it’s getting in the way of the rest of your life.” It requires a certain consciousness based on realism, not demonization, and a different sense of responsibility. Maybe that should be our legacy. T: The Together Interview: Jerrold Mundis

Charles M. Young is a journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Musician magazines.