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Martin A. Lee reviewed Martin Torgoff's Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 (Simon & Schuster, 2004)

Martin A. Lee, who co-authored with Bruce Shlain,“Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond” reviewed Martin Torgoff’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.

Lee describes the book as a “tour de force through the stoned 1960s when messianic delusions were nearly as plentiful as tabs of black market acid.” Morover, “Torgoff’s “ambitious chronicle packs considerable punch as an antidote to official policies based on ‘myths, fears, exaggerations and lies,’” writes Lee.

Still, notes Lee, Torgoff writes as well about his own “struggles with substance of abuse” and how illegal drugs found its way “from the criminal underground and avant garde fringes to mainstream society.” The novelist Tom Robbins is quoted as saying “There wouldn’t have been the Sixties without the drugs, at least not the Sixties that we knew.”

It is Torgoff’s contention, Lee continues, that “the failed policies of prohibition, not the drugs themselves are largely responsible for the violence, crime and corruption that plague so many communities.” But, continues the reviewer, the book is too uncritical of “counterculture hype.” It criticizes Reagan’s drug czar for saying that pot makes people gay. But, adds Lee, Torgoff fails to note that Timothy Leary claimed that LSD was a “cure” for homosexuals.

Torgoff claims that drugs are now “as American apple pie,” and that one can use illicit drugs without becoming addicted. “Drugs are a bet with the mind,” said Jim Morrison of the Doors. Concludes reviewer Lee: “It’s sobering to think that at age 27 he wagered and lost. The idea that we can win the drug war is little more than a pipe dream, but the collateral damage is real.”

Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2004