This book will explore the possibility of a revival of the Archaic or pre-industrial and pre-literate attitude toward community, substance use, and nature - an attitude that served our nomadic prehistoric ancestors long and well, before the rise of the current cultural style we call "Western." The Archaic refers to the Upper Paleolithic, a period seven to ten thousand years in the past, immediately preceding the invention and dissemination of agriculture. The Archaic was a time of nomadic pastoralism and partnership, a culture based on cattle-raising, shamanism, and Goddess worship. I have organized the discussion in a roughly chronological order, with the last and most future - oriented sections taking up and recasting the Archaic themes of the early chapters. The argument proceeds along the lines of a pharmacological pilgrim's progress. Thus I have called the four sections of the book "Paradise," "Paradise Lost," "Hell," and, hopefully not too optimistically, "Paradise Regained?" A glossary of special terms appears at the end of the book. Obviously, we cannot continue to think about drug use in the same old ways. As a global society, we must find a new guiding image for our culture, one that unifies the aspirations of humanity with the needs of the planet and the individual. Analysis of the existential incompleteness within us that drives us to form relationships of dependency and addiction with plants and drugs will show that at the dawn of history, we lost something precious, the absence of which has made us ill with narcissism. Only a recovery of the relationship that we evolved with nature through use of psychoactive plants before the fall into history can offer us hope of a humane and open-ended future. Before we commit ourselves irrevocably to the chimera of a drugfree culture purchased at the price of a complete jettisoning of the ideals of a free and democratic planetary society, we must ask hard questions: Why, as a species, are we so fascinated by altered states of consciousness? What has been their impact on our esthetic and spiritual aspirations? What have we lost by denying the legitimacy of each individual's drive to use substances to experience personally the transcendental and the sacred? My hope is that answering these questions will force us to confront the consequences of denying nature's spiritual dimension, of seeing nature as nothing more than a "resource" to be fought over and plundered. Informed discussion of these issues will give no comfort to the control-obsessed, no comfort to know-nothing religious fundamentalism, no comfort to beige fascism of whatever form. The question of how we, as a society and as individuals, relate to psychoactive plants in the late twentieth century, raises a larger question: how, over time, have we been shaped by the shifting alliances that we have formed and broken with various members of the vegetable world as we have made our way through the maze of history? This is a question that will occupy us in some detail in the chapters to come.