Catch-up on my drugs in TRP email

[Mark Kohut]

Laura confessed to being a little yearning-high when she wrote GR 'encouraged' drug use, which overstatements she makes fewer of than I do, for example.

Unlike to Rob, it is not obvious to me at all that any passages in GR are inspired by drug trips, so, different tokes for different foax. 

Re pot, it seems from Inherent Vice's text that TRP either believes that pot is useful for ..stress-relief [common argument] or as a social lubricant [like alcohol]. Seems the group read has established that he solves the crime(s) anyway. In other ways. Otherwise, TRP seems to side with pot as a self-befogger or else he is steadily satirizing that 'useful substance' at this time of his life. 

Yes, that pot is 'that useful substance' is all the non-fictional words we have from TRP about "drug use". That stash of hash in GR has certain pleasurable meanings, I suggest, but I would argue that (most of) the 'drug trips' themselves in GR are, as with most over-the-top surreal scenes, are for the purposes of the satire. Perhaps akin (in satiric import) to the sado-masochistic sex in GR? 

Yes, if IV is not (partly) about drug use, then what is it about, has been asked?   A---and, what is that opium on the Golden Fang about?  

As with just about everything, I think TRP makes finer distinctions about drugs than many of his "critics'--Wood's dishonest slam by association--- and readers easily admit. 

And, sure seems to me that TRP wrote Inherent Vice enthusiastically, at least. And, all of them I might say, the man seems to me to "suffer' his writing less than say Cormac McCarthy speaks of his in his WSJ interview----although TRP is obviously fiercely driven to get it more 'right' in research, layered detail, verbal precision than most of us---I mean ME, kemosabe-- can even imagine----until we read it. 

But that's just speculation akin to speculation on his drug use, I think.