Is this Taboo??

(drugs as literary device)

First of all, I owe you guys an apology. I haven’t posted since September 21, and honestly? University has been eating me alive. Between assignments, readings (partying as well ups) and all the other chaos that comes with trying to keep a life together, I just didn’t have the time (or mental bandwidth) to sit down and write something proper. So, I’m sorry for going quiet but I’m back now, and I’ll try to be more active again.

Now, let’s talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while: how drugs show up in literature: not just as props for shock value, not just as symbols of rebellion or downfall, but as literary devices. As mirrors of human consciousness. As metaphors for memory, trauma, identity, and the limits of truth.

When we read Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr., or Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, or even something more surreal like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by. Hunter S. Thompson, the drugs aren’t just there to scandalize us: they’re tools of introspection. They dissolve the borders between body and mind, reality and illusion, sanity and madness. These writers use intoxication not just to explore addiction, but to reveal what lies beneath the skin of ordinary life: desperation, fear, euphoria, loneliness, and the strange ways people cope with existing in an unbearable world (and honestly same).

Drugs in fiction become more than plot devices: they’re philosophical lenses. Through them, we watch characters unravel, hallucinate, transcend, or collapse entirely. It’s the same question every one of these stories seems to ask: what’s real, and what’s just chemical illusion?

And that’s what fascinates me. Because when you strip away the needle, the pill, the smoke: what’s left is humanity, raw and trembling. These stories aren’t about drugs, not really. They’re about how far we’ll go to escape pain, to seek meaning, to feel something when everything else feels numb.

About Requiem for a Dream:

Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream isn’t a book you read: it’s a book that consumes you. It crawls under your skin and stays there long after you finish it, whispering like an echo you can’t turn off. It’s one of those rare novels where addiction isn’t romanticized, pathologized, or even moralized. Instead, it’s rendered as something tragically human: a slow and inevitable collapse into delusion, driven by the simple hunger to feel okay again.

Selby strips his characters down to their barest selves. There’s Sara Goldfarb, the lonely mother who becomes addicted to diet pills while chasing her dream of appearing on television. Her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend Tyrone, who spiral into heroin addiction while chasing their own distorted versions of success and freedom. Each one of them is searching for a kind of transcendence: something to lift them out of the monotony and cruelty of their lives. But every high comes with a cost. Every illusion of escape only tightens the trap.

What makes Requiem for a Dream so brilliant, and also so brutal, is how Selby uses addiction not as a social issue, but as an existential metaphor. The drugs aren’t just substances. They’re symbols of every empty promise the modern world sells us: the promise of beauty, fame, love, wealth, control. Sara’s television fantasy isn’t that different from Harry’s heroin dream: both are just different brands of self-destruction sold in shiny packaging.

And Selby’s style mirrors that chaos perfectly. His prose is frantic, breathless, often lacking quotation marks or clear breaks. It feels like the reader is inside the mind of someone losing control, tumbling through fragmented thoughts and feverish visions. It’s the literary equivalent of withdrawal: claustrophobic, relentless, and raw. The way the sentences bleed into each other feels like time itself is collapsing. The novel doesn’t let you breathe, because the characters can’t either and I think that’s beautiful.

At its core, the story is about the universal human craving for connection and meaning and what happens when the world offers only illusions. The drugs become the language of despair. They promise love, safety, euphoria: but all they really give is silence. And Selby doesn’t let us look away from that. He forces us to confront the ugly truth: that addiction isn’t about pleasure. It’s about absence. About the unbearable void of wanting something that reality can’t provide.

In a way, Requiem for a Dream is the ultimate anti-American Dream novel. It’s about the rot underneath the fantasy: the idea that our dreams can consume us just as easily as any drug. Sara’s dream of being on television is just as toxic as Harry’s syringe; both are chasing validation in a world that’s built to deny them. And that’s the tragedy: the characters’ downfall isn’t only chemical, it’s cultural.

Selby’s vision is merciless but deeply empathetic. He never judges his characters, even when they destroy themselves. He just shows the truth: that addiction is a mirror, reflecting the desperate need to be seen, to be loved, to belong. It’s the human condition at its most stripped and vulnerable: naked, trembling, begging for a fix that doesn’t exist.

Requiem for a Dream isn’t just a story about drugs. It’s a requiem for humanity’s lost hope.

About Trainspotting:

Irvine Welsh doesn’t just write about addiction, he writes from inside it. His world isn’t a moral tale about heroin destroying lives. It’s about why so many people choose heroin in the first place.

Set in the working-class underbelly of Edinburgh in the late 1980s, Trainspotting throws us into the chaos of a generation abandoned by the system: a group of friends numbing themselves against the hopelessness of unemployment, Thatcher-era decay, and the total collapse of meaning. Welsh’s addicts, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie, Tommy, aren’t just junkies. They’re philosophers of disillusionment, anarchists of the body. They know the game is rigged, and heroin becomes both their escape and their protest.

One of the most famous lines in the book says it all:

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family… But why would I want to do a thing like that?”

Renton’s monologue is a manifesto of apathy: a middle finger to a society that’s sold out every ideal it ever pretended to stand for. In that sense, addiction in Trainspotting isn’t just self-destruction. It’s rebellion through surrender. When the system offers nothing worth living for.

Welsh’s style reflects that chaos: written in thick Scots dialect, the prose feels alive, dirty, and unfiltered. It’s almost unreadable at first if you’re not used to it, but that’s the point. It rejects literary respectability the same way the characters reject social norms. It’s literature that refuses to be tamed.

His characters are constantly shifting between tragedy and absurdity. One minute, they’re shooting up in a filthy flat; the next, they’re quoting Nietzsche or rambling about consumer culture. That’s what makes the book feel so alive: it’s brutally honest about how people cope with a world that doesn’t care about them.

But beneath the bravado and filth, Welsh is doing something deeply political. Trainspotting exposes the consequences of a society that has stripped away community, purpose, and hope. The heroin epidemic isn’t just a social problem; it’s a symptom of late capitalism’s spiritual emptiness. Welsh doesn’t glorify drugs, but he refuses to reduce them to a morality lesson. His characters aren’t evil or weak: they’re products of a world that has already failed them.

And the irony is, the addiction gives them the very thing society denies: connection. For all the chaos, there’s love and loyalty between the characters, a kind of warped solidarity. They hurt each other constantly, but they also see each other in a way the outside world doesn’t. Heroin becomes the glue that binds them, both literally and metaphorically.

Renton’s eventual attempts to “choose life” are loaded with bitterness. Even when he tries to escape, we can’t tell if he’s breaking free or just trading one illusion for another. Welsh doesn’t give us closure because there isn’t any. The addiction never really ends; it just mutates into another form of dependence: on money, on routine, on survival.

In Trainspotting, drugs become both poison and philosophy. They expose the hollowness of modern life, the absurdity of “normality,” and the quiet violence of conformity. It’s about what we’re trying to escape.

About Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the wild laughter that comes after the scream. Hunter S. Thompson’s masterpiece isn’t just a drug-fueled road trip: it’s a grotesque elegy for a country that sold its soul.

Thompson, through his alter ego Raoul Duke, and his anarchic lawyer Dr. Gonzo, drives straight into the neon nightmare of 1970s America with a suitcase full of everything from mescaline to ether. But this isn’t just about getting high: it’s about getting to the truth. The excess, the madness, the hallucinations: they’re all symptoms of a deeper sickness: the death of idealism, the collapse of the 1960s counterculture, and the rot at the heart of the so-called “American Dream.”

The book opens with one of the most iconic lines in modern literature:

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

From that moment on, it’s a descent into pure chaos, but it’s purposeful chaos. The drugs are not just props. They’re a narrative device, a lens through which reality bends and reveals its grotesque truth. Underneath the wild humor and surrealism, Thompson is dissecting a culture obsessed with consumerism, spectacle, and power. Las Vegas, the city of illusion, becomes the perfect stage for America’s hallucinatory self-image.

This is the genius of Fear and Loathing: it weaponizes intoxication. The drug trip becomes a metaphor for a society tripping on its own delusions: about freedom, success, morality, and control. The distorted perception mirrors a distorted reality. Thompson doesn’t glamorize drug use; he uses it to expose the absurdity of a system that’s already lost its mind.

And the style, Gonzo journalism, makes that even clearer. Thompson blurs the line between reporting and hallucination, fact and fiction. His voice is manic, paranoid, and brutally self-aware. He’s not an observer of the madness; he’s part of it. The writing itself feels like an acid trip: unpredictable, self-destructive, but occasionally, in flashes, painfully lucid.

At the heart of the book is this line, maybe the most honest thing Thompson ever wrote:

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle, that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”

He’s talking about the 1960s, about how that “wave” of rebellion and freedom felt unstoppable, until it wasn’t. Fear and Loathing captures what happens after that wave breaks: when idealism turns into cynicism, when peace and love give way to greed and despair. The drugs, in this sense, are not the problem; they’re the residue of the crash.

Thompson uses intoxication not to escape reality, but to exaggerate it: to push it until it breaks, until it reveals its ugly core. The result is both hilarious and tragic. Because behind every absurd scene, bats attacking the car, lizards in a casino, the endless desert, there’s a haunting awareness that the American Dream has rotted from the inside out.

What makes Fear and Loathing so timeless is that the hallucination never ends. Fifty years later, the world still feels like Thompson’s nightmare: a place where truth is subjective, spectacle is everything, and the system keeps selling new illusions to keep us pacified.

In the end, every story about drugs is really a story about truth: what we chase, what we escape, what we lose trying to feel something real. They’re mirrors, burning and merciless, showing us the unbearable hunger that drives us: for love, for meaning, for control, for silence.

Literature about addiction isn’t about the high. It’s about the after. The trembling, the emptiness, the flicker of human connection in the ruins of identity. And maybe that’s why these stories stay with us: because they remind us how fragile the line is between ecstasy and despair, between the illusion of freedom and the reality of being trapped in our own mind.

So yeah, maybe the trip never really ends. It just changes form.