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Gérard Borg is not an analyst, nor is he a psychiatrist. He seems to be something of an inspired adventurer who, after a series of peregrinations—which took him also to Brazil, where he studied native psychotherapeutic methods—decided to journey along the drug addicts' ‘route’ which goes from America and Europe to the Middle and the Far East. He travelled on this route as a ‘participant observer’, sharing the life of his research subjects as fully as possible but without losing his capacity for observation and reflection. He succeeded in getting the confidence, and even the friendship, of the young and this has enabled him to draw for us a very full and very living picture of them.
The facts he discovered both confirm and fill out the impressions and experiences of those who have been involved in one way or another in that particular ‘scene’. Thus, the fact that the drug addicts do not form a single and uniform block.
There are at least two important sub-groups: the one is made up of those who seek thrills and excitement or some dramatic form of suicide—these are the junkies; their choice of drugs falls on the amphetamines and the hard drugs and for them the end of the journey tends to be Turkey and the Middle East. In the other group, the hippie group, are those who seek to ‘expand the frontiers of the spirit’ and who want to experience the mysterious. They choose drugs like marijuana and L.S.D. in order to bulldoze the ego out of the way to ‘enlightenment’ or ‘paradise’; and their geographical destination is India and the Far East.
The hippies, whose ethical values lie on the side of love, non-violence and tolerance, are often profoundly contemptuous of the ‘junkies’. As one of them said to Borg: ‘The junkie is a tragedy. I have hardly ever seen a junkie laugh. They look as if they were at their own funeral.’ Borg himself was primarily concerned with the hippies.
Both drug groups share a profound distaste for the modern Western world. They tend to come from different