Early on in this book, Herbert Huncke, a grizzled survivor of the original Beat circle, remarks to author Martin Torgoff that when he first started doing drugs in the 1930s, "It sounded like a pretty interesting way to go to hell."

What follows this remark is basically a 500-page road map of the routes to perdition (though some of them would argue "heaven") taken by a cast of characters that includes Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, Charles Manson, Oliver Stone, Terrence McKenna and many, many others. Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 proves to be an immensely entertaining and informative atlas of, shall we say, the "High Country."

Torgoff, whose previous books include Elvis: We Love You Tender and American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp, attempts the near impossible here: a one-volume cultural, social and legal history of drug use in America from just after WWII to current times. It is a fascinating, if tangled, complex and often paradoxical narrative in which the heroes, if one may call them such, are often the villains as well.

Take, as just one example among many, Allen Ginsberg. When he was only 19, Ginsberg, while exploring the lower depths of Times Square, stumbled on the aforementioned Herbert Huncke, who, as Torgoff relates, appeared to Ginsberg "like some Virgilian guide to a new underworld, the connection to an entire subterranean population of outlaws, rebels, nihilists, outsiders, eccentrics, bohemians, romantics, artists, dreamers, adventurers, cultural experimenters, self-explorers, hedonists, spiritual seekers, thrill merchants and black marketeers."

Soon, Ginsberg discovered that smoking marijuana wasn't just a "recreational" experience; getting high changed his consciousness and enabled him to experience the world at a different plane of reality. And this was just pot - Ginsberg quickly moved on to the more powerful mind-altering chemicals like mescaline, psilocybin and LSD.

Ginsberg and his fellow Beats like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy discovered that, for them at least, drugs were not the evil portrayed by authority but a release from the straitjacket of social conventions and a revelation of a, well, higher existence.

These experiences, to Ginsberg, were so exciting, so life-changing, that he quickly came to believe that they were the key to changing America for the better. After getting high on psilocybin with Timothy Leary, at the time a professor of sociology at Harvard, the two men began to develop plans to get the whole country high:

"The idea was to give it to respectable and notable people first, who could really articulate the experience," Ginsberg explained to Torgoff. "I would act as the go-between," Ginsberg went on, "keeping as much of a low profile as possible considering my visibility as America's most conspicuous beatnik. Really, it was a perfect role for me to play: Ambassador of Psilocybin."

Leary would come up with the perfect catchphrase for their endeavor: "Turn on. Tune in. Drop out." For many, this would be more than a slogan - it would become a liturgy.

If people like Ginsberg and Leary were the High Priests of the movement, it was a man with the unlikely name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III who provided the actual material for the sacrament. Owsley's ambition in the '60s, as Torgoff notes, was "to make the purest and cheapest acid in the history of the world . . . guaranteed to provide the vital components of a great acid trip: blast off, rapid ascent, towering peak, plenty of ego dissolution and the full whirlwind of sensory effects."

And pouring out of Owsley's lab came LSD of astonishing purity and power with the names "Mother's Milk," "Blue Cheer," "Purple Haze" and "Orange Sunshine."

Unlike Ginsberg and Leary though, Owsley did not intend to confine the drug to the "respectable and notable people." Acid was for the commoner as well.

To this end, Owsley, in conjunction with the novelist Ken Kesey (who had taken part in LSD experiments at Stanford in the '50s) and his band of Merry Pranksters, initiated the Acid Tests - all night extravaganzas of apocalyptic chemical imbalance, Freak community interpretive dance marathons, and mind-blowing sensory overload provided for the eyes by the psychedelic light-show and for the ears by the Trips Festival House Band, the Grateful Dead. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Everyone passed. Everyone failed.

Most of us, whether we've done drugs or not, have heard all about the expansion of consciousness and will have our own notions of its validity, or lack of validity. The point here is that Ginsberg's initiation into what he called "eyeball kicks" are duplicated over and over by the people in the book. Some, like Ginsberg, find in the experience an opening up of the mind, a freeing of the body, an exhilaration of the soul; some, though, found a darkness from which there would be no escape.

As the book progresses, that darkness seems to overtake just about everyone. The shabby, sordid deaths by chemical misadventure of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison are representative of an arc of disaster visited on the known and the unknown throughout the years examined in the book.

There were a few giants who never really fell: Ginsberg and Leary were game to the end, literate and looney as goodwill ambassadors from another plane of reality. Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane fame and David Crosby of the Byrds and CS&N provide an unexpected sense of ragged dignity as they tell their stories of how far you can fall when you get too high. Kesey never gave up, barnstorming America with his Rolling Thunder machine and his message of hope and love and community.

But, still, the darkness comes on: coke, crack, PCP, speed. The descent is long and harrowing and Torgoff doesn't flinch. But that's a story you'll have to read for yourself in the book. And my guess is that if you pick up this book and read a few pages, you will be hooked.

It is that exciting, that alluring, that - OK, one more drug-oriented play on words - addictive. Fast-paced, well-organized and written with punch and pith, this is a book to go on the shelf with those worn copies of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. Go ahead. Take another hit.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.