In this book, Stuart Walton takes on Nietzsche's challenge in The Gay Science: Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? From Greek and Roman antiquity, through the Middle Ages, the English Restoration, to the present, Walton guides the reader through the Western history of intoxication and examines its implications for society, culture, religion and the corporeal individual. This is an account of how and why human beings in all ages have had recourse to altered states of consciousness (whether through drugs or alcohol) as a primary requisite of daily life.