Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

partly stems from its cover photographs, by 
Semina creator Wallace Berman, depict-
ing Lamantia shooting up. As Lamantia told it, he didn’t authorize the appearance of 
these photos, claiming the cover was to be all text; indeed, the pamphlet-sized book 
seems to have two covers, the photographic wrap with four images of Lamantia, and 
a sheet of red cardstock with a variant of the original title, 
I Demand Extinction of 
Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs, printed in pyramid form. Lamantia was dismayed 
by the images for reasons both personal— not wanting his family to see and fearing 
the very real possibility of arrest— and philosophical, for he felt they sensationalized 
the text, undermining the seriousness of its purpose. Notably he would never reprint 
any of 
Narcotica, his misgivings compounded by the feeling the text was no longer 
“accurate” in terms of the evolving political discourse around drugs in the United 
States.
A hybrid text, 
Narcotica consists of four poems by Lamantia, his translation of 
a poem by Giocomo Leopardi, and the prose “Demand” of its alternate title, plus 
two texts by Artaud concerning opium, translated by Lucile Dejardin. While his 
enduring anarchist political orientation is evident throughout the text— particularly 
in his assertion that “It is I WHO AM THE LAW!”— Lamantia felt 
Narcotica was 
misinterpreted, writing in an undated typewritten note: “any creep who got the 
impression I was recommending the taking of narcotics— addictive or not— doesn’t 
understand THE NATURAL RIGHT OF THE POET TO SPEAK TRUTH 
AS HE SEES IT.” Much of 
Narcotica, including Artaud’s two texts, “A Letter to 
the Legislator of the Law on Narcotics” and “General Security— The Liquidation of 
Opium,” concerns the psychic pain motivating drug addiction, which, in Lamantia’s 
case, was rooted in his still-undiagnosed manic depression. While it has ecstatic 
moments— notably the ode to hashish, “Memoria”— generally speaking, 
Narcotica is 
concerned with the political and psychiatric aspects of illegal drugs, while moments 
of 
ekstasis are reserved for the book of that title, hence the inclusion of “Interior Suck 
of the Night” there. The division between 
Ekstasis and Narcotica, in other words, 
isn’t between religious and drug experience but rather between mystical and political 
experience.
Of particular note in Lamantia’s Auerhahn period is the emergence of a concept 
he christens “weir.” This is not to be confused with the contemporary English word 
“weir,” a type of dam, but instead is a variant on the word “weird” that Lamantia 
derived from his researches into Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps the most widely read elabora-
tion of the concept comes not from Lamantia but rather from Michael McClure, 
whom Philip had known since the mid-1950s but who became a close friend around 
this time. In “Phi Upsilon Kappa,” the first essay in the second edition of his book 
Meat Science Essays (1963, 1966), McClure cites Lamantia’s concept as he describes the 

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high poet xliii
visionary state induced by peyote: “Philip Lamantia and I had spoken many times. 
He had mentioned his concept of Weir to me. Now I knew the phenomena I had seen 
with my still peyoted eyes— the chill luminescence— and the aelf-scin of the Anglo 
Saxons were the same radiance and halo. I saw that the aelf-scin was much the same 
light illuminating what Philip called Weir. Weir is a solid spectral reality of light on