Answering to this post from another thread here since it’s about something I have read. I still got “Diary of a drug fiend” in my library (for fun between Leary and Hofmann) but haven’t read it in decades. I bought it after a girl gave me a book about the more esoteric and occult aspects of Crowley and after reading it I thought “wow, that was ******* crazy” but also assumed it might be interesting to see what he thought about drugs, since I had some slight interest in that subject at the time…
IIRC It’s not as esoteric as one might think, but I definitely might have missd the more esoteric aspects since I was very young and read it mostly as a book about addiction. I still remember and liked how he used a phrase like “what thou wilt” as meaning something very different from “what you want”, the second phrase being more related to some hedonic want and the first more to some (I guess more esoteric) concept of a “true will”.
Also, what are you reading atm @psyber?