A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Forget "Just Say No." That campaign doesn't do much good anyway, evidently. If you want to keep your teenagers off drugs, just give them this book to read.

This novel totally caught me off guard--I was expecting science fiction, because that is Dick's genre, although his books are weirder and more interesting than most. This is not science fiction! In fact, much here is not even fiction. Instead it is a fictional framework for heavily autobiographical material about the author's experience as part of the drug world in the 1960s, as he makes clear in the "Author's Note" at the end of the book. His comments give you an idea of the theme of the book:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyway. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshittine and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief...."

As for the fiction part, the book tells the story of the undercover police agent Fred, who has been assigned to infiltrate the drug culture. Secrecy is so tight that his police bosses don't even know what he looks like. One of his chief assignments is Bob Arctor, a dealer and addict of Substance D, a drug with the side effect of gradually splitting the user's brain into two distinct, combative parts. What the bosses don't know and what Fred eventually forgets is that Fred is Bob Arctor, so that he is narcing on himself. By the end he is barely functional.

Both sides of the drug experience are portrayed: the sitting around being stoned and funny, followed by the paranoia, the suicides, the psychosis, the permanent brain damage. This is powerful stuff, made more-so by the fact that much of it was experienced by the author. At the end of the "Author's Note" Dick dedicates a memoriam to 15 of his friends who died or suffered irreparable damage from drug use.

Seriously, this book should be required reading for anybody who thinks it is "fun" to get high.