I felt honored to be asked to write the introduction to this first official English translation of German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin's writings about drugs.  Benjamin remains one of my intellectual heroes.  In the period between World Wars I and II he explored many of the topics that would come to the fore post-1945 -- media, collecting, revolution in everyday life, spirituality, language, mimetic magic ... and drugs.  Germany after WW I was at the forefront of scientific exploration of psychoactive drugs and Benjamin participated in a salon in Berlin that was involved in exploring the properties, philosophical, psychological, medical and otherwise, of a variety of substances including mescaline, hashish and cocaine.  The writing is remarkable for its sometimes confessional honesty, its crazy warping of language and cognition, and the numerous textual illuminations of key Benjamin concepts such as aura, the mimetic faculty and so on.