The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

Drugs, whether demon-grass, mescaline, or heroin, play an important role throughout the novel, and symbolize cataclysmic change. This can first be seen in the beginning of the novel, when one of the first focuses is on the devil-grass, a desert grass thatwhen inhaled after burning, causes devastating visions or nightmares. The devil-grass is the only fire fodder within the barren desert, but the gunslinger is careful not to sit in the path of the smoke for fear that he will be lost to its effects.

While the gunslinger never directly feels the effects of the devil-grass, Nort, a citizen of Tull, dies from smoking and chewing the grass. His addiction causes him to live his final days in a mad, dissociated state, before finally dying in his own black vomit. The Man in Black raises Nort from the dead, only for him to still be addicted to the devil-grass in his second life. This addiction that transcends death symbolizes something sinister in the land. Considering the numerous Christian allusions throughout the novel, Nort’s resurrection is most directly associated with Jesus’s resurrection in the Bible, a fact demonstrated by the townspeople of Tull, who think that the Man in Black must be an angel from God. However, Biblical resurrections are associated with healing and wholeness, while the Man in Black’s resurrection of Nort leaves him just as broken as before. In this way, Nort’s addiction to the devil-grass even after being raised from the dead reveals that the Man in Black is not the Jesus-like figure that the townspeople presume.

While devil-grass, a naturally-occurring desert plant, represents the forces of darkness that are at work in the land, the gunslinger’s reliance on mescaline to achieve answers about his future symbolizes that not everything that comes from the land is evil. While devil-grass is a fictional plant known only in the gunslinger’s world, mescaline is a naturally-occurring hallucinogen that’s derived from the peyote cactusand has been used for centuries in shamanic rituals in Mexico and the southwestern United States. The gunslinger uses mescaline to interact with the oracle, and he claims that it helps him see things as they really are. Based off of this description, it would seem to suggest that mescaline helps the user see the truth of this land’s reality, while the devil-grass reveals the evil of the land.

Finally, there is the brief mention of heroin, another drug common to our world. While the oracle is giving the gunslinger prophecies about his future, she says that he will encounter a dark-haired man who “stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN” (149). The gunslinger doesn’t know what heroin is, but considering that it’s associated with demonic possession, similar to the devil-grass, it can be deduced that heroin’s role later in the series will reveal further dark iterations in the gunslinger’s world.