The following essay on Walter Benjamin’s writings and experimental protocols on hashish, opium and mescaline forms a kind of preamble to a series of articles on some of the aesthetic presuppositions of the War on Drugs in the United States and one of its precursors, Hitler’s War on Drugs: Rauschgiftbekämpfung [The Fight Against Drugs] in the Third Reich, itself a long-forgotten importation of American Prohibition wedded to Nazi racial hygiene and a police state apparatus ever-ready to invoke the ‘wholesome popular sentiment’ expressed in the National Socialist-realist aesthetic to legitimize and enforce the performance principle of German fascism. --http://www.alchemind.org/2JCL/2JCL21.htm
Benjamin made his living as a free-lance author and translator in Berlin, where he also took part in progressive German psychopharmacological research. A prolific critic, he was forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933. Emigrating to France, he became a member of the Institute of Social Research (which included Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollack, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Karl Wittvogel and others). Benjamin made an attempt to join the Institute when it emigrated from Paris to New York. In flight from the Gestapo he took his own life in the Spanish border-town of Port Bou on September 27,1940. Some of his most important publications include: Goethe's Elective Affinities, The Origin of German Trauerspiel, One-way Street, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Berlin Childhood in 1900 and the monumental Paris Arcades Project.
Walter Benjamin - Illuminations[1Book, Amazon US] Walter Benjamin, a German structuralist. Included in this book is his influential the 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".