Gus Van Sant beware: films about drugs are not the same as druggie films

The prospect that Gus Van Santis to make a film of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fills me with mild trepidation. On the one hand Van Sant has form with the drug experience – the trippy scenes in Drugstore Cowboy, although mildly ludicrous, made an honest stab at realising the nature of being whacked out. On the other hand, once you try and depict the more exotic forms of intoxication, you are open to making a big fool of yourself.

The thing is: films about drugs are not the same as good druggy films. As a student, I experimented for three years with the notion that watching films under the influence of the major or minor hallucinogens was a good way of getting to their heart, exposing both hidden strengths and flaws.

So, for example, I learned that no amount of LSD could turn Easy Rider into a good film, whereas – and I don't think I'm the first to have discovered this – Apocalypse Now becomes even more enjoyable under the influence of a jazz cigarette or two, and in fact can even be considered a substitute for the stuff if none is to hand. Stop Making Sense on acid is an experience I will treasure to the end of my days. Whereas all the enormous hash brownie I had before seeing Prospero's Books did was rob me of the articulacy I needed afterwards to express my disgust at Peter Greenaway's pretentious buggering-up of Shakespeare. Never again, I decided.

Anyway, the obvious drug films – Roger Corman's The Trip springs to mind (Peter Fonda - in a laundrette: "let's communicate with our minds") – are usually cynical entrapment exercises designed to part idiot stoned students such I once was from their cash. (See Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or rather, don't.)

Will Self and I seem to be the only people in the country who hate the film Trainspotting (the book's a very different animal) because it makes heroin use out to be hip and transgressive. The best drug films are the ones where the drug use takes place just off to one side. The film critic Antonia Quirke has pointed out that Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye has Elliot Gould playing Marlow as the most stoned detective ever (check out the scene where he feeds his cat), and she's right.

Meanwhile, Walter Salles is continuing to say, as he has done for at least three years now, that he's going to be filming that benzedrine-fuelled nightmare ("that's not writing; that's typing" – Truman Capote), On the Road. On the corny old grounds that the bad book makes the good film, we may well be in for a classic. But I think I'll pass.

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