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Deborah Lopez

Mike Doughty isn't going to kid you: "I can't renounce drugs. I love drugs," he writes early in his new memoir, 'The Book of Drugs.' It's a frank chronicle of the early part of Doughty's career, from working as a doorman at the Knitting Factory in the early '90s to assembling, almost by accident, the musicians who became Soul Coughing to his deep and abiding dislike of the music they made together, all filtered through the lens of drugs. And a fair bit of sex. But mostly drugs, sometimes at the expense of sex.

Doughty's been clean now for years, and writing the memoir was more of an effort to collect "funny stories" than attempting to come to terms with his past -- which is not to say there's no introspection in 'The Book of Drugs.'

"I really tried to talk about all the bad s--- that I did or that I was involved with, just lapses of character and terrible moments that I totally engendered," Doughty tells Spinner. "So much of it is really salacious that I felt like, I've got to be hard on myself or I don't deserve to be writing this thing."

Doughty went on to tell us about sifting through his own (sometimes hazy) memories and how he feels, all these years later, about Soul Coughing.

Do you think the book glorifies drug use for all the impressionable children out there listening to singer-songwriters?

I don't know. From my own viewpoint, I didn't need to glorify it. They were glorious enough by themselves. I find the public-service stuff to talk people out of doing drugs very sad. People who want drugs will find drugs. There was an ad campaign in the subway, right before New Year's, there was a guy in a stretcher with a neck brace on and his face bloody, and it said, "This is not what he wanted to do three drinks ago." But if you drink like that, you are going to drink like that. It's very unlikely that the voice is going to intervene and go, 'Well, let's be nice to ourselves.' It's a compulsion.