Pink Floyd and drugs. The two go together like yin and yang, like David Hasselhoff and KITT, like any Roger Waters interview and the inevitable question about the Pink Floyd reunion. Or do they?

People think of Pink Floyd as a drug band. Either a band that were all on drugs, or that you can only enjoy on drugs. Nobody seems to think that it's entirely possible that you can enjoy Pink Floyd in a normal state of mind, or that the people who played the music weren't out of their brains on dope and acid.

The Floyd druggie image has been with them from the start and to be blunt, it hasn't really been deserved. Aside from Syd Barrett, who recorded with Pink Floyd for less than a tenth of their four decades on the planet, the Floyd have never had anything to do publicly with drugs. Sure, you can think that only someone who's high could think that Ummagumma is a good record, and you'd be right, but the Floyd have never been a drug band.

The problem is, and often was, Syd Barrett. His shadow hangs over everything else the Floyd have done since he left the group. Public perception is that the Floyd were a bunch of drugheads who lucked out and became as big as The Rolling Stones without really trying. And why? Because, to most people, one of them fried his head on drugs in the sixties and the early records are very, very weird--records that are talked about more than heard, and that's the core of the problem.

People think they know Pink Floyd, but they don't. They've heard of the early records, but they don't know them. They think that the stuff that didn't sell much is unknown because it's fried, unlistenable rubbish. (And only some of it--"Sysphus" for example--is). In some cases, the early records that are heard are often distorted by selection. Instead of the quirky pop of "Arnold Layne", they'll always play the uniformly odd "Bike" or the weirdest parts of "Astronomy Domine". It's easy--and lazy--to reduce anything complex to a set of simplistic clichés.

Syd was a man whose withdrawal from Pink Floyd was both very public and very messy. Stories of Syd's life are legion: walking from London to his mother's at Cambridge, the hair gel that melted under studio lights for a TV show that made his face look as if it were coming unglued, the vacant stare and those strange songs.

And the music speaks for itself. Even before drugs, Syd's songs were, at best, unique and unusual: curiously British and oddly whimsical interpretations of a reality that bore only a slight resemblance to the one most people live in. Therefore, Pink Floyd are this weird drug band.

In the British press at least, Syd Barrett was a spectre. Cheap copy recycled phrases like "Pink Floyd's Mad Genius" or "Rock Star Recluse", accompanied by a photograph of an old man walking down the street or cycling through Cambridge. Whenever the Floyd did anything (or didn't do anything, come to think of it) it became a handy excuse to reprint the old photographs and recycle the old clichés: when Wouldn't You Miss Me? and Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd were released, tabloids put a double page spread of the same old nonsense recycled from the sixties under the general description of him as a fried acid casualty living life as a reclusive wreck of a man.

Given the absence of The Cult Of Personality in the remaining members of The Floyd, known more to most people as a brand than a band of individuals (hence the apparent failure of Roger Waters' early post-Floyd solo career), it was easy for the media to conform to type and present Floyd based upon what they did know and what they last saw: semi-schizophrenic episodes that were seemingly triggered by excessive drug use and apocryphal tales from a man who had no interest in correcting any inaccuracies. The 'reclusive drug nutter' is a cheap, easy story to peddle. And it's an easy explanation for Syd's withdrawal from public life.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. It's fair to say a cult of sorts grew around Syd because of his work. That his legend grew in inverse proportion: the less he did, the bigger he got. Rumour and gossip and speculation expanded to fill the space where a normal artist would have made music and given interviews. For some, Syd's silence was compelling and added a mystery that simply wasn't there.

The Floyd themselves seemed ambivalent about it. The imagery the band employed is (and was) often surreal, or used an unusual juxtaposition of household objects in strange contexts, something that hardly dissuaded the lazy from challenging the established notion that the Floyd (and their fans) were mostly stoners. After all, a quick look at any of the covers--flying pigs, flaming men, giant stone heads, rivers of beds, and so forth, are hardly the stuff of conventional rock imagery. The short films that intermittently appear on television (criminally, the band's visual work has yet to be collected on DVD) present the band as largely anonymous, and use the vocabulary of the surreal and the mundane to create something strange and transcendental.

That dignified, stiff British upper lip did nothing to dispel the erroneous, established knowledge. Simply put, The Floyd are not--and never have been--a drug band. It's easy to declare the imagination and experimentation of the band, their music, and their imagery as the work of people who need drugs to achieve their artistic vision. But that is lazy and insulting. Perhaps, just perhaps, the other-worldly and experimental qualities of their work, the thing that draws us to them as being unlike every other act in the world, is not the result of mind-expanding drugs, but rather the result of their creative abilities.

Yes, you can take drugs and listen to them if that's what you want. I think most of the music sounds fantastic without drugs, and no amount of drugs can make rubbish sound good. And some people really have tried.

I am strictly agnostic in terms of viewing Pink Floyd as a drug band.

I really don't know for sure if listening to PF when high can truly take you to a different plane of existence, or whether in doing so, you're just as likely to find yourself waking up naked in a corn field hundred of miles from home with no recollection of how or why you got there.

I've never popped, snorted or smoked anything before ingesting Pink Floyd, and oddly most of the Floyd fans I've known over the years haven't either. Don't get me wrong; it's not like all my friends have been teetotalers. I've known lots of people who have been totally into drugs. But interestingly, nine times out of ten they're not really into Pink Floyd. Oh, they might claim to be. But then they'll say something utterly revealing like "Man, I love that song 'We Don't Need No Education'" or "My favourite album is the one with 'Money', 'Time', and 'Comfortably Numb' on it," and their bluff becomes patently obvious.

It is to my ultimate detriment as a guardian of the Floydian Fourth Estate that I can't conclusively comment--or even make an educated guess--on the "drugs or no drugs" argument.

Hypothetically, to satisfy my inner curiosity once and for all, I could always invite two friends over for an evening of listening to my favourite band, getting one of them completely baked without his knowledge.

Let's just call them Ed and Ned (hypothetically speaking, I mean). I could, hypothetically, give Ed and Ned a piece of chocolate cake. Ed and Ned both love chocolate cake. I could also spike Ned's cake with "white widow marijuana"--a particularly potent strain I found out about through a popular marijuana website that claims the plant's buds give the "strongest high around".

Now, let's imagine that once Ed and Ned finish their pieces of cake--or should I say, once Ned finishes his second, third and fourth piece of pot cake--I usher both friends into my listening room to listen to the whole Pink Floyd catalogue on my multiple thousand dollar audiophile home theater system (I wish this part weren't hypothetical). I could quite easily leave the room, putting a chair up against the doorknob, refusing to let them out until I hear the last strains of "High Hopes".

Now, assuming that purely-hypothetical Ned hasn't passed out from the effects of "white widow", or that this demon weed hasn't caused him to go completely psychotic and jump out the hypothetical window with a picturesque view of Central Park, and assuming Ed hasn't called the cops, I could let them out of the room, apologizing for locking them in. I would of course blame my hypothetical psychotic roommate Fred, who routinely smokes too much "white widow".

I could then question Ed and Ned about the music they had just listened to for the past 10 hours. With Ed talking about his love for "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Echoes" and Ned rambling incoherently about the glowing green orbs flying around the room, I could hypothetically write down the results of my experiment and publish them in an article such as this one.

Unfortunately, this discussion is purely hypothetical and I never, in any way, attempted to perform it in any form whatsoever. So I'm nowhere closer to the truth.

On the other hand, I do have anecdotal evidence that a Floyd concert may not be the best place to drop acid.

In 1994, as a 13-year old first time concert-goer, I ended up scoring three 32nd-row floor seats to see Pink Floyd. I had an incredible time. Unfortunately, not being on the tall side I barely saw a thing; everyone on the floor was standing up most of the time and all I could make out was the screen and the lasers.

I ended up mostly craning my neck, occasionally making out the top of David's head or one of Nick's drumsticks if I was lucky. It was still a once in a lifetime experience (because Pink Floyd never toured again), and when security succeeded in getting the perpetually excited audience to sit down occasionally, man, what a view of the band! I could not believe my almost luck.

Because I literally couldn't see the stage, I spend a lot of time listening intently while looking at those around me. I distinctly remember this longhaired, tie-dyed T-shirted "stoner" in front of me. Not only did he have long hair, his lengthy locks looked like they hadn't been washed in over a month, and his clothes gave off the impression that he had a phobia of washing machines. He was sitting directly in front of me, yet he spend the whole concert with his head between his legs, occasionally mumbling something to himself, seemingly on some sort of perpetually bad trip.

Periodically, those around him would take a break from reveling in Gilmour's guitar solos to ask him if he was all right. He would nod his head and then go back to curling in the fetal position in his chair.

And, to the contrary of what one might think, the music only made it worse! This poor Floyd fan actually seemed to regain his composure a bit during the set break, looking around at his surroundings like a deer finally out of the glare of a pair of high-powered high beams, only to totally flip out again when Gilmour and Co. came back out for the second set.

And make no bones about it, the dude was in bad shape. To this day, I am still not sure if he even made it out of the stadium without medical attention. In the mad dash for the exists once the show was over, I lost track of what happened to him, but I can only guess it may have involved a stretcher and a dose of a strong tranquilizer. He was freaking out quite badly by the time the finally notes of "Comfortably Numb" rang through the isles.

Does this mean that Pink Floyd is actually bad to listen to while doing drugs? That listening to "Echoes" could potentially cause a bad trip? Honestly, I'm not sure. The music did seem to have exacerbated one poor soul's drug-induced psychosis though. Maybe the moral of this story is to make sure not to eat any brown acid before attending a Floyd concert?

As I said earlier, I am really a fence sitter on this issue. That said, there was also the time that I bought a used copy of Ummagumma at a record show. The grizzled aging hippie who sold it to me remarked that when he was 13 he used to get stoned out of his mind while listening to "Several Species" over and over.

I politely thanked him, and as I was walking off thought to myself that listening to "Several Species" over and over couldn't be a healthy pursuit no matter what your mental state at the time.

So my only conclusion is that to actually enjoy most of the studio portion of Ummagumma, you have to be on some type of psychedelic. And I don't think anyone could make a valid argument against that fact. Hypothetically speaking, of course.