Leaving aside the licit kind that are supposed to make us better, there’s an awful lot of diverse experience that can be filed under the catch-all term of “drugs”, and much of it is awful. Attitudes to recreational drugs may be liberalising, but there remains a confusing picture about the nature of drug abuse and addiction. One person’s passing high is another’s journey into hell.

The hoary debate on legalisation or decriminalisation doesn’t really get to grips with the downside of drugs. It maintains, perhaps quite correctly, the pragmatic view that these things are going to happen anyway, so better to get them out in the open, where crime can be avoided and treatment delivered.

But there is also the real possibility, as Barney Hoskyns notes in Never Enough, his confessional memoir of heroin addiction, that if it had been any easier to get hold of the drug he may well have never quit. The question remains, though, and grows larger with each passing generation: if drug addiction is so bad – and its downsides are hardly a secret – why do otherwise rational people so often walk willingly into its feverish embrace?

In Hoskyns’s case it was a highly self-conscious decision, born in many ways from his love for junkie rock, the kind of knowingly hip attitudes and dangerous swagger struck by the likes of Lou Reed and New York Dolls.

Now a veteran music journalist and author of several well-respected music books and biographies, Hoskyns embarked on a three-year odyssey into heroin use and near lethal abuse as an uncertain 21-year-old who’d just left Oxford with a first in English. But then what 21-year-old isn’t uncertain underneath the false bravado? Very few of them, however, resort to intravenous drug use at the earliest opportunity.

Hoskyns seemed to revel in the destructive allure of heroin. As a teenager in the late 1970s, he had glimpsed the street decadence of downtown Manhattan, the city of Warhol’s heroin-fuelled Factory, and couldn’t wait to join the ranks of the elegantly wasted.

He became a music journalist on leaving university, writing for the NME, and despite it no longer being the drug of fashion, he almost simultaneously developed a serious heroin habit. Writing about drug highs is notoriously difficult to do well, or at least in a way that captures the imagination, but bookshelves heave with bleak dispatches from the frontline of dependency.

To his credit, Hoskyns does try to explain the numbing appeal of heroin, but he’s much more successful in conveying his interest in its image, to the extent that sometimes it’s unclear whether he still harbours an affection for the attendant myth that helped guide him towards heroin. He writes of trying to redeem the squalor of his life by turning his torment into something larger and more meaningful. “At a certain point you have to glorify your drug use in order to bear it, to look at the creature wasting away in the mirror and think, ‘You’re so cool’.”

There’s more than a hint of almost fond nostalgia for the milieu of low-rent posh bohemia in which he fed his habit. At least it’s with a cultural critic’s pride that he recalls scoring pure heroin from the cult writer Alexander Trocchi or his days shooting up with Nick Cave. On one occasion he saved the singer’s hair from setting alight when Cave was in a smacked-out stupor in Hoskyns’s flat.

The first half of the book is a powerful but sometimes frustrating recollection of these lost years; vivid, impressionistic but almost evasively disjointed. What makes it all the more curious is that Hoskyns quit heroin, and all forms of intoxicants including alcohol, when he was 24 and has been clean and sober ever since. He’s now 57 and yet his life, it seems, has been shaped by those three years of addiction and his determination to stay drug-free thereafter.

The second half of the book is an odd but interesting mixture of cultural criticism, learned philosophising – Barthes, Schopenhauer, Johnny Rotten – self-exploration and, gleaned from the countless meetings, shrinks and groups that Hoskyns has attended over the years, a conspicuous strain of therapeutic advice.

It’s an ambitious, intelligent book that seeks to explain the appeal of drugs and drug culture, as well as the existential angst that drove Hoskyns to find oblivion at the end of a needle. Yet for all his candour, Hoskyns is almost as fuzzy and distant a character at the end of the book as he is it at the beginning. What was the psychic wound that made him hate himself? Why does his youthful wrong turn haunt him so strongly more than 30 years later? I can’t help thinking that a little more conventional biography, and a little less intellectual wandering, would have made for a more telling account.

Luke Williams is an Australian journalist who decided to shine a light on his nation’s scourge of crystal meth, the drug famously made by Walter White in Breaking Bad, by moving in with a crystal meth dealer. The idea was to get the lowdown on the subculture and the deleterious effects of the drug.

However, there was a major flaw in the plan. The crystal meth dealer was a close friend of Williams and Williams himself had a history of drug abuse. Guess what? He soon became a paranoid, psychotic crystal methamphetamine addict. “Meth,” writes Williams at the outset of The Ice Age, “is the world’s strongest stimulant.”

He’s not kidding. But what it stimulates the user to do, according to Williams’s unblinking account, is sit in front of the TV, develop conspiratorial theories about the world and indulge in marathon sessions of masturbation, regardless of company. It’s a truly sordid descent that Williams records in a dispassionate way, shot through with little slivers of acid humour.

Which is quite different from the humour that informs Ayelet Waldman’s lively diary of taking acid, or rather microdoses of LSD. In A Really Good Day she details the vicious mood swings that bedevilled her adult years. Wrongly diagnosed as bipolar, she happens to read a scientific paper on the benefits to mood normalisation of taking 10 microgram doses of LSD – less than one-tenth of the amount that someone seeking a hallucinogenic trip would take.

Waldman, who is married to the novelist Michael Chabon, is a smart writer with an easy tone. As a suburban mother of four, she nicely plays up how unlike the archetypal acid tripper she is. The neurological and pharmaceutical science is well handled and she makes a strong case for medicinal LSD.

But perhaps what the book does best is demystify the chemical mythology of drugs. Even crystal meth started out as a treatment for depression. As Williams says, there are people who can take it, have an enjoyable time and then continue with their lives. The same is true of heroin and LSD. However, there are also the casualties, those people who should never go near drugs. The sad irony is they are often the ones who are least able to resist them.

• Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction by Barney Hoskyns is published by Constable (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

• The Ice Age: A Journey Into Crystal-Meth Addiction by Luke Williams is published by Scribe (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

• A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life by Ayelet Waldman is published by Knopf (£13.99). To order a copy for £11.89 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99