Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
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Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.7
The psychedelic experience differs markedly to most previous drug states available to westerners up until that time. Opiates and cocaine sedate or cause euphoria and a sense of increased energy and confidence, but true psychedelics cause a simultaneous ontological explosion and implosion. They have an effect upon the mind that cannot be simply expressed, and which, indeed, can only be truly understood if experienced. And taking psychedelics seems to spur people on to describe, document, discuss and communicate their experiences, generally because they are so baffling and novel. The drugs are not addictive, metabolically, but their effects are so profound that many users return for more.
Wasson was so dumbfounded that he went back to repeat the experience just three days later:
I repeated the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
Many intellectuals, chemists and other inquisitive people were fascinated by the psychedelic drug mescaline in the 1950s. The active chemical was first isolated from the peyote cactus by Arthur Heffter, a German pharmacologist, in 1897. Ernst Spath, an Austrian chemist, synthesized the drug in the lab in 1919. Mescaline, or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, is the drug that startled author Aldous Huxley into writing The Doors of Perception, the 1954 psychedelic classic. Its chemical backbone is phenethylamine, the other category of drug that prompts hallucinations and mystical experiences in humans. Phenethylamine is as malleable in the hands of a skilled chemist as the tryptamine skeleton, and can be manipulated in similar countless ways to produce hallucinogenic stimulant drugs.
Mescaline, which has long been used by indigenous peoples for religious and divinatory purposes, exists naturally in hundreds of cacti species all over the Americas, with a few examples found in the Caribbean. The presence of the extra chemicals on the phenethylamine skeleton changes its subjective effects, and makes humans who take it hallucinate and experience extraordinary and unusual effects, such as a sense of wonder at the natural world, or indeed almost anything, much laughter and intimacy with friends, along with a feeling of peace and, often, profound reflection in the final stages of the drug.
Lawmakers worldwide have forbidden most humans from experiencing its effects, although it has been used for millennia, and its effects have been studied over long periods in traditional user groups and found to be largely harmless, even beneficial.
One of the first and most diverting documentations of the use of mescaline in its natural form was actually made in 1898, in The Contemporary Review, one of the oldest English publications in the world, founded in 1866. Havelock Ellis was a British physician and social reformer who became renowned for his a radically objective scientific approach to the study of sexuality. He wrote the first medical textbook on homosexuality, and though some of his stances are anachronistic and even objectionable today – he details man-boy relationships impassively, and was later a eugenicist – his writings contained an unflinching look at hidden aspects of modern life as it accelerated into the Victorian age. He moved in circles that later formed the Fabian Society, Britain’s oldest political think-tank.
His 1898 essay for the Contemporary Review, ‘Mescal, a New Artificial Paradise’,8 brought some of that modern and open-minded attitude to the world of psychoactive drugs. The first of his writings on mescaline, it is an evocative description of the experience and predates Aldous Huxley’s musings on the matter by almost half a century. Ellis used his own body as the laboratory of discovery, and his work was neither illegal nor hidden. On Good Friday the previous year, at around 2.30 p.m., Ellis had brewed up some peyote buttons in his rooms in the Temple, London, and swallowed the bitter tisane. Soon afterwards, he started hallucinating.
He described how he was gently assailed by benign, bejewelled visions. Unfamiliar and intricate flower petals and gauzy butterfly wings wreathed his mind, folding and morphing before his eyes, and behind his eyes, for it mattered not whether they were opened or closed, he said. Every colour of the spectrum was present, a vast profusion, and he delighted in this glorious aesthetic overdose as his visions transformed once more into porcelain and lace, lattice-style mouchrabieh woodcarvings of Cairo, towering Maori-style archetypes of architecture.
As time passed and the drug’s effects diminished, he found sleep elusive and became fixated on his own legs and the shadows on the ceiling. Thirteen hours later, he closed his notebook after documenting the whole day’s events. He soon introduced friends to the experience, who reported extraordinary visions and ‘a very marked sense of well-being’.
Almost sixty years later, at noon on Friday, 2 December 1955, a distinguished member of the British establishment had a similar experience. A well-dressed pair of men, with cut-glass accents so refined they could contain a small measure of sherry, sat in an austere, post-war British front room. For one of the men, that would remain the case. The other man was about to witness an exquisite aesthetic transformation and a baffling temporal shift that would change his worldview for many decades to come. Between them sat a microphone, and a TV crew for BBC1’s Panorama documentary series filming the event. It marks the emergence of psychedelic drugs from the laboratory and the clinic into mainstream culture.
Liberal (at the time; he had previously been Labour) MP Christopher Mayhew steepled his fingers nervously and leant back with an awful, uneasy élan as the BBC’s cameras rolled. He was preparing to be administered a strong, 400 mg oral dose of pure mescaline hydrochloride. The clock swung to midday. ‘I’m feeling perfectly fit at the moment and as sane as I ever am. And I’ll take the drug now,’ said Mayhew in his stiff starched collars and brilliantine. An hour later, the molecule had entered the MP’s brain, and his curtains, previously a mundane blue, now seemed to be a florid, splendid mass of writhing colour. He was most pleased by their appearance. His face, before a tense knot of feigned confidence, was now lit up with a beaming grin he couldn’t quite control. The friend who had given him the drug, the fabulously named Humphrey Fortescue Osmond, was a progressive psychiatrist who claimed his place in drug history by inventing the word ‘psychedelic’, meaning ‘mind manifesting’, in correspondence with fellow mescaline fan and author Aldous Huxley. Today, Osmond would be classed as a drug dealer, though he was serving up highs that were, at that time, legal.
They weren’t even considered highs, but rather medicines; Osmond successfully treated many alcoholics with LSD in the 1950s until the drug was banned. Mayhew couldn’t have been in safer hands, even if Osmond did proceed to oversee a bizarre interview in which the MP, once the drug took hold, became convinced he was travelling through time. ‘Now, I’m off again, Humphrey,’ he said. ‘In my period of time. I’m off again for long periods, but you won’t notice that I’ve gone away for …’
Osmond often asked Mayhew to repeat, much as one might ask a maniac the name of the president or the current prime minister to measure their level of derangement, the mystifying phrase ‘To be prosperous, a nation requires a safe and secure supply of wood’. The MP didn’t manage it very often, and, as time went on (and on, and on) Mayhew was extremely pleased with himself when he occasionally got it right. A more peculiar experience for a first-time user of mescaline would take
no little time and ingenuity to devise.
The MP’s eyes were alternately alive and entranced, and, even through the hazed-out filter of the black-and-white film, they sparkled in wonder at the beauty of his surroundings, or registered wild, amused bafflement at his inability to add a couple of numbers together. Most charmingly of all, he grinned brilliantly and with the shyness of a small boy startled at play by an adult as reality unravelled and he unsuccessfully attempted to subtract three from one hundred. In later stages of the interview, as Mayhew addressed the camera, his pupils flat, eerily blank discs of infinite blackness, he unnervingly lurched from sense to mystified incoherence and back, as he discussed time and space. ‘There is no absolute time, no absolute space, it is simply what we impose on outside space,’ he intoned, right on the edge of either a psychedelic breakthrough, or his sanity.
It is one of the strangest pieces of television ever made, and, sadly, one never broadcast, though it would later be sampled by Scottish techno band the Shamen. The BBC consulted a selection of priests, philosophers and sundry other mystics and thinkers who rejected as invalid the experiences of blissful eternity that Mayhew reported. Mayhew himself offered a brilliant deconstruction of their logical fallacy and the primacy of lived experience when he reflected upon the experiment later in his life in the documentary LSD: The Beyond Within: ‘The psychiatrists afterwards, and common sense, they all said: “This is nonsense. You couldn’t have had these experiences [of time expanding to eternity]. There was no time, as the film shows, there was no time for you to have them in.” And the psychiatrists would speak and I accept this, they would say I was simply showing the symptoms of what they call the disintegration of the ego, and I accept that, too. At the same time, they didn’t have the experience.’
The Mayhew experiment was among the first live ‘trip reports’ ever undertaken, where a user of a psychoactive compound documents his experiences for the benefit – whether entertainment or education – of others. No lab will suffice, no brain tissues in culture; the mind is the test tube where the reaction takes place, and this experience would inform many explorers that followed him. The fact that this outlandish mental expedition was embarked upon by a distinguished British politician and an internationally respected scientist reveals much about the journey away from a more liberal British stance towards the dysfunctional model of drug prohibition that now prevails worldwide.
LSD remained legal for more than twenty years after its creation, since its users tended to be psychiatrists, scientists and, in the main, other serious-minded researchers. LSD’s early users included James D. Watson and Francis Crick, who cracked the fundamental secret of life in March 1953 when they imagined the double helix form of DNA while under the influence of a small dose of the drug, have shaped society in ways unimaginable before its appearance.
Once it escaped the psychiatry ward and other medical institutions in the 1940s and 1950s, LSD was the first compound to enable mass drug use in the West during the 1960s. The mescaline eaten by Ellis was organic, natural and derived from peyote. Huxley, Osmond and Mayhew’s hydrochloride was lab-made, but synthetic – and the dose was 400 mg. LSD was active at just 100 μg (micrograms). One small lab could produce enough LSD to dose millions of people. In America, the drug plotted a course from the clinic to the street, just as it would in the UK. Author Ken Kesey, and Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were among those who evangelized about the substance, believing its use would herald a new age of human consciousness. Owsley Stanley, the world’s most exacting and prolific LSD chef who supplied the majority of America’s West Coast with LSD in the 1960s, claimed he made so much acid not because he wanted to change the world, but rather because it was almost impossible not to make vast quantities of the drug once the synthesis had been embarked upon. This was also the moment when synthetic, laboratory-made drugs replaced plant-based compounds as the substances most commonly used recreationally, with the exception of marijuana.
Marijuana was in many ways the ultimate gateway drug for both users and lawmakers in the 1960s. Earlier in the twentieth century it had been the drug most widely used by the new black urban American underclass and, later, the mainly white beatnik counterculture. Laws forbidding its use in the US had originally been inspired by an influx of Mexican immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, who smoked marijuana recreationally. But the enthusiastic uptake of the drug by white, educated, middle-class American youths and students, and its association with the Vietnam- and draft-rejecting hippy counterculture, helped produce the Establishment conviction that drug-taking was a profound threat to society.
The streets and airwaves were flooded with the sights and sounds of psychedelia through the mid-to-late 1960s. In 1965, the Beatles slyly snuck a reference to their first LSD experience into their number one record, ‘Help!’, in the curious lyric: ‘Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors’. Most of the UK had no idea what the drug was, or that it even existed, or that the Beatles had taken it. Neither did the Beatles, initially, since their drinks were spiked with it by their dentist after dinner one evening.9 But the drug soon entered the culture and it popularized, if not normalized, recreational drug use in that era and beyond, and revolutionized youth culture, sexual politics, music and art on both sides of the Atlantic. Times were changing; in Western Europe and the US drugs saturated everyday life.
LSD was banned in the UK in 1966. During the debate on legislating against the drug, even Britain’s staid law lords revealed themselves to be strangely fascinated by it, with one, Lord Saltoun, asking, ‘May I ask the noble Lord whether LSD-25 is the drug that enables you to remember what happened when you were born?10 ‘He was pithily answered by Lord Stonham, ‘My Lords, I think that the hallucinatory effect created is not to enable you to remember back like that, but rather to forget and imagine that you are otherwise and elsewhere than you in fact are. But, of course, LSD is not the only substance that can create that illusion: I have known people who thought they could fly on four pints of bitter.’ The Lords did not offer any evidence-based reasons for banning the drug; they merely mentioned newspaper reports of people jumping from buildings or into lakes after taking it, and a British Medical Journal editorial that said the drug should be banned just as amphetamine was.
LSD, mescaline and psilocybin were all banned that year, though there was little scientific proof of their physical harmfulness – bitter beer, meanwhile, remained legal. LSD was banned federally in the US in 1968 after the passage of the Staggers-Dodd Bill, which amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
In the 1960s, another synthetic drug had become popular in a more working-class context: speed. Amphetamines were the first drug other than alcohol and nicotine to be abused recreationally on a wide scale in the UK.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, amphetamines had been widely prescribed by doctors for fatigue, a fact that might go some way to explaining the gruesomely chipper and relentlessly chatty representation of the British squaddie in films of the era – over seventy million amphetamine tablets were used by British soldiers during the Second World War. Popular too with housewives looking for a break from drudgery or to lose weight, they were seldom used recreationally at this time, and supplies were either stolen from factories or diverted from legitimate prescriptions.
The mod cult, born in working-class districts around industrial centres, gained a foothold as conscription or National Service ended in 1960. These dapper working-class kids rejected post-war austerity for conspicuous consumption, their sharply tailored clothes and foreign motorcycles bought on credit. They forged what was to become a classic youth culture template: sexual freedom, new drugs, all-night dancing to music with alien, possibly African rhythms, and a wholesale and unwholesome disrespect for authority. They rejected booze as a drug for the old, the square, the badly dressed and those unable to dance stylishly, and presented the media with their first ready-made post-war drugs scandal. The UK government swiftly moved to ban amphetamines
in 1964, with the main effects being a rapid increase in their use, and higher prices following a twenty-five per cent reduction in availability.
In the mid-1970s, the drug was popular with dancers in the north of England who found that the metronomic beat of classic American soul rocked harder still when jacked up on these banned pills and powders. Punks loved speed, too, the drug’s aggression and stiletto-blade sharpness matching their staccato anti-funk, their jackhammer drums and three-chord rants, the perfect powdered fuck-you to the hippy dream of love, peace and self-indulgence and a stinging gob in the eye of goblin-obsessed prog-rockers. From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, other than a brief and ruinous flirtation with heroin in the latter decade, Britain’s drug scene was restricted to this limited chemical palette of uppers and downers, acid and hash, and cocaine for the wealthy.
Cocaine had first become widely popular in America in its powdered form in the 1970s, and was ubiquitous among musicians and the wealthy as the acid daze came to an end. Discos of the era, such as New York’s glamorous Studio 54, were packed with prancing celebrities with pristinely powdered noses, while the far funkier Loft, run by DJ David Mancuso, took dancers on an all-night journey into the light in a ritualized, almost ceremonial urban setting where LSD was the favoured intoxicant. For all their differences, the contexts in which these drugs were taken, though, were similar – polysexual, multi-racial, music-driven. The cocaine that powered such venues enriched Colombian narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar by three billion dollars in 1989, and the undoubted glamour of the scene was presumably lost on the thousands of Colombians slain by the smugglers. In the 1980s came crack, the more potent, smokeable form of the drug that has ravaged inner cities, where it found favour for its lower price and harder hit. As harder substances replaced psychedelics, problems associated with drug use grew, including addiction, overdoses and inner-city crime.