The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  ‘If there is any one single investigator in America worth seeing,’ Huxley assured me, ‘it is Dr Leary.’

  There had been quite a bit of free-floating acid around Greenwich Village that winter, but mostly restricted to the ‘beats’ of the East Village and a few wealthy Manhattan cats to whom they sold it. It was legal, of course, in those days, and this considerably reduced the paranoia level. ‘Taking acid’ had not yet become the popular pastime of a turned-on youth, for such didn’t exist. The world of the late fifties and early sixties was unimaginably drab and dreary. It was still a tight little conformist world of roles and rules and rituals. Our culture had drowned itself in a sea of contradictory and conflicting voices. And, politically, Dulles & Co. had tied the Cold War noose around all our throats. We had finally conned ourselves into submission to some nameless fear. Western civilization lived under the paranoia of the mushroom cloud. Liberal and religious values had eroded to the point of insignificance. Twentieth-century mass society showed the political inhumanity inherent in technological life-worlds. And it was perhaps inevitable that some of us took to acid (and later to myths and ancient stories) to seek a formula that would turn the surrounding world to dust and reveal the portals of paradise.

  But I think that for perhaps the majority of the avant-garde, in this very early period, LSD was still something of an ‘exotic’, whose effects could not be taken for granted. LSD involved risk. It was anarchistic; it upset our apple carts, torpedoed our cherished illusions, sabotaged our beliefs. It was something you had to guard against, or you might explode. It was a difficult experience to assimilate. It was impossible to integrate with the ordinary world. And so on and so forth.

  ‘Turning on’ had not yet become a natural part of our existence, a symbol of certain lifestyles, or philosophy, or religion, or personal liberation. Yet there were some, of my circle, who, with Rimbaud, could say, ‘I dreamed of crusades, senseless voyages of discovery, republics without a history, moral revolution, displacement of races and continents: I believed in all the magics.’

  And our Crusade was to launch LSD on the world! While other artists/visionaries/seers had been content to observe the world, the New Message was simple: if things are not right, then change them!

  We would make the dynamic life-giving adventure exploring Inner Space the New Romance! We would set off an explosion that would sweep through our culture and give birth to a New Radicalism!

  We would even found a drug-based religion, whose message would be ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!’ We would proclaim the Reign of the Happily Integrated Modern Soul!

  The Man Who Turned on the World, 1973

  Stuart Walton

  Out of It – 1

  LEARY WAS A Harvard psychology lecturer who, during a visit to Mexico in 1960, took psilocybin mushrooms and declared he had had a religious epiphany. In 1961, in the atmosphere of feverish curiosity fomented by Hubbard, he took LSD and had another spiritual experience. He, too, now began insisting that everybody should take it, much to the disquiet of his employers. Leary got away with this increasingly obsessive campaign for two years before Harvard, fearful that its psychology department was being brought into disrepute, finally dismissed him.

  Wondering just what had taken them so long, he embarked on his self-styled career as the High Priest of LSD, enjoying to the utmost the role of dropout academic consultant to the hippie movement. His literary output during this period is now of no consequence whatsoever, for the reason that he himself later recanted the acid faith, disowning virtually all the subversive pronouncements of his post-Harvard career (the most famous of which – ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out’ – was the ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely’ of its day). He is reliably reputed to have grassed on several former associates, and happily provided information that led to the arrest of those who had helped him escape from prison while serving a term for possession of cannabis. When he died in 1997, having written a final book on the subject of dying, his last wish was for his ashes to be sent into extraterrestrial orbit. Leary was no guru, but a man of strikingly mediocre intellect whose career stands as a salutary caution against the fake appropriation of tribal cosmology in societies long grown out of it, and who – to borrow Lenin’s famous sneer at the bourgeois Western Marxist – was more likely viewed by the mud-caked crowds at Woodstock as a ‘useful idiot’.

  Out of It, 2001

  Howard Marks

  Nazi Narcotics

  I WENT TO Heidelberg.

  I passed by Weinheim, the home where my old mate Werner Piper used to live. Werner devotes himself to archiving dope music and literature, wearing dreadlocks provided by Frankfurt’s Korean Institute of Plastic Hair, and systematic psychedelic adventuring. He was the Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I called him.

  ‘Werner, are the Nazis still in charge?’

  ‘Absolutely, Howard. But instead of coming from Frankfurt and Hamburg and eating boys, they come from Boise and eat hamburgers and frankfurters. Heidelberg serves as headquarters for the United States Europe and Seventh Army (HQ USAAREUR/7A), the Central Army Group (CENTAG), and the Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force (4ATAF).’

  ‘What exactly do these American Nazis run, Werner?’

  ‘Drugs, basically. The agenda is slightly more sophisticated: control the minds of the people through dope and misinformation. If it doesn’t work, kill them. That’s why the German and American Nazis are always fighting wars.’

  ‘Hold on, Werner. The Brits like war, too. And we ain’t Nazis.’

  ‘You Brits were Nazis, right at the very top. England and Scotland’s first king was James I. His daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, came to Heidelberg, where she shagged and married out King Frederick V. Since then, you Brits have been controlled by Nazis – House of Hanover and all that. Britannia might have ruled the waves, but Nazis ruled Britannia. Even Queen Victoria was educated here in Heidelberg. The British Empire was a totally Nazi trip. Look at the Opium Wars. Look at the countries the Brits colonised: India, Burma, Jamaica, Nigeria: all major dope producers. Look at Bermuda, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands: all major money launderers.’

  ‘So why did we fight two world wars against each other if we’re the same side?’

  ‘To get rid of our arseholes, Howard. Every country has them.’

  ‘But how do the Nazis control dope? I thought we dope dealers were in charge of that.’

  ‘That’s why there’s a war on drugs. The Nazis’ main problem was being unable to discover a drug that turned individuals into unthinking and aggressive murderers. Every drug just seemed to turn people on and chill them right out. The only partial exceptions were American cigarettes and European shite lager. So that’s why Heidelberg has been the centre of booze for several centuries, since 1600, in fact. And that’s why Heidelberg has been Germany’s tobacco centre since 1945, when the US Army took over Heidelberg’s tobacco factory, Landfried House, next to the railway station. The Yanks cut off the excellent quality Turkish and local tobacco supplies, and got us hooked on Virginian rubbish. But far more interesting for you, I would have thought, is the German Pharmacy Museum. It’s in Heidelberg Castle.’

  Werner was right. The fixtures and fittings inside Apothecary Tower were most accommodating: prescription counters, bowls for bloodletting and medicine chests. I gazed at dope manufacturers’ Aladdin’s Caves of distillation heads, glass retorts, percolators, crucibles, blowpipes, pipettes, siphons, pestles, mortars, scales, stone ball weights, powder mixers, liquorice graters, pill machines, troughs and boards for cutting chopping and crushing, sifters, medicine spoons, tincture squeezers, sieves, ointment mills, measuring containers, tab dividers, pastille presses, urine glasses, breast pumps and pewter enema syringes. Glass cabinets were crammed full of the greatest varieties of dope I’d ever witnessed in my life: thousands of brain-tickling chemicals: friendly plant stuff like opium, morphine and hash; unfriendly plant stuff like curare (South American arrow poison) and a really mind-blowing collection of drugs of a
nimal origin, including powdered toads, ground lizards and parts of human mummies. An aphrodisiac subdivision yielded the once-prized castor, secreted from the anal glands of beavers. (Imagine having to suck a beaver’s arse just to get a hard-on.)

  We entered a shrine full of offerings, largely toads, for the gods of convalescence. It was explained that toads symbolised female genitals.

  Covering the walls were paintings of St Sebastian, St Rosalia, St Vitus and St Rochus, the patron saints of the plague; St Damien, the patron saint of pharmacists; and, holding a urine glass in his right hand, St Cosmas, the patron saint of piss-testing physicians. Dominating the paintings was one with a background of jars of dope and a foreground of a guy with a halo holding up a pair of dope scales. It was the man himself: Jesus Christ, the highest dope dealer of them all.

  Before we left, I noticed that a spotlighted offering was of a mixture of unicorn-horn powder, aloe wrapped in ape skin and bezoar stone (calcifications found in the entrails of Persian goats). A company calling themselves Merck AG (Darmstadt) had donated it, along with the most impressive chunk of the dope display we’d seen. These guys must have been really hardcore. Got to get to the bottom of this one.

  I went to Darmstadt.

  During the middle of the seventeenth century, Friedrich Jacob Merck was born and bred in a place called Pig Castle (Schweinfurt). He was such a dedicated worshipper of drugs that he set up a dope-manufacturing company called Angel Pharmacy. Merck decided to house the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt, which is German for ‘City of Entrails’. (Back to the goats.) The company has been in the possession of the family ever since.

  By the turn of the century, Merck’s 1,000 employees were busily manufacturing a wide variety of different chemical products. The Pharmacy of Angels survived World War I remarkably well, but was occupied by the American Army immediately World War II ended. Within a month, the Pharmaceutical Angels were manufacturing dope again, with the Yanks in charge. Merck’s product range now comprises over 20,000 different items and has product facilities in over twenty-five countries. In addition, 170 companies operate on behalf of Merck in a further forty-six countries. Merck’s propaganda omits to mention that in 1912 the Pharmaceutical Angels of Darmstadt, the City of Entrails, discovered and synthesised Ecstasy. A patent for manufacturing MDMA was granted in 1914. Merck’s official blurb also fails to disclose that for several decades Merck has sold far more cocaine hydrochloride than all the Colombian cartels put together.

  Furthermore, Europe’s answer to NASA is the European Space Agency (ESA) and is controlled by the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), Darmstadt, the City of Entrails. Germans like dicks. Psychedelic mushrooms and space rockets both look like dicks. Germans discovered LSD, MDMA, etc. It was a German, Herman Gainswindt, who, in 1891, first conceived of a space rocket, a giant dick with a little man in it being thrust into the moon, the mother symbol. V-2s were unmanned rocket bombs, guided missiles, successfully aimed at London during the last war. They were pioneered at Darmstadt, City of Entrails. Now, every condom manufactured in Germany is tested in Darmstadt, City of Entrails. Until 1945, Wernher von Braun headed the Nazi V-2 programme. Since then, von Braun and his mates have changed their diet from wurst to apple pie. Otherwise, nothing’s changed.

  Nazi Narcotics, 2001

  Dominic Streatfield

  Cocaine

  WHILE THE PRICE of cocaine is high for consumers, it is considerably higher for producers. Here in South America the dangers of the drug are a lot more scary than the occasional perforated nasal septum. The unfeasible amounts of hard currency generated by the drug ricochet around this continent, creating casualties wherever they go. In the last twenty-five years alone, cocaine-generated cash has been responsible for coups d’état in Bolivia and Honduras; has infiltrated the governments of the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Haiti, Cuba, and every single Latin American country without exception; has helped to fund a guerrilla war in Nicaragua (creating one of the most embarrassing scandals in the CIA’s history); and has prompted the US invasion of Panama. In the late 1980s, traffickers in Peru and Bolivia were so wealthy that they offered to pay off their countries’ national debts; meanwhile, Colombia’s traffickers were so powerful that they declared war on their own country – and brought it to its knees. At the time of writing, the cocaine industry is creating riots in Peru, policemen are being kidnapped and tortured to death because of it in Bolivia and, if I was a betting man, I would put money on the cocaine industry cranking Colombia’s ongoing civil war to its highest levels for the last thirty-six years within the next six months. At this very moment the governments of Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela are stationing troops on their Colombian borders to handle the expected influx of refugees.

  All this trouble, just because of cocaine? The drug you take on special occasions, in the lavatory with your mates, when out clubbing? The drug you take because it’s a laugh? Crazy, isn’t it?

  Cocaine, 2001

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Prozac Nation

  NOT TOO LONG ago, my friend Olivia brought her cat to the veterinarian because she was chewing clumps of fur off her back and vomiting all the time. The doctor looked at Isabella and immediately diagnosed the animal with something called excessive grooming disorder, which meant that the cat had grown depressed and self-absorbed, perhaps because Olivia’s boyfriend had moved out of the apartment, perhaps because Olivia was traveling so much. At any rate, the vet explained, this was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Isabella couldn’t stop cleaning herself just as certain people can’t stop vacuuming their apartments, or washing their hands all the time like Lady Macbeth. The vet recommended treating the cat with Prozac, which had proved extremely effective in curing this condition in humans. A feline-size prescription was administered.

  Now, you have to understand that Olivia had been on and off Prozac and its chemical variants for a couple of years herself, hoping to find a way to cope with her constant bouts of depression. Olivia had also recently insisted that her boyfriend either go on Prozac or take a hike because his sluggishness and foul moods were destroying their relationship. And I had, of course, been on Prozac for more than six years at that point. So when she called to tell me that now Isabella was on it too, we laughed. ‘Maybe that’s what my cat needs,’ I joked. ‘I mean, he’s been under the weather lately.’

  There was a nervous edge to our giggling.

  ‘I think this Prozac thing has gone too far,’ Olivia said.

  ‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘Yes, I think it has.’

  I never thought that depression could seem funny, never thought there’d be a time when I could be amused thinking that of the $1.3 billion spent on prescriptions for Prozac last year (up about 30 percent since 1992), some of them might even be for our household pets, who are apparently as susceptible to mental trauma as the rest of us. I never thought I would amazedly read about Wenatchee, Washington, a town known as ‘the Apple Capital of the World,’ a place where 600 out of its 21,000 residents are all on Prozac, and where one psychologist has come to be known as ‘the Pied Piper of Prozac.’ I never thought that the New York Times, reporting on the eleven million people who have taken Prozac – six million in the United States alone – would declare on its front page that this constituted a ‘legal drug culture.’ I never thought there would be so many cartoons with Prozac themes in the New Yorker, illustrating, among other things, a serotonin-happy Karl Marx declaring, ‘Sure! Capitalism can work out its kinks!’ I never thought that in the same week I would stare down at both a Newsweek cover with a large, missile-like capsule beneath the caption ‘Beyond Prozac’ and a New Republic cover of some shiny, happy people enjoying their sunny lives above the headline ‘That Prozac Moment!’

  I never thought that this antidote to a disease as serious as depression – a malady that easily could have ended my life – would become a national joke.

  Prozac Nation, 1996

  CHAPTER TWO

  OUT OF IT

  Howard Marks />
  Over-the-Counter Highs

  MARKETED AS MANDRAX in the United Kingdom and easily obtained on prescription, methaqualone became the 1960s London substance of sexual preference. A fair percentage of thirty-year-old readers were probably conceived as a direct result of Britain’s nocturnal drug of choice shifting from Horlicks to Mandrax. Being stoned qualified as a British domestic comfort: safe and exciting. Notting Hill Gate stoners heard tales of globe-trotting hippies sleeping into corpses as they drove off Greek island roads keeping their eyes on the dawn. Foreign hospitals weren’t too much fun. Neither were foreign jails, even before Midnight Express. The music was better at home. European rock was absolute shite. There was no need to travel.

  However, during 1967, Mick Jagger was busted and jailed in England for being in possession of legally obtained Italian speed. Although the appeal-court judges eventually cut him loose, the incident convinced pursuers of altered mind states that being a bombed-out tourist abroad was considerably safer than staying at home minding one’s business. Even worse, the authorities made the worrying discovery that Mandrax took the fun out of television ratings. They stopped doctors prescribing it. Gee’s Linctus is not much of an aphrodisiac, and the hallucinations on Feminax are well overrated. So, the heads took to travel.

  Nowadays, travellers to foreign lands tend to indulge themselves with New Age worries such as catching a strong dose of clap or the cost of mobile-phone diversions from one’s unattended office. I remember so well the days when foreign travel fulfilled with remarkable efficiency my desires to get off my face. It was so easy in the sixties and seventies: catch a cheap flight to Ibiza, walk from the Farmacia airport to a beach full of sex, lie on the tidemark, drop a Dormidina, let my wet dreams ooze into reality, have a happy night, and be woken at dawn by Guardia Civil attacking me with pointed sticks. It was what going abroad was all about. Spain for downers, Italy for uppers, South America for cactus and coca preparations, Morocco for marijuana tea, and up the Khyber for edible, drinkable and smokable hash suppositories.