The escapologists. by Joe Morgan

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The art, skill, or practice of escaping

The Escapologists

5. INTRO

22. SHULGIN

8/16/17/38/52/64. THE BEATLES

10. HOFFMAN

56. FREUD

48. CRICK

68. SAGAN

THE VAST MAJORITY OF SOCIETY’S INNOVATORS AND 6

DRUG

It is noteworthy that probably the vast majority of society’s innovators and benefactors were drug users. There is all too many we simply do not have the data on, and in the current political climate it is highly unlikely any studies will be done on this. In much of human history, drugs have been so much the norm as to not warrent mention regarding this or that personage. Has this held humans back? Is it not oppressive governments and laws which have impeded progress, rather than the selection of human pastimes? In some cases, drug use has been far more than a pastime. To many of these people, their drug use has been an integral part of their work. Could Lewis Carrol create Alice, if he did not use mushrooms? Could Picasso paint Picasso without opium? Would Paracelcus have learned to refine drugs, were he not an addict? Could the Rolling Stones have become “the greatest Rock-and-Roll band in the world”, if they did not get stoned?

es·cap·ol·o·gy

AND BENEFACTORS WERE

The art, skill, or practice of escaping

The

10 The Beatles’ story is inextricably linked with drugs. From their early prefame days on Benzedrine and Preludin, to the flower-power era of LSD, and onto harder drugs as the 1960s ended, here’s a broadly-chronological overview of what they took and when.

Beatles I never felt any responsibility, being a so-called idol. It’s wrong of people to expect it. What they are doing is putting their responsibilities on us, as Paul said to the newspapers when he admitted taking LSD. If they were worried about him being responsible, they should have been responsible enough and not printed it, if they were genuinely worried about people copying. John Lennon, 1967

BENZEDRINE John Lennon is quoted as saying his first encounter with drugs was the use of the stimulant Benzedrine, via a somewhat unorthodox method.

The first drugs I ever took, I was still at art school, with the group – we all took it together – was Benzedrine from the inside of an inhaler. John Lennon,

They were introduced to the drug by the beat poet Royston Ellis, whom The Beatles backed in Liverpool one night for a poetry reading.

According to George Harrison, “Ellis had discovered that if you open a Vick’s inhaler you find Benzedrine in it, impregnated into the cardboard divide.” According to Lennon, “everyone thought, ‘Wow! What’s this?’ and talked their mouths off for a night.”

In later years Royston Ellis claimed to have inspired The Beatles’ Paperback Writer. He also played a part in Polythene Pam, which was about his girlfriend Stephanie. John Lennon reportedly had an encounter with the pair in Jersey in August 1963 following a concert.

[Polythene Pam] was me, remembering a little event with a woman in Jersey, and a man who was England’s answer to Allen Ginsberg, who gave us our first exposure – this is so long – you can’t deal with all this. You see, everything triggers amazing memories. I met him when we were on tour and he took me back to his apartment and I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn’t wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about. John Lennon,

Paul McCartney had another experience with Benzedrine, though several years later. When living with Jane Asher‘s family in London in the mid-1960s, her father, Dr Richard Asher, told McCartney once again how the drug could be extracted from an inhaler.

Dr Asher loved to shock his family. Once, when Paul had a bad cold, Dr Asher wrote him a prescription for a nasal inhaler and showed him how to use it. ‘You take off the top and place it on your little finger, like so.’ He demonstrated. ‘Then you take a sniff with each nostril as per normal; then, after you’ve finished with it, you can unscrew the bottom and eat the Benzedrine.’ Peter shuffled his feet nervously and Paul grinned, not knowing how much he could confide in the good doctor. Paul: ‘We learned about that stuff up in Liverpool but hearing it coming from him was quite strange.’ Barry Miles

HOFMANN

imagination.

Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Hofmann was also the first person to isolate, synthesize, and name the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin. He authored more than 100 scientific articles and numerous books, including LSD: My Problem Child. In 2007 he shared first place, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, in a list of the 100 greatest living geniuses, published by The Telegraph newspaper.

Albert Hofmann, joined the pharmaceutical-chemical department of Sandoz Laboratories, located in Basel as a co-worker with professor Arthur Stoll, founder and director of the pharmaceutical department. He began studying the medicinal plant squill and the fungus ergot as part of a program to purify and synthesize active constituents for use as pharmaceuticals. His main contribution was to elucidate the chemical structure of the common nucleus of Scilla glycosides (an active principle of Mediterranean Squill). While researching lysergic acid derivatives, Hofmann first synthesized LSD on November 16, 1938. The main intention of the synthesis was to obtain a respiratory and also a circulatory stimulant (an analeptic). It was set aside for five years, until April 16, ...Affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizzi1943, when Hofmann decided to ness. At home I lay down and sank into a not so unpleasant take a second look at it. While reintoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated i synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed just a small amount of In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the the drug through his fingertips and daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an undiscovered its powerful effects. He interrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary described what he felt as being: shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. Some two hours later this condition faded away.

January 11, 1906

ALBERT April 29, 2008

Less than an hour later, Hofmann experienced sudden and intense changes in perception. He asked his laboratory assistant to escort him home and, as use of motor vehicles was prohibited because of wartime restrictions, they had to make the journey on a bicycle. On the way, Hofmann’s condition rapidly deteriorated as he struggled with feelings of anxiety, alternating in his beliefs that the

Hofmann famously performed a self-experiment to finaly determine the true effects of LSD, intentionally ingesting 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms) of the substance, an amount he predicted to be a threshold dose (an actual threshold dose is 20 micrograms).

BICYCLE

“... little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing them-

next-door neighbour was a malevolent witch, that he was going insane, and that the LSD had poisoned him. When the house doctor arrived, however, he could detect no physical abnormalities, save for a pair of incredibly dilated pupils. Hofmann was reassured, and soon his terror began to give way to a sense of good fortune and enjoyment, as he later wrote...

The events of the first LSD trip, now known as “Bicycle Day”, after the bicycle ride home, proved to Hofmann that he had indeed made a truly significant discovery: a psychoactive substance with extraordinary potency, capable of causing significant shifts of consciousness in incredibly low doses. Hofmann foresaw the drug as a powerful psychiatric tool; because of its intense and introspective nature, he couldn’t imagine anyone using it recreationally. Bicycle Day is increasingly observed in psychedelic communities as a day to celebrate the discovery of LSD.

selves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...”

April 19, 1943

intentional exposure.

The celebration of Bicycle Day originated in DeKalb, IL., in 1985, when Thomas B. Roberts, then a Professor at Northern Illinois University, invented the name “Bicycle Day” when he founded the first Bicycle Day celebration at his home. Several years later, he sent an announcement made by one of his students to friends and Internet lists, thus propagating the idea and the celebration. His original intent was to commemorate Hofmann’s original, accidental exposure on April 16, but that date fell midweek and was not a good time for the party, so he chose the 19th to honour Hofmann’s first

DAY

Are there lessons we can learn from the past insofar as what went wrong with the research, why it was stopped, that we should be attentive to, so mistakes are not repeated? On November 26, 1996, Charles Grob, M.D. visited with Albert Hofmann in Rheinfelden, outside of Basel, Switzerland, where Dr. Hofmann was recovering from knee surgery. The following are excerpts from their conversation. CG: Dr. Hofmann, thank you for speaking with me. I would like to tape record our discussion, with the understanding that you will be provided a transcript for review and approval before publication. I would first like to ask how old are you currently, and how is your health? AH: I am 90 years old, and I am feeling very fit. I had knee surgery last month, but am now doing very well. The rehabilitation hospital has provided excellent physical therapies for my knee, and I am almost

AH: I think there are many good signs. After years of silence, there have recently been some investigations in Switzerland and Germany, and also in the United States. We had a meeting in Heidelberg last year (European College for the Study of Consciousness), and there were many good presentations. In Heidelberg I enjoyed meeting with Rick Doblin and Professor Nichols (of the Heffter Research Institute), and I think both of their organizations are doing fine work. Their approach appears to be quite different than that of some of their predecessors from several decades ago. CG: Are you referring to Dr. Leary?

A Conversation with Albert Hofmann

CG: I would like to speak with you about your views on psychedelic drugs. To start with, do you believe it is possible to re-establish psychedelic research as a respectable scientific field?

AH: Yes. I was visited by Timothy Leary when he was living in Switzerland many years ago. He was a very intelligent man, and quite charming. I enjoyed our conversations very much. However, he also had a need for too much attention. He enjoyed being provocative, and that shifted the focus from what should have been the essential issue. It is unfortunate, but for many years these drugs became taboo. Hopefully, these same problems from the Sixties will not be repeated.

CG: From the vantage point of where we are now, in the late 1990s, what implications do psychedelic drugs have to the field of psychiatry?

ready to go home to Rittematte. I am in very good condition, and swim in the indoor pool every day. I will miss the swimming, but I am looking forward to going home soon.

AH: I believe that shortly after LSD was discovered, it was recognized as being of great value to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. It was not considered to be an escape. It was a very important discovery at that time, and for fifteen years it could be used legally in psychiatric treatment and for scientific study in humans. During this time, Delysid, the name I gave to LSD, was used safely, and was the subject of thousands of publications in the professional literature. Actually, just last week, I had visitors from the Albert Hofmann Foundation, to whom I gave all of the original documentation, which had been stored at the Sandoz Laboratories. This early work was very well documented, and shows how well research with LSD went until it became part of the drug scene in the 1960s. So, from originally being part of the therapeutic pharmacopeia, LSD became a drug of the street and inevitably it was made illegal. Because of this reputation, it became unavailable to the medical field, and so the research, which had been very open, was stopped. Now it appears that this research may start again. The importance of such investigations appears to be recognized by the health authorities, and so it is my hope that finally the prohibition is coming to an end, and the medical field can return to the explorations which were forced to stop thirty years ago. CG: What recommendations would you give to researchers now who want to work with these substances?

CG: So, you would say that it is very important that the researcher, the psychiatrist, know first hand the psychedelic experience? AH: Absolutely, absolutely. Before it can be used in clinical work, it must most definitely be taken by the psychiatrist. From the very first reports and guidelines written for LSD, this was clearly stated. And this remains of utmost importance today.

CG: Are there lessons we can learn from the past insofar as what went wrong with the research, why it was stopped, that we should be attentive to, so mistakes are not repeated?

AH: Yes, if it would be possible to stop their improper use, their misuse, then I think it would be possible to dispense them for medical use. But as long as they continue to be misused, and as long as people fail to truly understand psychedelics and continue to use them as pleasure drugs and fail to appreciate the very deep, deep, psychic experiences they may induce, then their medical use will be held back. Their use on the streets has been a problem for more than thirty years.

On the streets the drugs are misunderstood, and accidents occur. This makes it very difficult for the health authorities to change their policies and allow medical use. And although it should be possible to convince the health authorities that in responsible hands psychedelics could be used safely in the medical field, their use on the streets continues to make it very hard for the health authorities to agree. CG: It appears that young people are once again becoming interested in psychedelics and MDMA. We also have this new phenomenon of the rave, where young people take substances like MDMA and dance all night. What is your view on why these young people seek out such experiences? How can we respond to what they are doing?

AH: When LSD was distributed legally by Sandoz, there was a little brochure which was given together with the Delysid, which explained how LSD could be used. As an aid to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and also as a means for psychiatrists themselves to experience these extraordinary states of mind. It was specifically stated on the package insert that the psychiatrist who was interested in using Delysid should first test it on himself.

AH: This is a very, very deep problem of our time in that we no longer have a religious basis in our lives. Even with religion, with the churches, they are no longer convincing with their dogma. And people need a deep spiritual foundation for their lives. In older times it was religion, with their dogmas, which people believed in, but today those dogmas no longer work. We cannot believe things which we know are not possible, that are not real. We must go on the basis of what we know, that everybody can experience. On this basis, you must find the entrance to the spiritual world. Because many young people are looking for meaningful experiences, they are looking for this thing which is the opposite of the material world. Not all young people are looking for money and power. Some are looking for a happiness and satisfaction which is of the spiritual world, not the materialistic

world. They are looking, but there are no sanctioned paths. And, of course, one of the ways young people are using is with psychedelic drugs. CG: What would you say to young people? AH: What I would say would most certainly be: Open your eyes! The doors of perception must be opened. That means these young people must learn by their own experience, to see the world as it was before human beings were on this planet. That is the real problem today, that people live in towns and cities, where everything is dead. This material world, made by humans, is a dead world, and will disappear and die. I would tell the young people to go out into the countryside, go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. This is a world of nature to which we belong, absolutely. It is the circle of life, of which we are an integral part. Open your eyes, and see the browns and greens of the earth, and the light which is the essence of nature. The young need to become aware of this circle of life, and realize that it is possible to experience the beauty and deep meaning which is at the core of our relation to nature. CG: When did you first acquire this visionary appreciation of nature? AH: When I was a young boy, I had many opportunities to walk through the countryside. I had profound and visionary encounters with nature, and this was long before I conducted my initial experiments with LSD. Indeed, my first experiences with LSD were very reminiscent of these early mystical encounters I had had as a child in nature. So, you see that it is even possible to have these experiences without drugs. But many people are blocked, without an inborn faculty to realize beauty, and it is these people who may need a psychedelic in order to have a visionary experience of nature.

CG: How do we reconcile this visionary experience with religion and with scientific truth?

AH: It is important to have the experience directly. Aldous Huxley taught us not to simply believe the words, but to have the experience ourselves. This is why the different forms of religion are no longer adequate. They are simply words, words, words, without the direct experience of what it is the words represent. We are now at a phase of human development where we have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge through scientific research in the material world. This is very important knowledge, but it must be integrated. What science has brought to light is true, absolutely true. But this is only one part, only one side of our existence, that of the material world. We have a body, and matter gets older and changes, so therefore as far as our having a body, we must die. But the spiritual world, of course, is eternal, but only insofar as it exists in the moment.

It is important that we realize this enormous difference between these two sides of our lives. The material world is the world of our body, but the material world is also where man has made all of these scientific and technological discoveries. We must see, then, that science and technology are based on natural laws. But we must also accept that the material world is only the manifestation of the spiritual world. And if we attempt to manifest something, we will have to make use of the material world. For you and I to speak with one another, we must have tongues, we must have air and so forth. All of this is of the material world. If we were to read about spiritual things, it is only words. We must have the experience directly. And the experience occurs only by opening the mind, and opening all of our senses. Those doors of perception must be cleansed. And if the experience does not come spontaneously, on its own, then we may make use of what Huxley calls a gratuitous grace. This may take the form of psychedelic drugs, or perhaps without drugs through a discipline like yoga. But what is of greatest importance, is that we have personal experience. Not words, not beliefs, but experience. AH: Absolutely! I am convinced that the importance of psychedelics will be recognized. The pathway for this is through psychiatry, but not the psychoanalytic psychiatry of Freud and not the limited scope of modern biological psychiatry. Rather, it will occur through the new field of transpersonal psychiatry. This transpersonal view takes into account both the material world, including our body, as well as the spiritual world. It recognizes that we are simultaneously part of the material and the spiritual worlds. What fits with the concept of transpersonal psychiatry is that we open our doors of perception. What transpersonal psychiatry tries to give us is a recipe for gaining entrance into the spiritual world. This fits exactly with the results of psychedelics. It stimulates your senses. It opens your perception for your own experience. How this phenomenon affects our existence in the material world can be understood through scientific research, and how we can integrate this knowledge with our spiritual selves can be achieved through the transpersonal path.

CG: Projecting into the future, do you envision that there may be an accepted role within EuroAmerican culture for psychedelics?

CG: Dr. Hofmann, you have lived through two World Wars and a Cold War. When you look ahead into the future of mankind, are you hopeful or not?

AH: I am hopeful for the long distant future, but for the near future I am terribly, terribly pessimistic. I believe that what is occurring in the material world is a reflection of the spiritual state of mankind. I fear that many terrible things will occur around the world, because mankind is in spiritual crisis. But I hope that over time mankind will learn, finally learn, and that there will be hope. I just re-read the twelve lectures Aldous Huxley gave in San Francisco in 1959, called The Human Situation. I think that everything that we are concerned about today, about the ego, consciousness, the survival of mankind, it can all be read in this book. I would like to recommend it. Everything we are now trying to say, the ideas we are formulating, has been discussed by Huxley.

CG: Back in the Sixties many people became frightened of LSD and other psychedelics, including many psychiatrists. Why was that?

AH: I think the most important thing is that they use it in a religious framework and we don't. We must learn from them, we must identify the right structures, we must find new uses. I could imagine that it may be possible to create meditation centers for psychedelic use in natural surroundings, where teachers could have experiences and train to become adepts. I perceive this as being possible, but first psychedelics will have to become available to medicine and psychiatry. And then it should be made available for such spiritual centers. Basically, all that we need to know we can learn from how the primitive people use psychedelics as sacraments, in a religious framework. We need such centers, but we also need the psychiatrists. These psychiatrists must become the Shamans of our times. Then I think we will be ready to move towards this kind of psychopharmacopeia.

CG: What can we learn from the so-called primitive cultures who used psychedelic substances as part of their religious practices?

AH: They did not use it the right way, and they did not have the right conditions. So, they were not adequately prepared for it. It is such a delicate and deep experience, if used the right way. But remember, the more powerful the instrument, the more the chance of damage occurring if it is not used properly. And back at that time, there were unfortunately many occasions where psychedelics were not treated with proper respect, and used in the wrong way, and consequently caused injury. That is the great tragedy, that these valuable medicines were not always respected and not always understood. So, the psychedelics came to be feared, and were taken out of the hands of responsible investigators and psychiatrists. It was a great loss for medicine and psychiatry, and for mankind. Hopefully, it is not too late to learn from these mistakes, and to demonstrate the proper and respectful way psychedelics should be used.

The Beatles AMPHETAMINES The Beatles were introduced to drugs in Hamburg. To get through the long nights performing in the drunken clubs of the Reeperbahn, they were given Preludin, or ‘prellies’ – German slimming pills which removed their appetites and gave them the energy to take their stage shows to new, often chaotic, levels.

In Hamburg the waiters always had Preludin – and various other pills, but I remember Preludin because it was such a big trip – and they were all taking these pills to keep themselves awake, to work these incredible hours in this all-night place. And so the waiters, when they’d see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they’d give you the pill. You’d take the pill, you’d be talking, you’d sober up, you could work almost endlessly – until the pill wore off, then you’d have to have another. John Lennon

It has been claimed that Tony Sheridan introduced them to the pills in 1961, telling them: “Here’s something to keep you awake.” Other groups on the circuit used them too, and for many they became the normal way to get through a series of lengthy shows. The club owners didn’t mind; Preludin caused dryness of the mouth, which led to more beer being drunk and better on-stage performances.

This was the point of our lives when we found pills, uppers. That’s the only way we could continue playing for so long. They were called Preludin, and you could buy them over the counter. We never thought we were doing anything wrong, but we’d get really wired and go on for days. So with beer and Preludin, that’s how we survived. Ringo Starr

They were also given Preludin by Astrid Kirchherr, who took it from her mother’s medicine cabinet. The Hamburg club staff, too, would keep the groups supplied with the pills.

They were actually pills to make slimming easier for you. We used to take them with a couple of beers. They made you just a little speedy. But you can’t compare it to speed from today or cocaine or anything. It’s just baby food compared to that. Astrid Kirchherr,

During their various trips to Hamburg, Pete Best stuck to alcohol, and Paul McCartney was reportedly less keen on indulging, but John Lennon, in particular, became a frequent user of stimulants.

The speed thing first came from the gangsters. Looking back, they were probably thirty years old but they seemed fifty… They would send a little tray of schnapps up to the band and say, ‘You must do this: Bang bang, ya! Proost!’ Down in one go. The little ritual. So you’d do that, because these were the owners. They made a bit of fun of us but we played along and let them because we weren’t great heroes, we needed their protection and this was life or death country. There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren’t messing around here. They made fun of us because our name, the Beatles, sounded very like the German ‘Peedles’ which means ‘little willies’. ‘Oh, zee Peedles! Ha ha ha!’ They loved that. It appealed directly to the German sense of humour, that did. So we’d let it be a joke, and we’d drink the schnapps and they’d occasionally send up pills, prellies, Preludin, and say, ‘Take one of these.’ I knew that was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we’d be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, ‘What are you on, man? What are you on?’ I said, ‘Nothin’! ‘S great, though, isn’t it!’ Because I’d just get buoyed up by their conversation. They’d be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn’t really need one, I was so wired anyway. Or I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you’d find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies. This was good because it meant I didn’t have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn’t like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I’d wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over. So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock ‘n’ roll at that time. Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution. Paul McCartney

The Beatles

CANNABIS Some members of The Beatles were first offered cannabis in 1960, following their first trip to Hamburg. However, they remained unimpressed with the effects.

We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn’t actually try it until after we’d been to Hamburg. I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, ‘This stuff isn’t doing anything.’ It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, ‘This stuff doesn’t work, man.’ George Harrison

The DJ at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, Bob Wooler, claimed that The Beatles were occasional users of the drug when they started to play outside the city.

An early encounter with the drug took place on 1 January 1962, prior to their unsuccessful audition for Decca. As they travelled from Liverpool to London on New Year’s Day, The Beatles’ endured a 10-hour drive through snowstorms.

Upon arriving in London, their driver Neil Aspinall became lost, and a pair of seedy men attempted to talk their way into the group’s van as a safe haven for smoking cannabis. At the time the drug was unknown to The Beatles, and still a little-used substance in mainstream society.

It is well-known that Bob Dylan fully turned The Beatles on to cannabis. On 28 August 1964 they were introduced by a mutual friend, the writer Al Aronowitz, at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. Upon arriving at The Beatles’ suite that evening, Dylan asked for cheap wine; Mal Evans was sent to get some, and during the wait Dylan suggested they have a smoke. Brian and the Beatles looked at each other apprehensively. “We’ve never smoked marijuana before,” Brian finally admitted. Dylan looked disbelievingly from face to face. “But what about your song?” he asked. The one about getting high?” The Beatles were stupefied. “Which song?” John managed to ask. Dylan said, “You know…” and then he sang, “and when I touch you I get high, I get high…” John flushed with embarrassment. “Those aren’t the words,” he admitted. “The words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide…’” Peter Brown

After the room was secured, Dylan rolled the first joint and passed it to Lennon. He immediately gave it to Ringo Starr, whom he called “my royal taster”. Not realising the etiquette was to pass it on, Starr finished the joint and Dylan and Aronowitz rolled more for each of them. The Beatles spent the next few hours in hilarity, looked upon with amusement by Dylan. Brian Epstein kept saying, “I’m so high I’m on the ceiling. I’m up on the ceiling.”

Paul McCartney, meanwhile, was struck by the profundity of the occasion, telling anyone who would listen that he was “thinking for the first time, really thinking.” He instructed Mal Evans to follow him around the hotel suite with a notebook, writing down everything he said:

I remember asking Mal, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, ‘Have you got a pencil?’ But of course everyone was so stoned they couldn’t produce a pencil, let alone a combination of pencil and paper. I’d been going through this thing of levels, during the evening. And at each level I’d meet all these people again. ‘Hahaha! It’s you!’ And then I’d metamorphose on to another level. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, ‘There are seven levels!’ Actually it wasn’t bad. Not bad for an amateur. And we pissed ourselves laughing. I mean, ‘What the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels?’ But looking back, it’s actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn’t know that then. Paul McCartney

Evans kept the notebooks until his death in 1976, when they were confiscated and later lost by Los Angeles police.

By the time they came to make Help! in 1965, The Beatles’ cannabis use had reached a peak. It affected their songwriting, which became mellower and more introspective. During the filming of Help! they were often stoned on set, which caused them to forget their lines.

The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time. John Lennon

In 1970 Lennon claimed the group had smoked cannabis in the toilet of Buckingham Palace, on the day they collected their MBEs. In later years, however, George Harrison revealed it had been nothing

ALEXANDER “SASHA” THEODORE SHULGIN

Alexander Shulgin The man known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the Godfather of Ecstasyâ&#x20AC;? passes through a narrow door on a dusk-soaked evening in early winter. His strides are measured, his spine slightly hunched, though he still stands more than six feet tall. His words race smoothly from mind to mouth. He wants to show his lab off before it gets too dark.

THE “GODFATHER,” WHOSE NAME IS ALEXANDER SHULGIN (THOUGH HIS FRIENDS CALL HIM SASHA ... AND HIS CRITICS, MUCH WORSE)

The lab is perhaps a two-minute walk from his small gray- and redbricked house, all of it sitting on a 20-acre family farm in unincorporated Contra Costa. The “godfather,” whose name is Alexander Shulgin (though his friends call him Sasha ... and his critics, much worse) has lived on the farm since 1936. The lot boasts endless rolling hills and a postcard view of Mount Diablo. And, of course, it boasts his lab. Rustic and sturdy, Shulgin’s lab has seen its share of controversy. It was here that Shulgin discovered - or rediscovered - nearly 200 mind-altering chemicals, the most famous being Ecstasy, a drug that continues to dominate the world’s rave scene. In recent years, Shulgin’s research has drawn the ire of law enforcement, most notably the Drug Enforcement Agency, which believes the scientist is largely responsible for creating drugs popular among today’s club kids. All the same, Shulgin points out the aspirator system, the rotary evaporator, the solvent stills - everything a chemist requires for barebones pharmacological research. He believes his studies are critical to modern science’s quest to understand the human mind. When used clinically, he says, such drugs can help patients break down psychological barriers and look objectively at their lives. Did he intend his research to have worldwide distribution via technology like the Internet? He says no, though he and his wife have self-published two books filled with hundreds of his psychoactive recipes.

And Shulgin says he won’t stop, despite intense government pressure. In his lab sit shelves of long, white trays filled with carefully marked, clear beakers. “All chemicals,” he says. “All chemicals I’m making.” He pauses a moment before pointedly adding, “All of it legal, every last bit.”

A friendly reminder to the DEA should they try to harass Shulgin.

The tricky name 3,4,-Methylenedioxy methamphetamine or (MDMA/Ecstasy) is hardly memorable, or even pronounceable, to anyone outside the chemistry world. Yet the syllables glide from Shulgin’s lips like a knife cutting its way through warm butter. He sits on a lawn chair in his modest living room, explaining how to whip up a batch. His words are a maze of “aldehydes” and “phenols,” though he makes the process sound as easy as baking apple pie. His wife and “partner-in-chem,” Ann, chuckles as if to say, “Isn’t that simple?” Not a single word Shulgin has said has made sense to anyone but himself, though Ann, a petite, rose-cheeked grandmother and one of Shulgin’s staunchest defenders, believes there’s something deeper to be learned from the formulas her husband has spent a lifetime exploring.

“MDMA is an insight drug,” she says with a determined passion. “It helps you open doors to yourself. You can see yourself for what you are. You can feel a compassion for who you are.” Which is, of course, a very different picture from the one painted by the drug’s harshest critics. MDMA is an illegal drug with no accepted medical utility. Animal studies have found frequent use can change or imbalance serotonin levels, impair memory, and cause brain damage. The drug is almost always synthesized in underground labs. Pills are routinely laced with substances that can raise blood pressure and that can even be fatal. Still, 25 years after Shulgin’s discovery, the drug has swept around the world, not for the benefit of psychology, but instead to be purchased in the corners of dance clubs throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.

THROUGH PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS, HE HOPED TO EXPLORE THE HUMAN MIND.

Sasha and Ann Shulgin are complicated people - self-described intellectuals with unusual interests. They are unabashed advocates of drug legalization. Sasha once attended a rave and says he had a wonderful time. Both talk about past drug experiences as if they were a trip to Valhalla. The pair tours the world touting drug-assisted consciousness at universities and academic conferences. LSD pioneer Albert Hofmann is a friend. Iconoclast Timothy Leary was a colleague. The husband and wife, married 20 years (he’s a widower, she’s a divorcée) have penned two books on their chemical adventures. PIHKAL and TIHKAL chart the exploits of “Shura Borodin” and his wife “Alice” as they create new psychoactive drugs and down Shura’s powdery inventions like happy hour cocktails. In the back of each book are hundreds of recipes - all originating from Shulgin’s lab. To this day, these drugs are synthesized by Shulgin’s followers and are introduced to the rave scene under street names like “Foxy” and “7-Up.”

“It’s curiosity,” Shulgin admits, that led him to this field of research. “Why have these things been revered for centuries? Why are they seen as being a conduit to contacting the spiritual world?” For a moment he sounds more shaman than scientist, more fascinated with life’s hidden meanings than with molecules and Bunsen burners.

All of which is the ultimate mind-bending trip for two Contra Costa senior citizens with a houseful of books and impressionist paintings. There’s no throbbing techno beat coming from the den. Just classical artists. Prokofiev. Shostakovich. Shulgin plays a mean viola.

In chemistry, Shulgin discovered his art form. Through psychedelic drugs, he hoped to explore the human mind. A shot of morphine while in the Navy led him to wonder how drugs altered consciousness. Upon taking the narcotic, why was he able to so easily disassociate himself from pain? It would prove to be a lifelong obsession, and after earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UC Berkeley in 1955, he went to work developing insecticides in the Pittsburg and Walnut Creek laboratories of Dow Chemical. After he created an insecticide that was purchased for commercial use, Dow gave him carte blanche to study whatever interested him.

Shulgin talks about his childhood at length in PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, which includes a painting of Mount Diablo on its cover). His father was a Russian émigré; his mother came from a small town in Illinois. As a kid growing up in nearby Berkeley, he remembers his parents’ circle of friends having a distinctively Old World flavor. He had little initial interest in chemistry. Instead, his passions were stamps and marbles. A neighbor had a large basement of books, and over time Shulgin became a “lover of basements,” ultimately leading him into his own, where he set up his first chemistry lab.

Shulgin has lived in the East Bay all his life. Except for a stint in the Navy during World War II and a year at Harvard at age 16, he’s watched the area slowly develop from strawberry fields to suburban sprawl. Through it all, he’s spent most of his time on the farm. The lab is built on the site of his parent’s house, which was destroyed in a fire during WWII.

Of course, there is another side to the couple. The quieter side. The careful precision of their research. The way Shulgin meticulously charts drug activity, often at levels unlikely to put a glow on even the strictest teetotaler’s cheekbones. How he worked for decades as a DEA lecturer and adviser, though the federal agency has raided their property twice since they selfpublished PIHKAL in 1991 (the agents found nothing illegal). The way that, despite their guru status in the counterculture world, they have often observed it with academic distance. The way they worry about neighborly disapproval. Rocks flying through windows. Overzealous politicians. They’ve long treasured their anonymity. And, despite their legalization crusade, they worry about those who take science too far, at the expense of health and personal safety. They have only terse words about Timothy Leary. “He had an ego the size of an over-inflated balloon,” Shulgin says. And they feel a quiet devastation when they read in newspapers about deaths from “club drugs” some of which “the great Sasha Shulgin” invented.

THERE’S NOTHING ECSTATIC ABOUT

It was during these years that Shulgin began looking at MDA, a drug closely related to Ecstasy, which the U.S. Army had initially hoped might prove to be a good truth serum. Eventually his research led him to look for other derivatives, though MDMA’s supposed lack of activity led Shulgin to ignore Ecstasy for years. Instead he did prolific work for Dow on scores of other chemicals.

IF THERE’S ONE WORD THE SHULGINS CAN’T STAND, IT’S ECSTASY.

ECSTASY

The 1950s were a vastly different time for psychoactive chemistry. It would be another decade before the counterculture movement made Shulgins kind of work unpopular. “The science of these kinds of substances really came to a halt in the mid-’60s,” says Dr. David Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University. Until then, researchers were encouraged by drug companies to delve into mental illness research because, at the time, companies believed there might be a market for such discoveries. With this came a number of fresh compounds, including Albert Hofmann’s LSD.

Occasionally his creations made their way from publication in such mainstream magazines and medical journals as Science, Nature, and the American Journal of Medical Chemistry, into the counterculture world. One compound Shulgin invented, DOM, was resynthesized by underground drug labs and led to a rash of overdoses in 1967 in Haight-Ashbury under the street name “STP.” Shulgin says users were consuming the drug at more than four times the dosage he’d used in experiments. Still, at a time when an increasing number of chemists were moving away from psychoactive research, Shulgin says he never thought about stopping. The fact that his colleagues were getting cold feet only strengthened his resolve.

His friends claim this stubborn streak was critical in the long run. Says Nichols: “He’s been the most visible person to take this on and say this is research we should be allowed to do. What we know about the human effects of these kinds of substances, we largely know from the work of Dr. Shulgin.” “There isn’t any question he’s the most outstanding psychedelic chemist in the world,” says Myron Stolaroff, treasurer of the Los Angeles-based Albert Hofmann Foundation. “He’s spent his life studying and revealing new compounds. Nobody’s even approached his volume. Hofmann discovered some wonderful things, but it was only 10 or 12, compared to the couple hundred Sasha discovered.” Still, by the mid-1960s, Shulgin’s work had begun to chafe on his employers. Eventually Dow asked that he publish his scientific writings from home. Shortly thereafter, Shulgin built his lab and quit Dow to work as an independent consultant, continuing his increasingly controversial research semi-defiantly from his own backyard.

One reason is that they don’t think the name fits. “The drug should have been called Empathy,” Shulgin insists. He believes there’s nothing ecstatic about Ecstasy - though he mirthfully admits the drug dealers who coined the tag probably knew what was best for their business.

Soon after, Shulgin recommended the drug to a number of his psychologist friends. One of them, whom Shulgin has never identified, became a Johnny Appleseed of sorts, introducing MDMA to thousands of doctors across the country. At the time, the Shulgins were thrilled by the initial buzz surrounding the drug, though today they concede MDMA’s reputation has been sullied by what they see as a culture of irresponsibility and a federal government hell-bent on promoting an anti-drug agenda. They believe this has drawn focus away from MDMA’s potential in medical research, specifically for the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an area in which the FDA approved limited testing last fall.

“I was just amazed by what was there,” he says. In his lab notes, he wrote, “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.”

A week before, he’d received a call from a friend recommending he take a closer look. Starting out at 15 milligrams, he found the drug had no effect. Yet, as days turned into weeks, Shulgin gradually increased the dosage and soon found something unexpected.

Prior to 1985, which is when MDMA was declared illegal, it was one of hundreds of compounds that chemists mined for pharmacological activity. However, it wasn’t until the summer of 1976 that Shulgin was curious enough about the old German reject (it had been patented by Merck in 1912) that he decided to “taste test” a batch of his own.

I FEEL ABSOLUTELY CLEAN INSIDE, AND THERE IS NOTHING BUT PURE EUPHORIA

Until drug laws tightened in the mid1980s, Shulgin frequently invited friends to his home to test his discoveries. Shulgin’s “human health board” included a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and several chemists (Ann joined in the late 1970s).

Still, some psychologists believe the Shulgins rely too heavily on their own personal biases, and they question the motivations of those who encourage MDMA in therapy. “I don’t think the thrust of curiosity here is trying to find a drug to cure Post Traumatic Stress, but instead is enthusiasm of how it’s unique to experience altered states,” says Raymond Ruzicano, a Walnut Creek psychiatrist and member of the Medical Ethics Committee at John Muir Medical Center. “I think there’s a lot of naïveté about it. When you get down to it, most of the results are anecdotal. There’s very little data to support it.” Nor are Shulgin’s research methods universally embraced by the medical establishment. While mainstream testing is done on animals, Shulgin years ago adopted the controversial approach of testing his creations on himself and friends.

“I think it could prove most important in helping soldiers who have killed during war,” Ann says, adding that she cried on the day it was outlawed. “It allows you insight without self-rejection. It’s as if you can see your life happening to someone else, but view it with understanding compassion.”

KAL

Ann and alexander shulgin at Burning man festival

This eventually led them to write PIHKAL and TIHKAL, books that Timothy Leary once described as akin to Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Half semifictitious memoirs, half underground cookbooks, the Shulgins’ self-published books about their research have dramatically raised their public profile, forever altered their relationship with the government, and led to many of Shulgin’s recipes becoming hot commodities on the rave scene.

The Shulgins say they’re merely making the best of a bad situation, one in which federal law restricts their ability to do research on many chemicals, and neither the FDA nor the drug corporations are willing to fund broader psychoactive research. In recent years, they say, even scientific journals have grown increasingly uncomfortable about publishing Shulgin’s findings. “It’s called chicken,” Ann says.

“He is the patient. He knows what he’s taking. That’s the fundamental flaw,” says Dr. Neil Fruman, chairman of John Muir’s Medical Ethics Committee and a family practitioner in Lafayette “His perceptions are going to be distorted by what he uses, and the consequences and side effects of those perceptions, when he’s in a more lucid state, are what he’s going to write about.”

However,somecriticssayShulginhasviolated one of the fundamental tenets of research by involving himself in his studies firsthand. They say such interference is frowned upon in mainstream science because a researcher’s involvement can invariably alter an experiment’s results.

Shulgin claims his research group was crucial toward his conducting research on how the human mind interacts with psychedelic drugs. While it would be possible to study the physiological reaction of an animal, Shulgin believes only human testing illustrates how these drugs impact sensory perception.

PIHKAL

In their living room, the examples come fast and furious. “Do you know what a state of inflation is?” Shulgin asks, while Ann prepares tea. Such a state, he says, is equivalent to being Michael Jordan or the dictator of a third-world nation. It’s a sensation most people can only experience artificially, though the Shulgins believe there are lessons to be learned from it. Most important is how to return to the regular world. “The most valuable thing about such a state is that once you’ve experienced it, you begin to understand by contrast what is so valuable about your normal, noninflated life,” Ann says. To the Shulgins, such thinking is hardly controversial. So much so that when they finished PIHKAL, the first people they sent copies to were their old friends at the DEA.

Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story Alexander & Ann Shulgin Transform Press,U.S.; Reprint edition (22 May 1995)

“I COULD SEE SOMETHING LIKE THAT HAPPENING TO ME. ALL OF MY LAB BOOKS GOING UP IN SMOKE,”

So, instead, he chose to publish his findings. He says the goal was to attack the perception that drugs are either good or evil, and to assert that they are tools to be used for personal discovery. Both Shulgins believe there is nothing criminal about a search for self-awareness, and every person should have “the license to explore the nature of his own soul.”

I’M VERY SCARED

Sasha is telling a story. It’s drizzling on the porch outside. His words come noticeably softer now, a departure from the jokes he likes to crack, where Ann, puffing lightly on her third cigarette, tells him to mind himself and hush. The story is about an old psychologist who had his own strange field of research. At the end of his life, his work ran afoul of the FDA. He was arrested, but died before his trial. Shortly thereafter, authorities went to his house and burned all his papers. “I could see something like that happening to me. All of my lab books going up in smoke,” Shulgin says.

ABOUT THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING TODAY

Today the DEA has little to say about Alexander Shulgin. They admit he once held one of their analytical licenses, which allowed him to do studies on illegal drugs, and that the license was surrendered as “part of a civil matter.”

“Other than that, there’s nothing else I can say,” says DEA spokesman Richard Meyer. That the DEA has been so critical of their research has plainly left the couple stung. While the Shulgins say many DEA chemists are enthusiastic about their contributions to science, they feel the higher-ups in the agency have been both hostile and harassing. Following PIHKAL, Shulgin claims, the DEA killed some of his chemical ordering accounts and limited relationships with old friends in the Agency. Then there was the time two years ago when Ann called the police to report a prowler. Within hours, the DEA and the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department were combing the property, and Sasha was placed in the back of a police car. Though they found nothing illegal and the farm hasn’t been visited by drug investigators since, “the invasion,” as they like to call it, left the couple noticeably shaken. “We don’t need any more of the government hoping we’ll die,”Ann says. “Someone in the higher echelons of the DEA said something to that effect. We don’t need that kind of thing. It’s just not comfortable. Just because we don’t agree with their point of view? If it wasn’t for the First Amendment, we wouldn’t be alive, the way things have happened.” Shulgin adds, “I’m very scared about the way things are going today,” highlighting just how dramatically his relationship with the federal government has changed.

For 30 years, while Shulgin was not-so-secretly inventing compounds and advocating drug legalization, he was also one of the DEA’s leading consultants and expert witnesses at government drug trials. In the Shulgins’ office, hidden behind a row of musty file cabinets, are two commendations from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, a precursor to the DEA, presented in recog-nition of Shulgin’s “significant personal efforts to help eliminate drug abuse.”

THE FAUSTIAN

THERE WILL BE TRAGIC INCIDENCES FROM THIS RESEARCH WHERE ONE CAN ONLY FEEL DEEPLY SADDENED.

Rick Doblin, whose Floridabased Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has been leading the charge for MDMA medical testing, once called Shulgin’s government work the “Faustian bargain” he had to strike in order to continue his research. Yet, even now, Shulgin doesn’t see a conflict between his DEA work and his private research. There were many times in the past when DEA friends would visit his lab. They’d poke around beakers, curious to learn about the latest drug he was slowly perfecting. When the Shulgins were married on a hot July 4th, their minister was a DEA agent.

“It was a well-paying job,” Shulgin says of the arrangement. “I’m a sharer of information. I wasn’t consulting to their ends. I had no political alliance. It was the same information I would share at a university. The audience wanted what I had.” Of course, the DEA wasn’t the only group interested in Shulgin’s findings. Over the years, countless amateur pharmacologists have used his instructions to synthesize dozens of his creations for personal use and sale. It’s a reality the Shulgins find both empowering and disillusioning. They believe the spread of accurate information is good if it reenergizes the country’s drug legalization debate and advances the cause of psychedelics with medical utility. However, both know the more common use (or “misuse,” they would say) of their research is the creation of street drugs (or dangerous, poorly developed derivatives) that are often abused by teenagers, and in extreme cases, lead to death. Though a number of Shulgin’s drugs are illegal, the vast majority of his compounds remain both legal and accessible. Shulgin talks freely about one drug, “a potent psychedelic,” that is sold by an East Coast neurological supply house and remains completely off the books. Many of Shulgin’s drugs are now being commercially sold on the Internet; one, 2C-T-7, has had known fatalities.

AND YET THERE IS A LOT OF GOOD COMING FROM THIS TOOGOOD WHICH I THINK WILL STATISTICALLY COMPENSATE.”

“I certainly support his right to do research and publish it, but it would worry me that people would misuse it,” agrees Ellen Peterson, a community activist who educates adults on drug issues in Contra Costa County. “He certainly has the right to do it, but ethically, I couldn’t. I’d have trouble creating and publishing something that had the potential of hurting others. Still, I also couldn’t be a bartender or manufacture bombs. Even Shulgin’s colleagues agree there is a dark side to his work. “His perspective is clearly similar to the one the fathers of the atomic bomb had,” says Purdue’s Nichols. “They unleashed this technology they believed would help end all war, but at the same time, it had all of these possibilities for evil and doing destructive things. I think these compounds, when used properly, will ultimately prove to be very beneficial, but right now it’s very frustrating for him to see things that can help improve people relegated to the wastebasket.”

Last year a 17-year-old Memphis boy purchased 2C-T-7 from an acquaintance who had bought it over the Internet. Though information on the drug specifically states it should not be snorted, the teenager did just that and died of a massive overdose at a Tennessee hospital. It’s stories like this that make both doctors and parents shudder. “He should realize that the people who are paying attention to him are sometimes the people who have the least capacity to make better judgments,” says John Muir’s Fruman.

For Shulgin, who claims he never dreamed that his work would be used outside of science, it’s a tough call, and one he is most comfortable answering with a joke. “There are two things you must remember,” he says. “First, the average IQ is 100. Second, always remember that 50 percent of the people are below average.” He chuckles dryly, but then grows serious. “What are you going to do? Put yourself at an intelligence level of the least of the species? Never drive a car? Never leave your house? There will be tragic incidences from this research where one can only feel deeply saddened. And yet there is a lot of good coming from this toogood which I think will statistically compensate.”

YES.

DRUGS DON’T DO THINGS

He says the man who gave him these paintings had it wrong. It wasn’t the drugs that made him paint. It was something hiding deep within him that he didn’t know he owned.

The Shulgins treasure the artwork. It hangs beneath a strip of police tape left behind by the DEA. To Shulgin, they’re tokens of a career he believes will be buried in the finer print of scientific literature. Only when asked about the story’s significance does he answer with something semi-surprising.

The man stared at him intensely and said, “I took DOM for the first time four weeks ago. It was the first drug I’ve ever used. I had never painted before in my life.” He requested that Shulgin please take the two paintings.

In the Shulgins’ dining room hang two red and brown paintings. Their style is abstract, their brushwork crafted, and if you look long enough, you’ll eventually see women’s faces. The portraits were given to Shulgin by a man he met only once. It happened years ago, following a college lecture. The man was tight-lipped and incredibly serious. He carried dozens of paintings under his arm. “Are you Professor Shulgin?” he asked.

SHULGIN SAYS.

THEY ONLY CATALYZE WHAT’S ALREADY THERE. NO DRUG HAS SKILL. IT’S YOU WHO HAS SKILL. YOU ONLY HAVE TO KNOW IT.

The Beatles

LSD 40 While The Beatles were no strangers to drugs prior to 1965, their introduction to LSD caused a major shift in their music, personalities and public perception. The precise date of their first encounter is unknown, although it’s likely to have been between March and July 1965. It is known, however, that it took place at Flat 1, 2 Strathearn Place, London W2, in the home of 34-year-old cosmetic dentist John Riley.

Riley invited John and Cynthia Lennon, George Harrison and Pattie Boyd to dinner. After the meal he gave them coffee laced with LSD, which at the time was little-known and still legal.

He laid it on George, me and our wives without telling us at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George’s, and our dentist at the time. He just put it in our coffee or something. He didn’t know what it was, it was just, ‘It’s all the thing,’ with the middle-class London swingers. They had all heard about it and didn’t know it was different from pot or pills. And they gave it to us, and he was saying, ‘I advise you not to leave,’ and we thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house and we didn’t want to know. John Lennon, 1970

After the meal the five, along with Riley’s 22-year-old girlfriend Cindy Bury, adjourned from the flat’s small dining room into the lounge. On the mantelpiece six sugar cubes had been carefully lined up. The cubes, each of which contained a dose of LSD, were slipped into the guests’ coffees.

Riley’s LSD supply had been manufactured at a farmhouse in Wales. His intention was to be the first person to ‘turn on’ The Beatles, in the comfort of his flat, but his plans backfired when his guests insisted on leaving for the Pickwick Club at 15-18 Great Newport Street, WC2.

One night John, Cynthia, Pattie and I were having dinner at the dentist’s house. Later that night we were going to a London nightclub called the Pickwick Club. It was a little restaurant with a small stage where some friends of ours were playing. Klaus Voormann, Gibson Kemp (who became Rory Storm’s drummer after we stole Ringo) and a guy called Paddy. They had a little trio.

I just thought, ‘Well, what’s that? So what? Let’s go!’ This fella was still asking us to stay and it all became a bit seedy – it felt as if he was trying to get something happening in his house; that there was some reason he didn’t want us to go. In fact, he had obtained some lysergic acid diethylamide 25. It was, at the time, an unrestricted medication – I seem to recall that I’d heard vaguely about it, but I didn’t really know what it was, and we didn’t know we were taking it. The bloke had put it in our coffee: mine, John’s, Cynthia’s and Pattie’s. He didn’t take it. He had never had it himself. I’m sure he thought it was an aphrodisiac. I remember his girlfriend had enormous breasts and I think he thought that there was going to be a big gang-bang and that he was going to get to shag everybody. I really think that was his motive. W So the dentist said, ‘OK, leave your car here. I’ll drive you and then you can come back later.’ I said ‘No, no. We’ll drive.’ And we all got in my car and he came as well, in his car. We got to the nightclub, parked and went in. We’d just sat down and ordered our drinks when suddenly I feel the most incredible feeling come over me. It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life. It was fantastic. I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything. Everything was perfect, in a perfect light, and I had an overwhelming desire to go round the club telling everybody how much I loved them – people I’d never seen before. One thing led to another, then suddenly it felt as if a bomb had made a direct hit on the nightclub and the roof had been blown off: ‘What’s going on here?’ I pulled my senses together and I realised that the club had actually closed – all the people had gone, they’d put the lights on, and the waiters were going round bashing the tables and putting the chairs on top of them. We thought, ‘Oops, we’d better get out of here!’ George Harrison

After dinner I said to John, ‘Let’s go – they’re going to be on soon,’ and John said ‘OK’, but the dentist was saying, ‘Don’t go; you should stay here.’ And then he said, ‘Well, at least finish your coffee first.’ So we finished our coffee and after a while I said again, ‘Come on, it’s getting late – we’d better go.’ The dentist said something to John and John turned to me and said, ‘We’ve had LSD.’

42 From the Pickwick Club the party went on to the Ad Lib on 7 Leicester Place, a popular destination among London’s stars. They had arranged to meet Ringo Starr there.

We went out to the Ad Lib and these discotheques and there was incredible things going on. This guy [Riley] came with us, he was nervous, he didn’t know what was going on. We were going crackers. It was insane going around London on it. When we entered the club, we thought it was on fire. And then we thought it was a premiere, but it was just an ordinary light outside. We thought, ‘Shit, what’s going on here?’ And we were cackling in the street, and then people were shouting, ‘Let’s break a window.’ We were just insane. We were just out of our heads. We finally got in the lift and we all thought there was a fire in the lift. It was just a little red light, and we were all screaming – it was hysterical. We all arrived on the floor, ’cause this was a discotheque that was up a building. The lift stops and the door opens and we’re all going ‘Aaahhhh’ [loud scream], and we just see that it’s the club, and then we walk in, sit down, and the table’s elongating. I think we went to eat before that, where the table went this long, just like I’d read somebody – who is it, Blake, is it? – somebody describing the effects of the opium in the old days. And I thought, ‘Fuck, it’s happening.’ And then we went to the Ad Lib and all that. And then some singer came up to me and said, ‘Can I sit next to you?’ And I was going, [loudly] ‘Only if you don’t talk,’ ’cause I just couldn’t think. When the Ad Lib Club closed in the early hours of the following morning, George Harrison drove the others home in Pattie‘s orange Mini Cooper S, which he had given to her as a present.

John Lennon

It was daylight and I drove everyone home – I was driving a Mini with John and Cynthia and Pattie in it. I seem to remember we were doing eighteen miles an hour and I was really concentrating – because some of the time I just felt normal and then, before I knew where I was, it was all crazy again. Anyway, we got home safe and sound, and somewhere down the line John and Cynthia got home. I went to bed and lay there for, like, three years. George Harrison

John Lennon revealed more about the journey to George’s in his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

George somehow or another managed to drive us home in his Mini. We were going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand. And Pattie was saying, ‘Let’s jump out and play football, there’s these big rugby poles’ and things like that. I was getting all this sort of hysterical jokes coming out, like with speed, because I was always on that, too. George was going, ‘Don’t make me laugh!’ Oh God! It was just terrifying. But it was fantastic. I did some drawings at the time – I’ve got them somewhere – of four faces and ‘we all agree with you,’ things like that. I gave them to Ringo, I’ve lost the originals. I did a lot of drawing that night – just like that. And then George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine. I was driving it – they all went to bed and I was carrying on on me own – it seemed to float above his wall, which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it. And the second time we had acid in LA, which was different. John Lennon

Lennon’s wife Cynthia remembered the occasion less fondly.

John and I weren’t capable of getting back to Kenwood from there, so the four of us sat up for the rest of the night as the walls moved, the plants talked, other people looked like ghouls and time stood still. It was horrific: I hated the lack of control and not knowing what was going on or what would happen next. Cynthia Lennon

Although Cynthia only had one subsequent experience with LSD, her husband became a regular user. Lennon’s infatuation with the drug eventually created distance between the couple.

When John was tripping I felt as if I was living with a stranger. He would be distant, so spaced-out that he couldn’t talk to me coherently. I hated that, and I hated the fact that LSD was pulling him away from me. I wouldn’t take it with him so he found others who would. Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again. Cynthia Lennon

George Harrison later claimed that the shared experience of LSD brought him and Lennon closer together. After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, ‘I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.’ That is an illusion people are under. It’s nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It’s down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what’s going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death. As Yoko came into the picture, I lost a lot of personal contract with John; but on the odd occasion I did see him, just by the look in his eyes I felt we were connected. George Harrison

The Beatles had their second encounter with LSD on 24 August 1965, on a break from their US tour. On this occasion Paul McCartney declined, but Ringo Starr decided to partake. He was looked after by Neil Aspinall during his first trip.

Paul felt very out of it ’cause we were all a bit cruel. It’s like, ‘We’re taking it and you’re not.’ We couldn’t eat our food. I just couldn’t manage it. Picking it up with our hands, and there’s all these people serving us in the house, and we’re just knocking it on the floor – oh! – like that. It was a long time before Paul took it. And then there was the big announcement. I think George was pretty heavy on it. We were probably both the most cracked. I think Paul’s a bit more stable than George and I. I don’t know about straight. Stable. I think LSD profoundly shocked him. John Lennon

The Beatles held an afternoon party in Los Angeles on 24 August, with guests including Eleanor Bron, The Byrds and journalist Don Short. Also there was actor Peter Fonda, whose tale of accidentally shooting himself as a child while playing with a gun later inspired the song She Said She Said. LSD had a profound effect on The Beatles’ songwriting and recording. The first-released song to mention it was Day Tripper, but over time its influence resulted in less explicit and more abstract references to acid. The Beatles increasingly tapped into the burgeoning counterculture of 1966, and the first song recorded for Revolver was the psychedelic Tomorrow Never Knows, featured lyrics adapted from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience, itself a modern reworking of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The song perhaps most often associated with The Beatles’ use of LSD is Lennon’s Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. While the group always denied that the title was a reference to acid – Lennon and McCartney both maintained it was inspired by a painting drawn by Julian Lennon and named after a schoolfriend – there is little doubt that the Through The Looking Glass imagery was the product of drug intake.

Lennon only took LSD once in the studio, unwittingly, on 21 March 1967 during a recording session for the Sgt Pepper song Getting Better.

I thought I was taking some uppers, and I was not in a state of handling it. I can’t remember what album it was but I took it and then [whispers] I just noticed all of a sudden I got so scared on the mike. I said, ‘What was it?’ I thought I felt ill. I thought I was going cracked. Then I said, ‘I must get some air.’ They all took me upstairs on the roof, and George Martin was looking at me funny. And then it dawned on me. I must have taken acid. And I said, ‘Well, I can’t go on, I have to go.’ So I just said, ‘You’ll have to do it and I’ll just stay and watch.’ I just [became] very nervous and just watching all of a sudden. ‘Is it alright?’ and they were saying, ‘Yeah.’ They were all being very kind. They said, ‘Yes, it’s alright.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure it’s alright?’ They carried on making the record. John Lennon

In fact, the session was stopped once The Beatles realised that Lennon was tripping. Lennon’s car was not at the studio, and so McCartney took him to his nearby home at Cavendish Avenue.

I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It’s been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot. Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away. There’s something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t. After that you’ve got to get trepanned or you’ve got to meditate for the rest of your life. You’ve got to make a decision which way you’re going to go. I would walk out into the garden – ‘Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.’ It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But ‘I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.’ In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while. I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, ‘Go to bed? You won’t sleep!’ ‘I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.’ I thought, now that’s enough fun and partying, now … It’s like with drink. That’s enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. ‘Yeah, I think so.’ I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably. Paul McCartney

On 17 June 1967 Life magazine published an interview with Paul McCartney in which he admitted having taken LSD. Two days later, following intense press attention, he gave an interview to Independent Television News in which he discussed his use of the drug and the media reaction.

I remember a couple of men from ITN showed up, and then the newscaster arrived: ‘Is it true you’ve had drugs?’ They were at my door – I couldn’t tell them to go away – so I thought, ‘Well, I’m either going to try to bluff this, or I’m going to tell him the truth.’ I made a lightning decision: ‘Sod it. I’ll give them the truth.’ I spoke to the reporter beforehand, and said, ‘You know what’s going to happen here: I’m going to get the blame for telling everyone I take drugs. But you’re the people who are going to distribute the news.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you. But if you’ve got any worries about the news having an effect on kids, then don’t show it. I’ll tell you the truth, but if you disseminate the whole thing to the public then it won’t be my responsibility. I’m not sure I want to preach this but, seeing as you’re asking – yeah, I’ve taken LSD.’ I’d had it about four times at the stage, and I told him so. I felt it was reasonable, but it became a big news item. Paul McCartney

The Beatles’ use of LSD decreased after the 1967 Summer of Love. On 26 August that year they publicly renounced the use of drugs, pledging their belief in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi‘s system of Transcendental Meditation instead. Although their attempts at sobriety were short-lived, among John Lennon‘s reasons for his declining use of LSD was the number of bad trips he experienced, along with a gradual diminishing of his ego.

I had many. Jesus Christ. I stopped taking it ’cause of that. I mean I just couldn’t stand it. I dropped it for I don’t know how long. Then I started taking it just before I met Yoko. I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s and all that shit. We were going through a whole game that everybody went through. And I destroyed meself. I was slowly putting meself together after Maharishi, bit by bit, over a twoyear period. And then I destroyed me ego and I didn’t believe I could do anything. I let Paul do what he wanted and say, them all just do what they wanted. And I just was nothing, I was shit. And then Derek [Taylor] tripped me out at his house after he’d got back from LA. He said, ‘You’re alright.’ And he pointed out which songs I’d written, and said, ‘You wrote this, and you said this, and you are intelligent, don’t be frightened.’ The next week I went down with Yoko and we tripped out again, and she freed me completely, to realise that I was me and it’s alright. And that was it. I started fighting again and being a loud-mouth again and saying, ‘Well, I can do this,’ and ‘Fuck you, and this is what I want,’ and ‘Don’t put me down. I did this.’ John Lennon

By the time of his death in 1980 Lennon had stopped taking LSD, but nonetheless defended it against common public perception of its effects.

A little mushroom or peyote is not beyond my scope, you know, maybe twice a year or something. But acid is a chemical. People are taking it, thought, even though you don’t hear about it anymore. But people are still visiting the cosmos. It’s just that nobody talks about it; you get sent to prison… I’ve never met anybody who’s had a flashback. I’ve never had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I’ve never met anybody who had any problem. I’ve had bad trips and other people have had bad trips, but I’ve had a bad trip in real life. I’ve had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant. I don’t have to take anything. Acid is only real life in Cinemascope. Whatever experience you had is what you would have had anyway. I’m not promoting, all you committees out there, and I don’t use it because it’s chemical, but all the garbage about what it did to people is garbage. John Lennon

Francis Crick with James D. Watson, co-discoverers of the structure and function of DNA, are shown in this image taken circa 1953

50 Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 60 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American coresearcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was the experimental LSD, not the Eagleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws. It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy the world has ever seen the multimillion pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.

FRANCIS

James D. Watson

It was Crick’s presence in Solomon’s social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world’s first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD ‘tabs’.

CRICK WAS A FOUNDER MEMBER OF SOMA, A LEGALISE-CANNABIS GROUP NAMED AFTER THE DRUG IN HUXLEY’S NOVEL BRAVE NEW WORLD

Francis Crick

CRICK

Crick’s involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp’s close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making. They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release. ‘They have a philosophy,’ Harker told me at the time. ‘They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people’s mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

‘Dick Kemp once met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD. ‘It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp’s inspiration.’ Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge. He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said:

‘Print a word of it and I’ll sue.’

The Beatles

COCAINE A rock ‘n’ roll singer named Davy Jones was booked to play at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, followed by an evening show at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, Wallasey. The Beatles backed him on both occasions, in addition to performing their own sets.

Far from widespread in England in 1961, at the time cocaine was nevertheless used recreationally by small numbers of people. One person who unwittingly partook was Bob Wooler, the Cavern’s DJ. It was not a pleasant experience for him.

We didn’t have a strong drug scene by any means. Originally, it was just purple hearts, amphetamines, speed or whatever you want to call it. When The Beatles went down south, they sometimes brought back cannabis and gradually the drug scene developed in Liverpool. There was a rare instance of cocaine when Davy Jones, a black rock ‘n’ roll singer who’d been with The Beatles in Hamburg, appeared at the Cavern. He was a Little Richard/Derry Wilkie type, very outgoing and bouncy. His big record was an oldie, Amapola, and its lyric about the ‘pretty little poppy’ must have appealed to him. Alan Ross, who was a local compère, brought Davy down to the Cavern, and that was when I had cocaine for the first and only time in my life. I told Davy Jones about my sinuses, and he said, ‘This’ll clear it.’ Alan Ross gave me a smile of approval, I tried it… and nearly hit the roof. There was laughter galore, and I rushed out into Mathew Street, trying to breathe the effects out. I remember Pat Delaney saying, ‘What’s wrong, Robert?’ and I said, ‘Nothing, I’m just a bit giddy.’ The Beatles welcomed Davy Jones with open arms, so I’m sure the drug-taking didn’t stop with me. That is the common factor with The Beatles – whatever was going, they wanted to be a part of it. Bob Wooler

Later in the 1960s, Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to regularly use cocaine. He is said to have been introduced to the drug by London art dealer Robert Fraser, and used it during the time Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded.

I did cocaine for about a year around the time of Sgt Pepper. Coke and maybe some grass to balance it out. I was never completely crazy with cocaine. I’d been introduced to it and at first it seemed OK, like anything that’s new and stimulating. When you start working your way through it, you start thinking: ‘Mmm, this is not so cool an idea,’ especially when you start getting those terrible comedowns. Paul McCartney

At the time cocaine wasn’t widely used or easily available, although it had been fashionable in certain sections of society since the 1920s. During the making of Sgt Pepper Robert Fraser offered them cocaine, heroin, and speedballs – a mixture of the two. Cocaine was the only one of the three that was accepted.

He walked in with a little phial of white powder. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Cocaine.’ ‘Shit, that smells just like what the dentist used to give us.’ To this day, I swear as kids in Liverpool we were given cocaine to deaden the gums. People say no, that will have been Novocaine, but I think that was much later. I recognise the smell from the dentist; it’s a medical smell coke can have. Anyway, that was my first thought about it. I liked the paraphernalia. I liked the ritualistic end of it. I was particularly amused by rolling up a pound note. There was a lot of symbolism in that: sniffing it through money! For Sgt. Pepper I used to have a bit of coke and then smoke some grass to balance it out. So Robert introduced me to it, and I know the other guys were a bit shocked at me and said, ‘Hey, man, you know this is like, “now you’re getting into drugs”. This is more than pot.’ I remember feeling a little bit superior and patting them on the head, symbolically, and saying, ‘No. Don’t worry, guys. I can handle it.’ And as it happened, I could. What I enjoyed was the ritual of meeting someone and them saying, ‘Have you seen the toilets in this place?’ And you’d know what they meant. ‘Oh no, are they particularly good?’ And you’d wander out to the toilets and you’d snort a bit of stuff. Robert and I did that for a bit. It wasn’t ever too crazy; eventually I just started to think – I think rightly now – that this doesn’t work. You’ve got to put too much in to get too little high out it. I did it for about a year and I got off it.

I’d been in a club in London and somebody there had some and I’d snorted it. I remember going to the toilet, and I met Jimi Hendrix on the way. ‘Jimi! Great, man,’ because I love that guy. But then as I hit the toilet, it all wore off! And I started getting this dreadful melancholy. I remember walking back and asking, ‘Have you got any more?’ because the whole mood had just dropped, the bottom had dropped out, and I remember thinking then it was time to stop it. I thought, this is not clever, for two reasons. Number one, you didn’t stay high. The plunge after it was this melancholy plunge which I was not used to. I had quite a reasonable childhood so melancholy was not really much part of it, even though my mum dying was a very bad period, so for anything that put me in that kind of mood it was like, ‘Huh, I’m not paying for this! Who needs that?’ The other reason was just a physical thing with the scraunching round the back of the neck, when it would get down the back of your nose, and it would all go dead! This was what reminded me of the dentist. It was exactly the same feeling as the stuff to numb your teeth. I remember when I stopped doing it. I went to America just after Pepper came out, and I was thinking of stopping it. And everyone there was taking it, all these music business people, and I thought, no. Paul McCartney

While McCartney’s use of cocaine ended in 1968, the other Beatles were less restrained – notably Lennon and Starr, although their usage peaked in the 1970s after The Beatles had split up.

I had a lot of it in my day, but I don’t like it. It’s a dumb drug. Your whole concentration goes on getting the next fix. I find caffeine easier to deal with. John Lennon

It has been claimed that the line “He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca Cola”, in Come Together, is about cocaine. However, since the song’s lyrics are somewhat opaque, it is perhaps unwise to rely too much on conjecture.

F Then another. And another.

R I

On April 24, 1884, Sigmund Freud ordered his first gram of cocaine from the local apothecary. It was not to be his last. He’d read about coke, it was supposed to be great for fatigue. So great, the German army used it to stave off exhaustion[1], and he thought it might help out a few of his patients suffering nervous disorders. Like most people who purchase their first gram of coke, he was rather shocked - it cost him a small fortune. One tenth of his monthly salary to be precise. And again, like new kids in the cocaine game, the first thing he did was take a dose himself. Then another. And another. He sent some to his friends; he sent some to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, who lived some miles away, saying: I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance. Clearly, he was off his nut

E A junkie in the making Freud was going through a bad patch. He desperately wanted to marry the fetching Martha, but her parents were rich and sceptical of this young upstart who presumed to ask for their daughter’s hand. He’d started studying a variety of sea creatures in the hope of making great leaps forward in the new science of neurology and had the honour of being the first person to find the genitals of an eel (how he found the genitals while looking for the brain is a bit of a mystery). But it wasn’t enough. Poking around in the nether regions of fish wasn’t going to impress anybody[3], not least Martha’s snooty parents. So when the cocaine came along, he had high hopes. How could a highly addictive simulant not impress one’s presumptive in-laws? Not only did this new drug cure hunger, thirst and melancholy, it made him feel fantastic. Like totally groovy, man. He couldn’t wait to announce this new wonder drug to the scientific community, publishing “On Coca” in June 1884. Considering Freud was the father of psychoanalysis and spurred an entire new realm of intellectual discourse, the article was a complete mess. Rife with misspellings and inaccuracies, he managed to even get the comparatively simple chemical formula of cocaine incorrect. Why? Let’s just say he was extremely thorough in his research.

The rip off During this time, Freud had made the acquaintance of an ophthalmology intern named Carl Koller. Koller was keen to find a local anaesthetic for eye surgery, which, as one can imagine, was a terrible business, particularly given that the patient was generally required to stay awake throughout the procedure, rendering other available anaesthetics useless. Try convincing someone to hold still while you push a scalpel into their eyeball and you’ll get the picture. It involved much fussing about with burly lads holding down the patient and the use of gags and other apparatus to restrain the struggling victim; and a bullet or wooden spoon to bite, perhaps. Stitches were often torn out, and the results were, in a word, an eyesore. Freud and Koller started dosing up on cocaine together, doing a variety of medical experiments on themselves. Noticing that cocaine numbed his lips when he drank it, Koller had the bright idea to try putting a coke solution into his patients’ eyes before surgery. It worked a treat Sadly, for Freud, he was on leave at the time. He was off being a “big strong man” for Martha, whom he hadn’t seen in a year When he returned, he was mortified to know that his new discovery had been hijacked and that Koller was currently enjoying the accolades of his colleagues as the discoverer of the first local anaesthetic for eye surgery.

U While Freud was lamenting the loss of his breakthrough, the rest of the medical fraternity on both sides of the Atlantic were chattering like monkeys about the possible applications of this new drug. They started testing it in droves - mostly on themselves. They painted it on their skin, in their ears and up their noses. They injected it, ingested it and snorted it by the bucketload. They stuffed it into a variety of orifices. One particularly fervent researcher injected it into his penis, following up with the insertion of a range of objects to test its efficacy in anaesthetising mucus membranes. Research at the time suggested that cocaine could be used for urethral operations, removing ingrown toenails, catarrh, asthma, nymphomania, impotency, masturbation, lip waxing, seasickness, weight problems, head colds, gastritis, and toothache. And best of all, it had no side effects. They could all agree on one thing -- coke felt good.

I’d like to buy the world some coke Cocaine products started flooding the market: there were lozenges and pastilles, elixirs and pills. The most notable, however was cocaine wine, which was first sold in Europe under the name of Vin Mariani, named after its creator Angelo Mariani in 1860. It was a roaring success, and spawned an army of impostors. In the US, an enterprising chap by the name of John Styth Pemberton brought out his own version of the drink in 1881. He was moderately successful, but in 1885, Atlanta banned the sale of alcohol. Clearly, something had to be done. So Pemberton changed the recipe, took out the alcohol, and sold his new drink under the name Coca-Cola. It was good, but not great. Disillusioned that his fortune hadn’t been made overnight, he sold the entire operation to Asa Griggs Candler for a paltry $2,300.

What goes up. We all know cocaine is an addictive drug: about the most addictive drug on Earth. In one experiment, a chimp was trained to hit a bar in his cage to be administered with cocaine. At regular intervals, the number of times the chimp had to hit the bar was increased. The experiment was finally abandoned when the chimp hit the bar over 12,000 times to get a single dose of coke.

U Must come down.

But in 1885, the medicos were blissfully ignorant. So, not surprisingly, by the late 1800s more than half the scientific and medical community had developed healthy coke habits. One notable example was William Halstead, a founding father of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Halstead was a talented surgeon, now famous for introducing the rubber glove to surgical hygiene. Halstead became hopelessly addicted to the drug while perfecting nerve block anaesthesia in the mid 1880s. He developed a hefty two-gram a day habit injecting nerves, and never recovered. In a move that must make the legions of JHU medical graduates beam with pride, he eventually switched to morphine in an effort to cure his cocaine addiction and died an opiate junkie. Back in Vienna, Freud was having a similar problem with a good friend of his. Dr. Ernst Fleishl von Markow had developed a morphine addiction treating his painful thumb, and the young Freud figured there was one cure - cocaine and plenty of it. He started dosing Fleishl regularly, and miraculously, his morphine dependence wseemed to be on the wane. Things were looking good. But the tide turned, and before long Fleishl had developed an enormous addiction - equivalent to one full gram of pure cocaine a day. He became paranoid, experienced convulsions and tactile hallucinations better know to cocaine aficionados as “coke bugs”. This is a sensation caused by

chronic cocaine toxicity Your kind should not die out, my dear friend; the rest of us need people where the sufferer feels that like you too much. How much I owe you: solace, understanding, there are insects or snakes stimulation in my loneliness, meaning to my life that I gained through crawling under their skin. you, and finally even health that no one else could have given back to Fleishl spent hours at a time me. It is primarily through your example that intellectually I gained the trying to pick them out. strength to trust my judgment, even when I am left alone - though not Eventually, he settled on a by you - and like you, to face with lofty humility all the difficulties that morphine-cocaine combo the future may bring. For all that, accept my humble thanks! I know more affectionately known that you do not need me as much as I need you, but I also know that I today as a speedball - the have a secure place in your affection. very same cocaine cocktail that sent John Belushi to To all outsiders, Freud exhibited all the sympoblivion. Fleishl suffered the same fate, dying toms of a man in love. He shared intimacies in agony six years later in 1891. about his disappointing sex life with Martha, and told him all the dark secrets of his emoNow one would think that watching the slow, tional health. There was only one problem tortuous death of a friend and colleague would be enough to suggest that perhaps it was time to get out of the coke game. It wasn’t. Fleiss was a nutter.

The Coke-a-Rama Mutual Nasal Admiration Society

He was a master of quackery, a snake-oil merchant of the very first order. He and Freud spent long nights together concocting harebrained theories.

Some four years before Fleishl’s death, Freud had had the pleasure of the acquaintance of a young ear, nose and throat specialist called Wilhelm Fleiss. They became firm friends and remained so for years.

And Fleiss had a corker. He believed that the nose was the centre of all human illness - both physical and psychological. Rather in the way that phrenologists believed that the bumps on your head dictate the kind of person you are[8] Freud wholeheartedly agreed. And why not? High on cocaine, he was soaring at dizzy heights somewhere outside the galaxy. The two congratulated each other on their genius, named their new science “nasal reflex neurosis” and got down to working out the details.

His admiration for the young doctor bordered on the extremely creepy. In 1896 he wrote in a letter to Fleiss:

They experimented extensively with cocaine paint, diagnosed each other, and occasioned the odd operation, where they used cocaine beforehand as an anaesthetic, and afterwards to dull the pain of surgery. After the first operation, Sigmund started to feel better. A lot better actually. In April 1897 he wrote: I put a noticeable end to the last horrible attack with cocaine; since then things have been fine and a great amount of pus is coming out... Since the last cocainisation three circumstances have continued to coincide: 1. I feel well; 2. I am discharging ample amounts of pus; 3. I am feeling very well...”

THE FACT THAT THE DRUG MAY HAVE BEEN THE PRIMARY FACTOR IN THIS FEEL GOOD SAGA DIDN’T OCCUR TO EITHER OF THEM.

Freudian slip Freud’s inevitable disillusionment started around the same time, with the treatment of a young woman by the name of Emma Eckstein. Emma suffered from hysteria, and Freud figured that there was no-one better to cure her disease than his good friend and “magical healer” Fleiss. So he summoned him to Vienna to take a look at the hapless young woman. Fleiss immediately diagnosed the source of the problem - a bump on the inside of her nose. So he operated and split the city. A month later, Emma came to see Freud again - she was in considerable pain and had clearly developed a serious infection. Other surgeons were consulted, and discovered, stuffed into her nasal cavity, a length of gauze, which Fleiss had negligently, if unwittingly, left behind. In Freud’s words: There was still moderate bleeding from the nose and mouth; the fetid odour was very bad. [The doctor] suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse... At the moment the foreign body came out and everything became clear to me...I felt sick. After she had been packed, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water, and felt miserable... It was the beginning of the end of the great affair.

The final cut It’s difficult to ascertain exactly when Freud gave up his coke habit. We know he was using in the late 1890s and by 1904 had stopped completely. So what happened in between? By 1900 the friendship was becoming strained -- Freud was on the brink of success with psychoanalysis, while Fleiss was becoming increasingly grandiose in his theories, which largely centred around the idea of a male and female sexual cycle, and finally that many illnesses could be attributed to left and right handedness. But this is only part of the story. Freud behaved like a petulant lover, overly sensitive, and prone to fits of depression if Fleiss didn’t respond to his communications immediately. In one letter he wrote: There has never been a six-month period in which I so constantly and ardently longed to be living in the same place as you. A few months later Freud’s jealousy had all but destroyed the friendship. They met for the last time. Freud was cold and cross. He slandered ideas and theories that he had once rapturously congratulated Fleiss for. Typically, Fleiss put it down to envy. We think it was more likely to be the absence of the happy juice. Needless to say, Fleiss became a footnote in the life of Freud, whose own ideas went on to be celebrated across the globe. Although they’re now largely dismissed, there’s no doubt that they were ground breaking, and deservedly earned him the moniker of “the father of psychoanalysis”. We wonder if he would have had them at all if he half of Columbia hadn’t disappeared up his nose in his formative years.

66 The Beatles

HEROIN The Beatles’ first exposure to heroin is believed to have taken place in 1965. While filming Help! on Huntington Hartford’s estate on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, director Richard Lester witnessed two women attempting to introduce Paul McCartney to the drug.

[Lester] accidentally overheard two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, dressed in identical, stunning black swimsuits, try to coax Paul into taking heroin. The combination of their sexual come-on and the enticement towards hard drugs was one of the most chillingly evil moments Lester has ever encountered … His sense of relief when Paul rebuffed the twosome was profound. Andrew Yule

In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine, Paul McCartney described how he did take heroin, albeit unwittingly, in the 1960s.

I tried heroin just the once. Even then, I didn’t realize I’d taken it. I was just handed something, smoked it, then found out what it was. It didn’t do anything for me, which was lucky because I wouldn’t have fancied heading down that road. Paul McCartney

The account contradicts a passage in McCartney’s authorised biography, in which he recalls snorting the drug with art dealer Robert Fraser.

I was very frightened of drugs, having a nurse mother, so I was always cautious, thank God as it turned out, because I would be in rooms with guys who would say, ‘Do you want to sniff a little heroin?’ and I would say, ‘Well, just a little.’ I did some with Robert Fraser, and some of the boys in the Stones who were doing things like that. I always refer to it as walking through a minefield, and I was lucky because had anyone hit me with a real dose that I loved, I would have been a heroin addict. Robert Fraser once said to me, ‘Heroin is not addictive. There’s no problem with heroin addiction, even if it is addictive, you’ve just got to have a lot of money. The problem with heroin is when you can’t pay for it.’ Which of course is absolute bullshit! You’re a junkie, of course you are. This was the way he put it to me and for a second I was almost taken in but then my northern savvy kicked in and said, ‘Now don’t go for all of this. This is all very exotic and romantic but don’t go for all of it.’ There was always a little corner, at the back of my brain, that ‘knock! knock! knock!’ on the door – ‘Stop!’ A lot of his friends messed around with heroin. A lot of his lords and ladies were heroin addicts and had been for many many years. And give Robert his due, he knew I wasn’t that keen. He knew I wasn’t a nutter for that kind of stuff. So I did sniff heroin with him once, but I said afterwards, ‘I’m not sure about this, man. It didn’t really do anything for me,’ and he said, ‘In that case, I won’t offer you again.’ And I didn’t take it again. I was often around it when they’d all be doing it. They’d repair to the toilet and I’d say, ‘I’m all right, thanks, no.’ One of the most difficult things about that period was the peer pressure to do that. Paul McCartney

From around the middle of 1968 through to the latter months of 1969, John Lennon was addicted to heroin. While never made as explicitly public as The Beatles’ use of LSD, it found its way into his songs, chiefly Happiness Is A Warm Gun (“I need a fix ’cause I’m going down”) and Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey (“The deeper you go the higher you fly”), both on The Beatles (White Album).

He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin. Until that point we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. But now John started talking about fixes and monkeys and it was harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into. We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really know how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far. In actual fact, he did end up clean but this was the period when he was on it. It was a tough period for John, but often that adversity and craziness can lead to good art, as I think it did in this case. Paul McCartney

Lennon’s heroin addiction peaked during the protracted sessions for Let It Be, which saw him largely withdraw creatively from the band. In 1970 he put his usage down to the treatment Yoko Ono received from the others in The Beatles’ circle. Heroin. It just was not too much fun. I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. I mean we just couldn’t – people were giving us such a hard time. And I’ve had so much shit thrown at me and especially at Yoko. People like Peter Brown in our office, he comes down and shakes my hand and doesn’t even say hello to her. Now that’s going on all the time. And we get in so much pain that we have to do something about it. And that’s what happened to us. We took H because of what The Beatles and their pals were doing to us. And we got out of it. They didn’t set down to do it, but things came out of that period. And I don’t forget. John Lennon

Lennon later admitted he was addicted to heroin at the time of the Plastic Ono Band’s performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival on 13 September 1969.

We were full of junk too. I just threw up for hours till I went on. I nearly threw up in Cold Turkey – I had a review in Rolling Stone about the film of it – which I haven’t seen yet, and they’re saying, ‘I was this and that.’ And I was throwing up nearly in the number. I could hardly sing any of them, I was full of shit. John Lennon

It has been suggested that heroin withdrawal was one of the reasons behind Yoko Onoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s miscarriage, which she suffered on 12 October 1969. In her June 2007 appearance on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs, Ono suggested that the low purity of their heroin or lack of regular supply made it easier for them to kick the habit.

Luckily we never injected because both of us were totally scared about needles. So that probably saved us. And the other thing that saved us was our connection was not very good. Yoko Ono

Cold Turkey, released in October 1969, detailed the coupleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experiences of withdrawal. It had previously been rejected by Paul McCartney as a potential Beatles single, and so was released by the Plastic Ono Band. Recorded and released before The Beatles had officially split, it featured Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums.

CARL

SAGAN

Dr. Lester Grinspoon interviewed Sagan for his own groundbreaking book, Marihuana Reconsidered, published in 1971. The section written by a “Mr. X” was actually penned by Sagan, who chose to remain anonymous. After Sagan’s death in 1996, Grinspoon revealed the identity of Mr. X.

Here is the entire marijuana essay Sagan wrote for Grinspoon’s book:

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter.

It all began about 10 years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation 1. Popular science. Carl Sagan’s most widely rather than by chemistry. known legacy is perhaps his work to make science accessible to and popular with After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, the masses, best demonstrated by his TV however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a show, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Origfriend’s living room idly examining the pattern of inally broadcast in 1980, the show was – shadows on the ceiling cast by and still is – beloved for presenting complex a potted plant (not cannabis!). I scientific concepts in a way that made them suddenly realized that I was exgraspable. Sagan’s friendly and approachamining an intricately detailed able personality was a big part of this. miniature Volkswagen, distinctly Instead of lecturing viewers on scientific outlined by the shadows. I was theories, he sat down and chatted with very skeptical at this perception, them about how interesting science is. His and tried to find inconsistencies sense of wonder was always present on the between Volkswagens and what I show, and it was contagious. viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, chrome and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash…a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. Flash…same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields. Flash…Flash…Flash.

The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colours…exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly. I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience. I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘”really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observ2. Mars, the dusty planet. Sagan contriber-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I uted significantly to our understanding of smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the picMars. Mars was once thought to be covered tures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I supwith vegetation that changed with the pose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of seasons – leading to its varying patterns of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. light and dark as seen through telescopes. Possibly this is because I know it’s my own trip, and Sagan examined new data and determined that I can come down rapidly any time I want to. that the changing color patterns were caused by dust blowing in the wind across While my early perceptions were all visual, and cudifferent elevations. This was confirmed by riously lacking in images of human beings, both of later expeditions to the planet, which found these items have changed over the intervening years. it dusty and devoid of life. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I’m high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and tracks from its driving are visible in this view from orbit, acquired on 11 April 2014, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

WHILE MY EARLY PERCEPTIONS WERE ALL VISUAL, AND CURIOUSLY LACKING IN IMAGES OF HUMAN BEINGS, BOTH OF THESE ITEMS HAVE CHANGED OVER THE INTERVENING YEARS.

Curiosity and Rover Tracks at ‘the Kimberley,’ Date: 11 Apr 2014

Another interesting information-theoretical aspect is the prevalence at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 10 x 8 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had 3. Habitable moons. Sagan was one of the an image in which two people were talking, and the words first to hypothesize that water was present they were saying would form and disappear in yellow on Saturn’s moon Titan and Jupiter’s moon above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In Europa. These two moons are now the this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the source of much fascination and speculasame time an occasional word would appear in red let- tion, with many contemplating the possiters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in bility of human colonization, as well as context with the conversation; but if one remembered the exciting idea that the moons might be these red words, they would enunciate a quite different capable of developing life independently. set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversa- Though neither would currently be a very tion. The entire image set which I’ve outlined here, with comfy place to live – both have almost I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like unimaginably cold climates and Europa 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute. possesses potentially fatal levels of radiation – they both present possibilities. The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don’t know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion

4. Venus and the greenhouse effect. Venus was once thought to have a climate like Earth’s, only even more appealingly tropical. We now know it’s quite the opposite – hot and dry and uninhabitable. Sagan was the first to suggest that Venus’s clouds might not be an indication of a balmy climate; his study of radio emissions from Venus led him to hypothesize a surface temperature of 900° F. He later helped design and manage NASA’s Mariner expeditions to Venus, which proved that Venus is indeed uninhabitably hot. Sagan determined that while Venus may once have had water, it evaporated due to an intense greenhouse effect – and he warned of the danger of a similar path here on Earth, if global warming were allowed to careen out of control.

The Cassini spacecraft peers down though layers of haze to glimpse the lakes of Titan's northern regions.

5. SETI. Sagan was a pioneering scientist in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, a series of projects undertaken in hopes of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. A member of the SETI Institute’s Board of Trustees, he worked to bring attention and understanding to the search, with his characteristic blend of rational advocacy and total delight. Sagan could tell us how scientifically and culturally important it was to determine if we share the universe with other intelligent beings…and he could get us giddily excited about the possibility.

of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood. A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I’m down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that 6. Debunking UFOs. Out of Sagan’s fasciof other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also nation with the search for intelligent life in enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it the universe grew his frustration with the gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand cult of UFOism. While he was confident it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with that intelligent life is out there somewhere, the profusion of images passing before my eyes. he was also sure that it isn’t hanging The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen around Earth, buzzing deserted country greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time roads and performing probes on the expansion which comes with cannabis smoking. populace. In this and many other areas, Sagan was a noted skeptic, always advoI do not consider myself a religious person in the cating the power of scientific inquiry over usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some blind belief. highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd

The hemispheric view of Venus, as revealed by more than a decade of radar investigations culminating in the 19901994 Magellan mission, is centered at 270 degrees east longitude. The Magellan spacecraft imaged more than 98% of Venus at a resolution of about 100 meters; the effective resolution of this image is about 3 km.

can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word “crazy” to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union po7. The Planetary Society. In 1980, Sagan litical dissidents are routinely placed in insane founded the Planetary Society along with asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman. With its subtle perhaps, occurs here: “Did you hear what mission “To inspire and involve the world's Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.” public in space exploration through advoWhen high on cannabis I discovered that there’s cacy, projects, and education,” the society somebody inside in those people we call mad. is today the world’s largest space interest group. Through independent work and When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall private funding, the Planetary Society childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, is creating its own spacecraft to test the streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished possibilities of solar sailing. It also funds era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in other entities in a wide variety of efforts, childhood events only half understood at the time. from research on Mars to political action. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights. There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that 10 even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only

A portrait of Carl Sagan included in the archive housed by the Library of Congress.

if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do. I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while 8. Deflection Dilemma. One important high, in which I had an idea on the origins and infield of study for Sagan and the Planevalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution tary Society was Near-Earth Objects – curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely asteroids, meteors and other objects that talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower could collide with Earth to devastating wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to effect. Some have proposed the cineanother, and at the end of about an hour of extremely matic solution of firing nuclear missiles hard work I found I had written 11 short essays on a that could deflect a collision-course NEO, wide range of social, political, philosophical and altering its path so it would pass harmhuman biological topics. Because of problems of lessly by Earth. Sagan countered this space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but idea with the sobering thought that if we from all external signs, such as public reactions and create the ability to deflect an NEO away expert commentary, they seem to contain valid infrom the Earth, we also create the ability sights. I have used them in university commenceto deflect one toward the Earth – thus ment addresses, public lectures and in my books. harnessing destructive power beyond any of our current technology and endanBut let me try to at least give the flavor of such an ingering ourselves and other nations. This sight and its accompaniments. One night, high on Deflection Dilemma is just one example cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little of the many ways Sagan applied scientific self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be principles to political issues, attempting very good progress. I then paused and thought how to encourage sane and critical thinking in extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no all areas. It also reflects his grave concern assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his over weapons of mass destruction – he own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me spoke against them many times and like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud warned us of their dire consequences. had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea

X has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs. I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night 9. Writings. Carl Sagan was the author before informing me that there is a world around us or co-author of 20 publications, using his which we barely sense, or that we can become one friendly and approachable writing style to with the universe, or even that certain politicians bring science down to Earth for those of us are desperately frightened men, I may tend to diswithout advanced degrees in astrophysics. believe; but when I’m high I know about this disbeFrom his first – Planets, a contribution to lief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to a series of Time Life books – to his final take such remarks seriously. I say, “Listen closely, you two works, brilliantly penned while he was son of a bitch of the morning! This stuff is real!” I try undergoing painful and stressful treatto show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the ment for the myelodysplasia that would name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought take his life, Sagan sought to share his of in 30 years; I describe the color, typography, and hunger for knowledge with his readers. He format of a book in another room and these memeven wrote a novel, Contact, which was ories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am made into a well-received and award-winconvinced that there are genuine and valid levels of ning film, exploring Sagan’s idea of how perception available with cannabis (and probably our first experience with extraterrestrial with other drugs) which are, through the defects of intelligence might play out. our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each others’ minds. Cannabis enables non-musicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and non-artists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.

THROUGH THE DEFECTS OF OUR SOCIETY AND OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM, UNAVAILABLE TO US WITHOUT SUCH DRUGS.

Storm of Stars in the Trifid Nebula

So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I’m sure I would never have thought of down. I’ve written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it’s very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory. I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with no difficulty at all, though I 10. Wonder. Through all of it, his enordid have some thoughts about the marvelous chermous scientific achievements and his ry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the popular public appearances, Sagan never drive I’m not high at all. There are no flashes on the lost the thing that made him so notable insides of my eyelids. If you’re high and your child and so beloved – his sense of wonder. He is calling, you can respond about as capably as you wasn’t just a scientist because he was brilusually do. I don’t advocate driving when high on liant and knew how to do the work; he was cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experialso a scientist because he thought science ence that it certainly can be done. My high is always was so neat. His excitement came across reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and soin his speeches and TV appearances, his ciable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never publications and discoveries and hypotha hangover. Through the years I find that slightly eses, and in his lifelong enthusiasm for smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce science. And, always, in his two primary the same degree of high, and in one movie theater goals – to advance scientific knowledge, recently I found I could get high just by inhaling and to bring that knowledge to the people. the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater. There is a very nice self-titrating aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Mr X