LSD, Shrooms, & Other Fun Stuff

I remember being six years old. It was the mid ’80s and I lived in the small, cedar-paneled, wood stove-heated home that my parents had built by themselves on their 40-acre homestead in north Idaho. Our indoor plumbing consisted of a kitchen sink and a huge cast-iron claw-foot bathtub; toilet facilities would be located in an outhouse about 20 yards down a path until I was nearly 11. We had, however, recently acquired electricity, and in the afternoon my parents would play records of some of their favorite artists to get my brother and me to lay still on the pillows and cushions scattered across the wood floor and relax, if not actually nap. A few of the artists I still love to listen to who were introduced to me at this early age were Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, John Denver, and The Moody Blues. I can still remember singing along gently to the hypnotizing and mystical songs of The Moody Blues, chanting that lyrical-sounding name—“Timothy Leary…”

How little did I know the associations I was invoking.

Timothy Leary seems such a mythical figure now: a guru in the world of hallucinogenic drugs and a master in the art of tripping. Reading about his mansion at Millbrook and the League for Spiritual Discovery feels like reading a work of outrageous fiction—people really did this? This was real? The approach they took to drugs is incredible. People today take drugs to escape or just to have fun; Leary and his League took them to achieve something, to gain understanding. Under the influence of hallucinogens such as LSD or shrooms, the associations with Buddhism and Hinduism come naturally—the intrinsic connection to every particle in the universe; the feeling of enlightenment; the awareness of the presence in animals, tree, rocks, water. To experience this is one thing; to take something away from that experience and incorporate it into the rest of your life is really quite amazing.

Sure, detractors may read Diane di Prima’s account of that Thanksgiving Day at Millbrook as proof of blatant neglect, irresponsibility, or dangerous ignorance. After all, she lets her three-year-old son taste beer—but did you know that in many cultures there is no stigma against children drinking light forms of alcohol? The group accidentally allows a reporter to ingest a huge amount of LSD—but did you read the article about the CIA actually intentionally testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians? And Leary had randomly “dumped half the [LSD] powder” into a can with some vodka and “sloshed it around” as part of his supposedly scientific testing—but didn’t everyone there come of their own accord and know what they were getting into? I firmly believe that people in this country should be free to do to their own bodies whatever they desire. That includes accepted and legal things such as tattooing and piercing, semi-accepted and legally contended things such as abortion, and underground and currently illegal things such as ingesting whatever drugs one chooses. The so-called “war on drugs” has only made drug lords more powerful and the acquisition of drugs more expensive and dangerous than it should be. Have we all forgotten the immense folly of prohibition?

One example of a perfectly harmless drug that has been ludicrously elevated in its illegality to the same status of LSD is, of course, the magic mushroom. I think Andy Lechter had an excellent point when he suggested in Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom that the greatest threat to mushroom users is the danger of picking the wrong kind of mushroom—a danger that could easily be remedied or at least drastically reduced if mushrooms were readily available on a legal market. I’m sure the same goes for many drugs, even those considered by some to be incredibly dangerous. But think of it: would you rather have a friend or relative taking their chances with heroin purchased in a grimy back alley or in a regulated pharmacy? To me, at least, the answer is clear.