Paul Krassner : My Encounter with Owsley

Owsley 'Bear' Stanley, left, with the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia in 1969. Photo by Ho / Reuters.

"Investigative satirist" and former Realist editor Paul Krassner will join Thorne Dreyer on Friday, April 1, for a Rag Radio April Fool's Special. Rag Radio airs Fridays from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streams live on the web here. Listen to Dreyer's earlier interviews with Paul Krassner here and here.

My encounter with Owsley

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

[Owsley Stanley, an iconic figure from the Sixties who gained fame as a producer of LSD and as a sound man for the Grateful Dead, died March 13, 2011, in an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia. Stanley supplied what Rolling Stone Magazine once called "the best LSD in the world" to Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, and, through his work with the Dead, revolutionized the art of rock and roll sound engineering. See The Guardian's obituary after Paul Krassner's article below.]

In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist.

There were two shows, both completely sold out, and this was the first time anybody had realized how many hippies actually lived in Pittsburgh.

Backstage between shows, a man sidled up to me. “Call me ‘Bear,’” he said.

“Okay, you're ‘Bear.’”

“Don't you recognize me?”

“You look familiar, but--”

“I'm Owsley.”

“Of course – Owsley acid!”

Fun fact: His nickname, “Bear,” was originally inspired by his prematurely hairy chest.

Now he presented me with a tab of Monterey Purple LSD. Not wishing to carry around an illegal drug in my pocket, I swallowed it instead.

Soon I found myself in the front lobby, talking with Jerry Garcia. As people from the audience wandered past us, he whimsically stuck out his hand, palm up.

“Got any spare change?”

Somebody passing by gave him a dime, and Garcia said thanks.

“He didn't recognize you,” I said.

“See, we all look alike.”

In the course of our conversation, I used the word “evil” to describe someone.

“There are no evil people,” Garcia said, just as the LSD was settling into my psyche. “There are only victims.”

“What does that mean? If a rapist is a victim, you should have compassion when you kick 'im in the balls?”

I did the second show while the Dead were setting up behind me. Then they began to play, softly, and as they built up their riff, I faded out and left the stage.

Later, some local folks brought me to a restaurant which, they told me, catered to a Mafia clientele. They pointed out a woman sitting at a table. The legend was that her fingers had once been chopped off, and she’d go to a theater, walk straight up to the ticket-taker, hold up her hand and say, “I have my stubs.”

With my long brown curly hair underneath my Mexican cowboy hat, I didn't quite fit in. The manager came over and asked me to kindly remove my hat. I was still tripping. I hardly ate any of my spaghetti after I noticed how it was wiggling on my plate.

I glanced around at the various Mafia figures sitting at their tables, wondering if they had killed anybody. Then I remembered what Jerry Garcia had said about evil. So these guys might be executioners, but they were also victims.

The spaghetti was still wiggling on my plate, but then I realized it wasn't really spaghetti, it was actually worms in tomato sauce. The other people at my table were all pretending not to notice.

It was, after all, the Summer of Love.

“Thanks for enhancing it, ‘Bear.’”

[For years, Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America's premier satirical rag. He was also a founder of the Yippies. The above was excerpted from the expanded edition of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture -- not sold in any bookstores; available only at paulkrassner.com and as a Kindle e-book.]

Owsley Stanley at his 1967 arraignment for LSD possession. Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Owsley Stanley, 1935-2011:
Prolific LSD producer and
icon of the 1960s counterculture

By Michael Carlson / The Guardian / March 15, 2011

The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley Stanley who provided the means to do just that. Stanley, who has died at age 76, produced millions of doses of "acid", the psychedelic drug LSD, which fueled the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and spread around the world.

Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze was the consequence of Stanley's Monterey Purple acid; his varieties included White Lightning and Blue Cheer and aficionados called the best acid simply "Owsley". He supplied the Beatles at the time of their Magical Mystery Tour television film (1967), and provided the acid to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest novelist Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters", whose 1964 bus trip across America was chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Stanley's acid turned hippies on and he also tuned them in. The band on Kesey's bus was the Grateful Dead, with whom Owsley began an instantly synergistic relationship. The Dead took to his acid with such enthusiasm that Jerry Garcia became "Captain Trips", while Stanley funded their career and became their sound engineer, creating their unique live sound and, by recording each concert, providing the most complete archive of any band of the era. Along with Bob Thomas, he designed the band's "Steal Your Face" lightning bolt and skull logo, originally so his masses of sound equipment could be identified easily.

Stanley was also the quintessential drop-out. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, his grandfather of the same name had been governor of Kentucky, a US senator and congressman. His father, a state's attorney, was pushed by wartime experiences into alcoholism. After his parents separated, he lived first with his mother in Los Angeles, then returned to his father and was sent to military school.

Nicknamed "Bear" when he began sprouting body hair, he was expelled from school for getting his ninth-grade classmates drunk. He spent more than a year as a patient at St Elizabeth's, the Washington psychiatric hospital that also housed Ezra Pound, and tried college, but eventually joined the air force. His electronics training there led to work on radio stations in Los Angeles, while studying ballet and working as a dancer.

In 1963 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began smoking marijuana and selling fellow students morning-glory seeds for a legal high. The next year, he encountered LSD. He spent three weeks studying the then-legal drug's chemistry, and began producing it himself. Quitting college and working at a local radio station, he set up the "Bear Research Group" to make acid. By the time he met Kesey in September 1965, he had become the first private producer of LSD on a grand scale.

Along with Tim Scully he set up a massive lab in Port Richmond, at the northern end of San Francisco Bay; when LSD became illegal in California in 1966, Scully moved to a location opposite the Denver zoo. Stanley stayed ahead of the law by keeping his acid in a small trunk which he shipped between bus stations, but after a 1967 raid his defence was that the 350,000 acid tabs police confiscated were for his personal use. He fought the case for two years, but his bail was revoked when he and the Dead were busted in New Orleans in 1970, and he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Once released, he resumed working for the Dead. His mentoring of the band had floundered in 1966, because while sharing his house in Los Angeles's Watts ghetto they also had to share his carnivorous life-style. Stanley believed that carbohydrates poisoned the body and vegetables interfered with nutrition. Arguing with his fierce but erratic intelligence was challenging: "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure," said Garcia.

On a practical level, Stanley's perfectionism meant that sound systems took too long to set up and take down, and he feuded with the business-first approach of Lenny Hart, the band's manager and father of drummer Mickey. But in 1973 he delved into his archive to release Bear's Choice, a tribute to the recently deceased Dead co-founder, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and in 1974, at a concert in San Francisco's Cow Palace, he inaugurated the 604-speaker Wall of Sound.

Owsley later organised sound for Jefferson Starship and Dead bassist Phil Lesh's solo projects, and scraped a living selling marijuana and making jewelery, a trade he learned in prison. In 1985 he met his third wife, Sheilah, and they moved to the Australian outback, squatting on 120 acres of remote land outside Cairns, convinced there was an oncoming Ice Age which would be best survived there. He believed that global warming was part of a natural cycle, rather than man-made.

In 2005, Stanley contracted throat cancer, attributing his survival to starving the tumour of glucose through diet. He died and his wife was injured when his car ran off a road in Queensland, and crashed into a tree. He is survived by Sheilah; by two sons, Pete and Starfinder; by two daughters, Nina and Redbird; and is remembered in the Dead's song Alice D Millionaire and Steely Dan's Kid Charlemagne.

[Michael Carlson is a sportswriter (and former tight end at Wesleyan University). He also writes obituaries for the British daily, The Guardian, where this article first appeared.]

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Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

The original "Furthur," the magic bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, on the road. Photo from NoFurthur.
Paying Larry McMurtry a visit:
The Merry Pranksters' last acid test

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

HOUSTON -- In the heat of a July Houston morning in 1964, residents of the quiet Southampton neighborhood woke up to find a strangely painted school bus parked in front of an unassuming two-story brick house in the middle of the block.

The vintage 1939 International Harvester with its passengers of “Merry Pranksters” drove half way across the United States and was now parked in front of the house of novelist and Rice University professor, Larry McMurtry. The Southampton neighbors would learn that the brightly painted bus whose destination plate read “FURTHUR,” with two u's, was filled with strangely acting and even stranger looking people from California.

The leader of the Merry Pranksters was author Ken Kesey, whose novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been published that summer. Their cross-country road trip to New York City was in part a celebration to commemorate the publication of his second novel, as well as the fulfillment of a request by his publisher for a personal appearance and an excuse to visit the World’s Fair taking place in the borough of Queens.

Fueled by the then-legal hallucinogenic drug LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters stopped in Houston along the way to visit McMurtry, who Kesey knew from their days at Stanford.

McMurtry lived with his 2-year-old son, James, on the oak-lined street near Rice University, where he taught undergraduate English.

Larry McMurtry and son, James, 1964. Photo from The Magic Bus.
McMurtry was also experiencing success in his life during this time. His inaugural novel, Horseman, Pass By, had been adapted into a screenplay and released as the feature-length movie, Hud, staring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas, the previous year.

“I remember walking down Quenby Street one afternoon and seeing the school bus parked in front of the McMurtry’s house,” said Kentucky-based artist Joan Wilhoit. “It was very atypical and pretty damn psychedelic with lots of colors. The Pranksters were very accommodating and invited us on the bus. They were very different, sort of proto-hippies, and I remember they painted their sneakers with Day-Glo paint. My parents befriended them and brought old clothes and hand-me-downs to those who needed it. My parents weren’t rude like some of the other neighbors were.”

Wilhoit, who was nine at the time, remembers that not all the neighbors were as welcoming as her parents and that some made sarcastic remarks about the Pranksters.

“’Do you have a bathroom on that bus?’ I remember one our neighbors asking the Pranksters through the school bus window,” the former Houstonian recounted. “I also remember hearing about the ‘naked girl’ and I thought it was the strangest thing how the police were called and how she had to be admitted to a psych ward of some Houston hospital.”

“Stark Naked,” as she was referred to in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the novel that chronicled the exploits of Kesey and the Pranksters in the 1960s, was a bus passenger apparently “tripping” throughout her bus ride to Houston, who discarded her clothing in favor of a blanket that she wore for the duration of the journey. Upon her arrival in Houston, she experienced an episode of “lysergically-induced” psychosis, and confused McMurtry’s toddler son with her own estranged child, “Frankie.”

"Stark Naked" (aka "The Beauty Witch") wore nothing but a blanket. Photo from The Magic Bus.
Three years later, the brightly painted bus was parked once again in front of McMurtry’s house on the oak-lined street near Rice Village. Kesey and the Pranksters returned to Houston in March 1967 to visit their old friend and to conduct what is purported to have been the last “acid test.” The social experiment was staged in the dining room of Brown College, a residential facility on the campus of Rice University, with McMurtry acting as faculty sponsor.

“I would have been 14 years old when they returned,” said Pricilla Boston (nee Ebersole), an employee of the department of state health services in Austin and the mother of two teen-aged sons.

I remember getting off the school bus from junior high one afternoon and seeing that the painted bus was parked in front of Mr. McMurtry’s house again. It was immensely colorful and there was no missing it, that’s for sure. All the kids in the neighborhood used to play street games at night a lot and it was almost like there was another set of kids in the neighborhood.

They had a youthful, fun vibe about them. I remember this one skinny guy in particular who would interact with us; he was younger than the others and he showed us the inside of the bus. He once asked us to go home and look in our parents’ medicine cabinet to see if they had any bottles of pills and bring them to him. I was asking myself "Why would he want those?"

Boston recounted following the skinny Prankster’s instructions and looking in her parent’s cabinet. “I don’t remember whether I brought him anything or not,” she said, “I just remember having a sense of what I was doing as being a little bit naughty.”

Although Kesey’s arrival and the ensuing acid test were promoted as a “concert” in the March 9 issue of the Rice Thresher, the campus student newspaper, this non-event turned out to be an acid test in name only. The promise of a reenactment of the “tests” conducted in California between 1965 and 1966 never materialized. Absent was the liquid light show, the live, amplified rock music, the pulsating strobe lights and movie projector images on the walls.

Also conspicuously absent was the mass dispensation and ingestion of psychotropic drugs by the Rice student body and other “assorted weirdos” in attendance. Instead, the Pranksters indulged the more than 200 attendees with a “madcap improvisation” of toy dart-gun fights, human dog piles, deep breathing demonstrations by Kesey himself, and rides on the “magic bus” around the Rice campus.

“The great Kesey affair was an absolute dud,” reported the Houston Post on March 21. “Some of the kids hissed while he [Kesey] read some kind of incantation, and others just left talking about what a drag it was.”

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]


Merry Pranksters in the news, 1964. Top, in Houston, and below, in Springfield, Ohio.
Prankster Hermit and the original bus. Photo from Lysergic Pranksters in Texas.
Top, Ken Kesey with restored bus, by then renamed "Further" with an "e". Below, the 1939 International Harvester, before restoration, at the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, after being stored in the swamp for 15 years. Photo by Jeff Barnard / AP
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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : The Psychedelic Revolutionaries

The psychedelic revolutionaries...
'White Hand Society:
The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 12, 2010

[White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, by Peter Conners (City Lights, 2010); Paperback, 200 pp.; $16.95.]

I took LSD for the first time in 1970, and haven’t taken it since then. Three of the trips were with fugitives in the Weather Underground all of them wanted by the FBI. At that time, the clandestine organization of former members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) insisted that taking LSD was consistent with armed revolution.

To make their point, they took a break from planting bombs to help Timothy Leary, the apostle of LSD, make his escape from prison and to leave the United States for Algeria under a fake passport. It was in Algiers in 1970 that I met Leary, and took LSD with him. I actually enjoyed that acid trip, unlike the previous psychedelic experiences with the Weather Underground. Leary was irrepressible and dangerous -- an imp and a mad man.

My experiences in Algiers from 40 years ago came back to me recently while reading Peter Conners’ new book White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. Conners is a poet, a fiction writer, a book editor, and the author of a memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead.

In White Hand Society, he’s an historian and a group biographer. The individuals in the group that he profiles include not only Ginsberg, Leary, and the Weather Underground fugitives, but also many of the figures of the drug and countercultures of the 1960s, such as Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, and more. Jack Kerouac makes a brief and vivid appearance; his comments about his experiments with psychedelic drugs are well worth reading and pondering.

Conners’ main objective is to trace the connections between Ginsberg and Leary, and to show the impact they had on an era in which taking psychedelic drugs was an integral part of the rebellion and the protests of a generation. Indeed, drugs went hand in hand with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s; they were depicted as a kind of deprogramming of the institutional brainwashing that was carried out by the media and the educational system during the cold war. Moreover, drugs seemed to provide immediate gratification of pleasure.

White Hand Society is largely anecdotal, and the anecdotes, though they have mostly been told before, are well told in these pages. “White Hand Society” is the name that Leary gave to a group of his friends and associates -- and just one of a series of names he coined to create a sense of élan and mystery about himself and those around him.

Leary, Ginsberg and their associates come to life in this book, and so do the times they helped to shape. The story moves from Massachusetts to New York to California and to Europe. The sections of the book about Leary are the most vivid and the most trenchant.

Conners doesn’t advance a theory to explain Leary’s behavior or the drug culture, but he does offer a long and illuminating passage from Alternating Currents, a 1967 book by Octavio Paz, the Mexican author and Nobel-prize winner famous for Labyrinth of Solitude. It is well worth repeating here. In the absence of a theory about drugs and addiction it will do nicely.

“We are now in a position to understand the real reason for the condemnation of hallucinogens and why their use is punished,” Paz wrote. “The authorities do not behave as though they were trying to stamp out a harmful vice, but behave as though they were stamping out dissidence. Since this is a form of dissidence that is becoming more widespread, the prohibition takes on the proportion of a campaign against a spiritual contagion, against an opinion. What authorities are displaying is ideological zeal. They are punishing a heresy, not a crime.”

Paz’s comments make a lot of sense. They seem both timely and contemporary, though they were written before the War on Drugs, at least in its modern phrase, began in 1970 under President Richard Nixon. Indeed, Nixon and his drug warriors -- and all the drug warriors under every single American president since Nixon -- have combated illicit drugs, from LSD to marijuana and cocaine, as though they were zealots on a religious crusade. This year, on the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs, it is perhaps more obviously than ever before a campaign against a “heresy, not a crime.”

Conners does not focus on the drug warriors themselves, but on their victims -- on men like Leary who were arrested and jailed for smuggling and smoking marijuana -- and on men like Ginsberg who rushed to their defense and who called for the legalization of marijuana.

Conners does not idealize Leary. He depicts him as a showman, a self-promoter, a huckster, and a sham who also became a snitch and cooperated with the FBI in exchange for leniency and for placement in the federal witness protection program

Conners offers a quotation from Leary himself in which he defends his honor and his reputation. “I did not testify against friends,” he told a reporter for The Berkeley Barb, one of the first of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. Leary went on to say, “I didn’t testify in any manner that would lead to indictments against the Weatherpeople... The fact is that nobody has been arrested because of me, and nobody ever will be.”

Conners offers his own interpretation of that statement. “In true Leary mode, he was refashioning the whole boondoggle of busts, imprisonment, federal cooperation... as if it had been nothing more than a game,” he writes. “In Leary’s mind, he had simply worked the system.”

Of course, the fact that Leary was a con artist, a liar, and a victim of his own delusions doesn’t let the drug warriors off the hook. Indeed, the drug warriors and law enforcement officers persecuted and prosecuted Leary again and again on charges of violating the marijuana laws -- until they succeeded in sending him to prison. They did the same to hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers year after year since 1970. In fact, there have been, in the past 40 years, more than 20,000,000 arrests for marijuana -- most of them for possession.

That Leary was arrested on marijuana charges for the first time in Laredo, Texas was ironical indeed. After all, Ginsberg had written in his epic poem "Howl" (1956) about the “angleheaded hipsters” who were “busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York.”

It was perhaps inevitable that their paths -- the path of the poet and path of the man who called himself the “high priest” -- would cross. Maybe, too, Ginsberg and "Howl" gave birth to Timothy Leary as they helped to give birth to the counterculture of the 1960s. Ginsberg certainly showed compassion for Leary, even after he snitched on friends.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were unforgiving. “Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold,” Abbie said, and Jerry Rubin added, “I know from personal experience with him over the past 10 years that he never had a firm grasp of where truth ended and fantasy began.”

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation and is a professor at Sonoma State University.]

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Bageant Goes Trippin'

Skinny Dipping in Reality: A coot's account of the great hippie LSD enlightenment search party
By Joe Bageant / February 17, 2009

There's nothing better that 250 mics of good acid to kick start the cosmic coonhunt for Enlightenment. It takes juice. After all sonny boy, you don't knock down stars with a bee bee gun. -- Mad Dog Howard, Hippie Doper/Philosopher

First LSD trip, 1965: Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling inward with eyes closed, I could hear the spider plant hanging in the basket overhead singing in its green subatomic plant language, a hymn to the sunlight charging my bedroom atmosphere. On the back of my eyelids spun a great wheel of existence, turning both ways simultaneously generating an unearthly mournful chant that seemed to be composed of every human voice on earth. It rose in some unknown universal tongue singing, "Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangladesh, Bangladesh. Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangaladesh, Bangaladesh." Millions of starving faces, young men, girls, old men, babies, crones, materialized in uncountable swarms, each face transfigured by some unnamable mutual understanding that I could not share. Then they atomized, leaving the room filled with the scent of wood smoke, shit and citrus blossoms (an odor I would instantly recognize decades later in poverty stricken Central American villages.)

No words can describe an LSD trip, but let me say that at the end of this one, I sat down and cried. For happiness. My deepest hope and suspicion, the one to which I dared not cling, had been confirmed. Life could indeed be significant, piercing and meaningful.

I first took LSD in Winchester, Virginia, thanks to my gay friend George, who was being "treated" for his homosexuality with lysergic acid and enjoying every minute of treatment. Ever since reading about LSD in a Life magazine article a year before, both of us had wanted some of the stuff. Then one day George walked into my basement apartment and threw a cellophane packet onto the kitchen table. "There it is Bageant," he said. Next day, after creating a small meditative space with plants, a Tibetan mandala, and classical music on the turntable, we took it. Five years later I was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in the life.

Hard as it is to imagine today, LSD was perfectly legal at the time. Legal and apparently not dangerous. In fact, it never even interfered with my job at a microbiological laboratory in the local Shraft's frozen food plant, but seemed to improve work. Often I arrived there still under the influence of the previous night's psychotropics and still managed to impress the hell out of the lab boss, Ray Trotta, for my ability to note extremely subtle differences in cultured bacterial colonies. Of course, when we put our eye to the same lens of the dark field colony counter, we were by no means looking at the same colony, as I skimmed across and through the colorful landscapes and towers of teeming metropoli of bacterial civilizations.

For the first time in years, my life in that small town was very enjoyable. In fact Winchester soon spawned its own small psychedelic scene, one among thousands in heartland America at the time. We never hear about them today, the media having since trivialized the entire Sixties (which actually ran into the Seventies) into a handful of newsreel snippets of the Haight Ashbury, Kent State, long hair, Vietnam and the Beatles.

In Winchester, an assortment of perhaps fifty artists, gays, hillbilly hipsters, academics from a nearby college of music, passing beatniks, and psychedelic enthusiasts had accumulated around town, hanging out at a marvelous old "dinner and juke joint" in the poor section. Winchester's good Southern burghers couldn't help but notice all this "suspicious happiness," as the mayor once called it. But because the sons and daughters of local doctors, lawyers and authorities, including the daughter of the town's prosecuting attorney, were in the mix, and because the queer son of a state senator hung out there, a hands-off policy prevailed for the first couple of years. Finally, the good fundamentalist Christians and Republican business community just couldn't take it any more.

Meanwhile, I'd gained a profile for myself through openly espousing consciousness expansion and by working to racially integrate the all white Shraft's frozen food plant, which was later accomplished when the plant got a liberal New York manager named Hank. It was hairy for a while, but together we got it done.

As an aside, last year, some forty years later, I again saw the first Negro we hired (I use the non-PC word because it was the term of the day and feels right in this telling of the times), Ted, a religious man with a spark in his eye and built like a small tank. As we sat in his little house in Winchester's still-black section, Ted, now completely white haired and with one of those post cancer bowel bags attached, recalled that "Them was the days of Jim Crow, but they wasn't the worst thing to come along." "How's that?" I asked. "Crack," he answered. "Crack be destroyin' this generation. But if God took us through Jim Crow, he can take us through crack." We clasped our hands and closed our eyes in a short prayer.

Given that I openly advocated LSD and psychedelics, my uh, notoriety, grew, resulting in becoming the town's first pot bust. Tittilating as it was for the readers of The Winchester Star, the regular fare of which featured such things as potatoes that looked like Bob Hope and large unidentified bugs brought into its offices by local farmers, the trial itself was a dismal little thing, completely uninteresting in retrospect, even to the arrestee, despite that I was facing 15 years.

Anyway, several months later I was acquitted, partly for the fact that it was one of the few pot sales I didn't make around town, but mostly because of a hard boozing old Southern attorney named Massey, who sported white linen suits and carried a load of buckshot in his ass acquired while climbing out the window after screwing some guy's wife years before. Ever savvy, he selected blacks for the jury, people who for good reasons had no fondness for Winchester's lily white judicial system and law enforcement. Massey personally did not have much use for "cullids," and believed, as we were taught in schools then, that blacks were lazy and inferior because their culture evolved in a warm climate where fruit fell out of the trees and in the absence of the need for work, they just fucked all day. At the same time he understood that "the sight of cullids in the jury box is unnerving as hell for any prosecutor, the way they sit there blinkin' so inscrutable and all. You never know what they are thinking, but you know it ain't good for the prosecution. And besides, the commonwealth's prosecuting attorney is gonna have his hands full just keeping his daughter's name from coming up in your marijuana adventures. Nachully, you are gonna mention it every chance you get, and I'm gonna give you plenty. And we're lucky as hell, boy, that he's incompetent to boot." This all turned out to be sheer prophecy.

The verdict was "not guilty." Still, there was no living in Winchester after being all over the front pages of the paper. In fact, there was no living there during the long wait for the trial anyway because waiting for anything is boring as hell in an already boring place. So I moved to a tent in Resurrection City, the Poor People's Campaign camp on Washington's national mall, to wait for the trial.

After acquittal of the charge, I was gassed up, greased and ready to hit the road. I knew there was a big-time counter-culture out there somewhere, thanks to regular trips to D.C. to get publications such as Paul Krassner's The Realist, and by damned my wife and infant child and I were going to join them for good. Several months later, after a stint in New Orleans' French Quarter at the invitation of a junkie jazz man named Ed, who'd blown through Winchester earlier with his hooker wife, Kathy, after being released from Leavenworth. N'awlins was a scene in itself, given that we lived across the street from a hippie storefront church whose sole ritual was dropping acid.

Later, while headed for San Francisco, I found myself and my little family in Boulder, Colorado. Definitely this was a culture counter to the rest of America. Hell, they were hawking LSD out loud and openly on the streets! At least a dozen of them looked at us and asked, "Do you need a place to crash brother?" Or call out, "Brother and sister, come share food with us." We wanted for very little as we worked toward buying the old psychedelic school bus, a 1947 Dodge, that became our home. Not that we lounged about in drugged out ecstasy (though there was some of that involved too). I was working at a car wash from the first week there. Also beginning a serious attempt at writing -- at first for the small alternative weeklies, dealing a little dope now and then, but increasingly I got assignments from the larger slick magazines as years went by.

* * * * *
By 1970, the great hippie wave had years before broken on the West Coast, and the backwash had reached its high water mark, flooding the streets of Boulder and surrounding mountain canyons. There, thousands of similar minded young people sat up all night discussing metaphysics, the illusory nature of the "straight" world, and the coming revolution in American consciousness and politics we all felt was coming. Here in this self dubbed "Himalayas of the New World," midnight oil burned in mountain cabins and attic apartments of the town below. From the ponderosa pine's edge, mule deer pricked their ears and looked on at the noisy outdoor camps of America's new culture gypsies --restless strange young nomads with psychotropically morphed street names and identities such as Cloud, Spaco Mike, Berkeley Betty, John The Baptist, Deputy Dawg, Chrisie the Shrimp Girl, STP John, Wabbit, Goldfinger, The Glass Man. They smoked homemades, screwed and read a lot, and diced up reality beyond recognition under the influence of bootleg insight. A weird electricity arched over everything, as blown away rap sessions drove into the starry night while sanity cowered in the back seat. Yup, this was paradise all right.

* * * * *
It's a mortal sin for writers to paraphrase their betters in the craft, but I'd have to echo the late Hunter S. Thompson in his sentiment that, I wouldn't recommend drugs and mayhem to anyone, but it's always worked for me. For starters, LSD resolved, dissolved might be a better word, my bleak black/white, right/wrong judgmentalism forged in a fundamentalist childhood. But not the way one might think. As anyone who has used much of the stuff knows, acid can melt away painful lifelong imprints with a single blast of insight. But not usually. And it's potential is never quite the same for any two people, and definitely different for a redneck kid who'd been raised on Christian fundamentalism. You start discovering from the space and life experience you already know. For me, LSD began to power deep meditations upon the meaning of Christian symbols, especially of the holy cross. Not motionless sitting meditations, but physically active ones, in this case woodcarving. As the product of generations who worked with their hands, to this day my hands must always be in motion, either playing guitar, tapping the keyboard -- "talking with my hands." So for hours, days and weeks I carved every sort of cross imaginable -- plain ones, Coptic ones, Celtic ones, coarse ones and gold leafed ones, just sitting in our school bus home by dim lantern light carving, sometimes on peyote or acid.

And often the soft presence of a gentle and loving Christ would fill the air with a sense of transcendent peace. Despite my many personal conflicts with the Police Court Jehova of Christian fundamentalism, it was becoming clear that Christ was a guy whose actions were worth deep consideration, even if you considered yourself an atheist. Police Court Jehova be damned. Other times would come zappy symbolic glimpses of quasi cosmic order: Aha! The upright bar of the cross represents the onrushing spirit and mind of man through eternity, and the horizontal crossbar stands for undifferentiated matter. And where they meet one another all we know is made manifest -- all pain, all ecstasy and everything in between. Pure existence. Years later I related this to one of the numerous Asian Buddhist masters who passed through Boulder. He crinkled up his face and laughed in recognition. This mysticism, if that's what it is, was clearly not new.

LSD, by way of a discussion with Tim Leary, also delivered the question within a question: What is the question to which my life is the answer? Right away I knew I'd rather peel that metaphysical onion the rest of my life than grovel before a hollow religious institution which flails its cowering followers with the question WHY? Why does the world exist? Why does god take little children, or allow natural disasters? Why did god put so much fucking hair on my back?

So finally, I figured out that "Why?" was never the question. "Why?" was a bullshit ontological query Christianity forced upon its followers, so its priests could pretend they had the answer, and thus control the longing masses by withholding the answer. It's sure as hell worked. People raised in Christian cultures are still asking it. And still not getting an answer because there is no answer to a non question. I was very lucky in that I never completely inherited the quest for that question, despite coming from a fundamentalist family loaded with preachers. But be damned if I wasn't forced to go out and find some other unanswerable question anyway, because I did inherit their essential grim religiosity in approach to life -- the dirty cultural/spiritual genetics of misery the loving Protestant European peasantry.

Of hundreds, I only had one bad LSD trip, one in which I felt I could not get my breath and was being smothered to death. It turned out that I actually couldn't breathe, I'd always had bad lungs and I was experiencing the onset of COPD lung disease, which would later limit my life severely. If you've never experienced suffocation under the influence of a powerful mind altering substance, I'm telling you dear hearts, you can well grasp the horror of things like waterboarding and the kind of people who'd sanction such a thing. But even that experience taught me something, showed me once again the face of mortality. Eternity. Eternity without Joe Bageant in it. We may dance, make love and argue passionately, eat, shit and extrude children onto the floor of spinning speck of cosmic dust. But the universe yawns at the whole affair.

Nevertheless, once you've seen the face of eternity, you are left with the question of what to do about it. How to respond. "How will I live my life, in light of what I have seen?" I'm still wrestling with that question -- but then that's what I had wanted, wasn't it? That Great Question which would lead to the Great Answer? LSD doesn't give answers, just questions. But used with directed and sincere effort -- to the degree that is even possible -- it can make you ask the Great Questions, the only important ones. Such as "What are you going to do to eliminate human suffering? What are you going to do, Joe Bageant, now that you have seen the faces in the Great Wheel that turns both ways simultaneously? What will be your direct action?" If you really give a shit about the world, LSD will "serious your ass up real fast," as we used to say.

Grave as such propositions appear, one must, to my mind at least, be both serious AND silly about exploring consciousness to get results, do it in the spirit of enlightened philosophical levity. Even after all these years, that spirit – when and if it happens to be available at the moment -- still gets me through the day. It enables me to face the increasing sorrows that come with age. One of the nasty little truths about life is that it gets harder with age, not easier, and that there is no prize at the bottom of the box of crackerjacks. But the good news, as I see it, is that we are inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is supposed to be more or less negotiable through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with whether or not we actualize truth

Enter Buddhism. It is damned near impossible for any literate person to launch off on a teleological trajectory without being sucked into the gravitational force of Buddhism. Especially if the launch is powered by LSD, which is the difference between a journey on foot and a ride in a rocket sled. By the way, there is no Buddhist commandment that says, "Do not take drugs," though most Buddhists do not. Nor is there one that says, "Do not drink," though it's not the most recommendable thing to do. Buddhist leader Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Boulder's Naropa Institute, got drunk often, got laid too, and was very controversial for it. Our American Calvinism makes us equate morality and rightness with prohibition, especially of pleasure. The Christian church has always been about controlling its followers. Buddhism is not so much about prohibition, except for harming life. It's not even about religion, but more about the ultimate order of the world and liberation.

There are many, many forms of Buddhism, but they all fall roughly into two types. If I may vastly over simplify -- Mahayana and Theravada, "big boat" and little boat" Buddhism. Big boat aims at the enlightenment, over many incarnations, of all sentient beings through, among other things, selfless love. Little boat holds that you are alone responsible for your own enlightenment through your actions, and may possibly achieve liberation in a single lifetime -- enlightenment being the liberation from the desires that create unhappiness and pain in mankind. As I said, I am vastly oversimplifying here, which is sure to put American trust fund babies in ashrams around the country and elderly Theravadan gurus into a snit, generating an onslaught of disputative email, but the essence is correct as far as I'm concerned.

There is a lineage of Buddhism which translates as "crazy wisdom." It is the antithesis of what westerners usually think of in conjunction with religion, and it's purposefully full of irreverence, goofiness, shifting perspectives and absurdity. Crazy Wisdom has been described as the unifying metaphysical force field of "poets, philosophers, artists and gurus and other crazy fools gushing with wisdom." In one variant, the great Japanese poet monk Ikkyu found antidote to Zen formality in whorehouses and bars, i.e., "Her mouth played with my cock the way a cloud plays with the sky." For whatever reasons, the "People of the Book," Judaism, Christianity and Islam, opted out of the wine and blowjobs, which may partly explain the general crabbiness and vindictiveness that inspires them to enthusiastically kill other people who disagree with them, not to mention each other during such things as The Crusades, or more recently in Gaza.

By no means am I an adept at crazy wisdom, thus I am sure thousands of folks sitting zazen in Boulder and San Francisco are livid at my sloppy explanation and less than deeply dedicated application of its principles. "Using crazy wisdom as an excuse to escape the discipline of Buddhism," is the usual charge. Which is much the same discipline ridden thinking as that of my Baptist-Pentecostal boyhood. Lawdy Miss Claudy, the American system instills a psycho-sexual love of discipline in all of us. No sex in the park bushes, no marijuana for Americans, but rather debt slavery and airport cavity searches by direct orders from the Christian police court Yaweh, whose face is now the Department of Homeland Security. It all comes down to just how much discipline is the right amount for an individual. A thirsty man needs but one drink of water to continue his journey, not the whole tank. Drinking the tank not only halts the journey, but in all likelihood kills the traveler. At any rate, as the years go by, what I take or mistake to be crazy wisdom continuously opens inner doors, even given my poor discipline (and small intermittent doses of it at that).

Crazy Wisdom was brought to Boulder in early 1971 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a remarkable Chinese/Tibetan guru whose confrontational, unpredictable teaching style was smart, and controversial. Rinpoche ("The Rinp") put away quarts of Johnnie Walker scotch, possessed an overwhelming charisma and humor, and turned your mind inside out, emptying it of its conditioned defenses. Rinpoche was both an enlightened teacher and an intentional charlatan, which if you think about it, is exactly in the spirit of crazy wisdom. He never doubted for a moment that all who came within his presence benefited from the experience. I remember an occasion when he arrived in town dead broke, though already with a couple of followers. "The Rinp" was invited to dinner at the Pygmy Farm, an early commune in Boulder. Upon leaving, Rinpoche gave the commune members a bill for his attendance. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that Crazy Wisdom forces change through confronting convention at every turn and by any means available. Another one of those things you either get or don't get. Although it's about the purest wordless kind of awareness, being literate does help you start to get it, which is why it attracts so many highly intelligent people.

* * * * *
By no means am I stretching things to say ours was a more literate generation. Most of the hippies I hung with in Boulder followed the contemporary literary scene, had read Hesse, Joyce and Mann, Hobbes, Faulkner, Freud, Jung, Huxley, and had a passing knowledge of such things as Zen and Sufism. Not to mention an expanded consciousness. So when Rinpoche explained how the "mind is emptiness, the true world is empty" and that "the emptiness is permanent and all else is merely passing mental display" they could get their heads around it. And have room to spare.

At the time however, I too often judged Rinpoche from my born-and-bred American perspective and background, so I missed a great learning opportunity, many in fact, regarding Rinpoche Trungpa. If nothing else, I owe Trungpa, for several things, some of them minor, such as coming to understand that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manual for living. And some of them major, such as that I'd lived most of my life in my head in an effort to avoid suffering.

All these years later I am beginning to understand the effect living for a decade or so in a genuinely free time and place had on my life. Thanks to an ongoing a ttempt to understanding human consciousness, everything has changed over time. Yet nothing has changed at all, except my attitude toward everything. And yes, LSD had everything to do with it. When it comes to rewiring one's own neuro-circuitry toward ecstatic understanding and perception and playful wisdom, and real compassion, LSD and Buddhism can certainly jump start the awakening. Paradoxically, that awakening is to a dream. You come to see very clearly that the "It is the dream that is dreaming the dreamer." Such liberating insights are big as stars. And like Mad Dog says, "You don't knock down stars with a bee bee gun."

* * * * *

But if I never get another look at the face of God on acid or pick up another splinter of insight for the rest of my life, it'll be too goddamned soon for me! Life may be a shit sandwich all right, but brain damage ain't ketchup either! -- The Mad Dog in retrospection

Then that arc of electricity in the Himalayas of the New World snapped, and thus began what I call Enlightenment Fire Sale. For almost a decade change had come down like rain through the ozone (we still had some ozone left in those days) and Boulder found itself morphing into a metaphysical beachhead, a seething marketplace of salvation salesmen and exotic snake oil peddlers -- hawkers of truth and burning skyfulls of revelation. The Ten Commandments played in the park, consciousness tramps did Sufi slapstick in the alleys, while more introverted souls curdled their brains as they saw fit, for about a buck a dose. In the throes of the new consumerism Boulder consumed every cosmic thing imaginable, short of a giant asteroid, even though it was surely contemplated during the comet Kahotek. But still no avatars. No ship of deliverance. No change in the price of bananas or sidewinder missiles.

Desire turned to demand, then exhaustion, disillusionment or plain boredom. Having lifted veil upon veil, mortality still grinned across the void, offering no new deals. The Cold War was thriving as much as ever. The murdering bastards in charge still had the upper hand.

The hippie generation represented a massive threat to Cold War America, already hell bent on Global Empire, but not acknowledging such. The harder you looked around at America, the more terrible the shock. Slow leaks in the bucket of our national destiny. Within that advanced core of the most optimistic, best educated and most visionary generation America ever produced, belief seeped away. Yet it nevertheless launched the ecological movement, the health food movement, and attempted to open up the closed darkness of American power politics, which made it avant-garde.

Avant-gardes are, by definition, small. Despite the claims of graybeard stock brokers and aging realtors at cocktail parties, the majority of the generation never took part in the movement. They were the same as they are today, concerned more with sports, pussy and bling. Oh, they smoked pot, talked the talk, but that's about all. Thomas Frank documented this very well in The Marketing of Cool. Still, they were more open than the previous generation, and certainly more open than they are now.

Meanwhile, many, if not most, of those dedicated to the movement did not grow so fat and well-heeled as they aged. I can name many dozens who've remained true to their beliefs at great personal cost to their lives and families. A few still live on their humble organic back-to-the-land plots, or spent their lives teaching in school systems that keep on rotting despite their own best efforts, because the schools are themselves part of a degraded Empire of the type against which they fought. Or working in social services or the ecology and earth movement. (Speaking of which, I still hold the Rainbow Family and its gatherers to be among the highest order of men and women in America.) Many, if not most of the true blue hippies now suffer the gloom and depression of any intelligent and soulful person in this age. But they endure. Few of them as there are compared to the 300 million American other-minded souls around them, they endure.

Often at my speaking engagements or readings, I see one or more of them in the audience -- long gray hair, loose fitting sensible well worn clothing, soft eyes, and perhaps an herbal amulet around the neck or in the hair. I look very directly at them from the podium, until that old electric flash of mutual recognition pops. Immediately after the reading or talk or whatever, I seek them out if at all possible (press agents sometimes screw this up). Always there is the big smile and the hug.

And we are again brothers and sisters," as we used to sincerely address each other on the street. And again I have been granted the gift, that brief spark of unquestioned mutual love and goodwill in a darkening time.
* * * * *
For Cindy, who drove the getaway car, and Tim, who rode shotgun during the entire affair.

Source / Joe Bageant

The Rag Blog

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Emerging from the Drug War Dark Age : A Psychedelic Drug Revival

Alex Grey's Oversoul.
LSD and other psychedelic medicines make a comeback
By Charles Shaw

After a 40-year moratorium, credible research for treating illnesses and addictions with psychedelic compounds has made a miraculous comeback.

The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102. Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.

More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what he refers to as the "40-year-long bad trip" that researchers like him have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This 40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by "enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive."

We've all heard the tales of kids jumping off rooftops because they think they can fly, of otherwise normal people taking a single hit of LSD and "going insane," and of course the all-pervasive myth of the "acid flashback." Although there were acid casualties, most were rare or aberrant tragedies, most often occurring in individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions who never should have taken LSD in the first place. Most of the tales are apocryphal at best, intentional propaganda meant to discourage use.

An Era of Censorship

Why would our government embark on this 40-year Inquisition to burn the psychedelic prophets at the stake and wipe clean from the Earth the true history of psychedelic culture, as if it were the secret of the Holy Grail and the Merovingian dynasty? Why has the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s -- one of the most powerful revolutions in human consciousness in all of history -- been reduced to pejorative tales of tie-dyed morons skipping through Golden Gate Park in an orgy of self-indulgence? Why would something that the government claims does not deserve respectable attention be the recipient of such Draconian repressive measures? Could it be because, like the secret of Mary Magdalene, the truth could bring the whole order crashing down?

The answer, my friend, blew away in the wind. The extent to which LSD fomented the cultural revolution of the 1960s has all but disappeared in a miasma of drug war propaganda. But do not be fooled. This was no hippie-dippy bullshit. In its time, LSD was more dangerous to the ruling order than Mao, Che or the Founding Fathers themselves. As the New York Times obituary for Hofmann read, "[LSD] was no hustler from a shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions."

The U.S. government threw everything but the kitchen sink at getting (certain) Americans to stop "turning on," launching the drug war that eventually locked up millions of drug users. They handed down ridiculously disproportionate federal sentences to LSD makers that would have made Pablo Escobar commit suicide. But it wasn't the "turning on" part that they feared, for there are many benefits to having a population otherwise occupied in a false reality. No, it was the "tuning in" and "dropping out" part that kept them awake at night.

Although it may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand at face value, LSD and other psychedelic compounds can have a profound life-altering affect on the user that, more often than not, serves to connect them (or reconnect, as the case may be) to the universal compassion and love for life that is inherent in our species. It invariably causes them to question the validity of the status quo, to examine their life and what surrounds them in terms of beliefs and values.

And in this epoch of industrial civilization, the last thing a corporate culture that survives on war, aggression and consumer spending needs is a consciously awakened population of people who inexorably choose to leave said culture in droves because they see it is killing the planet, themselves, and each other. This is precisely, to the letter, the meaning of "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out."

But even for those who would call this hyperbole, what was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga -- plant medicines thousands of years old -- was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effective palliatives for the sick and dying.

Something with such legitimate potential to heal can only be kept in the bottle for so long. In fact, these transcendent therapies are now ebbing back into mainstream respectability. Doblin will be the first to tell you that times are changing, driven by too much government repression, too much scientific orthodoxy, and, perhaps more than any other factor, our culture's desperate need to learn how to handle what he calls our "collective emotional state."

"We talk about the veterans suffering PTSD, but it's really a culture-wide phenomenon," he said. "We're at a place where technology and the structure of contemporary life have taken us so far away from our emotions as to create pathological conditions. The systemic violence and selfishness and greed that are in our society need treatment."

Doblin was one of the first to break through that wall of obstinacy and challenge the Inquisition. He got the U.S. government to approve clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for returning veterans and victims of violent crime or abuse who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In many ways it was this Newtonian breakthrough that finally challenged the orthodoxy that reigned over the 40-year Dark Age. Western governments had to ask themselves what was more important to them: their irrational and erroneous drug propaganda, or the possibility that the millions of lives they had devastated by war, violence and iniquitous economic policies might actually be repaired. In this, the seeds of a psychedelic renaissance were planted.

A Return to Respectability

Much greater than usual media attention accompanied the most recent World Psychedelic Forum held in March in Basel, Switzerland, the home of Albert Hofmann. A headline in the May issue of the staid British medical journal The Lancet -- known for challenging the Pentagon's Iraq casualty numbers -- read, "Research on Psychedelics Moves into the Mainstream."

The Lancet article identified a number of early-stage clinical trials being conducted on various "anxiety and neurotic disorders" using psychedelic compounds. As previously mentioned, Doblin and MAPS are conducting three parallel studies in Israel, Switzerland and the United States on the use of Ecstasy for treating PTSD. MAPS has also funded the work of controversial Harvard researcher John Halpern and Yale researcher Andrew Sewell, who are studying LSD and psilocybin as treatments for cluster headaches. (Information about their research is available on clusterbusters.com and Erowid, an online clearinghouse for reliable data on virtually every psychoactive plant and chemical known to humans.)

Harvard University, which conducted the last legal research on LSD in the mid-1960s and was the site for one of Halpern's studies on the effects of MDMA on dying cancer patients, is once again considering clinical trials to support Halpern's research.

And in a major milestone, on May 13 of this year, Swiss doctor Peter Gasser administered the first legal dose of LSD in more than 36 years. It was for a study of anxiety in palliative care, which helps terminally ill patients transition more peacefully -- and with as little pain as possible -- into death.

Other complexes like addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder are being treated with what are called the "shamanic plant medicines": ayahuasca, the Amazonian vine preparation whose psychoactive component is dimethyltryptamine (DMT); peyote, the North American cactus whose psychoactive component is mescaline; and iboga, an African rainforest shrub.

Addiction is one of the most important new fields of study, not only because of the sheer numbers of afflicted, which the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates at 23.6 million persons a year at a cost of $181 billion. According to a newly released report from the World Health Organization, the United States is the world's most addicted society. Of those who are lucky enough to get treatment, half eventually go back to heavy use, and 90 percent suffer brief or episodic relapses for the rest of their lives. This makes the search for an effective and long-lasting new treatment more attractive -- and more pressing -- than ever.

The Healing Potential of Psychedelics

Unlike other treatments, which have shown pitifully low success rates, psychedelic-assisted therapy focuses on the emotional context under which a patient suffers addiction, not the use of the drugs themselves. "This," says Tom Roberts, a professor of psychology at Northern Illinois University and the co-editor of a new two-volume compilation, Psychedelic Medicine, "is what makes them uniquely effective. They allow negative ideas and feelings -- where most addictions have their origins -- to surface into consciousness. With the guidance of a mental health professional, the person can let them go." Once these negative feelings are gone, Roberts says, the person no longer feels the need to deaden them with drugs or alcohol.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy for addiction pokes a hole in conventional wisdom about drug use, which goes something like this: If, under American law, all illegal drugs are bad for you, how can you then treat an addiction to one drug with another purportedly dangerous drug? This shortsighted line of thinking has been keeping psychedelic compounds illegal in spite of evidence pointing to their benefits.

Indigenous peoples have been using psychedelics as traditional medicine for thousands of years. Ayahuasca and peyote have been used to treat toothaches, pain in childbirth, fever, breast pain, skin diseases, rheumatism, diabetes, colds, blindness, parasites and more. They have also been used as spiritual medicines to cure emotional disorders. Native Americans use peyote to treat the astronomical rates of alcoholism found on the reservations, reportedly with great success, although hard figures are difficult to obtain due to the legal protections given to the Native American Church.

And Western scientists have known of the healing capabilities of psychedelics for decades.

In 1954 two chemists, D.W. Woolley and E. Shaw, published an article in Science magazine that argued that the neurochemical serotonin was the likely culprit behind most major mental disorders, writes Dirk Hanson in Addiction: A Search for a Cure. The worst of the bunch were depression, drug addiction and alcoholism. Woolley and Shaw also confirmed in their study that the most powerful known manipulator of serotonin was LSD because it had an "eerily" similar chemical structure.

Later in the '50s, a well-known LSD "apostle" named Alfred Matthew "Captain Al" Hubbard started peddling the idea that LSD might hold considerable psychotherapeutic potential. With the assistance of Aldous Huxley and other prominent acid-taking intellectuals, Hubbard gave LSD to Canadian researchers Abram Hoffer, Ross Mclean, and Humphrey Osmond, who studied it as a treatment for alcoholism, while a similar study was conducted at the Stanford Research Institute.

Later, Stan Grof worked with street-level addicts while Timothy Leary conducted psilocybin therapy on prisoners. Even Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an acid enthusiast, promoting LSD as a "gateway to an accelerated spiritual awakening." Wilson noticed that the turnaround in alcoholics did not happen until they hit bottom, and LSD, because it surfaced difficult emotions, hastened an alcoholic's bottom and helped them avoid more catastrophic bottoms.

The therapy is reinforced through the "afterglow" effect of a "transcendent psychedelic event" (a trip), which Psychedelic Medicine says is "characterized by an elevated and energetic mood and a relative freedom from concerns of the past and from guilt and anxiety." There emerges an "enhanced disposition and capacity to enter into close relationships." The "afterglow" usually lasts anywhere from two weeks to a month and then gradually fades into a series of memories that are thought to continue affecting attitude and behavior.

All of these researchers stress that psychological professionals must guide psychedelic sessions, and that full recovery is only possible through continued therapy.

"After 40 years of review," Doblin takes great care to mention, "we can accurately say it's not a miracle cure." Psychedelic-assisted therapy has powerful healing potential, he says, but "does not work for people who don't really want to look at their inner conflicts."

[Charles Shaw, a Chicago-based writer, is a regular contributor to AlterNet. He is the former editorial director of the Conscious Choice publications and a contributor to Reality Sandwich and the Huffington Post. He is currently writing Exile Nation, a drug war memoir.]

Source / AlterNet / Posted July 11, 2008

Thanks to radman / The Rag Blog

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Doug Zachary in the 70s : Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say NO

Confessions of an ex-Marine on Acid
By Doug Zachary / The Rag Blog / June 22, 2008

It is 1970, I am 20 years old, and I have been out of the Marine Corps for about a year. Finally, women are paying attention to me. I'm a fuckin' Hero, having "won" a discharge as a Conscientious Objector. I am attending school at the University of Texas in Arlington and have become a piece of the pro-peace community there. I am an activist with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and I write an entirely nonsensical article for The Free University Press (Arlington's very tame Rag) from time to time.

Remember "Girls say Yes to Men who say NO!"? A young woman who had been born a few days before me but who was easily 20 years my elder (in experience) takes me home on my 21st Birthday and shows me "everything you'll ever need to know about women, Doug.” Life is good. We, the VVAW, get the pick of the crop.

I have become a favorite of Dr. Suzanne Katsikas, a Post-Marxist eco-feminist ("Whut da hell is that, Zachary?" -- this from my VVAW comrades). Suzanne teaches International Theory and has very little respect for other academics ("Hacks, Apologists, all of them"), nurturing a special repugnance for anyone who would want to call our field "political science". She also holds in utter disdain not just the right wing and the Rockefeller Republicans in the department; she also disrespects the old liberals and teaches her small core of "visionaries" to do so.

By the end of my sophomore year I have learned quickly and I am grading the graduate level theory essays for Suzanne. I get some evil kind of pleasure giving failing grades to all the Dallas commuter students who would not find the time to read Das Kapital or anything the least bit challenging. I am dissing anyone and everyone in sight who is not on the unofficial Central Committee, including the Detroit White Panthers who come to town armed to the teeth and move in next door to our grocery coop in a Black church on the Hill (Arlington's ghetto). Smart -- and smart-ass -- mutha-fucker, I am. There is this one ol' boy, Sam Hamlett, who had been a guerilla warrior on some island near Austrailia for two years during WWII, a man who detested state violence... I never slow down enough to hear his story and gain his wisdom. Ten years later I will return to seek him out and listen.

I am running a weekly coffee shop called "The Belly of The Whale" which takes place in the Wesley Foundation, an ecumenical building just off campus. Each Friday night I handle anywhere from fifty to 500 hits of LSD (the record was about 1,000 hits of this particularly powerful Orange Barrel stuff) in the upstairs library while my girlfriend watches the door and sends a message should any "adult" start up the stairs. Our house band, "The Saint James Version," -- so named as to pull the wool over the eyes of the progressive pastors who fund our activities -- holds forth every Friday with a rockin' blend of blues and psychedelia, although when they began to peak they often walk, or fall, off the stage before finishing the first set. One night I count 300 trippers on the dance floor and two nervous pastors and a priest sitting near the door as if planning their escape.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone in a suit, which is defined as a shirt with a collar and/or buttons and a full-length pair of pants without holes, but I have somehow become the go-between for the Freaks and the Liberal Establishment. One story that will haunt (and entertain) me many years later: I have been convinced to initiate a study group which will watch and critique Ingmar Bergman films (an easy three college credits, I figured). After the first of six films, I drop one, two ... is it three?... hits of window pane and set off hitchhiking for California one Friday at noon, straight into the first winter cold front, bare-footed and dressed only in a T-shirt and a pair of cut off shorts. Damn, we must be a bunch of idiots, if I am the one who teaches Hitchhiking (and Shoplifting) in the Free University. I damn near freeze to death in a ditch in near-west Texas and hitch a ride back to Ft Worth the next day with a Charlie Manson-looking bunch; four in the cab and six in the bed of an old pickup, this smelly crew makes me feel like a runway model.

That semester and the next I make 1,000 promises, each one of which I fail to keep, let the Police confiscate an ol' '54 Ford in pristine condition, spend a night in the Arlington city jail with thirteen friends tripping and singing Kris Kristofferson and Willis Alan Ramsey songs, get summarily dismissed by three of the most delightful women I will ever have the privilege of knowing, and "earn" the 30 semester hours of "Fs" that bring my GPA from a 3.99 to a 3.22 upon graduation four years later.

I won't go on any longer; just wanted to point out that because I remember ME, I have a hard time judging these young people today. I get my feelins hurt. I get tired from the constant vigilance I have to exercise to see that they show up for anything. I am often hurt by the not-all-together things they say about me and my generation. Overall, though, they seem to have more sense, and greater sensibilities, than I did at their age.

Respectfully ... after all these years,

Doug

[Doug Zachary, who has grown up a little, is president of the Austin chapter of Veterans for Peace and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog]

The Rag Blog

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