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7.
Psychedelic Drugs
"Sex, drugs, and rock and roll" was
the fast-track reality for a significant segment, working-class
as well as middle-class, of the sixties generation. Drugs melted
defenses and broke barriers, creating a momentary sense of unity
with mankind and the world. They functioned as magic elixirs for
the missing initiatory rituals in an increasingly transient society.
In the matter of drugs, I must stress, I was merely an observer:
as an Italian-American, I am a product of Mediterranean wine culture,
where intoxicants are integrated with cuisine. As a libertarian,
I favor legalization of drugs, not because I approve of their use
but because in my view government should have no power to dictate
what individuals do with their bodies. On the other hand, I am painfully
aware of the tragic toll that drugs took on my generation. This
was one of the great cultural disasters of American history. I warn
my students that recreational drugs-now a toxic cocktail of black-market
tranquilizers-may give short-term gains but impair long-term achievement.
Nevertheless, it was drugs, abused
until they turned on their takers, that
helped trigger the spiritual explosion of the sixties. Getting high-as
in the magnificent, rumbling Byrds song "Eight Miles High"-was to
elevate perspective. Aspiring beyond materialism and conformity,
young people manufactured their own martyrdom. They pushed their
nervous systems to the limit, until social forms seemed to dissolve.
What they saw was sublime-the High Romantic vision of creative nature,
its vast energies twisting and turning along a continuum from the
brain to the stars. That cosmic consciousness is precisely what
is lacking in too many of today's writers and academics, especially
followers of poststructuralism and postmodernism, cynical systems
that are blind to nature.
The association of drugs with the avant-garde
began with British High Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's great
"mystery" poems of the 1790s ("Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner") were partly inspired by his experiences
with opium, present in laudanum, a common pain medication to which
he had been addicted since childhood. In Artificial
Paradises (1860), his response to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions
of an English Opium Eater (1821), Baudelaire described the hallucinations
of his experiments with hashish mixed with opium. In late-nineteenth-century
America, white middle-class women took "patent
medicines" containing morphine, a derivative of opium, for their
"nerves" or "female ailments." In the same period, opium dens were
common in Chinese immigrant communities around San Francisco. Opium, extracted from the seedpod of the
opium poppy, had arrived in China from India via Burma in the seventeenth century; by the next
century, China was the center of a flourishing international
opium trade. Non-prescription possession of opium and cocaine was
banned in the US by the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which
helped create organized crime. Drugs, like alcohol during Prohibition,
would be eagerly supplied by an underground economy.
William James first studied the connection
between drugs and mystic vision that would become so basic a tenet
of the 1960s. In his 1901-02 Edinburgh lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience,
James described his experiments with nitrous oxide, which he believed
duplicated the altered perception reported by saints in their visions
of God or angels. James skeptically viewed foundational religious
figures as obsessives afflicted with "nervous instability."
Havelock Ellis was more sympathetic:
in an 1898 article, "Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise," he described
ritual use among Southwestern American Indians of mescal, obtained
from the button of a cactus plant. He himself had experimented with
mescal in London. Aldous Huxley cited Ellis' essay in The Doors of Perception (1954), where he
described his own experiment with mescaline (a synthetic version
of the chemical agent in mescal) the prior year at his Hollywood home. (Huxley's title, based on a Blake
maxim, inspired the name of the Los Angeles art-rock band, the Doors.) Huxley's partner
in taking mescaline was Humphrey Osmond, a British research psychiatrist
attending a convention of the American Psychological Association
in Los
Angeles.
It is Osmond who invented the term "psychedelic" for the effect
of hallucinogens on the brain. Later transmogrified into "psychedelia,"
it remains the best word for the garish mental adventurism and extremism
of the sixties.
The Beats used peyote, derived from
mescal buttons. Snyder first tried peyote while studying American
Indian culture at Reed College in 1948. It had been used since the Aztecs,
who chewed the buttons or steeped them in a bitter tea. Ginsberg
took peyote in New
York
in 1951 and Kerouac at Big Sur,
California, the following year. Peyote use was common
in bohemian Greenwich
Village
by 1957; mescaline arrived there the next year. In 1960, the Native
American Church of North America won the legal right (revoked in
1990) to use peyote in its religious rituals. "Magic" mushrooms
("'shrooms" for short) containing psychotropic psylocibin were also
used by the Beats: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neil Cassady had been
given them by Timothy Leary in 1960 after his return from summer
vacation in Mexico, where he had first tried them. Before he began
investigating LSD,
Leary called his program the Harvard Psylocibin Project.
The sixties' premiere drugs, however,
were marijuana and LSD.
Marijuana entered the US in the early twentieth century with migrant
Mexican farm workers in Texas. The hemp plant from which it comes was
introduced to North
America
in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who used it for fiber for
rope and ship rigging. Before World War I,
New Orleans was a major port for marijuana shipments
from Mexico and Cuba. Marijuana use, then confined to the working
class, spread through the rural South and was brought by blacks
to Midwestern and Northeastern cities during the Great Migration
for factory jobs during and after World War I.
It was in the urban centers that marijuana became associated with
music and the underground-a hip marriage that would last through
the sixties and beyond. The Beats who made a cult of be-bop jazz
(a style evolving from the late thirties through the mid-fifties)
imitated black musicians' habit of smoking "reefer." Marijuana was
then used by white folk musicians and spread across the country
via leftist circles. It was through folk music (cf. Bob Dylan's
line, "Everybody must get stoned," from "Rainy Day Woman") that
marijuana was transmitted to college students in the sixties-the
first time it had entered the middle class. For white users in the
fifties and sixties, therefore, marijuana had the aura of creativity
and progressive politics.
LSD-25
(lysergic acid diethylamide; hence the term "acid") was synthesized
from rye fungus in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a biochemist at Sandoz
Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. Hofmann discovered the chemical's hallucinogenic
effects when he inhaled it by accident in 1943. Because it seemed
to mimic the warped sense of space and time in psychosis, LSD was first viewed as a promising mental-research
drug. Humphrey Osmond tested it in Saskatchewan as a potential treatment for alcoholism.
LSD also seemed to
reproduce the effects of peyote in ancient Mesoamerican rituals.
In 1949, Dr. Max Rinkel brought LSD
from Sandoz to the US, where he began experiments in Boston. ("Sandoz" lingered as a code term for
LSD in the UK, as in the Animals' 1965 song, "A Girl
Named Sandoz.") The CIA
conducted its own tests on LSD
from 1951 through the decade.
LSD
was being used in Greenwich
Village
by 1961 and was available on the East and West Coasts the next year. By the summer of 1964, it
was widespread in the San Francisco Bay area, where it confused the political climate
on the Left. (See Mark Kitchell's first-rate 1990
documentary, Berkeley in the
Sixties.) Within a year, LSD
had become a major street drug in cities nationally. It was popularized
by a 1964 book by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, The
Psychedelic Experience. The book's subtitle, A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, showed the religious
cast that drug-taking was acquiring. As a student volunteer at a
California veterans hospital,
novelist Ken Kesey first took LSD
in 1959 (the same year that Ginsberg did) and later conducted "Acid
Test" parties at his home in the hills near San Francisco. Neil Cassady was part of these carnivalesque
gatherings, which evolved into the Merry Pranksters, a free-form
hippie group that toured the US in a Day-Glo-painted 1939 school bus. By
the late sixties, Kesey (who was jailed for five months for marijuana
offenses) was denouncing LSD.
His recantation resembled that of Alpert, who went to India in 1967 and became Baba Ram Dass, a drug-free
Hindu guru.
Hyperbolic claims were made for LSD in the sixties. For example, Walter
Houston Clark, a friend of Leary, predicted in a 1969 book, Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion,
that LSD's intellectual
effect on civilization would equal that of "the Copernican revolution."
In his 1970 bestseller, The
Greening of America, Yale Law School professor Charles Reich similarly celebrated
marijuana as an indispensable "truth-serum" that exposed society
as "unreal." Drug taking was also a gesture of rebellion against
Western commercialism: marijuana-called "weed" or "mother nature"
to highlight its organic character-was the intoxicant of choice
for those who rejected the businessman's martinis or scotch and
sodas. On the West Coast in particular, drug takers savored psychedelics'
associations with the "vision quest" of tribal shamans. In The
Teachings of Don Juan (1968), the first of several best-sellers,
Carlos Castaneda claimed, without substantiation, that he had received
spiritual instruction in peyote from a Yaqui Indian shaman in Mexico. By establishing continuity or solidarity
with Native American and pre-Columbian societies, drugs became an
affirmation of multiculturalism as well as a vehicle of religious
revelation.
The psychedelic "trip" into inner space
replicated the shaman's magic journey, from which he returned with
secret knowledge for his tribe. This myth of a spiritual journey
was a motif of premodern societies from Central
Asia
to the Amazon River basin. It is possible that hallucinatory shamanism
was widespread in Native American cultures because it was brought
from Siberia by the Indians' North Asian ancestors when
they emigrated across the Bering
Strait.
("Shaman" is a Ural-Altaic word.) Furthermore, North America, in contrast to Africa, for example, is especially fertile in
hallucinogenic plants. Even the species of strong tobacco (nicotiana rustica) used in Native American rituals had hallucinogenic
properties.
Many ritual practices, such as fasting
and marathon drumming, have been used throughout history to induce
trance and facilitate divination. In some cases, techniques of flagellation
or mutilation resemble those of the modern S&M scene, whose
devotees claim to attain a beatific state. Mushrooms eaten by Siberian
shamans caused convulsions. Hallucinogens, perhaps mushrooms, were
used by worshippers in the Eleusinian mysteries. Possessed by Apollo,
the Delphic oracle went into paroxysms after intoxication by fumes
from a cleft in the earth. Fault lines have recently been identified
in the bedrock at Delphi by an archaeologist and geologist, who
speculate that the priestess was maddened by oozing petrochemical
vapors like ethylene (prized by modern glue-sniffers). Drugs were
also used in medieval European witchcraft. The iconic Halloween
image of the witch flying on a broomstick is another version of
the shaman's visionary journey: ritual staffs were smeared with
a greenish hallucinogenic ointment and "ridden," to autoerotic effect.
The massive drug taking in the sixties,
promoted by arts leaders and pop stars,
redefined the culture and set the stage for the decade's religious
vision. But shamanistic drug taking in tribal societies took place
within small communities unified by a coherent belief system. Hippies
and college students casually sampling hallucinogens were relative
strangers and brought with them a mélange of private turmoils and
family psychodramas. What they shared was a yearning humanitarianism-and
rock music, which urged the liberation of sexual desire. Sex was
portrayed as a revolutionary agent: the establishment, like the
walls of Jericho, would fall before eros unbound. This overestimation
of sex-the faith that sexual energy freed of social controls is
inherently benign-was one reason for the dissipation of the authentic
spiritual discoveries made by the sixties generation. A philosophy
of random contacts and "good vibrations" built little that could
be passed on to the next generation. At its mildest, the sixties
cult of sex and drugs led to a frivolous dilettantism, youthful
high jinks like the Florida spring flings of the fifties. At its
worst, however, there was permanent damage that has never been systematically
assessed. In retrospect, it is clear, for example, that the meteoric
literary careers of Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey were sadly truncated
by drug abuse.
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