Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (15 page)

It was a very strange first trip indeed, and it was of many hours’ duration, perhaps fifteen. What I had experienced was the equivalent of death’s abolition of the body. I had literally ‘stepped forth’ out of the shell of my body, into some other strange land of unlikeliness, which can only be grasped in terms of astonishment and mystery, as an
état de l’absurde
, ecstatic nirvana. I could now ‘understand’ why death could produce the sort of confusion I was experiencing. In life we are anchored through the body to such inescapable cosmic facts as space, gravity, electro-magnetic vibrations and so forth. But when the body is lost, the psychic factor which survives is free to behave with uninhibited extravagance.

Once back in the present, when the ‘mountains were again the mountains, and the lakes again the lakes’, I felt a degree of apprehension about the acid I had by now stashed away in my study. It was pretty volatile stuff. How on earth could the energy of this strange atom be utilised; how could man adapt it to his needs? LSD was a bundle of solutions looking for a problem, the problem being how to undertake a work of integration on a massive scale. Modern man had fallen victim to the merciless vision of his own sceptical intelligence. Caught up in a wilderness of externals, he was a stranger to himself.

Accordingly, I telephoned Aldous Huxley at his home; he might at least advise me about what was happening with regard to LSD. Huxley had used both mescaline and LSD and had found in them, perhaps, the visions he had so long sought. On the phone, he was very sympathetic. No, there was still no one in a position to say what was happening in relation to visionary experience via LSD, though it seemed to excite a great curiosity in the minds of many he had discussed it with.

Huxley called me back a few days later, having thought over my problem, and suggested that I go to Harvard to meet a Dr Timothy Leary, a professor there, whom he’d met earlier that year in Copenhagen, when he had presented a paper on induced visionary experience before the Fourteenth International Congress of Applied Psychology. Leary had also read a paper on ‘How to Change Behaviour’, describing the induction of visionary mental states by psilocybin, the synthetic of the sacred mushroom of Mexico. He spoke very warmly of Leary as a scientist but also as a man, whom he described as ‘a splendid fellow’. Leary had also written three classic monographs on personality and psychotherapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Turned on the World
, 1973

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

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

Out of It
, 2001

I
WENT TO
Heidelberg.

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

‘Werner, are the Nazis still in charge?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went to Darmstadt.

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

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

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