The Drug Report: Life Extension, LSD, Oddities, Sundries

I didn't do a drug report last month, so you might say I've been "clean" for at least a month. Add to that: I haven't smoked any pot for at least 20 minutes, as of this writing. Sooo: two and a half cheers for moi?

On with it...

Possible Life Extension Drug: Metformin
If you're the sorta dreamer I am, you long for the day when you swallow one or what the hell: a handful of pills and they:

1. Stop your telomeres from fraying while continuing to do what they did when you were 15
2. Wipe out any and all cancers forming while not throwing your hardy-yet-delicate immunological systems out of orbit
3. Erase all plaques that gum up your aorta and arteries and that crap that leads to Alzheimer's
4. Level the playing fields of life by making you really pretty and attractive to possible sex partners
5. Laughs: life will be full of 'em with this/these new drugs

Those of you trained in cryptanalysis and steganography might notice the first letters of my five here spell out SWELL. Yea, it would be real swell if we had drugs that did this stuff, but no matter how optimistic/hedonistic/giddy or just plain stoned we are, let's get real.

As I handicap a bevy of life extension drugs over the past three years, a diabetes drug called Metformin looks fairly promising. And I confess the older I get and the more I accumulate readings of articles about the Possible Miracle Drug For Everything, the less sanguine I've become. But Metformin has about 60 years of safety. For Type 2 diabetics it suppresses the liver's glucose production and increases sensitivity to insulin. It's increased the lifespan in worms and mice. Researchers think there's a physiological basis in this diabetes drug that delays the aging that gives rise to diseases. Ones even worse than diabetes, like dementia, cancer and heart disease.

Here's the crux: doctors and researchers need to convince regulators and research funding agencies to give 'em the money to test this. What are they gonna test? How long will it take? Will I be dead by the time it hits the market? Probably not: under the TAME (Targeting Aging With Metformin) clinical trial they'll take over 3000 70-80 year old folks who have one or two of these lovely maladies: cancer, heart disease, or cognitive impairment, give them Metformin, then see if it forestalls these septuagenarians and octogenarians from getting those other brutal disease they don't already have.

It'll take five to seven years and cost $50 million.

I know, I know: this is not what you wanted to read about. But you tell me what's out there that's more robust and promises more in the way of longevity.

The horrible truth is, if you have dementia but don't already have cancer or heart disease, you're gonna get one or both of those others before you kick off for the Big Dirt Nap. Talk about a reality sandwich!

Researchers caution: this is not an "immortality" drug! (As if they needed to tell us, after what you've just read.) The big deal here seems to be: Metformin is a well-accepted drug for Type 2 diabetes. But: the TAME study, if it pans out, will establish Metformin as a drug that delays aging. And aging is statistically linked with nasty-ass degenerative diseases, which have already been named in this article, no need to give them more press here. The Unistat FDA says they are open to the study. Researchers want merely to "extend a person's healthy years by slowing down processes that underlie common diseases of aging."

So, in closing I must confess what I know about myself. I read this stuff and one part of my brain - the part that I associate with non-magical thinking and statistics, knowledge of inherent human biases, and appreciation of ever-changing information about the complexity of systems - this part thinks "this seems pretty realistic and at least it's something." But I also know I will wake up tomorrow, and sometime after lunch, catch myself dreaming of the True Wonder Pills, the ones that will do the SWELL stuff. Am I the only one?

Instead of Exercise, Take a Pill? (Just: Not Yet)
I confess I love exercise, sweating, stretching, getting all breathless, even if it has nothing to do with sex. I do yoga and cycle, love hiking, but Cross-Fit seems vaguely fascistic to me, but I digress...

So, a welter of exercise physiologists have determined that, when we're exercising - not doggin' it, but really working up a sweat and approaching oxygen debt - we experience over 1000 molecular changes in our skeletal muscles. And who knew? What's going on at that level rarely crosses my mind as I approach a 1500 foot uphill climb on my bike. My thinking's more along the lines of, "If my heart explodes and they find me dead and my bike in the middle of the road here, after a cement truck and school bus run my body over, it's good I brought my ID with me so they can notify next-of-kin, but at least I can say I wore a helmet if I wasn't already dead" or "this ascent looks like a mutha; just think of the endorphin buzz I'll cop about 40 minutes after I summit." Stuff like that.

But: if we know the 1000 molecular changes that happen, maybe we can just mimic those in a pill! It's all just biochemistry, isn't it? Hey yea: they're working on it. For reals! (Or they're fucking with science writers and the public, hoping for more funding to do far less romantic research, but I don't want to be a bummer, especially after that take on Metformin.)

There are a lot of people who can't exercise, so this would really help them. It would be a godsend for the obese, for people with diabetes, heart disease, etc. One article I read on this research said it would be really great for people who already exercise. That sounded gluttonous to me.

The sobering news here: it's gonna be at least ten years, as one researcher said, "before a pill could conceivably be available." Let's hope the Metformin we'll be able to take will get us there at a young enough state that...oh hell: I need a drink.


Maurice Mikkers: Microscopy and Drugs = Art
If you have the time, check out the gorgeous colors and lines in drugs. This link begins with what Mikkers calls "party drugs" but I really only think of GHB and MDMA/Ecstasy and maybe amphetamine as drugs to "party" with. DMT, 2C-B, and LSD should be used in the proper set and setting, which often is NOT a "party" in the sense most of us think of parties. But aside from that, who knew these drugs were so beautiful, under the microscope, enlarged 40x-400x?

The MDMA/Ecstasy was breathtaking to me. Of course Ecstasy would do that.

Check out Mikkers's website for tonnes of astonishing photography, especially if you need a contact high.

Also, nota bene: it's officially been declared, by the International Moral Credit League ("Oh yea, the IMCL? Great buncha people...") that if you just "take a languid gander" at an "exhibit" - that's the way I see how Mikkers has laid out his wares online here - then you get "credit" for not going to the actual brick and marble Museum this month. I mean, what it'll cost you here? 12 minutes? Think about it. This offer only good through April of 2016; after that you must feel vaguely guilty again on May 1st until you go to the museum or talk or poetry reading. Just floatin' that out there. Hey, facts are facts.

                                            Robin Cahart-Harris, PhD

Recent LSD Research
Just in time for April 19th/AKA "Bicycle Day" and I'm no doubt writing yet another Epistle to the Converts, but what the hell, I just have to mention it. The Beckley Institute crowd-funded a study on LSD and got some stellar drug researchers from Imperial College in London to conduct it. The eminent Dr. David Nutt was the study's lead author, and Robin Cahart-Harris led the study. These are not lightweights. What did they find?

After giving 20 healthy volunteers injections of 75 micrograms of LSD (and others got a lousy placebo, but it was FOR SCIENCE!), the trippers had their brains imaged three ways: with fMRI, something called "arterial spin labelling" (don't ask), and magnetoencephalography. The study said the LSD users tripped for "six hours."

Aside: every LSD trip I've done was at minimum 200 mikes, but always on blotter. And it always lasted at least 10 hours. This Imperial College London stuff Nutt got must have been really righteous! Moving on...

So: there are numerous reports on this study, but the finding that most intrigued me: neural networks in the adult brain normally "talk" to closely-connected networks nearby. It's about specialized function. To rehash basic developmental neuroscience, we have way more neurons as babies, but they get pruned away with experience in the world, which we can call "learning." The stuff that's not pruned gets reinforced and the connections get stronger. We develop neural pathways that "know" how to do millions of things. Neurons are use-it or lose it: what's not recruited in learning/experience in the world gets flushed, literally. Eventually, we develop a sense of our "self" and some sort of "ego," hopefully a relatively healthy one.

What this study did was show how LSD gets the brain to "talk" and connect to other areas it usually doesn't, and therefore it was likened to a return to a "childhood" sense of wonder and imagination. It also reduced the "normal" connectivity we usually experience. What it taketh away it more than giveth backeth in spadeths.

In the past 30 years, neuroscience has continually found more fascinating aspects of how "plastic" the brain can be, even in adults, in the right circumstances. This is termed "neuroplasticity" and is the main reason why even stodgy old farts can still learn a thing or two.

As I read the articles about this study, certain lines jumped out. LSD and presumably other psychedelics "might help some users return to a childlike sense of wonder and imagination." (Most of these quotes are from Cahart-Harris or David Nutt.) When I read this, I think my first reaction was, "I wonder how many church-goers privately think, "This ain't working for me, but it's what's expected...I need to show up at least..." Well, what you REALLY want is a return to a childlike sense of awe and wonder, where parts of your brain get to know other parts for the first time, then you'll know what true religion is. But here of course I'm biased.

In a repetition of research with psilocybin over the past five years (or more), it was observed that the users experienced "improvements in well-being" after the effects of the drug wore off. Psilocybin research showed that one trip significantly changed people towards more openness for the rest of their lives. I know it's an olde riff, but if we could only get this stuff in the punchbowl at the Republican National Convention, amirite?

Cahart-Harris: "This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way, and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug's effects have subsided." Yes, and it's once again suggested by people with actual PhDs from high-ranking universities - actual scientists, not assholes like Ted Cruz or some raging right wing pastor who thinks Jesus needs more nuclear missiles so we get to live out the book Revelation.

But Cahart-Harris also addresses a point I blogged on a few weeks ago: why must psychedelic experience use religious language? I recently read Dennis McKenna's book Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss and here's a PhD psychonaut of impeccable credentials who has managed to develop a vocabulary to talk about psychedelic experience that's drawn from cosmology, phenomenological philosophy, science fiction, and the arcana of alchemy.

We have our work cut out for us, friends.

Once again, hard-core researchers are suggesting these drugs might or can or should be used for depression, addiction and - presumably if Metformin and the exercise pill never get here in time - for end-of-life anxiety.

I will close with a quote from the estimable British drug researcher, Dave Nutt, talking about this latest LSD research:

This is to neuroscience what the Higgs boson was to particle physics.

And with that, I bid you all a fondue.

Drug Report: LSD and Flying; Future Drugs; Cannabis Potency, etc.

First off: tidbits of drug news I've found interesting: Science Inches Closer To Home Brew Heroin. While I don't think smart guys with a few flasks, some re-agent, a Bunsen Burner and a worn out copy of Principles of Organic Chemistry, 31st edition, will be making this stuff soon, let's face it: it's only a matter of time before we will all be able to make our own heroin, or maybe even Dave Nichols and Sasha Shulgin-level psychedelics. The costs of hardware are falling precipitously.  Others are doing it right now. But can you trust them? NB the Doctor who says to consider illicit drugs a disease that we've been treating with antibiotics for 50 years. Wouldn't we expect the drugs (and their users?) to become antibiotic-resistant after 50 years?

Speaking of Shulgin: he's only been dead for 13 months and he seems bigger than ever, if my Internet reading is an accurate indicator. No doubt the main reason is that he published two fat books on psychedelic chemistry - PIHKAL and TIHKAL - despite the DEA telling him they'd rather he not. In a conversation Shulgin had with Martin Torgoff, author of Can't Find My Way Home: America In the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, Torgoff writes, "His reason for publishing this remarkable collection of how-to recipes was twofold. The first explanation was philosophical. 'Every drug, legal or illegal, provides some reward,' he wrote. 'Every drug presents some risk. And every drug can be abused. Ultimately, in my opinion, it is up to each of us to measure the reward against the risk and decide which outweighs the other...My philosophy can be distilled in four words: be informed, then choose.' The other reason had to do with Shulgin's passionate belief in the freedom of information. As he explained it, 'You know where all of Wilhelm Reich's notes and his manuscripts  and writings went after he died? the FDA burned them. I felt the same thing could have happened to my work, which is why I wanted to get the stuff scattered as widely as I could.'" (p.393)

                      Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, with fan Hamilton Morris, in Shulgin's 
                      home lab in Lafayette, CA. Photo probably by Ann Shulgin?


Fans of Robert Anton Wilson will be familiar with this idea of Reich's books being burned by the Unistat government less than 15 years after we supposedly fought a war against fascism, because, among other things, those fascists violated our basic ideas about freedom of information, and they burned books. (See RAW's Wilhelm Reich In Hell, for the uninitiated.)

Take a moment or two and ponder the AMA-FDA burning Reich's books, and Shulgin's recipes flying all over the world, to some exotic place where people are now tripping on some analogue of mescaline or DMT, or Ecstasy.

Also: those seeking to buy their own copies of PIHKAL and TIHKAL via online vendors: caveat emptor; the fascists no doubt are monitoring the movement of these books. I have them for my own "Walter Mitty" reasons I've discussed many times before here in blogspews about "dangerous" or "demonic" books. I somehow manage to screw up microwave dinners, so I'm a far cry from being able to understand, much less cook up something like Shulgin's underground favorite (or one of 'em), 2C-B:

"A solution of 100 g of 2,5-dimethoxybenzaldehyde in 220 g nitromethane was treated with 10 g anhydrous ammonium acetate, and heated on a steam bath for 2.5 h with occasional swirling. The deep-red reaction mixture was stripped of the excess nitromethane under vacuum, and the residue crystallized spontaneously. This crude nitrostyrene was purified by grinding under IPA, filtering and air-drying, to yield 85 g of 2,5-dimethoxy-(Greek beta letter)- nitrostyrene as a yellow-orange product of adequate purity for the next step..." (PIHKAL, p.503)

The text goes on to make the previous look like "heat on high for 4 minutes, remove, wrapper, let cool for one minute before eating." It gets way out there. It's like reading some experimental poetry to me: I don't get it at all, but the odd linguistic effects of reading it give a sort of Joycean thrill. Clearly, I want my future psychedelic bathtub chemists to have at least gotten an "A" in Organic Chemistry Lab. At a really good school.

Where's the buzz in having/reading the Shulgin cookbooks if you wouldn't know a methyl group if they ganged up on you behind the tennis courts? After all his abstruse chemical prose, there are always abrupt, jarring tonal shifts in prose: trip reports from his select group of elect psychonaut explorers of inner space, scattered around Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco (Shulgin's lab was on his property in nearby Lafayette, California). And now, one would guess, because of the dissemination of the two books all over the world, there are vast unpublished trip reports for such Shulgin drugs as AMT; 5-MEO-DMT; 5-MEO-DIPT, 4-Acecoxy-DiPT, and DOB.

Drugs That Alter Auditory Perception
A second little thing: about psychedelics and perception of sound: In my old copy of Lee and Shlain's Acid Dreams, I ran across a wild line about the CIA developing futuristic drugs, and there was one that "only alters auditory perception, under its influences all sounds become atonal, while other human faculties remain unaffected." (p.292) The authors give no citation, and when I first read about this, years ago, I thought they had to have been taken in by someone, if not some CIA person, then someone who had been reading a lot of William S. Burroughs. This sounds like a WSB-invented fiction. I would like to think the drug was called "Schoenberg," but I didn't really believe a drug could be that specific in the brain.

That is, until I read about Shulgin's DIPT, which supposedly makes people hear music one octave lower (or so) than its normal pitch. That reminded me of trying to learn blazing fast scale passages from my favorite guitarists by putting the record on at 16rpm rather than 33 1/3: a Randy Rhoads passage played high on the neck suddenly sounds like it's down around the 2nd fret, with Ozzy sounding truly evil and not like the carnival barker I believed him to be in so-called "real life." And then I read about Takao Hensch, a Harvard (those guys again?) professor of molecular and cellular biology, who took adult non-musicians and had them do musical ear-training tests on valproic acid, a mood-stabilizing drug. The subjects developed perfect pitch! I'd love to have perfect pitch, but with follow-up research I see Hensch's subject group was small. Even more irritating: what valproic acid does is potentiate the brain's neuroplasticity: your brain gets a re-set to the time when you were very young, and soaking up language and info like a vast sponge. We could all learn quantum field equations! and Swahili! and Chinese! and...how to do chemistry like Shulgin!? Ah, but the Big Caveat: the brain's neuroplasticity and our earlier "critical periods" for learning (before some neural window closed on us) seem very basic, and evolution probably did that for some good reason, which we won't want to tamper with. For right now, my main model to reason with this is If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, It Probably Is Too Good To Be True. So, we probably ought not tamper with this ancient system of learning.

But we will. Someone will, right? Stay...<ahem> "tuned." Maybe this will turn out to be Something Veddy Innaresting...

Cannabis Potency: A Law-Enforcement Myth That Even Most Pot Smokers Believe?
You've all heard this one: the pot you find now is 10 to 30 times stronger than the stuff the hippies were smoking in the late 1960s/early 1970s. I remember when we bought dime bags of Acapulco Gold and Panama Red: stringy, leafy, stems-and-seedy stuff we loved. Rarely anything that looked like an actual bud. And then rarely we'd find some guy who'd have Thai Stick (awesome!), or even more rarely, "Hawaiian," like Maui Wowie, which was the best stuff I'd ever had. Then, as recounted wonderfully in Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire, Reagan got elected and started a campaign of spraying the Mexican pot crops with paraquat, an herbicide linked to Parkinson's Disease. And so, as Pollan writes, our best gardeners went underground, played with the genes of various strains of cannabis and came up with the most amazingly strong weed, which was grown in the Emerald Triangle of far northern California. And when "sensimilla" (without seeds: a truly utopian concept at the time) filtered into my suburb of Los Angeles, circa 1982: I took one hit and felt like I was on acid. So for awhile even I believed the stories about vastly increased potency.

But I had had conversations with renegade pot growers, guys who really knew their stuff, and they said that was all Cop Propaganda. I said, but what about all the amazing buds you guys have come up with, like Blue Cheese, Purple Urkel, Green Crack, and others? They said that stuff was always around, but I was too penurious to be able to afford it. Because it was scarce. Only the Beautiful (and rich) Dope Smokers were indulging in stuff like Dogshit Orgasm or Purple Kush...But still I was skeptical.

Then I read Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science. Goldacre is a tireless debunker of "woo" and at one point in the book smelled bullshit about the "it's 30 times more potent now...so...the children will all be KILLED!" shit the cops were playing. He uses math and stats and logic to debunk increased potency since 1970. (see Goldacre, pp.189-193) I was impressed by his zeal and rationality, but...I had access to all sorts of weed that was so potent, so...good I required more dissentual data about increased potency. It turns out if you look, you can find.  I read Brian Preston's Pot Planet: Adventures in the Global Marijuana Culture, which I remember liking a lot, but I don't remember much about <cough>. Preston quotes an expert who says it's not true that pot is way more potent than in the 1970s; it's just that the very potent stuff [17%-30%THC] is way easier to find now.

                Blueberry Afgoo, left. NYC Diesel bud on right. Photos by Erik Christiansen

I've started to come around. I think Goldacre and Preston's expert are probably right; Pollan is not wrong; he's inadvertently explaining (in his wonderfully written chapter in Botany of Desire about cannabis) why the Really Good Stuff is so omnipresent now. And some people still doubt Progress!

Flying on LSD: Literally
Who knows the deep story about Captain Trips? Who was Al Hubbard, anyway? We have reason to suspect he's telling the truth about growing up poor in Kentucky and getting rich in uranium. Why disbelieve his stories and documents about working for the OSS (and then the CIA?) Aldous Huxley found him charming. (Two more disparate personalities you'll rarely find in a friendship, by the way. Hubbard was a spy, a Cold Warrior, and not educated. Aldous was nothing if not ridiculously well-educated.) Hubbard had a mystical experience on LSD, seeing himself being conceived during his parents' sex act. He flew all over the world in his own plane, with his seemingly unlimited supply of great acid. He wanted to turn on the world. Was his motivation on the level? And his ties to the highest levels of the Unistat government made his "Johnny Acidseed" jaunts easy. He received a happy birthday card from Ronald Reagan just before he died. At a party at Oscar Janiger's house in 1979, Timothy Leary greeted Captain Al with "I owe everything to you!" (Acid Dreams, p.293)

Now: I haven't flown anywhere in a long time, largely because 1.) before 9/11 every time I took my bags to airport I got sidelined while everyone else went on with their business of passing through security, waiting for their flight, etc. But not me. I always had to wait for my "security" to be cleared. Sometimes this only took five minutes. Other times: 30 minutes or more. Why? Because, at some point in the 1970s - this is all I've ever been able to get from airport security people and researches online - some person in Canada hijacked a plane, and they used a false name. That name is my exact name. (You may have seen this on 60 Minutes many years ago.) The hijacker used one of the most common Unistat names there is: "Robert Johnson." The name on my birth certificate is this name, although I've always gone by my middle name: Michael. But then I asked, "How come you cleared me six months ago, this is the same airline, and you have to clear me again?" Just following orders. So, my name is on a list, totally undeservedly so, and yet no one can do anything about it? Later I found out I could pay some fee to...someone and it would make all that go away. But I thought this was just bullshit. I still do.

Then: 9/11 and the quasi-fascistic/quasi-Kafkaesque TSA of true "security theater" arrived. I'll do a blog on how profoundly worthless the entire TSA security theater show is some other day. Or, as Ring Lardner said, "You could look it up."

Anyway: when I did fly, it was always a tad sensory overload to me. Aside from the security issues and the waiting, flying was a rich source of stimuli, observation, and odd perspectives that I actually enjoyed. (I once flew 16 hours to Tokyo, which was grueling and not fun at all. Another story...) The idea of being on LSD while flying just seems like too much to me. But not to Timothy Leary. Here he is in 1969. The Supreme Court had set him loose from a 30 year charge for having half an ounce of weed. He was finally free, after four years, to leave the country:

"In mixing sacrament for the trip I had accidentally taken too much and sat primly in the Air Iberia waiting room at JFK, rushing, sorting out James Bond paranoias, hoping that Franco's agents would fail to penetrate my disguise. (I've been busted three times in airports.)"

Leary and his wife Rosemary get on the plane. "Two elderly men in uniform tottered by, painfully lugging briefcases, gold teeth flashing forlorn smiles. 'They look like retired generals from the Spanish Civil War,' I whispered. 'Hush,' said Rosemary. 'They are our pilots.'"

Leary starts to get telepathic signals from the other elderly Spanish passengers. He imagines them all as old, committed fascists under the Franco regime. He says to Rosemary, "What have we got ourselves into this trip? This plane is like the second-class bus from Malaga to Torremolinos. It will never make the Atlantic!

"Rosemary was pretending she didn't know me. 'How much did you drop? Really!'" Leary felt like it took "3 1/2 hours to wheeze down the runway and takeoff." He's convinced the steward is a secret police agent. Eventually two Spanish stewardesses approach Leary. We know who you are...do you mind if we ask you some questions? Leary, to himself: "Here we go!"

The stewardesses asked Leary if he had any dope on him. He denied it. You always deny it, he'd learned. The stewardesses were disappointed. "What a drag. Our friends in Madrid will be disappointed. Well, at least give us your autograph."

Leary, taken aback, asked, but what about Catholic Spain, Franco, the secret police?

"Young people are the same all over the world, Doctor Timothy. [...] Young people like to get high and feel good and make love." (Jail Notes, pp. 137-138)

                                  Michael Horowitz in 1972. Photo by Timothy Leary

It's July 1970 and Leary is back in California, in prison. Recently he'd made Michael Horowitz his official archivist. Horowitz writes, "I was no longer a hippie minding his own business; I was now a member of the entourage/support team of the High Priest, the Disgraced Harvard Professor, the Pied Piper, the Acid Martyr - the world's best advocate of 'better living through chemistry.'"

Leary was doing 10 years for possession of two roaches. Leary had asked Horowitz to visit him in prison. Michael's friend came to his Berkeley apartment to drive him to the airport. Michael decided to cut a hit of strong Windowpane acid in half, to share with Leary. His friend honked his horn, and impulsively, Horowitz swallowed his half and kept the other half hidden underneath his fingernail. "The desire to be tripping on acid while meeting the High Priest of LSD got the better of me, so I slipped the other half under my tongue."

In less than an hour Horowitz climbed into a Navaho Piper Cub to fly to the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo. Horowitz writes that he enjoyed flying while stoned, while I get a panic attack just reading about this...and typing it to you, Dear Reader. But just think: Horowitz was going to enter  the world of the Prison. As they approached, a sign said 20 years for bringing in "narcotics" or weapons. He became acutely aware of the "tiny thing under my thumbnail." Horowitz had a huge hippie 'fro, purple-tinted glasses, and a fringe-leather jacket with "Timothy Leary for Governor" on it, bell-bottom jeans. He felt all the guards were staring at him, and the paranoia, mounting, he wished the acid would quit coming on stronger and stronger. Hilariously, Horowitz writes, "What was I thinking? That this was something other than a fucking prison?"

"'Look at that freak visiting Leary!,' one of the guards hissed from across the room." As he's given multiple forms to fill out, using the writing hand that had the other half-hit of Windowpane under the nail, eight burly guards came up and surrounded him. He tried to read and fill out the forms, but the words swirled on the page. (If you've never done acid you have no idea how INSANE this scenario must have felt.)

When asked his purpose for the visit, Horowitz somehow blurted out "editorial and archival matters." One of the guards sneered, "What does that mean?" Michael answered.

He was directed to a gate. A guard said to another, "It looks like like he's on something, don't it?" And they laughed. Security doors, gates, drab prison dullness of walls, electronic security. Finally he meets Leary and they hug and Horowitz relaxes a little, buys them both a coffee and candy bars, feels less like "Joseph K visiting the Castle" and more like a fellow Merry Prankster. Finally, Leary realizes Horowitz is on acid.

"You're on acid? Shit! What do you think this is? Fillmore East? I'm looking at ten years! I desperately need your help - and you show up on acid!"

"I have some for you."

"Great. I just can't wait to trip in this place! Look around - it's the perfect set and setting, isn't it?"

"Sorry," I said, downcast, feeling I had totally blown it.

Leary perks up, tells Michael about the book he's writing on DNA and LSD and the stages of evolution and says, wait till the guard turns away before you slip me the hit of acid. Horowitz is elated: he gets to get high with Leary and hear him talk about his ideas. Then he looks down and notices the hit is gone: it's not on his fingernail.

"Um, Tim..."

Okay, so that was more about prison than flying. But when I first read this story (in Psychedelic Trips For the Mind, pp. 49-51), the flying in a Piper Cub to a prison was enough to give me an mild anxiety attack. What's all the fuss about whether we can explore parallel worlds as theorized by some High Priests of physics? We already have ways to explore parallel worlds. It's called literature.

Finally: Allen Ginsberg, while the Bard of the counterculture, had also, from an early age, believed in watching the watchers. He'd kept files and clippings and notes on the FBI, the CIA, police of all kinds, politicians, world leaders. (And you bet your ass they had a massive dossier on him, too.) He'd come to realize the CIA's role in disseminating LSD in Unistat, and it was always a hot topic of conversation with his friends.

From Ed Sanders's book The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg:

                              October of '77
                              he was in the air on the way
                              to a symposium called LSD: A Generation Later
                                           at UC Santa Cruz

                              and dropped a hit on the plane
                                          thinking about the CIA and LSD.
                              Later at the symposium
                              he told what he'd done and asked
                     "Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of
                       one of the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised, or
                       triumphantly successful 
                                            experiments in mind control?"
                          (p. 129)

Other Writings Consulted
"SiHKAL: Shulgins I Have Known and Loved," by Hamilton Morris
Nomad Codes, Erik Davis, pp.207-211, wonderful writing on the impact of Shulgin
Visionary State, by Erik Davis. Contains two wonderful large, full-color photos of Shulgin's lab, taken by Michael Rauner.
Pharmako-Gnosis, by Dale Pendell. Stunning erudition throughout.
Storming Heaven, by Jay Stevens
"Why Harvest Opiates When You Can Get Yeast to Produce Them?"
Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s, pp. 17-40, "The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture," by David Farber

                                            art by the wild Bobby Campbell
                               

Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, by Rhoney Gissen Stanley

He was reading about chromatography and with his wire-rimmed glasses and long hair, he looked like Benjamin Franklin with his balls hanging out. 
-p. 60, Rhoney Gissen Stanley describing the legendary LSD alchemist "Bear" Owsley Stanley in Owsley and Me: My LSD Family.

Now here's a delightful little memoir that was up my counterculture alley. I try to read every book that comes out on cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy and other psychedelics, but it's getting difficult to keep up. Arriving in 2012 and co-written with Al Franken's old and now-dead sidekick, Tom Davis, Stanley writes about the mid-late 1960s in Berkeley as if it were last year, with novelistic patches of remembered dialogue that we just have to take her words for as being...fairly...accurate? 50 years later? Anyway, it was a fun read.

Rhoney Gissen was an upper-class east coast jewish girl who wanted to get as far away from her repressed family as she could, and majoring in English at Berkeley in 1965 did the trick. Her LSD "family" is largely a threesome, with Augustus Owsley "Bear" Stanley III, and Melissa Cargill. The extended family turns out to be quite large: members of Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, members of the Hell's Angels, Richard Alpert (about to go to India and become Ram Dass), other luminaries that many of you could guess.

Gissen Stanley appended Owsley's last name, but they were never married; Gissen took the last name "Stanley" when she went back to school to become a dentist, many years after Owsley took the rap for his entire operation and went to prison; after all, she had had a child with him. The book has a sincere yet odd tone: most of the time the well-educated Gissen is obsessively in love with Owsley, and he loves here too, but it's complicated, and Gissen suffers through much of her memoir in a sort of heart-on-her-sleeve schoolgirl's crush on the charismatic Brilliant Man.

                              Owsley in hat and shades; Jerry Garcia in beard 
                               photo by Rosie McGee

And oh my: Owsley was brilliant. This was the main reason I picked up the book: here's a guy who's known for making the best LSD ever, for turning on almost an entire generation (mostly for idealistic reasons), and he was self-taught. And LSD is notoriously very, very difficult to make well. The ideas many of us got about how much technical know-how went into making the vastly superior or "purest" blue meth in "Breaking Bad"? LSD appears to be more difficult than that to produce at the most pure levels. (In one scene a batch of Owsley LSD is tested in a lab at UC Berkeley and is found to be 99% pure.)

But Owsley was a true modern alchemist, and Rhoney Gissen relates scenarios a-plenty that illustrate the wizard-like aspect of Owsley, who, while making LSD was often seen pouring over thick chemistry textbooks at a kitchen table, all night, in the nude. Here's a scene from early on:

At Bear's house one day, I opened the door to the tall and handsome Richard Alpert. He could have just stepped out of GQ in his polo shirt, tan pants, and boat shoes with tassels. I took him to the kitchen where Bear was naked and totally engrossed in two large books open before him on the table: Electromechanical Metallurgy and The Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Richard and I waited for him to look up and acknowledge us.

"Is he reading those two books at the same time?" he asked. 

"At least." I motioned for him to take a seat. 

Richard sat and began talking to Owsley, who just added the conversation as a third object of his attention. "LSD is not enough to bring me to liberation and bliss. I always come back down into my thinking mind, this body, these clothes." Owsley looked up and uncrossed his legs, moving his balls out of the way with his hands.

Gissen says Owsley saw himself as a psychedelic Prometheus, "enabling mankind to choose to take a sacrament for transformation of mind and soul. His LSD was the purest. Purity of LSD was his raison d'etre." A leitmotif in the book is Owsley, backstage at rock concerts or other gatherings of psychedelic intelligentsia, administering his 99% pure God-Juice sublingually from a Murine bottle he carried with him.

We get one of the most vivid pictures of Owsley yet in this book: his off-beat but erudite ideas about how important it was to eat meat - especially steak - rare; why he ended up living his last decades in extreme biodiversity, off the grid in Australia: because a huge storm was about to hit the Northern Hemisphere and bring on an ice age and Noah's flood-like conditions. (see p.253 for details) About Owsley's love of comic books, ballet, that astrology had actual merit, that the tips of his right hand pinky and ring finger had been lost since childhood (Why, again? It's sorta mysterious: Gissen, noticing hair was growing out of the finger-stumps: "What happened to your fingers?" Owsley, laughs dismissively: "I was a kid. But they grafted skin from my belly. That's why hairs grow.") Gissen paints an Owsley who usually thought if an idea wasn't his own, it was probably wrong. And a lot of the time he was right. He was a gifted lover of women, hated tobacco, and probably didn't let enough people know how much in debt he was to his main squeeze, the gorgeous and ultra-brilliant Melissa Cargill, who did major in Chemistry at Berkeley, and probably deserves much more credit for the purest LSD ever.

While we can understand why such chemists would rather remain mysterious, with hindsight it's perhaps time to reassess the technical and intellectual contribution Cargill made to late 1960s/early 1970s psychedelic culture.

At the same time, Owsley deserves far more notice for his stellar work in acoustics and sound engineering (again: mostly self-taught). His determination to aid and abet the Grateful Dead in bringing forth a new cosmic consciousness via not only LSD, but a synergy of psychedelics in human nervous systems, plus new ways to organize and record live rock music? He still seems relatively unheralded here, eh? He tinkered with speaker placement, condenser microphones, live rock sound controlled by a mixer who was stationed amidst the audience, allowing the band members to hear each other and themselves...prior to Owsley, loud rock bands were very noisy live; the sound was chaos. He played as big a part in engineering concert sound as anyone. How many people are aware of this? Even his home stereo was avant-garde:

If I could not be at a live show, next best was listening to music at Bear's. He modified his home audio system by exchanging the components of the amp and preamp with precision parts he ordered from an aircraft manufacturer. He changed the type of cables and the wiring of the connectors. He had the best speakers  - JBLs with the cones exposed. He even altered these, adding a subwoofer to increase the amplitude of the bass. His placement of the two tall speakers was calculated to optimize the quality of the sound. I pulled out an LP of the Bulgarian Women's Choir. I placed the record into the turntable and dropped the needle. 

"Jerry Garcia loves this," I told Richard (Alpert)."
"Jerry Garcia is a bodhisattva," he said.

Later, Owsley is explaining to Gissen: "Nobody has figured out how to record live music. We can do it! We need time, and we have to get this acid tabbed, too. LSD is part of the alchemical equation and helps the music become transformative."

A word on Owsley's background: his great-great grandfather had come to Unistat on the Mayflower. His grandfather had been governor and US. Senator from Kentucky. His godfather was a Supreme Court Justice on the Earl Warren court, or so Rhoney Gissen says; I was unable to identify which Supreme was Owsley's godfather after at least fourteen minutes of Google searches. He grew up believing what his grandfather taught him: that Prohibition violated the Constitution: an adult person had the right to do with their own nervous system what they willed. This seems partly why, after his acid-team got busted in Orinda, just over the hills from Berkeley,  Owsley eventually decided he could take the rap for everyone and, using a stack of law books, defend himself - with counsel - and not go to prison. But of course, that's not the way things shake out in this Epoch, as you well know, my friends. Owsley did a stretch in many prisons in the California Archipelago, much as Timothy Leary did. (Owsley learned metallurgy in prison, and his belt buckles sell like gold to this day...)

Speaking of Leary, there was a point where it was thought Owsley's "Hobbit" house in Berkeley (HERE, see about 50% of the way down the page) might be hot - the Feds may have been on to him - so someone in his circle pointed out there was a house available in the Berkeley hills near the one that Leary owned, but he balked because he perceived Leary as someone who sought media attention, and Owsley wanted nothing to do with that.

For denizens of Berkeley and surroundings, Grizzly Peak, Telegraph, Bancroft, and Sproul Plaza appear; Marin and the Oakland hills and the great rock auditoriums of San Francisco (Fillmore West/Winterland/Carousel Ballroom) are characterized. Bill Graham and Owsley didn't get along. Also: Boulder and Denver (and unnamed Tim Scully), and Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and Altamont appear. Owsley and Gissen visit Leary at Millbrook but Leary's only interested in drinking and the Owsley crew get busted by Liddy's pals as they leave. There's lots of driving while high on LSD. There are anecdotes about Hendrix being recorded privately at the Masonic Hall in San Francisco whilst everyone was very high (read to see what turned out with the tapes!), a quasi-hilarious bad trip with Buddy Miles, and a harrowing bad trip with Robert Hunter, who, it turns out, did an insane amount of strong LSD, by accident. They visit the Hollywood Hills and meet George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, and David Crosby.

I liked this book.

A couple of extra notes: I find it striking how acid cognoscenti were aided by the children of the wealthy elite in Unistat. Famously, the Mellon family's children helped Leary; Owsley was greatly aided by these types too. However, I fail to see any sort of the conspiracy that some have: the elites, in conjunction with CIA, sent their children to derail the counterculture. I think rich kids sometimes have different values than mumsy and pop. Also: this book is yet another that draws a distinction between the renegade flavor of the psychedelic counterculture on the West Coast of Unsitat, with the more Asiatic-religion-influenced trippers on the East Coast of Unistat. I wonder how "true" this distinction really was; I've seen it recur in book after book. I suspect much of this distinction has been born of a meme that propagated well, and even had "them dat wuz there" believing it, years later, as they recalled their lives in, say, 1969, at age 23.

Finally: the most striking element of the book was, to me, the passages in which Gissen is tripping marvelously through her 1960s, stoned, immaculate, listening to Ravi Shankar...and then the sudden juxtapositions of technical language in exposition of the making of LSD, which at times seem almost Joycean. (See, for example, pp. 48-52; 54-61; 71-74 (making DMT); and 101-104.) A taste, to ride out of the too-long review here:

Melissa took a washed beaker, squirted acetone on it, and held it up for inspection.

"See how clean! Look, the beaker is dry. Every piece of glassware must have a final rinse of acetone."

"Oh, that acetone smells terrible. Anything that smells that bad can't be good for you."

"Acetone smells bad but the flasks are glad," Melissa responded. She blasted the beaker with compressed air. "This hastens the drying process." She examined the glassware; if it were wet and there were any streaks or spots, it would come back for a do-over. 

We fell into a routine: eat, sleep, and work.

We usually worked at night, and for this phase of the synthesis, columns clamped to rods were setup. Tim was in charge of packing them because he was tallest. The process is called column chromatography, or affinity chromatography, because the desired LSD - the iso-LSD - and the impurities have different affinities for the alumina adsorbent and separate out at different rates, or affinities, as they travel down the column. According to Bear, the trick was to get the mother liquor down the column without breaking off into crystals along the way.

When Owsley first started making LSD, he did not use column chromatography to purify the acid. He used vacuum dessication...



Here's Owsley talking about psychedelic effects interacting with sound equipment:

This Is The Week That Is: Crazy?

Humanity: if you break it, you bought it.

Some poet wrote in some whacked long poem edited by Ezra Pound that "April is the cruellest month..." Okay, I'll bite: why?

Oh. That.

Now that Dzhokhar (friends called him "Jafar" according to some social media stuff I've seen) Tsarnaev has been apprehended - after half a state was locked down to search for an (admittedly dangerous) - badly wounded 19 year old wearing a hoodie, I was reminded that the Columbine shooting happened on 4/20 too. That's a day we should all be getting stoned LEGALLY, listening to music, talking wild speculative philosophical talk, reading poetry, and having transcendent sex.

April 20: it can be more than Hitler's Birthday and Columbine. Really.

No, but seriously: not to get all teleological on yer asses, but the goddess put cannabis there to help prevent people who'd listen to a little Loudmouth with a funny mustache...from taking him seriously. Sure, the Treaty of Versaille was a bum deal and we've dealt with an epically lousy economy, but dude! Get real. I don't like the way you say "lebensraum." You've got a malicious vibe goin' man. Chill.

Oh and the Oklahoma City bombing was on April 19th. And so was the Unistat government starting a fire and burning some religious nuts and their children alive, near Waco.

[Readers who do not live in Unistat: forgive my relatively selfish non-cosmopolitanisms here. It's a fair bet some really heinous things have happened in your neck to the planetary woods between the dates 19-25 April. For example: if you live in Rwanda I'm honored that you're even looking at this, but you must be rolling your eyes already. There are many more examples. Like this next bit.]

21 April: Nine years ago, in southern Iraq, in the place often cited as the possible "real" location for the Bible's Garden of Eden, Basra? Fallout from the Unistat war which was started under false pretenses: five suicide car bombers, in a coordinated attack, targeted police stations. 74 were killed, 160 wounded. And Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bush...are still free men. Which I take as a very ominous existential fact.

Are there any historical forces from this week that may be working to oppose..."all that"? Aye, viz:

Earth Day is April 22nd. Albert Hofmann, one of the most brilliant chemists of the 20th century, sampled an ergot from his lab at Sandoz, thinking it a very small amount. He started to feel odd, so decided to ride his bicycle home. Turns out the lysergic acid dose he'd ingested was a very large one, for humans of any size. This bicycle ride took place on April 19th, 1943. On a human historical time scale, nuclear fission - which could eventually make ending all life on Earth possible - happened a mere few seconds from the time Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD. Coincidence?

Stewart Brand was on LSD in San Francisco, thinking about a talk Buckminster Fuller had given, about how we're all inhabitants of one spaceship: Earth. If we could only get a picture of Earth taken from space; if only people could see the Pale Blue Dot they live on, their spaceship as seen by the rest of the cosmos, maybe enough of them would think differently about their perspectives, and we could avert catastrophe.

                                                        Reminder

Brand successfully obtained that picture. It was very widely disseminated. That pic proved a major force in getting the first Earth Day going.

What is it about this week? Or am I just stoned and cherry-picking my sources? Who is the Wizard Who Makes The Cannabis Green?

If you're keeping score, here's how I've voted. How about you?

Period of the Year: one month into Spring in the No. Hemisphere, April 19-25

• Shakespeare being born on April 23: Yes
• Hitler born on the 20th: in this universe the outcome was bad: No
• Earth Day: getting in touch with everything outside your own skin, AKA "the environment": Yes
• Timothy McVeigh and the way he handled his "patriotism": No
• cannabis, celebrated on 4/20: oh hell YEA
• overkill, literally: The State burning humans alive near Waco, seemingly because their religion was weird: NO
• the Tsarnaev Bros, and the symbolic "brothers" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Boston Marathon bombing and Columbine school shootings, respectively), and the way voters and Authority responded: I'll go No on the violence and we really need to think about the responses.
• Bicycle Day: Yes
• all the other desperate acts of violence I haven't covered here: No
• Unistat government under Neo-Cons and everyone who did their bidding in order for them get away with it, unspeakable levels of human misery and sorrow, a $3,000,000,000,000+ war (according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) that was based on a series of lies: No
• Buckminster Fuller's idea that the human species needs to notice the "omnidirectional halo" and get their act together in order to not end the Human Experiment on Earth and to become a "success in universe": I'll go with Yes
• sex, music, poetry, wine, laughter, trodding more lightly on Our Spaceship: as the Poet has an emanation of the Goddess say, "yes I said yes I will Yes."

                                                        No

                                                        Yes

EXTRA CREDIT EXERCIZE:
Pick any one of the events mentioned above and, using your imagination and research (your ingenium), close your eyes and meditate on "This event happened because of this and this and this." Then think of what may have led those things to happen. Go back in time and, even though this is a "fiction" think of possible causes. If it turns out that the 1939-45 World War happened because someone wasn't getting enough love in France in 1473, so be it. Charles "The Hammer" Martel and 732 CE? Easy. If Alexander the Great hadn't sneezed in 326 BCE "all this woulddna happened"? Someone saying "knife" and someone else heard "wife" in 1608, and this led to a pogrom in Russia? Metternich felt much better that day of negotiation - no indigestion for a change - and the Cold War never would've happened? A servant girl caught a nasty bug and Henry VIII's immune system did not fight it off, and he died early on? Just think! Stranger things have happened. Maybe. Counterfactuals. But what really might have happened? If Yeltsin's and later, Putin's people advised him to just let Chechnya go to Chechen rule...do we get the Boston Marathon bombing? How and why did your parents meet? What if someone's car didn't start "that day" and they stayed home instead and watched "I Love Lucy" re-reuns? This may sound like a fruitless or even "stupid" exercize, but you may surprise yourself. Report your finding, 'cuz, like, heck, ya know? I'd like to get to the bottom of some of this stuff too.