I'm absolutely aglow in the middle of the night right now, I took LSD a few hours ago. I'm watching my mother's apartment. She's visiting home to Russia for the first time since coming to America thirty three years ago. I love her apartment, I feel so at home here. I put on Bon Iver and bawled my eyes out looking at old photo albums. And then I got thinking to a conversation I had had when visiting my old school last week. We got to talking, me him and my friend Ani who I was visiting the school with and who is a fellow psychedelic enthusiast on this very website. Ani was talking about how it's come out recently that Nalgene bottles are terrible for you and they seep all this noxious shit into your water, cancerous shit. And Mr. Hale, the old science teacher goes, "Probably better than all the drugs you guys are doing." How he knew, I don't know, but I guess the fact that I've become sort of hippieish and in the seven years since he had last seen me grew all this hair from a crewcut...could of had something to do with it.
Anyway then he said he was joking, that he teaches a 2 week session in anatomy all about drugs, both the good effects, he said - and the bad. Well, except for LSD he said. Cause that only has bad effects. Havent you ever heard of a bad trip? That can stay with you forever?
And I told him I was going to email him some important information about LSD and he said he would like to read it.
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Dear Mr. H.,
It was great running into you the other day. I hadn't been by the School in quite some time and didn't know what to expect. Especially not in terms of what I'd feel, having spent fourteen years of my life there. I grew up in the School but I never dreamed how much I'd grow once I left it. The past seven years of my life have been tremendous, and I find that every day I enjoy growing up and growing older and becoming more the person I want to become because I know I am. My mother is in Russia right now, visiting home for the first time since she left it thirty-three years ago. I'm sitting in her apartment as I write this. It's quiet and very late at night and I just looked through a lot of old photos and then a progression of high school yearbook photos that proceeded on into early college, and got to thinking about who I am and what's going on in my life, and about our conversation in the hallway.
When I was in college I was really stricken by the desire to hallucinate. I really wanted to see things move. I hadn't started smoking pot until senior year of high school and that only really picked up at all once I went to college. And in December of my freshman year I got some mushrooms. I had no idea what I was in for - all I knew was what I wanted. I really wanted to see stuff move. I had read some of the literature, but in general was just going on a sense that this thing might have something to offer. What I found flipped my whole world upside down. It was more than a hallucination. It was an experience, an immediate, felt experience.
The past seven years of my life have dealt increasingly with the ramifications of that night that I took psilocybin mushrooms. I realized instantly that what I was dealing with was something totally different from what I expected. It just took me a long time to come to give it any sort of name. In these past seven years I have been a very well-journeyed psychonaut, focusing almost exclusively on the class of tryptamines known as indole hallucinogens. However, I don't enjoy the term hallucinogen, because what I think these neurotransmitters do isn't a hallucination. Psychedelic is a term most widely used but it has many connotations tied up with the hedonistic love affair with drugs that was the late sixties and early seventies. After hundreds of journeys primarily with the aid of psilocybin, LSD and DMT, what I have come to conclude is that there is an eminently spiritual aspect to these experiences, a very primal and fundamental experience at the heart of them, and that is why I of late am coming more to terms with my discomfort over calling them entheogens.
Entheogen is a word that means generating the divine within that is growing in popularity among circles of psychedelic researchers and enthusiasts, one of whom I proudly if quietly count myself to be. I believe these drugs are actually sacraments. It was a long road to even being able to use any kind of sacred, holy vocabulary.
I was raised in a very secular Jewish atheist household. We were Jewish culturally but I feel we were pretty much raised to be atheist, or at the very least agnostic. Nowadays those just looks like any other silly -isms to me.
As a young writer I often used religious themes and symbols but I always knew in my heart of hearts that I was an atheist, a scientific rationalist, someone that believed in the firm matter of this world and when we end we're dust and that, my friend is that. I look back at that guy now and I have no idea what he was thinking, but I see that he was still concerned with all the right things, and just looking at them from strange and lonely angles. I'm still concerned with meaning and spirituality in this world...only now I am absolutely convinced that it is both present and necessary. Spirituality has become a very important part of my daily life, and entheogens are a part of that.
Recently, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD passed away. He was 102 years old and a champion to the joyous end for the usage of LSD in a variety of medicinal and psychotherapeutic contexts for which they have already been proven to be helpful. I went to a memorial service for Dr. Hofmann where a microphone was passed around. A strange collection, we, people whose lives had been so changed by their encounter with this molecule, this LSD.
While psilocybin has come to be a very important entheogen to me, LSD has been really pivotal in helping me become the person I am today. So when I heard you say what you said about LSD, it really struck a chord with me. I got up that night and shared with those people what LSD has given me. I'll share it with you, too.
The first time I took LSD I had taken mushrooms a few times and each had been very beautiful. They opened me up slowly. But it was LSD that really blew the doors wide open on how I viewed the world. I remember standing out on my balcony that night, sophomore year at the Carlyle Dorm off Union Square. We had a fifth floor balcony and I stood there looking out at the world as it fluttered and moved beautifully. As if some presence was behind every moment, every speck of dust, putting it where it was and moving it where it was going. This beneficent, creative, loving force that was hidden from us, and coy. For a reason. As we chased it and chased meaning it lead us to learn more about ourselves as a species. This is how I was looking at God and Man. And I realized the same was true on any individual human scale.
I had been staring at this graffiti across the street the whole time. It said You Are Alive. And I thought, you know, up until this moment, I had really taken that for granted. And ever since that night, I have never felt more alive. That was six years ago. In the time since then I have become a voracious reader of all literature pertaining to this area of knowledge. I read everything. Every perspective. The stuff the DEA prints and the stuff the newspapers print (which is actually much more harmful and awful than half the stuff the DEA prints) and the stuff that amateurs like me have written. There is a wealth of knowledge available at your fingertips, because the internet has helped entheogen culture and psychedelic culture really flourish over the years after it was pushed down into hiding.
You know, the government really quashed it all, no research, nothing. Only recently have they started doing trials again into the beneficial qualities of psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA. And the results are nothing short of astonishing. It's really easy to swallow the line about all the dangers but when you go out there and you read the literature and you do the research yourself, going through scientific reports, academic journals, psychiatric journals, it's all quite clear - these substances have a low toxicity level, have no addictive properties, and when used in a proper spiritual or psychotherapeutic context, can be enormously powerful tools for helping us navigate human consciousness. And the only thing after that is to try them for yourself. And that is not for everyone. It's a decision that needs to be made carefully, in a proper mindset, and a proper setting.
I urge you, Robert, to please at least do the research for yourself before you teach those kids that LSD only has bad effects. I don't need or expect you to tell them about the good effects, but I just can't tell you how much it actually wounds me to think of these molecules, to whom I feel a sacred and loving relationship, slighted. They have really helped me open up to the fact that the universe is not a cold, heartless thing. That everything is part of an interconnectedness that it will never be possible to extricate ourselves from, either as individuals, or as a species. My experiences have awakened in me a spiritual realm that I never knew existed and that I find grows more intense and rich by the moment. Recently, two friends with whom I have shared many LSD experiences and who are going to be married next year, asked me to perform the ceremony in their wedding. You see, LSD was what bonded us, but LSD isn't what keeps us together.
Drugs are not the totality of my experience. And were I to put them aside for the rest of my life, the joy they have given me could never leave me. At the Hofmann memorial I said it's not a matter of belief. I don't have to believe. Believing implies effort. I have seen, I've touched, I've been, I know. And that has enriched my life in a way that I hope is one day available to all responsible, conscious adult decision makers. Because I believe it has the capacity to enrich and beautify most people's lives and perceptions. One experience in a truly respectful set and setting with psilocybin mushrooms will stay with a person for eternity.
I'm not saying that entheogens guarantee a spiritual experience or a spiritual life. No, not at all. But what I am saying is - and if you want scientific proof you can actually look at the very recent experiments done at St. John's in which a majority of respondents replied after their psilocybin experiences that it was among the most important of their lives - these are tools, and like any tool, the hand that holds the tool and the intent behind the hand is what drives what the tool makes.
My psychedelic experiences, and this is a personal thing to talk about, because I undergo most of my journeys in solitude - they are not a holiday. Or a hedonistic fun time. Often they can be really difficult. You grapple with The Big Questions. Sometimes in the middle of an experience you are forced, you are absolutely forced to come to grips with your own mortality and the fact that you will one day be ash and dust. And a proper psychedelic session, with a guide to help steady the course and keep the mind afloat, can do a lot of great work on a mind. I don't need a guide. I have a strong mind and I personally thrive on going it alone in these rough waters. When I trip I work on myself, I spend a lot of my energy and my concentration on examining my life, and how I Want to be a better person and an even more vibrant member of a vibrant community. Of all my communities. But it's also about ecstasy. Not pills, I mean a feeling of ecstasy. As in, a joyous happiness, a religious sort of happiness at being alive. LSD and psilocybin give you this. And I believe that as humans, experiencing that ecstasis is a birthright none of us should have denied to us.
The one thing psychedelics have given me more than anything is a sense of really valuing community. That's why it was so great to come back to the School and to hear Dr. M. [the headmaster] talk about wanting to focus more on art - leaving there I was grumpy, writing about death, and never wanted to look back. Now I am so ravenously joyous at being alive. And I would love to participate in some sort of young writer's workshop. And write about life!
You see, psychedelic enthusiasts - and there are many of us, we're everywhere! - are not slack-jawed drooling freaked out people. We are, most of us, tax-paying, social, responsible and loving adults trying to live our lives in a way that puts us in touch with the love at the heart of the psychedelic experience in every moment. I savor the connections between everything. I truly savor this opportunity to connect with you and I hope that you are reading all of this with the an open mind and an open heart.
It's not about counter culture anymore and I want you to know that there are many of us, responsible acid-using people who believe in participating in culture. Being the change you want to see in the world, and not creating your own society to do it. Why give up on this beautiful albeit lumbering and bloody machine humankind has created? You're never gonna get that bloated monkey off your back, so it's time to inherit it. Inherit the awful crush of history and turn it, individually, in each moment, into love that you radiate outwards into the world.
My use of psychedelics has certainly had negative affects on my life at times, but most often that was a case of my attitude toward the drugs not being in its proper place. And that has really changed over time. Did I seem like a pretty fully functional adult when we were having a conversation? Would your perception of me change if I told you that I have eaten LSD well over two hundred times and ingested psilocybin mushrooms around one hundred times or more? See, the point is, after all this, I should really hope not.
Society really needs to rethink the way that it thinks about drugs. Even the word sucks. Drugs. Do you know what the word drugs is? Drugs is society putting a hand up in front of a huge load of issues it doesn't want to deal with. Namely race and poverty. Drugs is an easy scapegoat for all our problems, and some great drugs get thrown under the truck and their names sullied for no good reason. The drug war is an absolutely criminal waste of our taxpayer money and I find its entire mission morally outrageous. It turns people making decisions about their lives into criminals and it relies on the same war it is trying to extinguish. It is a poorly operated war, that costs us about 4 billion dollars a year. 4 billion dollars a year! And so much of that is aimed at advertising, at straight-up out-and-out propaganda and misinformation! It's amazing some of the stuff I could dig up for you on the D.A.R.E. and O.N.D.C.P. websites that are absolute horseshit! The drug problem in this country, and yes we have a drug problem - it is not a criminal issue for the police and the courts. Drug information and drug rehabilitation if a public health issue and all drug policy should be approached from a harm-reductive, public-health standpoint. In my personal opinion.
You strike me as a clever individual, someone very hungry for knowledge, and doesn't want anything blown by him without a good look. Well I'm telling you this thing is getting blown by you and I'm asking you to please take a look. You don't have to take any drugs, I just want you to take a look for yourself and tell me what it is that you see when you spend time and energy on looking into the issues behind LSD and drug use in general.
And I would love to point you in so many directions. I only hope that this letter, as long-winded as it may be, leads to a dialogue opening between us. Some people find it very hard or uncomfortable to talk about this topic. One of my sisters understands where I'm coming from, to the other one I'm a mystery and quite possibly 'wasting my life on drugs' - but I just want you to know how important it is to me to communicate on a personal level to whoever I can what these experiences have done for me. They are so misunderstood. And they have a relationship to humanity that dates back to ancient times.
For all your drug information at all I would hope you go to erowid.org
For more details on various psychedelic research being undergone right now, such as low-doses of LSD to relieve anxiety of death in terminally ill cancer patients, or psilocybin to combat OCD, or MDMA to combat post-trauamtic stress disorder, please go to www.MAPS.org. MAPS is a great organization and the only non-profit I gladly give my money to year in and year out. They are good people doing good respectable work.
"Ever hear of a bad trip? That can stay with you forever?"
That's what you said about LSD, if I remember correctly. Do you know how many people's lives are bad trips, that stay with them forever? Psychedelics are tools that we can and that I personally feel we should use to better ourselves and to understand ourselves as a species and as individuals. These tools can help people see ways that they have been destructive towards themselves and those around them, and help pave the way towards fixing those things. They are not a fix in of themselves. But they have a way of presenting things with awful clarity.
I hope we'll talk soon about all this Robert. And I would also like you to please keep it quietly between us. While my sisters know my life interests, and indeed entheogens are what I would call a passion of mine, I have not had this conversation with my mother, and she is still in touch with some people from the school, so I would prefer if all this was kept between you and I. She should hear all this from me and when that happens is my business.
I don't try and push psychedelics on anyone, but when I hear them being slighted out of what I perceive as being a simple result of misinformation, I feel a personal sense of responsibility and obligation to bring another perspective into the situation. I am my own evidence, but there is other evidence out there. Veritable mountains of it, miles deep.
Peace to you and yours.
-OneMoreRobot3021 [or, insert real name here]
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Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.
-Erik Davis
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