Disinformation Book of Lists (3 page)

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

About his encounters with laughing gas, he also wrote:

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.

James also took peyote, which didn't do much for him, and chloral hydrate, the hypnotic that puts the knock-out in a Mickey Finn.

20

Mitch Kapor
—pioneering software developer (Lotus 1-2-3), founder of Lotus Development, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—told the Buddhist magazine
Tricycle
:

I had gotten to college in the 60's and started experimenting with marijuana and psychedelics, fairly heavily. I had some distressing experiences with LSD. Bad trips. So I stopped doing drugs and then started getting acid flashbacks. I decided to give meditation a serious try to see if that could have some calming effect. I got hooked in to TM and eventually made the decision to go through advanced training to become an initiator, an instructor
.

21

Famed comedian
Groucho Marx
first took LSD in 1967 or 1968 with counterculture icon Paul Krassner. Soon after, Marx smoked pot with extras on the set of the all-star comedy
Skidoo
, and he even tokes a little on-screen. Krassner relates the following exchange:

I said to him, “My mother once told me she was concerned that LSD would lead to marijuana.”

Groucho replied, “Your mother was right.”

22

Opiate historian Barbara Hodgson says of
Guy de Maupassant
, France's greatest writer of short stories: “Much of the ill health that plagued him through his adult years could be blamed on syphilis, against which he tried ether, hashish, cocaine and morphine.”

23

Weir Mitchell
—the most illustrious neurologist of his day (a nineteenth-century Oliver Sacks), who also wrote popular novels and short stories and was friends with Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and other notables—seems to be the first Westerner to try peyote and write about his experiences:

Stars, delicate floating films of colour, then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes; Zigzag lines of very bright colours…

24

Kary Mullis
won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method for studying DNA molecules. In his autobiography,
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
, Mullis describes the first time he smoked a joint, in 1966 when he was attending grad school: “I looked at Richards, my wife, with new eyes.

She was the same Richards, but not to me. I grabbed her in a primitive way, rolled her onto our enhanced bed, and felt the surging power of bliss.”

The next week, Mullis dropped acid with a friend to guide him. At that point, the “double-domed 1000-microgram Owsley” he took was legal.

I started laughing. I got up from the table and realized, on the way to the couch, that everything I knew was based on a false premise. I fell down through the couch into another world….

I wasn't afraid. I wasn't anything. I noticed that time did not extend smoothly—that it was punctuated by moments—and I fell down into a crack between two moments and was gone….

I felt like I was everywhere. I was thrilled. I'd been trapped in my own experiences—now I was free
.

Mullis describes the immediate after-effects of his inaugural trip: “I appreciated my life in a way I never had before. On the following Monday I went to school. I remember sitting on a bench, waiting for a class to begin, thinking, ‘That was the most incredible thing I've ever done.'”

It wasn't always rosy, though. The outspoken chemist reports feeling overwhelming feelings of guilt and ugliness when he dropped acid after leaving his wife and daughter. During a previous experiment, he synthesized an LSD analogue and accidentally took ten times the proper dose, which “annihilated” his personality. The next morning he couldn't recognize his wife or child. “I couldn't remember who I was, what I did, what I liked…. I had no preferences. I didn't recognize my body.” Twenty-four hours later, his memories and personality started to return, and in another day he was fully integrated again.

25

That nurse among nurses,
Florence Nightingale
, used morphine, though we don't know how often.

26

Anaïs Nin
—experimental/erotic novelist, diarist, consort of Henry and June Miller—engaged one time in LSD therapy under its pioneer, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Although she enjoyed the experience, she realized afterward that what she had experienced was already within her. “Therefore, I felt, the chemical did not reveal an unknown world. What it did was shut out the quotidian world as an interference and leave you alone with your dreams and fantasies and memories.”

27

Paracelcus
, the physician and alchemist whose contributions to Western medicine are paramount, was a proponent of opium. PBS notes that in 1527: “During the height of the Reformation, opium is reintroduced into European medical literature by Paracelsus as laudanum. These black pills or ‘Stones of Immortality' were made of opium thebaicum, citrus juice and quintessence of gold and prescribed as painkillers.”

28

Of mescaline, the celebrated Mexican poet
Octavio Paz
—winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature—wrote:

An encounter with mescaline: an encounter with our own selves, with the known-unknown. The double that wears our own face as its mask. The face that is gradually obliterated and transformed into an immense mocking grimace. The devil. The clown. This thing that I am not. This thing that I am. A martyrissible apparition. And when my own face reappears, there is nobody there. I too have left myself. Space, space, pure vibration. A great gift of the gods, mescaline is a window through which we look out upon endless distances where nothing ever meets our eye but our own gaze. There is no I: there is space, vibration, perpetual animation
.

29

Plotinus
, the ancient Roman philosopher who founded Neoplatonism, is said to have used opium.

30

We know that
Edgar Allen Poe
liked to quaff absinthe, sometimes mixed with brandy, but whether or not he used opium has been the subject of intense debate. Martin Booth, author of
Opium: A History
, believes that Poe was a user, possibly an addict.

31

Marcel Proust
may have had a hard time remembering things past, considering his fondness for opium, morphine, hypnotics, camphor cigarettes, and possibly heroin, not to mention booze.

32

Living during the second half of the 1700s,
Mary Robinson
started out as a popular Shakespearean actress, but her career was aborted by scandal when she temporarily became the mistress of the Prince of Wales. However, she found a second life as a poet and novelist. For her rheumatism, she took heroic doses of laudanum. One night when she was 34, she had an opium dream about a menacing lunatic. Calling her daughter to her bedside, she dictated a poem (“The Maniac”); the next day, she didn't remember doing this. Thus, we have the first poem known to have crossed over from an opium dream. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was friends with Robinson, and skeptics think he might've made up the creation story of “Kubla Khan” in imitation of her.

33

Carl Sagan:
Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer and biologist; famous popularizer of science; creator and host of the
Cosmos
TV series; author of
Cosmos, Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain
, and other books; avid potsmoker. As discussed in
Carl Sagan: A Life
(and subsequently in my
50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know
), Sagan loved to toke reefer. He said that it enhanced his productivity, creativity, and insights, among other things. In his anonymous ode to Mary Jane in the classic
Marihuana Reconsidered
, he wrote: “My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover…. [T]he illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

34

Sir Walter Scott
, the Scottish novelist and poet, drank massive amounts of laudanum to combat stomach cramps. He wrote many works under the drug's influence, including
Rob Roy
and
The Bride of Lammermoor.

35

When being interviewed by
High Times
, the intellectual-philosopher-theorist
Susan Sontag
was asked if she wrote while stoned on pot. She replied: “I've tried, but I find it too relaxing. I use speed to write, which is the opposite of grass.”

36

Robert Louis Stevenson
wrote
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
on a six-day cocaine binge in 1886. Many commentators have noticed the uncanny similarity between Stevenson's drug of choice and the potion that turns nice guy Dr. Jekyll into the uncontrollable bastard Mr. Hyde.

37

Pancho Villa
, the bandit who became a general and leader of the Mexican Revolution, was a party animal. Villa and his men were well-known for their copious use of marijuana, mescal, and sotol (psychedelic cactus whiskey).

38

Andrew Weil, M.D.
, is one of the biggest names in alternative medicine. Along with Deepak Chopra, his is the bearded face of holistic health in America. Combining his mainstream medical training (from Harvard) and scientific outlook with botany, natural healing, Eastern approaches, and consciousness studies has resulted in numerous best-selling books (including
Spontaneous Healing
and
Natural Health, Natural Medicine
), repeat appearances on Oprah and Larry King, and a professorship at the University of Arizona, where he founded and heads the Program in Integrative Medicine.

Weil has always been up-front and unapologetic about his professional and personal interest in psychoactive substances (among other methods of altering consciousness). Several of his early books addressed the topic, including the classics
From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs
and
The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness.
In the course of his writings, he has discussed his usage of marijuana, yage, MDA (a close cousin of ecstasy), Jimsonweed, coca leaf, cocaine, LSD, magic mushrooms, toad venom, and others that I've probably overlooked.

In March 2001, he briefly made headlines when he told
60 Minutes
that LSD had cured his lifelong allergy to cats. If only acid were legal, he said, “I think I would recommend that some patients do it.” Not that he recommends all the drugs he's tried. His experience with Jimsonweed, for one, was horrible, and he advises against taking any plants of the
Datura
variety. “Its physical toxicity is, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, very dangerous. Its mental effects are unpredictable, often unpleasant, and always uncontrollable.”

39

Besides imbibing absinthe,
Oscar Wilde
smoked tobacco steeped in laudanum.

Honorable Mention

When we think of
Sherlock Holmes
, we imagine the pipe in his mouth, not the needle in his arm. Yet Arthur Conan Doyle's archetypal detective was a devotee of blow. Only one work contains a scene of Holmes' cocaine use, while eight others refer in passing to his habit. (Meanwhile, his fondness for morphine is only alluded to.) The second novel featuring the super-sleuth literally opens and closes with coke. These are the very first paragraphs of
Sign of the Four:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Dr. John Watson, who is narrating the story, tells us that Holmes has been shooting up three times a day “for many months.” He asks Holmes: “Which is it to-day, morphine or cocaine?” The detective replies that it's the latter. At the time the book was written, the addictive, destructive aspects of the drug weren't widely known, so Doyle was going very much against the current when he had Watson give his friend a tongue-lashing over his jones. Holmes replies that he only mainlines coke when there is nothing else, such as a case, to keep him busy. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”