Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (22 page)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, 1972

I
T USED TO
be thought that women became pregnant through all kinds of ways: fire, wind, star formations, and even the Holy Ghost. The guys didn’t think spunk was for reproduction: they just loved to drink the stuff, even if it was smelly, stale, or someone else’s. Most of the world (until the sixteenth century) believed that a mixture of spunk and menstrual blood was all that was required to produce kids and tit milk. They believed, too, in the Incubi, a bunch of the Devil’s gofers who stole spunk from guys while they were having wet dreams, made spunk cocktails, and rammed them up women to mix with the menstrual blood and make double monsters. It was also believed that spunk was a kind of distillate of the bodily fluids that kept men kicking. For this reason, wanking and shagging were frowned upon. Losing spunk was not cool. But if too much was lost, one could always reach for the spunk nightcap or suck a second-hand vagina.

Then the broomstick-wanking, toad-wart-pus-sucking witches took over and invented pox, homophobia, AIDS, and come-carrying condoms designed after the Holy Grail (which God slapped on his dick to stop him fucking virgins). That’s why now it’s largely women that drink spunk, usually when both are warm and fresh. The current popularity of blow jobs is clearly the result of a feminist conspiracy to suck out our vital forces.

In his science-fiction novel
The Man in the High Castle
, Philip K. Dick imagined an alternative world in which World War II had been won by the Japanese and the Third Reich. In Dick’s fictional world, the Japanese occupation authorities introduced and legalized marijuana as one of their first moves at pacifying the population of California. Things are hardly less strange here in what conventional wisdom lightheartedly refers to as ‘reality.’ In ‘this world,’ too, the victors introduced an all-pervasive, ultra-powerful society-shaping drug. This drug was the first of a growing group of high-technology drugs that deliver the user into an alternative reality by acting directly on the user’s sensorium, without chemicals being introduced into the nervous system. It was television. No epidemic or religious hysteria has ever moved faster or made as many converts in so short a time.

The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin. Heroin flattens the image; with heroin, things are neither hot nor cold; the junkie looks out at the world certain that whatever it is, it does not matter. The illusion of knowing and of control that heroin engenders is analogous to the unconscious assumption of the television consumer that what is seen is ‘real’ somewhere in the world. In fact, what is seen are the cosmetically needed surfaces of products. Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addictive and physiologically damaging as any other drug.

Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state. The worries and anxieties of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a television program as by going on a ‘trip’ induced by drugs or alcohol. And just as alcoholics are only vaguely aware of their addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than they really do . . . people similarly overestimate their control over television-watching . . . Finally it is the adverse effect of television viewing on the lives of so many people that defines it as a serious addiction. The television habit distorts the sense of time. It renders other experiences vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater reality for itself. It weakens relationships by reducing and sometimes eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for communicating.

Most unsettling of all is this: the content of television is not a vision but a manufactured data stream that can be sanitized to ‘protect’ or impose cultural values. Thus we are confronted with an addictive and all-pervasive drug that delivers an experience whose message is whatever those who deal the drug wish it to be. Could anything provide a more fertile ground for fostering fascism and totalitarianism than this? In the United States, there are many more televisions than households, the average television set is on six hours a day, and the average person watches more than five hours a day, nearly one-third their waking time. Aware as we all are of these simple facts, we seem unable to react to their implications. Serious study of the effects of television on health and culture only begun recently. Yet no drug in history has so quickly or completely isolated the entire culture of its users from contact with reality. And no drug in history has so completely succeeded in remaking in its own image the values of the culture that it has infected.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing and manipulation. Television induces a trance state in the viewer that is the necessary precondition for brainwashing. As with all other drugs and technologies, television’s basic character cannot be changed; television is no more reformable than is the technology that produces automatic assault rifles.

Food of the Gods
, 1992

T
O LET NOTHING
pass that Jugglers and Impostors counterfeit, They set a Lamp with Characters graved upon it, and filled with Hare’s fat; then they mumble forth some words, and light it; when it burns in the middle of women’s company, it constrains them all to cast off their clothes, and voluntarily to shew themselves naked unto men; they behold all their privities, that otherwise would be covered, and the women will never leave dancing so long as the Lamp burns: and this was related to me by men of credit. I believe this effect can come from nothing but the Hare’s fat, the force whereof perhaps is venemous, and penetrating the brain, moves them to this madness. Homer saith, The Massagetae did the like, and that there are Trees whose fruit cast into the fire, will make all that are near to be drunk and foolish; for they will presently rise from their seats, and fall to leaping and dancing.

From:
Wildest Dreams: An Anthology of Drug-related Literature
, ed. Richard Rudgley, 1999

William Shakespeare

T
HE MOST SINGULAR
effect of the
amanita
is the influence it possesses over the urine. It is said that from time immemorial the inhabitants have known that the fungus imparts an intoxicating quality to that secretion, which continues for a considerable time after taking it. For instance, a man moderately intoxicated today will by the next morning have slept himself sober; but (as is the custom) by taking a cup of his urine he will be more powerfully intoxicated than he was the preceding day. It is therefore not uncommon for confirmed drunkards to preserve their urine as a precious liquor against a scarcity of the fungus.

The intoxicating property of the urine is capable of being propagated, for everyone who partakes of it has his urine similarly affected. Thus, with a very few
amanitae
, a party of drunkards may keep up their debauch for a week. Dr Langsdorff mentions that by means of the second person taking the urine of the first, the third of the second, and so on, intoxication may be propagated through five individuals.

In
Letters from a Citizen of the World
, Oliver Goldsmith speaks of ‘a curious custom’ among the Tartars of Koraki. The Russians who trade with them carry thither a kind of mushroom. These mushrooms the rich Tartars lay up in large quantities for the winter; and when a nobleman makes a mushroom feast all the neighbours around are invited. The mushrooms are prepared by boiling, by which the water acquires an intoxicating quality, and is a sort of drink which the Tartars prize beyond all other. When the nobility and the ladies are assembled, and the ceremonies usual between people of distinction over, the mushroom broth goes freely round, and they laugh, talk double entendres, grow fuddled, and become excellent company. The poorer sort, who love mushroom broth to distraction as well as the rich, but cannot afford it at first hand, post themselves on these occasions round the huts of the rich, and watch the opportunity of the ladies and gentlemen as they come down to pass the liquor, and holding a wooden bowl, catch the delicious fluid, very little altered by filtration, being still strongly tinctured with the intoxicating quality. Of this they drink with the utmost satisfaction, and thus they get as drunk and as jovial as their betters.

‘Happy nobility!’ cried my companion, ‘who can fear no diminution of respect unless seized with strangury, and who when drunk are most useful! Though we have not this custom among us, I foresee that if it were introduced, we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from the wooden bowl on these occasions, and to praise the flavour of his lordship’s liquor. As we have different classes of gentry, who knows but we may see a lord holding the bowl to the minister, a knight holding it to his lordship, and a simple squire drinking it double distilled from the loins of knighthood?’

1981. From:
Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader
, ed. Mike Jay, 1999

Kenneth Grahame

C
HATERJEE TOLD ME
that he had once been in the coffee business down by a place called Shrevenoot.

‘Excellent coffee. You know, of course, that Karnataka grows the best coffee beans in the world?’

‘I’d heard,’ I replied politely. ‘I must say, though, I find the coffee here a little milky.’

‘Well, milk is another matter entirely.’

I let it pass and asked instead about some of the stories I’d heard.

‘Do you know anything about how Baba trained his tigers to milk cows?’

‘That is just mythology.’

‘Like the monkeys, I suppose.’

‘I know no monkeys.’

‘You haven’t heard how he trained his monkeys to pick the beans for him?’

‘More nonsense.’ He took a sip of his tea. ‘There are, of course, the coffee-picking monkeys of Shrevenoot.’

I laughed. ‘Wait – so there are actually monkeys trained to pick coffee beans?’

‘Of course not. They are not trained. It is a natural phenomenon. They pick the fruit off the tree and eat. That is how you get Monkey Coffee. Surely you have heard?’

Actually, I had read about this stuff. Monkey Coffee was something that had existed in the nineteenth century, supposedly the best brew in the world.

‘So there really is such a thing?’ I asked.

‘It is a well-known fact. I have read it is a delicacy in some countries.’

‘Yes, yes. I’ve read that too. They say it is because the monkeys will pick only the best, the ripest berries, right?’

‘So some say. Others claim it is the chemical reaction within the bowels.’

‘Bowels?’

‘Yes. The monkeys eat the beans and then pass them through their digestive system. That is the Monkey Coffee.’

‘You mean it’s monkey, uh, feces?’

‘As I have said, nobody drinks it here. They are unclean animals.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘But it was a terrible problem in Shrevenoot. The monkeys ate all the best beans.’

I was never quite sure whether to believe all this until much later, back in the States, when I discovered that Monkey Coffee had recently become part of the gourmet coffee roster. It does not, however, come out of either a monkey or India, but a small Indonesian creature called the palm toddy cat, a nocturnal tree lover that lives on the naturally alcoholic tree sap used to make toddy (wine) and fresh coffee berries. Whether it’s because the animal’s intestinal juices impart some special flavor (perhaps because of its alcoholic diet) or merely because it eats only perfectly ripe berries, the toddy cat’s droppings, cleaned, produce what many say is the world’s finest coffee. Japan buys most of the stuff nowadays, but the US firm of ME Mountanos (800-229-1611) sells it under the name Kopi Luwak at about three hundred dollars a pound, making it the world’s most expensive cup of joe. Another firm, called Raven’s Brew Coffee ([email protected] or 800-91-RAVEN), sells it by the quarter-pound for seventy-five dollars and, in that grand American tradition, throws in a free T-shirt showing the beast hard at work with a cup under its ass and the caption ‘Good to the Last Dropping.’

The Devil’s Cup
, 2000

I
ARRIVED AT
Heathrow’s Terminal Two to be confronted by some stupid fucking leaflet portraying the customs channels as traffic lights (lights for traffickers: green for go, red for stop). Why has the orange become blue? While I was transferring my baggage from the carousel to a trolley, my dick suddenly experienced a warm soft pressure, nudging, stroking, licking and fondling. I looked down full of expectation and disappointingly discovered a dog’s head sniffing away at my balls. The dog was attached to an officer of Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise.