Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (71 page)

He spoke sarcastically. He refrained from telling me what he told me long afterwards, that the apparently contradictory properties that I was ascribing to it were really there, that it can be used by the expert to produce a number of effects, some of which seem at first slightly mutually exclusive.

Diary of a Drug Fiend
, 1970

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

IT

II Samuel 22:9

Psalms 18:8

I’m dreaming of a stoned white Christmas, just like every other. Do I want the powdery stuff dissolving my nostrils? Or do I want to hold the icy stuff in my hands, reignite my hash hand-rolling skills, and make snowballs, the only known objects capable of indicating the difference between snowmen and snowwomen? When did it ever snow in Bethlehem?

This and other Christmas frauds was the first proof I’d encountered of my parents’ ability to sacrifice their principles of honesty and say downright lies for the sake of something held by them to be more sacramental than mere truth. In their case, manifesting care for loved ones (by distributing gifts), being charitable (by helping the needy and engendering goodwill) and expressing faith (believing something despite vast evidence to the contrary) were considered higher ideals than factual accuracy. But why this deal with a saintly North Pole resident called Santa Claus upstaging infidel magic-carpet rides and, by a correct focus on hanging stockings and suspenders, making witches headfucking broomstick flights look like wanking with a piece of wood? This holy Eskimo delivers your annual dope supplies on a flying trolley operating on several reindeer power. There’s no chance of being busted, even if the cops are watching: he delivers down the chimney. Cool! Then there’s mince pies, trimmings, holly, King Wenceslas, crackers, fir trees, fairies, partridges, pear trees and puddings, to say nothing of loving and shagging one’s neighbours under mistletoe and virgins giving birth in stables under shiny stars guiding heavily perfumed but wise Oriental despots.

At the very least, Christmas is meant to be a celebration of the birth of someone called Jesus Christ. Some say he was both God and the Son of God, born through immaculate conception provided by Himself. Logically, this renders him a motherfucker. Other unkind souls say he was a deranged faggot. Many think he was just a cool travelling dude whose dad was a carpenter and whose mum was a sweet lady called Mary. But there wasn’t much love around before Jesus Christ, not in the Old Testament. A mild, peaceful and pure guy, that’s for sure. Gentle as a lamb. While shepherds watched their flocks by night, Mary had a little lamb.

When the booze ran out at his mate’s wedding, Jesus turned water into wine. (He’d already trodden on the water in preparation.) When he knew Judas had grassed him up, he grabbed a bottleful of red wine, swallowed it and asked to be remembered by others through their doing the same trip. He is the true vine. So let’s have rivers of the Blood of Christ. Let it flow for Christ’s sake. Get off your face, and see God.

The Bible indicates Christ to be a seven-days-a-week workaholic, a non-mistletoe eating Pisces (fisher of men) with an Access All Areas guest pass to all the hip, exclusive, and high places. So why make out he was a Sunday-kipping, earthbound druid born as a Capricorn in December?

The first Christian kingdom was ancient Britain under King Arthur before the English (Angles), French (Saxons) and Germans (Vikings, kind of) grabbed it. Those gallant Knights of the Round Table got well stoned and tenaciously devoted themselves to magical swords, dope-dealing Welsh wizards, shagging and the discovery of the Holy Grail, a goblet containing an inexhaustible supply of mind-bending red wine, carefully mixed with the menstrual blood of Mary Magdalene, the first holy hooker. Why are we these days expected to drink at communion, very infrequently, a mere thimbleful of sickly liquid not as potent as the average shite lager? What kind of communication is that? Even when reindeers do their trolleying thing in the sky, Rudolf is allowed to get plastered, show off his red nose, and form part of the bizarre indoctrination we suffered as kids.

O
NE OF THE
simplest and most complete of Magick ceremonies is the Eucharist. Take a substance symbolic of the whole course of nature, make it God, and consume it. A Eucharist of some sort should most assuredly be consummated daily by every magician, and he should regard it as the main sustenance of his magickal life. The magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal fame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name.

Majick in Theory and Practice
, 1926

T
HE UNREALISTIC VIEW
of pills is possible because of what we could call the ‘holy pill’ syndrome. Pills are viewed by society as something holy, sort of a Eucharist.

In this analogy the pill – or host – is capable of miraculous things but only if it is treated in a certain ritualistic way. Thus, a high priest (your doctor) must first authorize its use in accordance with proper canon. It must be further consecrated by another level of priest (your pharmacist) who will place it into your outstretched hands from a counter three feet above your head.

You must not vary from the bottle’s holy procedures. You must not transfer any of the pills in the bottle to another person or else something unspeakable may happen.

When pills are handled by lay people, they can become hideous things, instruments of death, sowers of discord. Drugs routinely used by psychiatrists in the USA to treat schizophrenics were the very ones used by the evil Soviets to ‘torture’ patients in its mental hospitals. Mom’s Darvon is good for Mom only. If anyone else takes the pill consecrated for Mother’s use, they are abusing it. To give anyone else one of your sleeping pills is a heretical act. To act on your need for an antibiotic without prescription is also heretical. It is also irreligious, not to mention illegal, to manufacture your own medicine without proper license – tantamount to permission from the Bishop.

Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History & Consumption
, 1999

John Ford

T
HE FUNGUS RECOGNISED
today as the
Amanita muscaria
, or Fly Agaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the skin of its characteristic red- and white-spotted cap, there is concealed a powerful hallucinatory poison. Its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of study in recent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have been clinically examined. These include the stimulation of the perceptive faculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or much smaller than they really are, colours and sounds are much enhanced, and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental, quite outside the normal range of human experience.

The mushroom has always been a thing of mystery. The ancients were puzzled by its manner of growth without seed, the speed with which it made its appearance after rain, and its equally rapid disappearance. Born from a volva or ‘egg’ it appears like a small penis, raising itself like the human organ sexually aroused, and when it spread wide its canopy, the old botanists saw it as a phallus bearing the ‘burden’ of a woman’s groin. Every aspect of the mushroom’s existence was fraught with sexual allusions, and in its phallic form the ancient saw a replica of the fertility god himself. It was the ‘Son of God’, its drug was a purer form of the god’s own spermatozoa than that discoverable in any other form of living matter. It was, in fact, God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinely given means of entering heaven; God had come down in the flesh to show the way to himself, by himself. To pluck such a precious herb was attended at every point with peril. The time – before sunrise, the words to be uttered – the name of the guardian angel, were vital to the operation, but more was needed. Some form of substitution was necessary, to make an atonement to the earth robbed of her offspring. Yet such was the divine nature of the Holy Plant, as it was called, only the god could make the necessary sacrifice. To redeem the Son, the Father had to supply even the ‘price of redemption’. These are all phrases used of the sacred mushroom, as they are of the Jesus of Christian theology.

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 1970

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It was during Rasulid rule that the mystical movement of the Sufis became a major social force, as followers of men like Shadhili arrived with the promise of guidance for those seeking closer understanding of God. Missionaries passed through Mokha and Aden on their way to Africa, including one Abu Zarbay who is credited by some Hararis with funding their town, and by others with introducing qat to Yemen in 1400. The name Sufi itself comes from the Arabic word meaning wool, perhaps a reference to the simple cloth they wore. This ascetism was one major part of the Sufi
tariqa
, or path; but even more revolutionary, was their use of stimulants to help them along to spiritual enlightenment.

Certainly, drugs seem to be able to push experiences in the directions people are hoping and expecting to go. And for the Sufis, like the ancient Cretans on the island of Aphrodite, that direction was religious ecstasy. Their beliefs were varied but centred on the idea that, by repetitive rituals of prayer and meditation, the individual could approach God. From this developed an idea of a secretive select group, above the laws of man. Some took this to be licence for a life of sensuality and luxury but most advocated simplicity and austerity. One of these was a certain Ahmed ibn Alwan whose father was a scribe at the thirteenth-century Rasulid court.

Ibn Alwan moved to Yufrus on the western side of Jebel Saber where he founded a religious school and became noted for his outspoken attacks on the kings. In legend he is credited with using qat in his meditations and prayers, the drug lifting him and his followers on their path to religious ecstasy. It was a time when the ‘mystic saint’ was a figure of great influence and importance, and qat, with its power to work some strange alchemy of the mind, must have been a valuable tool: that mix of dreamlike unreality and sharpness of thought that bestowed instant mystical experiences – a short cut to sainthood. As ascetics too, the holy men were sympathetic towards a substance that tended to deprive users of sleep, appetite and libido.

The first coffee and qat trees to arrive in Yemen were probably planted on Saber or its neighbour, Jebel Habashi, a word from which the old name Abyssinia is derived. Initially they may have arrived in the form of powder, mixed up as teas, rather than as seeds or plants. What is clear is that both substances began to be used as part of religious ritual by Sufistic sects, knowledge of them spreading anywhere that the Sufi missionaries travelled. But the secular world was not far behind, and when qat and coffee moved out of the narrow circles of the Sufis, they became controversial almost immediately.

Eating the Flowers of Paradise
, 1999

Viscount Palmerston

M
Y MEMORIES OF
childhood and adolescence are deeply marked by a series of attempts to experience the beyond, and those random attempts brought me to the ultimate experiment, the fundamental experience of which I speak. At about the age of six, having been taught no kind of religious belief whatsoever, I struck up against the stark problem of death. I passed some atrocious nights, feeling my stomach clawed to shreds and my breathing half throttled by the anguish of nothingness, the ‘no more of anything’. One night when I was about eleven, relaxing my entire body, I calmed the terror and revulsion of my organism before the unknown, and a new feeling came alive in me: hope, and a foretaste of the imperishable. But I wanted more; I wanted a certainty. At fifteen or sixteen I began my experiments, a search without direction or system.

Finding no way to experiment directly on death – on my death – I tried to study my sleep, assuming an analogy between the two. By various devices I attempted to enter sleep in a waking state. The undertaking is not so utterly absurd as it sounds, but in certain respects it is perilous. I could not go very far with it; my own organism gave me some serious warnings of the risks I was running. One day, however, I decided to tackle the problem of death itself. I would put my body into a state approaching as close as possible that of physiological death, and still concentrate all my attention on remaining conscious and registering everything that might take place. I had in my possession some carbon tetrachloride, which I used to kill beetles for my collection. Knowing this substance belongs to the same chemical family as chloroform (it is even more toxic), I thought I could regulate its action very simply and easily: the moment I began to lose consciousness, my hand would fall from my nostrils carrying with it the handkerchief moistened with the volatile fluid. Later on I repeated the experiment in the presence of friends, who could have given me help had I needed it. The result was always exactly the same; that is, it exceeded and even overwhelmed my expectations by bursting the limits of the possible and by projecting me brutally into another world.