Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (73 page)

If it should ever chance that the consumption of mescal becomes a habit, the favorite poet of the mescal drinker will certainly be Wordsworth. Not only the general attitude of Wordsworth, but many of his most memorable poems and phrases can not – one is almost tempted to say – be appreciated in their full significance by one who has never been under the influence of mescal. On all these grounds it may be claimed that the artificial paradise of mescal, though less seductive, is safe and dignified beyond its peers.

It may at least be claimed that for a healthy person to be once or twice admitted to the rites of mescal is not only an unforgettable delight, but an educational influence of no mean value.

The Contemporary Review
, January 1898

From:
The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature
, vol. 1, ed. Peter Haining, 1975

Alexander Pope

Within the low-level field of electrical conductivity which is the medium of brain activity, messages are carried around the brain by chemical agents known as neurotransmitters, of which the best-known are probably dopamine and serotonin. In 1994, the mechanism of action of cannabis was finally understood: it’s a natural analogue of a neurotransmitter which exists in the brain, an ‘endo-cannabis’ in the same way as endorphins (‘endo-morphines’) are our natural internal opiates. So cannabis and opiates work by flooding the brain with chemicals which are themselves designed to send out waves of signals, initiating ‘cascade reactions’ of other chemicals which translate these brain signals into powerful physical reactions. In the early 1950s, it was discovered that when the neurotransmitter serotonin was incubated in vitro in the pineal gland tissue of mammals, it broke down into a range of complex organic metabolites. Serotonin itself is a tryptamine, and some of these metabolites were other methylated tryptamines, such as dimethoxytryptamine – DMT. What’s more, these in turn broke down into betacarbolines harmaline, tetra-hydro-harmine and the rest. Various mammalian and human pineal glands were then analysed for these chemicals, and found to contain them. The extraordinary fact was that the ayahuasca brew of harmaline and DMT was actually present in the human brain.

William Shakespeare

I
N
1979,
IT
was discovered that the human brain seems to secrete dimethyltryptamine – which is also one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca. This substance produces true hallucinations in which the visions replace normal reality convincingly, such as fluorescent snakes to whom one excuses oneself as one steps over them. Unfortunately, scientific research on dimethyltryptamine is rare. To this day, the clinical studies of its effect on normal human beings can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call ‘animate essences’ or ‘spirits.’ This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders and chromosome shapes. This is how shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder . . .). DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and ‘nonrational’ states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable. The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery.

Shamans say the correct way to talk about spirits is in metaphors. Biologists confirm this notion by using a precise array of anthropocentric and technological metaphors to describe DNA, proteins, and enzymes. DNA is a
text
, or a program, or
data
, containing
information
, which is
read
and
transcribed
into
messenger
-RNAs. The latter feed into ribosomes, which are molecular
computers
that
translate the instructions
according to the genetic
code
. They
build
the rest of the cell’s
machinery, namely
the proteins and enzymes, which are
miniaturized robots
that construct and maintain the cell.

The Cosmic Serpent
, 1995

Samuel Butler

A
DOG TURNED
in its circle and lay down in the shade, and a vulture swung up and down in a short arc above the jungle, as if suspended from a string. In the heat of the siesta, the street below was hollow as a bone.

He took the cork out of the bottle, and holding his breath to kill the bitterness, drank off half the brown fluid in a series of short gulps, gargling harshly when he was finished and spitting the residue into the street. The aftertaste made him gag. He sat down on the window sill and in a little while the nausea receded, leaving only a thick woody taste and a slight vagueness.

A half-hour passed. Maybe the Indian had watered the infusion. A voice in the salon below sounded remote to him, and he nodded; he was on his way. A little more ayahuasca, Mr. Moon? He took up the bottle and drank off another quarter of it, then set it down very slowly. You’ve made a bad mistake, he thought; already he knew he did not need it. The effects were carving very suddenly, and he stood up and stalked the room. In
overdose
, he had read somewhere,
the extract of
Banisteriopsis caapi
is quite poisonous and may bring on convulsions, shock and even death
.

How silent it was – the whole world was in siesta. He glanced quickly out the window, to take time by surprise; the dog slept soundly, and the vulture still swung up and down its bit of sky, dark as a pendulum. From the far end of the street, a solitary figure was moving toward him, down the center of the street – the last man on earth. There you are, he thought, I have been waiting for you all my life. Now he was seized with vertigo and apprehension; his heart began to pound and his breath was short. He went to his bed and lay down on his back. He felt a closure of the throat and a tension in his chest, a metal bar from chin to navel to which the skin of his chest was sewn. Breathing became still more difficult, and a slight pain in the back of his head became a general, diffused headache. He turned cold and his teeth chattered; the hands pressed to his face were limp and clammy.

I am flying all apart, he thought; at the same time his chest constricted ever more tightly.
Let go
, he told himself aloud.
Let
go.

He rolled over on his side and blinked at the other bed. The man on the bed retreated from his vision, shrinking and shrinking until he was no bigger than a fetus.

Color: the room billowed with it; the room breathed. When he closed his eyes, the color dazzled him; he soared. But there was trouble in his lungs again, and his heart thumped so, in heavy spasmodic leaps, that it must surely stall and die. He broke into a sweat, and his hands turned cold as small bags of wet sand . . .

He sat up, aching, in a foreign room. He could breathe again, although his heart still hurled itself unmercifully against his chest: how thin a man’s poor chest was, after all; it was as thin as paper, surrounding a hollow oval space of wind and bitterness.
Thump, thump-ump, um-thump
; it would crash through at any minute, and what then? Do I greet it? Introduce myself? How long can a man sit holding his heart in his hands?

He keeled from the bed and drifted to the window, but the figure coming down the street was gone; again he had missed some unknown chance. The street was void, a void, avoid. Dog, heat, a vulture, nothing more. A dog, a vulture, nothing more, and thus we parted, sang Lenore.

Singing. Somewhere, somewhere there was singing. His whole body shimmered with the chords, the fountainhead of music, overflowing. The chords were multicolored, vaulting like rockets across his consciousness; he could break off pieces of the music like pieces of meringue.

You’re sleeping your life away, he told the dog.

Do you hear me? I said, Do you hear me?

Meri-wether
, Sheriff Guzman said.
That’s some name for a red nigger, ain’t it? You’re the smart one, ain’t you, kid? Ain’t you supposed to be the smart Cheyenne? Done good in the war, and now they gone to send they little pet Christ-lovin Cheyenne to college, ain’t that right, kid? Well, kid, if you’re a real smart Injun, you won’t even go and look at me that way, you’ll keep your Injun nose clear, kid
.

Oh, to be an Indian! (Now that spring is here.) Big Irma:
Be a good boy, Lewis. Do not fight so much. You come back and see us now
. Alas, too late – the world is dead, you sleepyhead. The Inn of the Dog and the Vulture. There are voices, you see, then singing voices, then strange voices, then strange musics, hollowed out, as if drifted through a wind tunnel, these followed by a huge void of bleak silence suggesting DEATH.

The Story of my Life
, by Lewis Moon

Now . . . something has happened, was happening, is happening. BUT WILL NOT HAPPEN. Do you hear me? I said, DO YOU HEAR ME?

A softer tone, please.

To begin at the beginning: my name is Meriwether Lewis Moon. Or is that the end? Again: I was named Meriwether Lewis Moon, after Meriwether Lewis, who with Lieutenant William Clark crossed North America without killing a single Indian. So said my father; my father is Alvin Moon ‘Joe Redcloud,’ who lived up on North Mountain. Alvin Moon still traps and hunts, and in World War I, when still a despised non-citizen, exempt from service, joined those 16,999 other Indians as insane as himself who volunteered to serve in World War I. Alvin Moon is half-Cheyenne; he went down South when he came home and took up with a Creole Choctaw woman named Big Irma and brought her back up to his mountain. The worst mistake that Alvin Moon ever made was trying to educate himself; his information about Lewis and Clark was the only piece of education he ever obtained, and it was wrong. He used to joke that he couldn’t educate himself unless he learned to read, and how could he learn to read if he didn’t educate himself? So he left off hunting and trapping and came down off his mountain and took work near the reservation to keep his children in the mission school, to give them a better chance in life.

Again: my name is Lewis Moon, and I am lying on a bed (deathbed?) in a strange country, and I hear eerie voices and a crack is appearing on the wall, wider and wider, and the bulb in the ceiling is growing more and more bulbous, and will surely explode – a crack (of doom?) of lightning down the walls.

The extract of
B. caapi
is a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen containing phenol alkaloids related to those found in lysergic acid, and whether or
not
it finds a respectable place in the pharmaceutica of
man,
it has held for unknown centuries an important place in the culture of Indian tribes of the Amazon basin
.

At the time of my experiment I was lying in a narrow room with a corpse in the next bed, with god, a vulture and a dog as witnesses and wishing that Marguerite was here. Marguerite. I wish to tell Marguerite that the reason I did not make love to her that time in Hong Kong was not because I did not want her but because I had reason to believe that in the late, low hours of the week before, I had contracted a low infestation. I did not know Marguerite well enough to give her crabs – you understand? Marguerite had alabaster skin, triumphant hair and an unmuddied soul, and a swinging little ass into the bargain.

I have opened my eyes again, to shut off all that blue. Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that – an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem. But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks; the bureau budges; they back and fill, about to charge. From above, the bulb socket descends like a falling spider, leaving the bulb behind.

B. caapi,
which is named for the
caapi
of certain Brazilian Indians, is also the
camorampi
of the Camps, the
natema
of the Jivaro, the
ayahuasca
or
haya-huasca
of the Quechua-speaking peoples, the
yage
of Ecuador, the
soga de muerte
of most Spanish South Americans, names variously translated at ‘Vine of the Devil,’ ‘Vine of the Soul,’ ‘Vine of Death’: the Spanish term means literally ‘vine rope of death,’ the
soga
referring to the jungle lianas used commonly as canoe lines, lashings, ropes, etc. In addition to certain medical properties, the vine can induce visions, telepathic states, metaphysical contemplation and transmigration; these conditions are used by the Indians for the reception of warnings, prophecies and good counsel. Among many tribes one purpose of the dream state is identification of an unknown enemy, and the use of it is thus related to the Jivaro practice of taking
tsantsas,
or shrunken heads
 . . .

I am cut off, I feel both silly and depressed; it is the solitude, not solitude but isolation . . . Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?

I am trying to reach out to you, but I do not know who you are, I cannot see you. I only feel your presence in this room. Perhaps . . . I wonder . . . are you inside me? And if so . . . Now listen carefully: there is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago. Are you in touch with it: can you tell me – did you see? – the man with the blue arrow –

Or are you the figure in the center of the street? So you came here, after all! Can you hear me? I said, CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN-YOU-HEAR-ME!