Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (18 page)

The human digestive system transforms everything we eat, including cholesterol, into unrecognizable bits of matter
before turning it into us. The process begins in the stomach, where the foods we eat are subjected to hydrochloric acid and some horrendous catalysts that begin breaking it down. In our intestines, we change the scene. Now without the acid of the stomach, we subtly slip sharp enzymatic blades into the molecules that are left and sever their structures into units of universal biologic currency. Only these little pieces of universal life matter are allowed into our bloodstream. Through the portal vein they are admitted to our liver. When our liver gets through with the meal it sends it out to the rest of our body in a form that is so dissected down to the lifeless elements of earth that no cell anywhere in our body except our annoying brain can know exactly what we had for dinner.

There are a few things, however, that we cannot afford to break down into their constituent elements because we have lost the ability to re-form them. These are the compounds that we call vitamins. It is our need for vitamins that got us into our present nutritional obsession.

Vitamins are little bits of organic matter that most earthly organisms can assemble out of the basic elements that our liver generates. Sometime during the long, pretelevision, days of evolution, our cells forgot how to make things like vitamin C out of the stuff coming up out of our liver. It was an accident. It had to do with random mutations in our DNA that, at the time, didn’t matter. We were already getting plenty of vitamin C coming up out of our liver. It came from our food and was not broken down in our stomach, intestines, or liver. It emerged into the bloodstream intact, readily available to all of our cells. We lost the ability to make it ourselves, without becoming extinct, because we didn’t need to make it. And more than
that, we reproduced faster than our associates who had not lost the ability to make it.

There is a very important rule in evolution:
Don’t trouble yourself with details that do not matter for survival
. Evolution has to deal with intense competition—like a race car driver always on the last lap, wishing he had just enough gas to get him to the finish line. Whoever can do something more efficiently survives. Losing the ability to make something that you already have in plentiful supply is efficient. In the long run it limits your options but in the last lap, streamlined is better than being burdened with useless tools.

We also lost the ability to make a number of other molecules that we need. Like vitamin C, they were readily available in the leaves and fruits we were eating and did not get processed into something unrecognizable in the digestive system or the liver. Now, a couple of million years later, we have assigned the letters A, B, C, D, and E to them.

One day, about 2 million years ago, we decided to exercise one of our options. We came down out of the trees and stopped eating only leaves and fruit. It was a good move because Africa was drying up into more grass and fewer trees. The trees were dark and more and more filled with things that were feeling the pressures of a shrinking habitat.

While we were up in the trees, we had noticed that there were awkward-looking, grass-eating animals on the edge of the forest. They would later be called ungulates and still look awkward today. We came down from the trees in little gangs, chased those ungulates around until they got tired, bashed them with sticks, and ate them. Eventually we discovered that the meat tasted a lot better when cooked, but unknown to anyone
on the planet at the time, the fire also destroyed vitamin C. So those of our ancestors who ate only well-done steaks and no green leaves died of scurvy, while those of us who retained a taste for salads and fruit survived.

The first humans who dropped the salad habit, in an organized fashion, were the sailors. The hearty mates who set sail from Europe in the fifteenth century ran out of salad about the same time that they started missing their girlfriends on shore. They began to succumb to scurvy after three months, and it was ugly. The first sign was that their teeth and fingernails started bleeding. It looked contagious because somebody came down with it first and then sailors all over the boat started showing symptoms. The first cases were thrown overboard in a futile effort to save the rest.

One day, a lucky scurvy victim was dropped off on an island with citrus trees. He started eating oranges and miraculously recovered. He made his way back to England and, on arriving, announced to the Admiralty that scurvy was not infectious but rather was caused by a nutritional deprivation. Ships were then fitted out with large barrels of limes and the British sailors were thereafter referred to as limeys. It made an incredible difference in maritime activity, and it started a nutritional mania that is now reaching ludicrous heights.

For some reason, people today have accepted the claim that a normal diet can’t possibly satisfy all of our nutritional needs and that many of the things that we eat are very bad for us. There are “nutritionists” who present themselves as experts on eating. They are not biochemists, nor are they incredible chefs. They tell us that just eating a normal human diet is not enough, and we can buy their books to learn the right way to be healthy.

There are several molecules that we do need and that we have lost the ability to make because they were plentiful in our food at some time during our evolution. There are only a few of these, but they are heavily represented in our present diet. If you isolated someone from normal foods and fed them only things without these molecules, they would get sick.

But how did we get from there, the concept that the esthetic existence of our bodies is determined by certain essentials in our food, to the concept that the esthetic appearance of our bodies is shaped by a very careful balance of carbohydrates, proteins, unsaturated fatty acids, no milk shakes, no saturated fatty acids, no really fat fatty acids, omega-3-fatty acids, no chocolate, no eggs, no pizza, no hamburger, undulating fatty acids, spine-tingling fatty acids, and fingernails chewed to the quick out of the fear of an improper diet?

Some people eat too much; some people eat too little. Nothing else about diet really matters. Check out the reality of things and it will make you feel better. Logically established facts allow you to sleep better at night, which is essential, even in the presence of creatures howling in the dark and nutritionists who write diet books. Throw the books out and shut the door. You’ll sleep better.

I
STARTED USING
drugs when I was a child. I got them from my mother. She started me off on barbiturates. Remember The Thing? People trapped in the Arctic with a monster you couldn’t see, my brother Robert on the floor behind the seats in front of us asking me what was happening. How about Them? Giant ants in Nevada that moved to New York. Night would come. Robert would be sound asleep. He’d only
heard
about giant ants in the sewers with venom dripping off their two-foot stingers. I could still see them. Mom would give me phenobarbital. Phenobarb was considered by my mom and her physicians to be a reasonable way to overcome a sleepless night. It has long since been replaced with more expensive things like Valium.

Once in a while, Mom would give me codeine for pain.

When I had a cold she’d buy me a Benzedrine inhaler. There was a small piece of cotton inside the inhaler that was saturated with amphetamine free base. It was a little off-white plastic tube that cost thirty-nine cents and fit easily into my pocket. I could sit directly in front of Mrs. Coleman, my first-grade teacher, snorting speed. It relieved a stuffy nose, and when a cold was trying to put you down, it picked you right up.
If first graders tried to get away with that kind of behavior today, they’d never see the bright lights of second grade.

When I had a cough, or diarrhea, I got paregoric, a solution of 10 percent opium in alcohol. Opium comes from a handsome poppy. It cures diarrhea. It also cures coughs, and when you feel bad, it makes you feel better.

No one warned my mother that she was doing something bad. She was just giving me the medicines that good mothers had always given their children, drugs that could be purchased at the local pharmacy. Eventually all of these wonderful things became illegal. It was hard for me to understand exactly why a drug like paregoric, one of the most useful drugs in all the pharmacopoeia, should suddenly be considered dangerous and outlawed. Nobody seemed to mind, however, even my mother didn’t complain.

Kansas became the final state to outlaw paregoric, in 1976. I was living in Kansas in 1976, working with Richard Zakheim, a pediatric cardiologist. I was headed to Mexico for a vacation and Dick wrote me a prescription for paregoric just in case. It may have been the last bottle.

The summer following my freshman year at Georgia Tech in 1962 I was working with Al Montgomery in our lab, trying to purify a solution of para-phenyl benzoic acid in benzene. It was worth about forty dollars a gram and I had made almost fifty grams. As I was boiling the benzene on a hot plate, it burst into flames and blew flaming benzene all over my hand. I wrapped my shirt around it and Al and I raced twenty miles in rush hour traffic to the hospital. We drove the old blue ’55 Chevy up on sidewalks, went through lights, did things that would have attracted a police escort any other time. No luck.
We raced into the emergency entrance of the Baptist Hospital. I waited with my hand in a stainless steel pan of warm sterile solution for ninety minutes while they tried to find a doctor. Many doctors walked blandly by the door. Finally a surgeon arrived and gave me something for the pain. One minute I felt like I was holding burning coals in my hand—then the morphine came down my arm. It was the most pleasant feeling I’d ever had. I could still feel a sensation, but it wasn’t pain. More like a pleasant itch.

At Georgia Tech some of my friends used speed. They were part of the academic tradition of staying awake all night to cram for exams. No one considered speed “drugs.” The Sigma Chi fraternity house bought them from the housemother—they were available by prescription for weight control. Our housemother was conveniently overweight. Nobody called her a pusher. It was the 1960s.

At Georgia Tech, I had a wife and a little girl. I had short hair and I studied all the time. My senior year I made perfect grades. I studied physics and math and chemistry to the point where I would never have to study them again. And all I knew about drugs was what I read in magazines like
Time
and
Life
. I learned that marijuana was a dangerous addictive drug and that I should stay away from it. On the other hand, I learned that LSD was a miracle that just might enable scientists to understand the workings of the brain, could be the cure for alcoholism, and, just incidentally, might prevent World War III. Psychiatrists were prescribing it for their patients. In 1966 LSD had not yet been made illegal. Respected, well known people were admitting that they had experimented with LSD. The Luce family, the publishers of
Time
and
Life
, were so
intrigued by the scientific potential of LSD that they funded the research of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.

A person who loved playing with chemicals as much as I did just couldn’t help but be intrigued by LSD. The concept that there existed chemicals with the ability to transform the mind, to open up new windows of perception, fascinated me. I considered myself to be a serious scientist. At the time it was still all very scholarly and still legal. There was no tawdry aura over it. People weren’t blaming their kids’ problems on it yet. Hippies had just started to differentiate themselves from beatniks and the difference seemed to be fewer years and more hair on the hippies. And they stayed in college.

In 1966 I wanted to try LSD. My wife, Richards, helped me pack up the Impala, we put our daughter Louise in the back seat, and we drove to Berkeley for graduate school. It was the first time I’d been to California and it surprised me. I had not expected that the trees would be different. I didn’t know that the Pacific Ocean was always cold. I didn’t expect San Francisco to be foggy in the summer. I thought there would be naked girls. I certainly didn’t know that I would be changed so profoundly.

I didn’t want to take LSD alone. I had learned that from magazines. The first week of class I became friendly with the only guy in my class with long hair, Brad. I figured he would have LSD. Brad was smart. He appreciated the fact that I could calculate how long it would take the moon to fall to the Earth. He had graduated from Oberlin College, where they knew it was possible to do such a calculation but they wouldn’t be so crass as to actually learn how.

Brad had experimented with psychedelic drugs and agreed
to guide me through my first trip. He suggested that before I took LSD, I should smoke some marijuana because it might give me some idea of how my consciousness would be changed. Marijuana scared me, I told him. Everything I’d read about it said that it was a bad drug, an addictive drug—one toke and you’re a slave for life.

He persuaded me to smoke a “joint,” as he called it. Within moments my fear disappeared. I was laughing. Brad and I talked about wise things for hours. At some point, Brad left. 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.

A week later I said, “Brad’s going to come over tonight. I’m taking acid.” Richards said she would make a nice dinner.

During dinner, Brad gave me what was called a double-domed 1000 microgram Owsley. He had bought it for five dollars. It was soon to become illegal. I didn’t finish dinner. 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.

Brad put
Mysterious Mountain
by Hovhaness on the stereo and kept playing it over and over. It was the perfect background for my journey. I watched somebody else’s beliefs become irrelevant. Who was that Kary Mullis character? That Georgia Tech boy. 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.