Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (19 page)

My body lay on the couch for almost four hours. I felt like
I was everywhere. I was thrilled. I’d been trapped in my own experiences—now I was free. The world was filled with incredibly tiny spaces where no one could find me or care what I was doing. I was alone. My mind could see itself.

Brad had given me 1000 micrograms because he wanted me to have a thorough experience. I think he said “blow your ass away.” With 100 micrograms you feel a little weird, you might hallucinate, and you can go dancing, but you know you’re on acid. You’re aware that you’re having a trip and the things that you see are hallucinations. You know that you should not respond to them. When you take 1000 micrograms of LSD, you don’t know you’ve taken anything. It just feels like that’s the way it is. You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt three thousand years ago, watching boats on the Nile.

After four hours Brad told me we were going to take a ride in the car. I didn’t know what a car was. We got inside this thing and it started moving and I started to panic. I didn’t want to be in a car. I didn’t like movement, I just wanted to find a quiet place. Eventually we stopped in Tilden Park by a fountain. I got some water. It was cold and fluid but it wasn’t the water I knew. It left trails and it was alive. I didn’t know Brad, I didn’t know my wife. When they got me back in the car I understood I was inside a vehicle. I knew it had a key that made it work, but I didn’t want it to. I was sitting in the back seat, and we started down Marin Avenue, which drops 800 feet in four blocks. Berkeley was below and I was dizzy. I reached over from the back seat and pulled out the key. Brad took back the key, told me to behave, and drove home.

About five o’clock in the morning I began to come back to
earth. The most amazing aspect of the entire experience was that I landed back in the middle of my normal life. It was so sweet to hear the birds, to see the sun come up, to watch my little girl wake up and start playing. 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.”

I wrote a long letter to my mother. I often wrote to my mother to tell her what I was thinking about. As I was writing the letter, I began to realize that for the first time in my life, there were some things that I might not be able to explain to her. But I tried.

My mother responded by sending me an article she’d torn from the
Reader’s Digest
. It said that taking LSD was bad for your brain and will cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. She entreated me not to do it anymore. I wrote back that it was too late. It had already changed me.

I wanted to understand what had happened. How could 1000 micrograms—one thousandth of a gram—of some chemical cause my entire fucking sensorium to undergo such incredible changes? What mechanisms inside my brain were being so drastically affected? What did these chemicals do to my visuals? I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to know more about neurochemistry.

Berkeley had a classic biochemistry department, meaning it consisted of professors who specialized in the chemical mechanisms underlying all life. They didn’t know much about mammals, besides their wives and students, and they weren’t interested in neurotransmitters. I was on my own. I knew that my brain was behind my eyes. I learned that no one knew very
much about how it functions. We knew which parts of the brain controlled certain things, but we didn’t know how or why. It seemed pretty obvious to me that neuroactive drugs might help us find out. These chemicals caused a really interesting interaction between psychology, biochemistry, and anatomy, but we didn’t know why. There was good reason to expect that we might learn something about mental illnesses, which might be caused by an imbalance in the chemistry of the brain.

A
S WE LEARNED
very quickly, LSD was not the only mind-altering chemical. When it became illegal, we started synthesizing other chemical compounds. It usually took the government about two years from the time the formula for a new psychoactive compound was published to make it illegal. Numerous derivatives of methoxylated amphetamines were created, for example, and every one of them had a different effect on the brain.

I was very careful to make only legal compounds. Other people were not. And the authorities were serious about this business. People were going to jail for chemistry. Once, someone in the chemistry department got arrested. I was working in Joe Neilands’s lab at that time, and he responded to a bust by dropping a copy of the Berkeley
Gazette
on my desk. “They’re getting pretty close to home, don’t you think?” he remarked. “If there’s anything in the freezer that shouldn’t be there, maybe now would be a good time to clean it out.” Then he walked away. Joe treated his students as adults, but he didn’t want to visit me in jail.

Drug laws don’t have much to do with science or health.
Opium was made illegal in California because Chinese dock workers in San Francisco were taking jobs away from Irish dock workers who preferred to be drunk than opiated. Opium dens were raided and Chinese workers were arrested. Conveniently, they couldn’t report for work in the morning. They moved north.

Marijuana was declared illegal after the end of Prohibition in 1938 because the opium/alcohol cops needed something to police or they’d lose their jobs. To gain public support, marijuana was depicted as a dangerous drug that caused black and Mexican men to lust after white women. It wasn’t the drug. Black men and Mexican men didn’t suddenly develop a need for white women; white men suddenly developed a need, after 1938, for jobs. Alcohol was back in; marijuana was shortly going to be out. People who wanted to be into prohibition would now prohibit marijuana. The same people, and maybe their children, would be happy to make a living prohibiting LSD.

LSD somehow got connected with the anti–Vietnam War movement. Drugs had to be the reason that the youth of America had long hair, wore beads, enjoyed sex, and didn’t think it was a good idea to go to a foreign country and kill the locals. Psychedelic drugs were made illegal.

The one serious effect it had, besides putting a lot of people in overcrowded jails, was to bring to an end serious research by people who knew what to look for. The only scientists permitted to work with psychoactive chemicals now were people who never used them and knew nothing about them. For the first time, science reference books were censored. Standard chemical reference books like the
Dictionary of Organic Chemicals
eliminated all mention of LSD and methamphetamine. How dare they censor reference books? It was as if an entire
class of chemicals no longer existed. It was getting darker in America.

Every drug experience was unique.

While always interesting, it was not always fun. I sometimes visited very dark places. During the year after I left my wife and daughter, my pain was magnified every time I took acid. I had hurt other people, and I felt my guilt. I thought I was the ugliest person in the world.

There was one trip from which I thought I would never come back. I thought I had destroyed my physical brain. My friend Eric, with whom I often did psychedelic drugs, was a strategic air command pilot. In the air, he was responsible for one of the keys required to arm the nuclear bombs. If war started, he had partial responsibility for dropping them. One day he realized he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, do it. They gave him an honorable discharge. Psychiatric problems—he wouldn’t help blow up the world.

One weekend while he was still on active duty, he was staying with Richards and me. I had synthesized diethyltryptamine. Not much was known about it. I expected the effect to be similar to dimethyltryptamine, but lasting longer. I weighed out what would be a reasonable dose, but I made an error. I must have had a premonition because I told Eric that I would take it first, we’d wait a half hour until it took effect, and then if it was all right, he would join me. I took ten times the amount I had intended. Within a few minutes something was terribly wrong. The last sane words I said were, “Don’t take it, Eric.”

It was too much. The fire roared out of the fireplace. I was no longer in the room. I was somewhere lying on a gurney, being wheeled down a hospital corridor. Not on Earth. My friends were playing a joke on me. They were sending me to
Earth to be born. To them, it was like sending me to a scary movie. They didn’t know I was going to spend a lifetime on this planet far, far away. It was just a joke. And then I realized that this had already happened. I am here. I’m stuck. I don’t know how to get home. I wanted it to stop, but I couldn’t speak.

I woke up in the living room and saw a snake coming out of the fireplace. I found a piece of wood and started beating the snake. It was Eric’s clarinet. He was unhappy about the clarinet, but he and Richards were far more worried about me.

I woke up the next morning huddled under my desk. Everything was gray. I couldn’t remember who I was, what I did, what I liked. I was terrified and sad. I looked out the window and saw children playing in the yard. One of them was mine, but I didn’t know which one. Richards woke up. She told me she was my wife, but I didn’t remember her. Nothing in my house was familiar. I thought I loved books and music, but I couldn’t remember which books or what kind of music.

I had annihilated my personality. I had no preferences. I didn’t recognize my body. I wasn’t physically uncomfortable. I could walk around. I could eat. I had no friendships, no love, no humor. Eric and I had often gone camping along the Navarro River. He thought that might be a good place for me to be. That evening as we sat by a campfire he read me a poem he said I liked. “Do you remember what a poem is?” he asked. I remembered parts of it, but only from a distance.

In the morning my memory slowly began to come back. In another day it was back completely. Whole and undamaged. I was functioning normally, and my personality was back. I felt that I had been to some very important place. I now knew what it felt like to be psychotic, to be meaningless. But it sure as hell hadn’t been fun being lost.

W
HEN
I
FIRST
heard in 1984 that Luc Montagnier of France’s Pasteur Institute and Robert Gallo of America’s National Institutes of Health had independently discovered that the retrovirus HIV—Human Immunodeficiency Virus—caused AIDS, I accepted it as just another scientific fact. It was a little out of my field of biochemistry, and these men were specialists in retroviruses.

Four years later I was working as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica. Specialty was trying to develop a means of using PCR to detect retroviruses in the thousands of blood donations received per day by the Red Cross. I was writing a report on our progress for the project sponsor, and I began by stating, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.”

I asked a virologist at Specialty where I could find the reference for HIV being the cause of AIDS.

“You don’t need a reference,” he told me. “Everybody knows it.”

“I’d like to quote a reference.” I felt a little funny about not knowing the source of such an important discovery. Everyone else seemed to.

“Why don’t you cite the CDC report?” he suggested, giving me a copy of the Centers for Disease Control’s periodic report
on morbidity and mortality. I read it. It wasn’t a scientific article. It simply said that an organism had been identified—it did not say how. It requested that doctors report any patients showing certain symptoms and test them for antibodies to this organism. The report did not identify the original scientific work, but that didn’t surprise me. It was intended for physicians, who didn’t need to know the source of the information. Physicians assumed that if the CDC was convinced, there must exist real proof somewhere that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

A proper scientific reference is usually a published article in a reliable scientific magazine. These days the magazines are slick glossy paper with pictures on the front and lots of advertisements, a lot of editorial material by people who are professional journalists, and a few pictures of girls selling you things you might want to buy for your lab. The advertisers are the companies who make things for scientists to buy and the companies who make drugs for doctors to sell. There are no major journals without advertisements. Therefore, there are no major journals without corporate connections.

Scientists submit the articles in order to report their work. Preparing articles describing their work and having them published is crucial to a scientist’s career, and without articles in major journals, they will lose their rank. The articles may not be submitted until experiments supporting the conclusions drawn are finished and analyzed. In primary journals, every single experimental detail has to be there either directly or by reference, so that somebody else could repeat exactly what was done and find out whether it comes out the same way in their hands. If it doesn’t, somebody will report that, and the
conflict eventually has to be resolved so that when we go on from here, we know where “here” is. The most reliable primary journals are refereed. After you send in your article, the editors send copies of it to several of your colleagues for review. They become the referees. The editors are paid for their work on the journal; the referees are not. But what they do gives them power, which most of them like.

I did computer searches. Neither Montagnier, Gallo, nor anyone else had published papers describing experiments which led to the conclusion that HIV probably caused AIDS. I read the papers in
Science
for which they had become well known as the AIDS doctors, but all they had said there was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was probably HIV in some AIDS patients. They found antibodies. Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated. The patient had saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease. They didn’t show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease. In fact, they found some healthy people with antibodies.