[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 20 - "Why not?"—Timothy Leary]

The first time I did LSD I was fourteen and at a Traffic concert in Boston that I’d hitchhiked to. It was of the “windowpane” variety in the shape of a pyramid, a type I’ve never seen since.

LSD had been classified as illegal two years earlier, so good quality LSD was still easily available. I was nervous because I wasn’t sure if I was going to see awesome colors or go berserk and eat my own eyes after tearing them out with a plastic spoon, as these were the only two outcomes advertised.

As I sat in my chair listening to “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” I began to see the stage and everything on or near it morph into something like a giant fountain. Its perimeter expanded and soon everything, including myself, the sounds around me, even what I was thinking, was getting pulled into the bottom of this fountain and being pushed out the top, spewing back into the world, into everything that was, which eventually dissolved again to get sucked back into the fountain. It was an endless loop of absorption, dissolution, and creation. For the first time since I was a child, everything made sense. I was experiencing something similar to my fusion experience of eight years earlier, but now it was coherent and structured, and far intellectually comprehendible. This visualization of the fountain of life was far more than a “model” I could grasp with my mind. It was life itself, and occurring on every level of existence, in each of my cells, in every thought and in every moment.

To say LSD opened my eyes is like saying being born is a life-altering experience. Nothing appeared the same after that. If there’s a danger associated with LSD, it’s related to one’s ability to handle such an insight. It’s easy to see how one can become imbalanced when their entire paradigm of existence is shredded. The danger of using LSD at a young age is that one doesn’t yet have a stable footing in any paradigm, so any radical shifts are large seismic events—everything is going to break. Beyond that, the dangers of LSD are best summed up by Timothy Leary when he said, “LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.”

Albert Hoffman, the Sandoz Swiss chemist who will go down in history as one of the greatest contributors to humanity of all time, invented LSD on April 16, 1943. He took LSD his entire life and died a happy, wise, healthy man at age 102. His discovery has been used with stunning results for treating everything from anxiety due to life-threatening diseases to optic nerve hypoplasia, from psychotic antisocial behavior to autism. Therefore, it was no surprise to me that serotonergic psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline) were eventually proven to increase mental health and reduce mental health risks, but this information was not published until years later. In the early seventies we were told that taking LSD would cause permanent insanity and genetic mutations. There was no mention of how Dr. Timothy Leary’s use of these drugs to rehabilitate prisoners was, at worst, “somewhat beneficial” to an “astonishing success,” or how this drug was used as a therapeutic aid for the previous thirty years. It certainly was not promoted as something that many who would come to change the world would credit one day as “one of the best things I’ve done in my life. (Steve Jobs).”

I instinctively knew that this drug, and those like it, could not only save me but maybe even fix the insanity of the world. I dedicated myself to understanding this amazing drug. Since LSD was both difficult to get in my town and expensive, I attempted to make my own, but the chemical process was beyond my ability or means, but there were alternatives. I learned that LSD, or something quite close to it, occurred naturally in the seeds of the common and beautiful morning glory flower, but I also learned that commercial morning glory seeds were required by law to be poisoned before they were sold so that no one could benefit from the LSD-like substances they contained. This was the first time I suspected that the world was not only filled with crazy people, but that these crazy people were running it, and these same crazy people were dead set against anything that threatened their own crazy worldview.

For the past 100 years or so we can find social programs designed to keep people away from drugs and alcohol abuse. The general theme of these campaigns was always along the lines of “This drug is bad for you. It will ruin your life, your family, your health. It is also illegal, so don’t do it.” This seems rational and reasonable for drugs that could seriously debilitate its user. The anti-drug laws and propaganda against drugs that altered consciousness in a manner that was not in harmony with social values of productivity and efficiency seemed to have another agenda other than health and welfare. We watch the early anti-marijuana campaigns today and laugh at the over-the-top ridiculousness of their claims and the not-so-subtle way they planted seeds of fear into the minds of viewers. Then LSD came along. This was a whole new level of threat to The System, and they wasted no time in bringing out their big guns and instilling fear into the deepest core of our existence, our own DNA. Claims began to fly that taking LSD caused genetic mutations, that your children would be born mutants, that insanity was inevitable, and that even if you took LSD just once, it would come back to terrify you for the rest of your life. They added more spice to the soup with films of animals and people having psychotic breakdowns. The System seemed quite threatened by this new drug, and correctly so. But The System, like a parasite infecting the global brain, was as flexible as it was persistent. Soon enough it realized that fear was not the best defense mechanism. Far more effective was to co-opt the counterculture movement and hand it over to Madison Avenue. In no time the symbology and message of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was being used to sell products and lifestyles. It was a tremendous success, as the emerging consumer market were those baby-boomers who were rejecting, in the words of Abby Hoffman, ”A system that channeled human beings like so many laboratory rats with electrodes rammed up their ass into a highly mechanized maze of class rankings, degrees, careers, repressed sexuality, hypocrisy, ulcers and psychoanalysts.1

I persevered and researched the drug’s origins all the way back to when it (or rather its cousin) was consumed by the witches of the Middle Ages in the form of ergot mold that formed on rye. I decided to grow ergot fungus inside dozens of petri dishes I prepared with agar. I scoured bags and bags of rye seed that I bought at the local Agway farm supply store. Not surprisingly, unlike in the Thirteenth Century, none were infected with ergot. Eventually I abandoned this project, which turned out to be a good idea as ergot has nasty side effects, such as convulsions, gangrene, and death, none of which were deterrents to me at the time.

When I read Carlos Castaneda’s “Tales of Power” wherein Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian shaman from Mexico, describes how to prepare and use Jimson seeds to see into the other world, I got on the phone with the Redwood City Seed Company that day and had bags of those magic seeds shipped to me. Rushing in where angels feared to tread, my typical modus operandi, as soon as the bags arrived I took a teaspoon of them, chewed, and swallowed. Few things, if anything at all, taste worse that Jimson seeds. My mouth became painfully dry. I got extremely tired but managed to stay awake. Then I sat back and enjoyed the sepia-toned movie of cowboys and Indians battling in the old west that magically appeared on my wall. At no point did I ask myself, “Hey, how is this movie appearing on my wall?” It was perfectly normal like the rest of my environment, which didn’t change one bit. I was still in my room, no weird colors, no strange sounds, no bizarre hallucinations…except for the movie on the wall, which was beautiful and entertaining. I then fell asleep. Years later I suspected I was watching a scene from my own past life, or perhaps a parallel life.

When I woke up I was blind! Not blind as in everything was black, but blind as in everything was blurry, like I was underwater. I couldn’t even focus on my hand five inches in front of me, and it was a school day.

I didn’t know that recuperation from a Jimson seed trip was not only psychological but physical. Specifically, you were quite blind for about three days after taking the seeds. Carlos didn’t mention that part of his experience. I freaked the fuck out. Going to school was both terrifying and comical and, thinking back, pointless. Fortunately, as I was already in the “special” classes, no one actually expected me to do anything. The only real difficulty was walking to and from school without getting hit by a car or falling on my face.

Of course I shared my discovery with my co-druggies. The kilos I had bought cost so little I just gave these seeds away, like a psychedelic Johnny Appleseed. Short of the annoying side effect of blurry vision, these seeds were incredibly popular. Within days kids were getting picked up by the police for strange behavior and being admitted into the hospital for sight problems and, as the seed was a belladonna alkaloid, other unpleasant side effects.

The fascinating thing about Jimson seeds is that it doesn’t seem to change your cognitive perception of reality but adds certain elements to it. I remember having a casual chat with my friend while he was under the influence and during our conversation he would turn his head every now and then to continue another conversation he was having with small dark people, as he described them, then return to our conversation perfectly lucid.

During this burst of local Jimson seed consumption there were many stories of bizarre experiences, including kids having conversations with invisible friends and parents while they were being questioned by the police. Perhaps the most bizarre story was from Willie, my partner-in-crime from the past. He claimed he saw a beautiful woman in his room and, during his pleasant conversation with her, got her phone number, which he never called. Willie was always trying to prove what an operator he was with women. He collected phone numbers like baseball cards, so that part of the story was believable. Months later he saw the woman on the street, dressed as she was in his hallucination, and approached her. She was nervous and quite shaken when she discovered that this strange kid had her phone number. Perhaps Willie made up the whole thing, but that didn’t matter to us because it was a good story. It also fueled my desire to know more about the hidden world that always felt so close, yet always just out of reach.