Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (17 page)

But spending my days on a grand tour of west London’s better-stocked chemists, faking the symptoms of a bizarre range of ailments and telling outrageous fibs to a mistrustful pharmacist, makes me feel subversive, delinquent and different.

And it makes me feel young again.

Drugstore Cowboy
, 1996

I
DRANK ABOUT
eight ounces of DM cough syrup. I was feeling kind of achy and wanted to see if it would kill pain. Previous smaller-dose experiments had shown me that the stuff could cause confusion and restlessness, but I couldn’t remember how much I’d taken.

Soon enough, pain went away, and I went to bed a couple of hours later. It was midnight. I felt neither awake nor asleep, sort of like a typical narcotic high, but no great shakes. Mildly content, kind of nodding – just not as pleasant.

At four o’clock in the morning I woke up suddenly and remembered that I had to go to Kinko’s copy shop and shave a week’s worth of stubble from my face. These ideas seemed very clear to me.

That seems normal enough, except I HAD A REPTILIAN BRAIN. My whole way of thinking and perceiving. It was like I was operating with a medulla only.

I had full control over motor functions, but still had the impression that I was ungainly. That’s because I felt detached from my body, as if I was inhaling nitrous oxide. I got in the shower and shaved. For all I knew I was hacking my face to pieces – or maybe not. Since I didn’t see any blood or feel any pain, I had no worries about it. In fact, ‘feelings’ were so shallow or nonexistent that I probably couldn’t have felt anything like anxiety. I lost any sense of time.

I knew I was capable of performing various actions, but could not conceive of any consequences to those actions. Had I looked down and seen another limb, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It was very much like being a passenger inside my own body.

During this experience I gained the sort of insight associated with acid or dreams. Like a dream, you aren’t surprised by the absurd (an extra limb) and, like an LSD trip, you realize the absurdity of it all. But without hallucinations.

The world became a binary place of dark and light, on/off, safety/danger. When I felt a need, I determined it was hunger, and ate almonds until I didn’t feel the need any more. Same thing with water. It was like playing a game. Staying alive, but with no fear at all. I sat down at my desk and tried to write down how this felt so I could look at it later. I was very aware that I was stupid. I wrote down the word ‘Cro-Magnon.’

I thought I would have trouble driving but I had none. I felt ‘unsafe’ confronting the dark street but then this feeling disappeared when I crawled into the ‘safe’ car. Luckily there were only a couple of people in Kinko’s and one of them was a friend. She confirmed that my pupils were of different sizes.

I was fucked up.

There was no way I could make any subjective decisions or know if I was correctly adhering to social custom. I didn’t even know how to modulate my voice. Was this too loud? Do I look like a normal human? Outside, my friend shivered, so I asked her if it was cold, because for me there were only two temperatures – tolerable/intolerable (I found that out in the shower). I guess I wasn’t cold since I had no urge to change locations.

I understood that I was an entity in the big contraption called civilization and that certain things were expected of me – but I could not comprehend what the hell they might be.

All the words that came out of my mouth seemed equivalent in meaning. Instead of saying ‘Reduce it about 90 percent,’ I could have said ‘Two eggs and some toast, please,’ and these two phrases would have been the same. The whole world broke down into elemental parts, each of equal ‘value’ to the whole, which is to say, of no value at all.

I sat at a table and read a newspaper. It was the most absurd thing I had ever seen! Each story purported to describe a thing or event, or was supposed to convey ‘news’ of a reality of some other location. This seemed stupid. An article on a war in Burma was described as ‘the war the West forgot.’ It had an ‘at-a-glance’ chart that said Burma was three times the size of the state of Washington.

This was meaningless, and I knew it. The story did not even begin to describe the tiniest fragment of the reality of that place. From a vague recollection of my pre-reptilian days, I knew of things called ‘complicated.’ But the paper’s pitiful attempt to categorize individuals as ‘rebels’ or ‘insurgents’ or to describe the reasons for the agony was literally ridiculous. I laughed out loud.

I found being a reptile kind of pleasant. I was content to sit and monitor my surroundings. I was alert, but not anxious. If someone had come at me with an axe, I would have acted appropriately. Fight or flight. Every now and then I would do a ‘reality check’ to make sure I wasn’t masturbating or strangling someone, due to a vague awareness of non-reptilian expectations. At one point, I ventured across the street to a hamburger place to get something to eat. It was locked up and yet there were workers inside. This truly confused me, and I considered trying to break in, and make off with food. Luckily, the store opened (now that it was six a.m.) and I entered the front door like a normal customer.

It was difficult to remember how to do a money-for-merchandise transaction and even more difficult to put words into action, but I finally succeeded at the task. I ate bite by bite until I was full. If I had become full before finishing the hamburger, I think I would have simply let it fall from my hand.

The life of a reptile may seem boring to us, but boredom has no place in a reptilian brain. If, as a reptile, something started to hurt, I took steps to get away from it. If it felt better over here, that’s where I went. Writing this, twenty-four hours after becoming a reptile, it seems that my neocortex is reconnecting. Soon, I hope to be human again.

As a reptile I still believed in God. I didn’t feel like praying (which seemed ludicrous), but there was no diminishing of my belief. Why? Is a purely human question. As a reptile, questioning my existence was none of my business. I just didn’t care. Become a reptile for a while; it straightens out a thing or two.

From:
Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill

A
FEW YEARS
ago, Durian, Heinrich and I took a house in Slovenia with no intention other than idling away the summer. It was a peasant house with a small garden and along one side of the house there grew in abundance a plant which I recognised as henbane,
Hyoscyamus Niger
. I watched the plant with an interest bordering on obsession throughout the summer, as I waited for its seeds to ripen. When this occurred I collected a quantity and set about preparing them.

I discovered that there are two ways of experiencing henbane. One is to make a sort of paste from the seeds and to rub it into an area of the chest close to the heart. The other is to roast the seeds and inhale the fumes. Feeling unconvinced about the first method, I decided to start with the second. I took a handful of the flat, greyish seeds and placing them on a metal plate, I heated them slowly from below using a spirit stove. I watched with anticipation and unease as the seeds began to swell. Shortly after, their shells burst and the fumes began to rise. I inhaled deeply . . .

It was not long (although I cannot say how long) before it became clear that the fumes were beginning to penetrate my consciousness. The first effects were physical and I began to feel very unsteady on my feet. My head was aching and I experienced a sickening dizziness. Also my mouth and throat became parched, to the point where I could barely swallow, let alone speak. I began to feel frightened. One might have thought that this was related to having taken the henbane, that it was a fear of poisoning or death. But it could not have been, as I no longer had any idea how I had got into this state. No, it was just a vague, unspecific terror. I remember looking in a mirror and this increased my anxiety. My face had swollen and become livid. The flesh on my head had grown much heavier and I could feel the bulk of it weighing about my cheeks, distorting the shape of my face. My eyes stared out at me, enlarged and black. I had trouble fixing my gaze on the mirror as it kept moving back and forth. Soon not just the mirror but the entire room was on the move. I had to clutch hold of something to stop myself from sliding rapidly first to the left then to the right. My senses were diminishing. Sounds began to fade and the objects in the room began to darken. My peripheral vision became lost in a grey fog, I was drenched in perspiration by now and as the darkness deepened, sight was replaced by a series of terrifying hallucinations. A thin stone column with an elaborately carved capital suddenly presented itself to my sight. It stood in front of me and was looking at me. I tried to move my head to avoid its gaze but found I was unable to. My body no longer responded to my wishes. I was paralysed. The gaze of the column became unbearable. I was overcome with a terrible sense of shame and terror towards this. My whole body seemed to be shaking uncontrollably. As I stood there, unable to move, the column slowly dissolved and reformed in the shape of a grotesque infant. Its face was hideously contorted in a silent scream. It appeared to be in great pain, but I felt no sorrow or pity for it. I knew that it bore me ill-will, and I desperately wanted to escape its malevolence. There was something deeply violent and almost satanic about it. At this point, a whole host of images crowded around me – weird animals, talking plants, a cloud of tiny black insects, demented voices whispering urgently to me, as if semi-human creatures were trying to crawl inside my ears. It was as if I was inhabiting the world of a medieval text, a bestiary of madness. All the time I was trying to move, to escape, but my legs refused to respond. A wave of sickness rose up in me, to the point where I was sure I would collapse, although at the same time I knew that this would not bring me unconsciousness. The grotesque visions would continue to haunt me.

The next stage which I remember was both the most horrifying and also the most exultant. Between the waves of nausea, I experienced moments of profound well-being. These were accompanied by a feeling of bodily disintegration. Although I was paralysed, it appeared that parts of my body were beginning to detach themselves and take on a separate existence. My head was stretching upwards and at any moment would be parted from my body. Simultaneously, a sensation of flight began to take hold of me. With this came a relaxation. As I experienced the terror of my dissolving body, I abandoned myself to my hallucinations and I was soon at one with them, drifting through a gloomy sky and over a strange, crepuscular landscape. This was little short of euphoric. The terror had lifted and I accepted the horror of the images which presented themselves as a matter of course.

When I returned to consciousness, I was totally disoriented. Durian and Heinrich must have carried me to my bed, where I lay for some days languishing in deep gloom. My body was racked with discomfort and the nausea remained with me. Even several days later I was still unsteady and found it difficult to walk or take hold of objects.

This account is inevitably sketchy and incoherent. One consequence of henbane narcosis is memory failure, so all that I was left with are one or two particular hallucinations and a general sense of the physical effects. This may be for the best. I shudder to think what nightmarish images I have forgotten.

The Decadent Gardener
, 1998

H
E CAME BACK
with the ether bottle, uncapped it, then poured some into a Kleenex and mashed it under his nose, breathing heavily. I soaked another Kleenex and fouled my own nose. The smell was overwhelming, even with the top down. Soon we were staggering up the stairs towards the entrance, laughing stupidly and dragging each other along, like drunks.

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel . . . total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue – severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally . . . you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.

You approach the turnstiles leading into the Circus-Circus and you know that when you get there, you have to give the man two dollars or he won’t let you inside . . . but when you get there, everything goes wrong: you misjudge the distance to the turnstile and slam against it, bounce off and grab hold of an old woman to keep from falling, some angry Rotarian shoves you and you think: What’s happening here? What’s going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: ‘Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out! . . . Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born . . . born? Get sheep over side . . . women and children to armored car . . . orders from Captain Zeep.’

Ah, devil ether – a total body drug. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. The hands flap crazily, unable to get money out of the pocket . . . garbled laughter and hissing from the mouth . . . always smiling.

Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. In this town they love a drunk. Fresh meat. So they put us through the turnstiles and turned us loose inside.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, 1972

T. S. Eliot

QUALITATIVE COMMENTS
:
DMT

(with 150mg, orally) ‘No observable psychic or vegetative effects.’