The Sixties (5 page)

What happened when you smoked a joint and to a far greater extent when you dropped acid was that the world outside your head
was utterly changed. It looked, I and others would say over and over again as we tripped, so
real
. By which, I suppose, we must have meant
unreal
, except that is not how it seemed. We watched reality become a conundrum as the chemicals we ingested altered the chemicals
in our brains. Change and reality were as easy to make and unmake as swallowing a pill or drawing smoke into our lungs. The
‘one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small’ of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was a perfect description of
the astonishment at the changes we made happen inside our own heads. We had a childlike wonder that we could produce such
weirdness from ourselves – that our own familiar minds had the latent capacity to see the world entirely anew. Drugs were
also an unfathomable, fascinating, magical toy – it wasn’t coincidental that we took to blowing bubbles though plastic hoops
and making morphing patterns in bright colours with oil and heat. And notice how taking acid dripped on to sugar cubes or
blotting paper combined the magical contraption with the favoured, forbidden foodstuffs of our childhoods.

There were still books to read, but now they were the
Vedas
,
Gita
,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, the
I Ching
, books on Buddhism by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, novels and essays informed by Eastern philosophy or drug use by Herman
Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Carlos Casteneda, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as John Lilly, writing from his sensory
deprivation tanks, and Dr Leary, the professor of psychedelia. This reality game, we discovered, had been played for millennia
by other cultures with and without the use of drugs. We read up on oriental religions and philosophies and discovered how
the West had got it so wrong, and that ‘Oh, wow, it’s so
real
’ was not a brand new vision brought about by brand new chemicals at all. All along Buddhism had been saying that reality
was not what it seemed, and the tribal societies had chewed and smoked natural substances that took them into the dream country
and gave them stories and visions with which to blur the edges of reality and shift gear out of the mundane. It turned out
we hadn’t discovered the fast route to re-visioning the world, but we freely partook of its current availability. We had rediscovered
it for ourselves, reinvented the point of the prayer wheel and the joint, and were bringing it home. We were investigating
and disturbing the self in order to dismiss self. Transformation was our task, change outside from alteration inside. We did
it from books:
Teach Yourself Altered Consciousness
was our generation’s virtual addition to that series of practical self-education books we’d grown up with. We knew the worth
of self-education. To start with we eschewed the shaman, the guide, the guru – though soon there would be a great flocking
to the East in search of teachers and a stream of teachers heading in the other direction towards these willing students.
We just took the drugs and read books. There was a feeling that we could, that we had to do it ourselves. Gurus and guides
were just another form of parent. We could take the ancient wisdom in its raw form, mix it with lysergic acid diethylamide,
and make it work for ourselves. Like those Victorian, Edwardian and post-war children our parents had thought quaint and safe
for bedtime reading, we took ourselves off, made our own way, like Alice, Dorothy, the Pevensies and Peter Pan, to different
realities, and assumed with the bravado of youth that we’d make it back to Kansas to tell of what we saw and be able to implement
the, by definition valuable, new connections and disconnections our changed minds had made.

It’s very hard to look at the drug culture here and in the States today from the point of view of those who lived through
the Sixties, and understand it as anything other than negative and destructive. The supply and demand has become a template
for capitalism. It was always the case that drugs were brought in from somewhere else by entrepreneurs and were divided up
to be sold by individuals, and some of those individuals were certainly businessmen. But the grimness and the profiteering
have become universal. Watch
The Wire
and you are confronted by the parodic vision of capitalism working perfectly in the projects and high rises. We bequeathed
heroin and cocaine to the miserable masses, not any kind of psychedelic solution to poverty and injustice. Luckier kids take
Es and party, dance in a trance, and it must be fun – they even call it being ‘loved up’, but it doesn’t seem to have any
other cultural aspect attached to it. No books or art, and the music is too mechanical for the likes of my generation to get.
The punks were the last comprehensible youth movement, and were a genuine phenomenon for only a flash. And of course, the
Sixties drug generation had to watch Thatcher’s babies, the thirty-somethings who dealt in fantasy money, hoovering up cocaine
just to keep them on a money-making high. It feels to me, although I know that plenty of people were fucked up by drugs back
then, that the party has turned spectacularly nasty and pointless.

We were also a bunch of dissolute, hedonistic druggies. We lay around and got stoned, had sex, listened to music that exalted
lying around, getting stoned, having sex, and hymned our good times. Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, the
Grateful Dead, Love, Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, Frank Zappa all played our tune from far away on the West Coast of
the United States. Their albums arrived in British shops, we bought them, put the records on our turntables, rolled our joints
on the covers. We even had some of our own, though it was a little softer, lacking the desperate edge of the Americans. Pink
Floyd, the Who, the Stones, the Beatles, the Incredible String Band, the Small Faces, the Animals. The music knew where we
were going in our heads and wrote the score. We partied. Perhaps the music was too good, enabling us to stay indoors and just
watch and listen. We altered the world hardly at all because, whatever we told each other, and however connected we might
have felt sitting in the same room, the search we were on was for the singular, individual experience. To be sure, it was
of the interior kind, the kind you can keep still and have, rather than the current much-desired extreme sports, falling-fast-out-of-the-sky
sort. But we had about as much effect on the world as someone jumping from a plane does. The straight world wondered what
we were up to. They disapproved, they feared, they sent the cops round, and that was all grist to our other sense that we
were doing something. But our interiority, our single focus on our inner selves did not achieve anything very much. No new
ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry come to mind from those late Sixties days – just an album cover or two. And though
the music was remarkable, and much of it was recorded in a haze of cannabis smoke, it was usually mixed by sober technicians
and distributed by multinational companies.

Like children we played cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians in Covent Garden. It involved a lot of cleaning. It may have
been my most domesticated period. Whenever there was a rumour of a drugs bust – which was several times a week – floors had
to be hurriedly but very thoroughly vacuumed, and surfaces wiped down to catch the bits of hash and grass that had dropped
while we made the joints or our friendly dealer cut an ounce from his block. I knew people who had been busted for a speck
of hash that the vacuum cleaner had missed. For those who actually went to prison – one twenty-five-year-old I knew for two
years for having a couple of grams – playtime stopped. But for most of us, we acted out our underground lives, developed paranoia
and outlaw slang with all the solemn delight of Peter Pan’s lost boys. It was a dangerous game. There were people who didn’t
stop injecting Methedrine when it started to go bad. Drug doctors did the rounds of certain flats and wrote out private prescriptions
for whole cartons of Burroughs Wellcome’s blue and white 12-ampoule boxes. People went crazy, got very ill. There is no describing
the come-down from a long weekend on Methedrine. I stopped it when I started to see bugs crawling about all over me and couldn’t
catch them. But for a few weeks I lived with a much healthier, more disciplined heroin addict. We shared the kitchen of the
flat in Covent Garden. A mattress on the floor, covered with a gold candlewick bedspread to make it more homely. In that period
addicts were registered with a licensed general practitioner or clinic, and received from them controlled amounts of heroin.
It meant that they could be physically and mentally monitored and, although there was some over-prescription, there wasn’t
a great surplus of heroin on the market. This policy was stopped in 1975. In 1971 there were between 6,000 and 15,000 drug
users; by 2002 the number had risen to between 161,000 and 266,000. In 1968 the great days of the entrepreneurial drug industry
were yet to come, and there was also no organised crime involvement; the black market was mostly from over-prescription by
doctors. If you needed heroin you got it for nothing. My boyfriend made his daily rounds, visiting the doctor, the chemist,
shooting up regularly, and felt vastly superior to us outlaws. He disapproved of doing drugs. He was sick, he told us when
we rolled a joint or dropped acid. We were just messing about. He dressed neatly and with care, washed his hair daily, made
sure he ate nourishing food regularly, and kept his equipment tidy in a black leather zip-up case which he carried with him
everywhere. He went out each morning and did who knew what, wheeling and dealing, bartering and selling things and sometimes
part of his prescription, but not breaking into houses or mugging people on the street for a fix.