Er.. sorry for going on a bit. Rant rant rant…!

@ Reality Surfer – Thanks for the link. Holy shit! Somebody pitched a perfect game in baseball on ACID???

@ Arsene – It’s not humor per se, but there are some very amusing moments like Ram Das buying a plane and flying to Mexico when he’d hardly any experience flying. Don’t think that would be allowed to happen these days.

@ Rachel – Thanks a lot!

@ Steve – Agree 100%, why do we do that? Surely communication is the way to solve problems and drug taking IS a problem.

About 20 years ago a girl died at a club I frequented although I wasn’t there that night. She had taken ecstasy and then collapsed and died on the way to hospital.

The tabloids lapped it up because she was the daughter of a one of the counties most senior Police Officers. Headlines such as “Killer Drug Claims Another Life’ were rampant.

At the inquiry on here death the toxicology report backed up what friends had said and that was that she’d drunk half a bottle of vodka on the way to the club and taken 14 pain killers!

It was that, that killed her and not the ecstasy.

There were no front page stories covering this saying we got it wrong amazingly enough. A year or two later I was reading a story on clubbing deaths and she was still listed as somebody that had died through taking e’s even though it wasn’t what killed her.

One report I remember suggested upwards of 6,000,000 tablets were being taken per weekend by kids and on average there was 1 death per annum. In the UK alone 200,000 people die each year from smoking and alcohol and kids can do that math.

@ Lisis – That’s a good point. Native Indians have been eating mushrooms and licking the backs of toads for hundreds of years.

And yeh you’re right, some of my friends have very respectable jobs that they managed to hold down.

@ Nathalie – I think a lot of it is who your friends are. I had two distinct sets of friends at the time and to be honest if I’d never opened the store I doubt I would ever have been exposed to that particular counter-culture.

I’m quite a bit younger and have never felt the need to participate in this type of lifestyle. That may just be my overly geekiness talking, but it never appealed. Besides, you can be high on life – or at least on raw chocolate. ;)

Thank you for your openness and for sharing things I never knew about. (Hello, Harvard!)

I think it’s important to keep in mind that when these “magic mushrooms” were being discovered (by the mainstream, anyway, since all sorts of natives already knew about them) they seemed like a natural, healthy, wonderful way to expand consciousness and bond with others. I can certainly understand why they would want to research them for potential benefits to society… but it still baffles me that, even at Harvard, the approach to the “research” was so unscientific and totally lacking in objective controls.

Nonetheless, what a fun story it was, at least for me. Sadly, I was not yet born during the 60′s, and was only in diapers (and in Latin America) during the 70′s. So I missed out on the whole psychedelic, tie-dyed, groovy stuff that was going on. This book, with its amazing amount of detail made it a little more real to me, which is as close as I’m gonna get, I’m afraid.

Good for you for being upfront and open about your experiences of this magical era. I think you’d be surprised how many “respectable” members of society were partying right along with you back then. No need to be ashamed of the experiences that made you YOU. And if it filtered out a few intolerant readers… all the better.

;)

In America we are socially repressed about several major topics. Sex, Drugs, and Money. Sure we talk plenty about them, but it is rare to hear open honest intelligent conversations about those topics. It takes courage to face these issues. Thanks for having the guts. We need more people like you, Tim. I can’t say I relate to the club scene, but I can relate to being deep into a counterculture while growing up. You know… one of those Heavy Metal burnouts that mothers used to fear. I recall walking through suburban shopping malls dressed in jeans, a black concert T-shirt, and black leather, with my hair halfway to my butt, and watching mothers with small children pull them closer as I passed, like I might grab their kid and run off to a black mass. That was during the big phony satanic panic era of fundie America. I just laugh about it now… but I wouldn’t change it for anything.

I’ve read your blog with interest and I think it is very brave and honest of you to be so open. The experiences that you have encountered can only add to a more ’rounded’ persona, which in turn gives one a deeper understanding of the human psyche.

Good luck

The book sounds… interesting (and like a good read, I like humour). The self-experimentation is good, and risky (I like risky too).