Field Trippin'
February 5, 2009 8:46 AM Subscribe

A high school teacher's account of an LSD trip he didn't mean to take.
posted by gman (201 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite

I had a big day that I didn't want ruined by an LSD trip

This guys an idiot. He gets dosed and continues to chaperon children on a field trip. I would fire the fool.

On another note, the only thing more boring than inducing hallucinations in yourself is listening to other people give you a play by play of their trips.
posted by milarepa at 8:55 AM on February 5, 2009 [10 favorites]

Reading that gave me an anxiety attack.
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 8:57 AM on February 5, 2009 [5 favorites]

On another note, the only thing more boring than inducing hallucinations in yourself is listening to other people give you a play by play of their trips.

Couldn't disagree more.
posted by gman at 8:57 AM on February 5, 2009 [25 favorites]

Speaking as someone who has recreationally enjoyed the drug: Dosing someone with LSD without their knowledge is one of the most sociopathic acts I can think of. I don't give a shit if the kid somehow managed to get his act together. Not suspending and prosecuting him was a gross failure of responsibility towards the society on whose behalf this teacher was supposed to educating him.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:58 AM on February 5, 2009 [74 favorites]

I can't imagine anyone who has taken acid ever in their lives before would feel a trip coming on and think "hey, let's keep going with this field trip!".
posted by munchingzombie at 9:00 AM on February 5, 2009 [10 favorites]

Dosing someone with LSD without their knowledge is one of the most sociopathic acts I can think of.

This.
posted by davejay at 9:01 AM on February 5, 2009 [9 favorites]

We were barely past MacArthur when I felt it beginning to take hold.

I'm sure your Samoan attorney will agree that that's an excellent way for you to begin a drug adventure story.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:02 AM on February 5, 2009 [23 favorites]

I do think the article would have benefited from a tighter edit, but it was interesting. Also it gave me 19 panic attacks.
posted by Divine_Wino at 9:02 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Speaking as someone who has recreationally enjoyed the drug: Dosing someone with LSD without their knowledge is one of the most sociopathic acts I can think of. I don't give a shit if the kid somehow managed to get his act together. Not suspending and prosecuting him was a gross failure of responsibility towards the society on whose behalf this teacher was supposed to educating him.

I agree. I have a relative who spent most of the 70s in a disconnected, incoherent daze because someone decided to spike the damn drinks. It totally derailed his life.
posted by milarepa at 9:03 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Also speaking as someone who has recreationally enjoyed this drug, and who grew up with teachers and is married to one, I have doubts about the veracity of this story.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 9:03 AM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

I've never taken acid, but it seems rather harsh to blame the guy for lacking judgement when he's been unwittingly dosed with LSD.
posted by Llama-Lime at 9:03 AM on February 5, 2009 [14 favorites]

Seriously...I would have whipped that kid's ass afterwards, or possibly during. I wonder if I could get away with it, blaming the acid?
posted by stifford at 9:04 AM on February 5, 2009

Would be interesting to read about this from some of the kids' perspective.

Having said that, this is a pretty shitty and dangerous thing to do. Someone tried to dose the security guard at my high school, a janitor (old guy) got the cup of coffee instead and had a heart attack. He lived.
posted by marxchivist at 9:06 AM on February 5, 2009

If it was really only one or two doses, it shouldn't have been that intense. Sounds a bit exaggerated.
posted by nasreddin at 9:06 AM on February 5, 2009

The thing that gets me is that the kid with such a cavalier attitude towards drugs is studying to become a pharmacist. Of course that assumes this is an accurate and truthful account. Besides, I thought LSD was getting hard to find especially when this incident probably took place.
posted by TedW at 9:07 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

If it were me, I would have pummeled that stupid fucking kid and told the cops that I was just trying to get my money back from this damn vending machine.
posted by orme at 9:08 AM on February 5, 2009 [42 favorites]

If it was really only one or two doses, it shouldn't have been that intense.

It was the brown acid and it only takes a little bit to kill. Beware.
posted by Xurando at 9:10 AM on February 5, 2009

"It looked like his face was on fire, officer. I was just trying to put it out with my huuuuuuge haaaaands, maaaaaaaann..."
posted by stifford at 9:12 AM on February 5, 2009

Isn't there a story of the Grateful Dead dosing a bunch of people at the Playboy Mansion (including Hef)?
posted by gman at 9:13 AM on February 5, 2009

You know, he might have got away with this, but he had to put in that last detail about Max growing up to be a pharmacist. Get it? Dosing people for a living. Yup, he got a little greedy there, and brought down the whole damn house of cards.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:15 AM on February 5, 2009 [12 favorites]

It's not a harmless prank, but the teen wasn't exactly burning people's pensions to fuel his private jet or set puppies aflame. The teen will be a pharmacist soon, which, due to the fairly intensive study and responsibilities associated with it, isn't something I tend to associate with careers chosen by sociopaths. I've seen teens do worse.

However, I don't think the teacher is a fool. He only has a few options:

1) Continue to chaperone the teenagers (we're not talking about tender six year olds) on the trip and self-monitor, which is what he chose to do. It's certainly not easy to play it straight while tripping, but it isn't impossible unless you're completely peaking and tweaking out.

2) Try to cancel the field trip, because "oh I got dosed and I'm tripping," which would probably lead to expulsion, if not arrest, and quite a lot of hulabaloo and some permanent consequences for what is essentially a short-term, stupid teen thing to do. He'd have to explain how he knew he was dosed, etc. "Oh, so you're familiar with LSD, are you?" Might lead to his arrest, too; this is the United States we're talking about.

3) Try to cancel the field trip and fake that he had food poisoning or something, which would be hard to do in the absence of other symptoms (I suppose he could dash to the bathroom and make obnoxious noises) and then try to play it relatively straight, despite the fact that his pupils would be enormous, and, once everyone was alerted to the fact he wasn't feeling well, would become obvious. It's a good chance that this tactic would lead to option #2.

The premise that the teacher is a fool is self-defeating: if he was so impaired that he couldn't be trusted to follow a band of teens around, point, and tell folks it was time to walk back to school, he most certainly would be impaired enough that his decision-making process about something involving much higher, complex functions was out of whack, and he would therefore not be a fool as a person, only temporarily a fool because of the LSD.
posted by adipocere at 9:15 AM on February 5, 2009 [22 favorites]

blaming the acid?

"Well, you see officer, I was just keeping an eye on my students when I noticed that the walls were melting. This got me worried as I figured that any heat capable of causing such structural damage was probably a health hazard to anyone nearby, but right around that point, I saw some music float in and it was made of the most wonderful blue taste, this naturally allowed us to make our escape. Unfortunately as we were working our way up the waterfall, we were attacked by a giant spider with white gloves.

Fearing for the safety of my charges, I picked up a piece of cartoon illustrated rebar which I used to bludgeon the arachnid, and that's when the garden gnomes tackled me and held me down.

Then, a few light years later, you showed up. I'm pretty sure I can identify the spider in a lineup if that will help."
posted by quin at 9:20 AM on February 5, 2009 [23 favorites]

Not that what the kid's actions weren't those of a criminal asshole, but the guy mentions touring with the dead and the rock medicine thing as being major parts of his life. He seems pretty open with his students and Max probably had some idea of this when he did it and guessed that he could handle it. He didn't dose the 60-year-old virgin English teacher, when that might have been much more interesting (and easier to get away with). I see it as exponentially more stupid than malicious, and it's VERY good to see that the teacher (who evidently COULD handle it) found a better way to deal with the situation than to ruin the rest of this kid's life with expulsion from an alternative school and criminal charges.

And fwiw, it has never been my experience that LSD distorts reality in the ways he describes. And with only two hits? I suspect this is fiction by a guy who once took 'shrooms.
posted by cmoj at 9:21 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

cmoj, you know that everyone's experience with LSD is different, right? The wonders of brain chemistry...
posted by HopperFan at 9:22 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Being dosed on acid while on a field trip with a large group of school children could be kind of awesome is you dressed them all up like lawn gnomes and had them sing lawn gnome songs.
posted by The Straightener at 9:22 AM on February 5, 2009 [16 favorites]

Seriously...I would have whipped that kid's ass afterwards, or possibly during. I wonder if I could get away with it, blaming the acid?

Shane Tilley, here in Nebraska, got away with stabbing his friend, Andy Lubben, 2 dozen times.

Tilley had swallowed 32 Coricidin pills, smoked marijuana and drunk alcohol before he stabbed Lubben to death on Super Bowl Sunday 2006. Tilley apparently stabbed Lubben at least once in his apartment, then followed him outside when he fled and continued to stab him...

Tilley was found not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds that he could not distinguish right from wrong when he stabbed his high school friend Andy Lubben 24 times.

Tilley was a minor at the time, but still, I think you could get away with it, that is, if you live in Nebraska.
posted by trueluk at 9:25 AM on February 5, 2009

Honestly, I don't know what kind of shit acid some of you have taken, but two hits should do just fine.
posted by gman at 9:27 AM on February 5, 2009 [5 favorites]

adipocere: "The teen will be a pharmacist soon, which, due to the fairly intensive study and responsibilities associated with it, isn't something I tend to associate with careers chosen by sociopaths."

Josef Mengele held a medical degree from The University of Frankfurt. Just sayin'.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:32 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I can't seem to find any info on a teacher in Sonoma named John Moss. Anyone?
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 9:33 AM on February 5, 2009

My conclusions from the story...

1. The teacher now knows a pharmacist who owes him a huge solid.
2. An apathetic kid found his calling.
3. Prosecution or beating the kid's ass are not options.
4. Seniors in high school are old enough to be unsupervised on a field trip ... to the bookstore/community center/park.

I only feel bad for the Truffula Trees.
posted by clearly at 9:34 AM on February 5, 2009 [7 favorites]

I am psychedelics-positive and reverential, but the idea of being dosed unawares and unprepared scares the everliving shit out of me.
posted by kosem at 9:35 AM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

I can't seem to find any info on a teacher in Sonoma named John Moss. Anyone?

This is like trying to find info on an architect in New York City named Howard Roark.
posted by clearly at 9:36 AM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

Um… Scooby-doo windowpane? Windowpane is a clear gelatin… Scooby-Doo would be blotter, dude.

(Having gone to an alternative high school, this really isn't that huge of a deal. I remember one of my favorite teachers talking about a forum trip, which were like weekend field trips for a homeroom, where he'd been on his cabin on an island with about 20 students and Kurt Vonnegut surprise dosed him and then got drunk and passed out on top of the kitchen table. The funniest acid story from my high school days was when a kid dropped acid and then locked himself in the driver's ed car and thought he was driving. He had the keys next to him on the seat, so the police had to jimmy the window to get him out. They kept yelling at him to unlock the door and he kept saying, "I can't find the keys!"
"They're right there," they'd yell, and he'd just say again, "I can't find the keys!")
posted by klangklangston at 9:36 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Honestly, I don't know what kind of shit acid some of you have taken, but two hits should do just fine.

The first time I tripped, it was only half of a year-old tab that my roommate found in a winter jacket he took out of his closet. That was the only time I ever had any "real world" hallucinations (where something that definitely wasn't there appeared to be very real in front of me). My roommate was sitting in a chair, and then he turned into a skeleton with a day-glo orange afro, and then into Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner.
posted by stifford at 9:38 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

If it was really only one or two doses, it shouldn't have been that intense.

In fairness, we have only the word of the student that it was just one or two doses. He could have been lying.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:38 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

This story sounds like it was cobbled together from "greatest hits" trip stories of days gone by. I'm calling BS.
posted by orville sash at 9:40 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Clearly, that was my point.
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 9:44 AM on February 5, 2009

I do agree that the story is a little too perfect to be strictly true. But it does remind me that I'm a little sad to have missed acid growing up. And now I feel much to old to give it a try, if I could even find any.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:48 AM on February 5, 2009

And now I feel much to old to give it a try, if I could even find any.

Dude, you're peaking at 28!
posted by gman at 9:50 AM on February 5, 2009

Well yeah, the flip side is that I'm much more stable than I was ten or twelve years ago, so maybe it actually would be a good idea.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:51 AM on February 5, 2009

"Look, this is how it's going to go. I'm going to ride this out, and you're not going to tell anyone about it. Then you're going to be expelled and brought up on criminal charges for dosing your teacher. Finally, you are not going to tell anyone what you did as it will seriously jeopardize your outcome. Clear?".

Does this make any sense? No.
posted by taz at 9:53 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Bad trip or no, it sure beats another one of those fucking apples...
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:53 AM on February 5, 2009

Some type of confrontation with the kid afterwards is not part of this story? BS, so say we all.
posted by digsrus at 9:56 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

My god, NOT COOL. When I was 14 I was hanging out with a couple of girls my age and these two 17 year old guys, who thought it would be hilarious to secretly dose us. The next twelve hours or so were the single most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me. The day ended with me sitting down to dinner with my entire family, desperately trying not to give away that anything was wrong as I methodically sliced through the dinner table, thinking I was cutting my steak.

Even for someone who's older and might have done it before and is able to handle it, doing this to someone without their knowledge is just freaking unconscionable.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 9:58 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I dosed in class once and I went on a field trip by myself.
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 10:00 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Dormant Gorilla, that's the story I want to hear.
posted by lyam at 10:03 AM on February 5, 2009

I sat down to watch that movie Romeo is Bleeding with my dad while I was on acid. It was a bummer.

uncleozzy, as soon as I had to support myself for a living (after I turned 18) I found that the couple of times I did hallucinogenics, my worries about my day-to-day bled in and ruined the trip. It was fun when I was in high school, but so were video games. You're not missing too much.

YMMV
posted by orville sash at 10:04 AM on February 5, 2009

"And fwiw, it has never been my experience that LSD distorts reality in the ways he describes. And with only two hits? I suspect this is fiction by a guy who once took 'shrooms."

Well, since doses aren't really measured for accuracy, it's very well within the realm of possibility that he got a strong two doses. I remember my "existence" trip, which blew the top of my head off. I literally couldn't see anything but hallucinations for about four hours - couldn't make out people's faces, or the landscape, or much of anything except massive fireworks of color. That was two "doses," which probably were a lot stronger than other doses I'd taken before, and I was very experienced by that time. Could not have handled guiding a field trip, that's for sure.
posted by krinklyfig at 10:05 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Besides, I thought LSD was getting hard to find especially when this incident probably took place.

It is still available in the Bay Area. There are plenty of old hippy intellectuals that still like their dose. Especially in Sonoma.

The story sounds totally plausible to me, especially since he was a DeadHead and a volunteer for the Haight Ashbury Rock Med program. I used to know a lot of regular acid eaters that would dose and go to work. Knowing what to expect is half the battle. He's got a class of high school students at an "alternative" school, ie. smart, delinquent kids. I'm sure he knew they didn't need babysitting in their own town.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:06 AM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Being dosed at 14... well. I only remember snatches of it. We were walking through the woods when it started and everything was just really, really GREEN. The green was pouring off the trees and onto me and I had no freaking idea what was happening. I think that was the point at which the two guys started laughing and told us what they'd done, and I just freaked. I was absolutely heart-poundingly terrified. Everything felt wrong, and loud, and tight, and I had no idea how to make it STOP so I could get reality back. The next few hours I have no detailed recall of, just a memory of feeling terrified and out of control and like parts of me kept melting and jesus make it stop. Then I was sitting at the bottom of this girl's driveway, eating my way through a giant bag of Doritos and laughing and laughing and laughing. If I tried to stop, my stomach would cramp up and make me laugh. This went on for, I think, about an hour and a half. Ok, this was actually a fun bit. There was orange from the Doritos all over my hands and oh god it was so funny and cars kept going by and god they were just fucking hilarious. Driving! In straight lines! One after another!

After that...I can't believe I remember this, but it was the day the video for November Rain premiered on MTV, and we sat there and watched it absolutely gaping at the screen and I remember trying to count the raindrops. Also, there was a stuffed deer head on the wall above the tv and it was singing along to the lyrics and I kept screaming at it to stop. This was a lot more disturbing and less funny than it might sound now. Then I jumped off my friend's porch (about twelve feet up) not because I thought I could fly or anything interesting like that, but just because I....really wanted to. I rolled all the way down her lawn and when I stopped moving tried to dig myself a hole in the dirt because if I could hide from the air maybe my brain would go back to normal. The ground was frozen so I didn't get far, but I did manage to snap off two of my fingernails.

I don't remember anything else till my dad came to pick me up, and I sat there in the car afraid to move because light was coming out of my head and I was sure he'd be able to see it. I just remember feeling absolutely petrified that he would find out. Which is hilarious in retrospect, considering I've now seen his high school yearbook and discovered his nickname was the Acid King. If I'd told him he probably would've just given me an orange juice and sent me to bed, but at the time I was convinced that if he found out, he'd hate me forever, and I had no idea how to hide it. I remember sitting there in the car and thinking "USE VERBS REMEMBER TO USE VERBS USE VERBS WHEN YOU TALK AND DON'T YELL USE VERBS WHILE YOU DON'T YELL". We got home and he told me to go wash up for dinner and I ran off into the living room and started walking around in circles. I think I'd decided that if I walked around in a hundred circles the acid would stop and I could be normal again. And then came the dinner table, where I couldn't tell which was the food and which was the plate and which was the table, and boy was that ever fun.

To this day I have no idea if my parents knew. They've never said anything about it. And I've never again touched any kind of psychedelic- the thought of it gives me screaming panic attacks. So yeah, when I hear about someone getting dosed I cringe for them, and those of you who do it for fun...I just...I don't understand how it's FUN. I just don't understand how anyone could enjoy being altered like that. I will stick to Vicodin, thank you very much.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 10:32 AM on February 5, 2009 [46 favorites]

So... my first time on acid was back in May of 1990 when I was just about to turn 14. One Friday after school, a bunch of us were hanging out (read: loitering) when an older student offered up some hits with biplanes on them. Although interested, none of my friends bought any. I figured it would be just like hash, so as instructed, I placed it on my tongue and hopped on the subway to meet up with another group of friends. Back then, I hung out with some real ruffians and as soon as I realized these people were going to entertain themselves for the rest of the evening by fucking with me, I decided to try and get a hold of a 'real friend'. Thing was, I didn't have a fuckin' quarter to make the call. I took the escalator down to the subway level and in an attempt to procure change, I bought a roll of those massive white/chalky candies. Unfortunately, they were 80 cents... and I needed to get the fuck outta there. I got on the subway just as I began to peak. For some fucked up reason, I decided to purposely put my leg out and trip an older man. After being scolded by an Asian fellow, I continued to pop candies in my mouth and bite down on them hard. Next thing I knew, I was alternating between holding my mouth and spitting out what I thought were pieces of my teeth. After what seemed like hours, I somehow managed to arrive at my father's place at 6:25. I remember the time so vividly because I knew my dad got home from work around 6:30 and I didn't know what the hell I was gonna do when he did. I must've called my mother 3 or 4 times in a 10 minute span to make plans for her to pick me up. I exited the apartment just as my father's girlfriend was attempting to unlock the door. I pushed her out of the way and used my key to lock her out as I headed for the elevator.

Right away, my mother knew something was wrong, but I simply wouldn't speak. Dinner was served as soon as we arrived back at her place a few minutes later. Me? I just began circling the table as my mother and her boyfriend ate their dinner. Having worked in an emergency ward somewhere in New York for almost 20 years, her boyfriend knew what was going on almost immediately. Once the gig was up, I was actually able to relax and enjoy my trip. My mom called the friend I'd been trying to get a hold of earlier and asked him to come over and help take care of me. Mom and I went for a walk to meet Tyler at the station. Well actually, she held my arm like I was a psycho patient, as we paced back and forth in anticipation of my friend's arrival. Unfortunately, the Asian man yelling at me incident from earlier was the impetus for me getting into some sort of martial art pose and challenging all Asian people walking by to a scrap.

My buddy arrived pissed at the fact he had to take care of my dumb ass when it was his girlfriend's last night in the city before she moved down to the States. *Needless to say, she later came over to my mom's place and they banged in the bushes outside.

As soon as we got back to my mom's place, she called my father and told him what was up. He FREAKED and demanded I tell him where I got the drugs. BAD TRIP. BAD TRIP. I actually told him I was picking up pieces of paper on the street on my walk after school and putting them in my mouth. After that conversation ended, I had the time of my life.

My mind simply wasn't ready for the intense trip that is - acid. Still, for some fucked up reason, I must have done LSD a good ten times between the ages of 14 and 16. From then on, I always had a blast and up until very recently, made sure I indulged at least once a year. Most underrated drug EVER.
posted by gman at 10:36 AM on February 5, 2009 [9 favorites]

"I do agree that the story is a little too perfect to be strictly true. But it does remind me that I'm a little sad to have missed acid growing up. And now I feel much to old to give it a try, if I could even find any."

Doesn't matter how old you are. But I'd advise against taking it unless you're in the right set and setting, and you're prepared to spend the next 12 hours not doing anything else.

Some people shouldn't take it, particularly people who are schizo-affective or have a family history of schizophrenic type disorders. Most people will have interesting experiences. Some people, like myself, will have their lives forever changed by it, to the point where I could at least partially attribute my being alive today to having taken it. It helped me overcome a serious addiction problem and eventually emerge from chronic depression. The trip which changed my life was frightening and difficult, because it was all about me. Life is much better today. YMMV.
posted by krinklyfig at 10:40 AM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Reading that made me kind of light headed... not an anxiety attack as others have said, but exactly like that short period of mild anxiousness as you are waiting for the psychedelic to kick in. Sort of an excited nervous energy with a bit of dread underneath.

Is this what a flashback feels like?

Could just be my coffee.
posted by utsutsu at 10:42 AM on February 5, 2009

Falling asleep mid trip sounds a little suspicious to me. I've never found it easy to relax, let alone fall asleep in my years and years of acid abuse. Makes me wonder if it wasn't some other research chemical or the like, as the instant, vivid hallucinations aren't really the mark of true LSD either.
posted by smackwich at 10:44 AM on February 5, 2009

So apparently dosing is fine - as long as you're a 7-year-old at the dentist, amirite?
posted by fungible at 10:44 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

It seems pretty obvious to me that pharmacists are what smart people who are very interested in drugs grow up to be. I knew someone just like that. I can see this being true. Sometimes life hands you an anecdote that is implausibly narratively well-structured.
posted by rusty at 10:45 AM on February 5, 2009

Gman:

Your story is much more awesome than mine. We should start a support group for kids who've had to attend family dinners while tripping.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 10:51 AM on February 5, 2009

And now I feel much to old to give it a try, if I could even find any.

I didn't touch the stuff until I was 29, and I had a fun time. Your mileage WILL vary.

But anyway, the story certainly reinforces my experience that drugs are only fun if you've steeled/primed yourself in advance. It is very difficult to get yourself into "drug mind" if you're only expecting to handle your day-to-day reality. Interestingly, it was only the onset of panic/anxiety attacks later on in my life that led me to this conclusion. The sudden onset of unexpected disorienting and/or crippling physical effects is not something it's so easy to "relax into." Whether the story's a fake or not, that's a skill that one masters with practice. (And boy, are panic attacks good practice.)
posted by mykescipark at 10:54 AM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

No other Sonoma Valley Dragons out there? Well, I liked hearing about Reader's Books as a scene. Be careful Creekside - they're already set to mess with you. Creekside teachers (and students) have done incredible and hard work for years. To the folks who support their continued success, donate or volunteer there!

See everyone at the Class of 2000 10 year class reunion ;-)

Also, shouldn't this reference back to Boingboing.net?
posted by unclezeb at 10:55 AM on February 5, 2009

I think that's really fucked up that we were both typing out our stories of tripping with parents at the age of 14 - at the same fuckin' time. I love a good acid trip story. *and your story was my 420th favourite
posted by gman at 10:56 AM on February 5, 2009

As long as we're swapping psychonaut tales...

My friends and I, being Manhattan prep school types, planned our trip carefully - laying in ahead of time supplies of visual stimulus. I had gone to an educational toys shop called Star Magic and purchased a metal disc with some kind of light refracting overlay on it that you could spin on a tabletop to see pulsating rainbow-hued thingies.

I brought the disc with me as a good-vibes totem when we hit the Museum of Natural History. I found that I could use it to "dial away" the shadowy visual hallucinations of rats that I kept noticing at the edge of my peripheral vision. The planetarium show was, needless to say, the best planetarium show ever.

Walking back to the apartment through Central Park, I found that my perceptions of "cleanliness" and "dirtiness" had - in a dramatic reversal of the norm - become hippie-aligned. A factory-new piece of plastic felt "dirty" but a soil-covered tree root felt "clean". That's as educational as it got.

Then, somewhere in the summer day among those hundreds of people, someone loudly played the recording of "Resolution" from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. A holy moment.
posted by Joe Beese at 10:57 AM on February 5, 2009 [5 favorites]

Two things: I've eaten dinner with my family while tripping and they knew and didn't make a big deal out of it, which I thank them for.

And John Coltrane's Africa Brass (specifically, the bass hum of Africa's intro) is my recentering music for when I trip. (Which I haven't been able to do in years, due to a lack of supply. But now I live near Disneyland, so I want to again, pretty badly. Or at least see Keith Jarrett at the Hollywood Bowl.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:03 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

"I CURED MY ACID REFLUX" advertisement at the top of the article.
posted by gman at 11:04 AM on February 5, 2009

A factory-new piece of plastic felt "dirty" but a soil-covered tree root felt "clean". That's as educational as it got.

This is actually a pretty good insight.
posted by naju at 11:10 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm sorry, I really can't buy this story, not even if it's set in California wine country. I mean, let's boil it down:

TEACHER: Uh oh. I feel a trip coming on.
MAX: Ha, ha, I dosed you! I admit it! I dosed you!
TEACHER: Max, when I come down, you are going to be in some serious trouble.
KENNY ROGERS: I JUST DROPPED IN TO SEE WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION WAS IN
TEACHER: {TRiPPiN BaLLS}
IMAGINARY COPS: Hey, Teach. Enjoying the tree?
TEACHER: I'm cool. I'm cool. I'm okay. Okay. Cool.

LATER...

MAX: Hey, I never got in trouble. And now I'm gonna be a pharmacist!
TEACHER: Dosing people for reals! How's that for irony?
fin

(okay, I admit, I put the Kenny Rogers in for artistic embellishment.)

But still. How does the kid escape trouble in this one? The teacher doesn't get him in trouble because he knows he'll catch hell for chaperoning kids in that altered state? But then he goes and writes about it in the paper? It just doesn't jibe. I don't care how cool you are with the stuff, or how well you can ride it out, but if someone throws that on you without your consent, prior knowledge or anything, that someone is in TROUBLE. No matter what.

Man.
posted by Spatch at 11:18 AM on February 5, 2009 [21 favorites]

I agree. I have a relative who spent most of the 70s in a disconnected, incoherent daze because someone decided to spike the damn drinks. It totally derailed his life.

This is a part of what happened to Syd Barrett. He was already out of the Floyd and decidedly schizophrenic, and he was living with a bunch of hangers-on who thought it was funny to dose his drinks and watch him flip out. There was one in particular named "Mad Jock" who would go out of his way to make sure Syd was constantly tripping. Sometimes Syd would lock himself in an empty room and just flail his body up against the walls for hours, people would visit and ask about the noise and be told "oh, that's just Syd". Sad story.

I knew a kid in high school that did this to the vice principal. He (the kid) was a pretty big dealer of the stuff and usually had a sheet of blotter on him. He put some ridiculous amount in the guy's coffee, and later he was taken away by an ambulance. I thought it was funny then, now, not so much. Dosing people with psychedelic drugs without their knowledge is just cruel, especially if they've never used them before.
posted by DecemberBoy at 11:22 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Pig Pen used to beg people not to dose him, but some assholes did it anyway. It's a pretty agressive act. Max: Christ what an asshole.
posted by fixedgear at 11:22 AM on February 5, 2009

3 biggest pieces of advice I ever got from someone about LSD.

#1. You're not over the edge until the snakes come out of your eyes.
#2. Don't drive.
#3. If you must drive, pretend you are a giant crayola crayon and stay in between the lines.
posted by Nanukthedog at 11:24 AM on February 5, 2009 [10 favorites]

"I don't care how cool you are with the stuff, or how well you can ride it out, but if someone throws that on you without your consent, prior knowledge or anything, that someone is in TROUBLE. No matter what."

Or not. I mean, it's not cool to do it, but if you're not freaked out by acid, it's not something that needs to be an Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker moment, y'know? I have a feeling that Max got yelled at a bit, was contrite, learned his lesson, and that's pretty much the end of it because, fuck, it's not like he put peanuts in an allergic kid's sandwich or anything. Max sounds like he was a teenage asshole, your demand for TROUBLE just kinda makes you sound like an asshole.
posted by klangklangston at 11:29 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

dude.
posted by Drasher at 11:32 AM on February 5, 2009

My younger brother dosed one day in high school, and his student teacher found out about it. The student teacher, who happened to be a good friend of mine, then told my brother that Colin Powell was coming to school, and that my brother, as one of the top students, would be expected to ask him an informed question.

Oh Jesus, that's simultaneously cruel and hilarious. I used to think it was fun to trip on acid at school. Kind of an adventure, can I do it and get away with it? I never got caught. Of course, I also got pretty shitty grades for my first two years, but that was more because I didn't show up half the time. I've since told my parents about all my past drug use, and they were incredulous that I'd been tripping in front of them countless times. On the other hand, a friend of mine had an ex-hardcore-hippie mom who had the uncanny ability to immediately tell exactly what we were on when we walked into his house. "Acid, huh?" or "mushrooms, huh?". It was almost scary.

#2. Don't drive.
#3. If you must drive, pretend you are a giant crayola crayon and stay in between the lines.

Not that I'm proud of it, because it's irresponsible, but I've driven on pretty much everything (never alcohol, because paradoxically I almost never drank back then and still hardly ever do), and LSD was never that hard or scary. Like you say, just go slow and pay attention to the lines. I had more difficult experiences when I was really stoned on good homegrown.
posted by DecemberBoy at 11:39 AM on February 5, 2009

On another note, the only thing more boring than inducing hallucinations in yourself is listening to other people give you a play by play of their trips.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? One of the most entertaining read in history.
posted by tkchrist at 11:42 AM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

Or not. I mean, it's not cool to do it, but if you're not freaked out by acid, it's not something that needs to be an Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker moment, y'know?

If it was someone I am close and good friends with, probably. Outside that very small circle of trust, even if I wasn't that freaked out, it's going to become a UATW,MFer moment.
posted by stifford at 11:45 AM on February 5, 2009

Years later I read an interview with Paul America in The New York Times where he stated he'd been on LSD all during the shooting [of My Hustler]. I didn't know that, specifically, at the time, but what I did know was that there was a lot of it out there that weekend. We were with the Cambridge kids again, and they were slipping it into everything. I made sure I drank only tap water, and I only ate candy bars where I could tell if the seal had been broken. Believe me, I knew these people well enough to know that if you spent a weekend with them, you'd get a dose of acid if you weren't careful. [...]

Everybody has different stories about who had acid that weekend and who didn't. All anyone agrees on is that we had a Crystals record called "He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)" playing over and over day and night, which everyone loved because they lyrics were so sick. Gerard [Malanga] said that the acid was in the eggs and that everybody ate the eggs, including him. Stephen Shore said that he saw the Sugar Plum Fairy put it in the orange juice and that everybody drank the juice, except him. For months afterward Gerard insisted that the acid was in the scrambled eggs and that I had some. We had long fights about it.

"Everybody ate the scrambled eggs, Andy. Paul ate the eggs, I ate the eggs, you ate the eggs - we all ate the eggs! I saw you eat them. Admit it!"

"You were tripping right? So then you hallucinated it, because I didn't have any."

"Why don't you just admit it?" Gerard would keep saying. "It was beautiful, a beautiful trip. No one had a bad trip, not even Paul Morrissey! I mean, when we found him beside the boardwalk in the fetal position, he was smiling... "

"Look, Gerard, maybe Paul ate the eggs, maybe you ate the eggs, maybe everybody in Cherry Grove ate the eggs, but I did not!"

"Andy. We came into the kitchen and you were on the floor picking up garbage and putting it into bags in a very childish, very peculiar way."

Gerard obviously thought people only cleaned when they tripped. I could never convince him that I absolutely hadn't had anything that was going around, that I was really living off candy bars and tap water the whole weekend. - Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties
posted by Joe Beese at 11:53 AM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the post, gman, but jeez, this guy is long-winded. There are plenty of other, better reports on Erowid IMO.
posted by wastelands at 11:55 AM on February 5, 2009

Not that I'm proud of it, because it's irresponsible, but I've driven on pretty much everything (never alcohol, because paradoxically I almost never drank back then and still hardly ever do), and LSD was never that hard or scary.

I must be a total lightweight because I'm trying to imagine driving on acid and I could never NEVER have done it. I can't even successfully eat a Dorito when I'm tripping.
posted by lysistrata at 11:58 AM on February 5, 2009

Oh, Metafilter, you have convinced me never to try acid. I'll just be over here makng heebie jeebie noises.
posted by marginaliana at 12:00 PM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

I must be a total lightweight because I'm trying to imagine driving on acid and I could never NEVER have done it. I can't even successfully eat a Dorito when I'm tripping.

Well, different things effect different people different ways. Acid never did much more to me than make me really giggly, super-alert and stimulated, and cause me to see somewhat faint patterns and visual distortions. Sometimes the patterns would be more vivid if the acid was more potent, but that's about it.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:03 PM on February 5, 2009

AFFECT. Fuck. Kick me.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:03 PM on February 5, 2009

My first time was slightly different from these stories in that a friend told me we were both dropping acid, but then after I dosed, he said, "ha ha, I didn't take any, you're on your own" (or words to that effect).

He then drove me to a house where we visited these two girls we knew. We sat at their kitchen table with a bright light on overhead. He told them I was on acid & they proceeded to talk about how lame acid was & how people who took it were losers.

Finally, he drove me to the one decent club in town. I remember walking in and hearing Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" start playing - that was the first time in the whole experience I felt good. I thought, ah ha ha, these people get it.

I recall seeing a guy at the club who I'd been mad at for a few years. He was wearing a smiley face t-shirt and, as soon as I saw him, I burst into tears & ran over and hugged him.
posted by stinkycheese at 12:08 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

OK, I'm in on the my-first-acid-trip stories.

I was 17 in 1996 (I think) and I had been going to raves in the Toronto - London - Windsor - Detroit corridor for a little more than a year without touching any sort of drug. I never wanted to be the kind of person that needed drugs to have fun, so I spent that "sober" year making sure that I could enjoy raves without chemical support.

Anyway, a few friends from the London scene were organizing a road trip down to Windsor for an upcoming Plus8 label party, called Sikness / Rekovery (those who were in this scene at the time have probably heard of this party; Plus8 actually lists this as one of the "legendary" events that shaped the sound of the label). Anyway, I had been in the scene long enough to realize who awesome this party was going to be and that I was coming up on my 1-year raving anniversary, so I decided to pop my cherry.

After having done a tonne of research reading pharmacological and epidemiological articles on drug use and side-effects, I decided that LSD promised the right kind of experience for me, and with relatively low health risks compared to other drugs in use at the time. So during the drive down to Windsor, I told my buddies that I was up for trying acid, if they knew where to find it. And find it they did.

When we actually got to the party location—it was a grassy corner of a vast cornfield just outside of Windsor—the party was just starting and Richie Hawtin and the rest of the Plus8 crew were just standing around, shaking hands and talking to people; he was still in his shaved-head-and-glasses phase at that time. I tried not to appear starstruck and shook his hand.

I did a quick tour of the encampment with my friends and then we found ourselves back in the refreshment tent where Hawtin and his entourage were standing. There was a hippy-esque guy I recognized from the London scene that was talking to Hawtin. My buddies knew this guy, talked to him for a bit, and then one of my friends whispered something in his ear and he nodded.

Then he looked at me and said, "Put out your hand."

I put out my hand.

SQUIRRRRRT!

In plain view of the occupants of the well-lit refreshment tent, this guy delivered what was easily 7 or 8 drops of liquid acid into my palm. "Lick it," he said. Well, duh, I thought, and licked it. My friends smirked at each other and then told me they were going to look after me tonight.

In the end, they deposited me near a huge wall of speakers and I kept myself entertained all night, DJ after DJ, right through to dawn and afterwards. One of my friends would drop by occasionally and check in on me. The other one had clearly taken more than he could handle: he disappeared for a long time and then emerged from the cornfields, covered in dirt and claiming that he had been eating raw corn and dirt and there was a naked guy in the fields and he thought maybe he was some sort of spirit and...(etc.)

Considering how much I had taken, I noticed even during my trip that I was having a lot less visuals than I had expected. Instead, it was perma-smile, body rushes and a newfound dancing skill all night long.

After that, there followed about 3-4 years of flawless acid trips (infrequent, mind you), and then I moved to Toronto just as the acid dried up.
posted by LMGM at 12:09 PM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

I sat up on bad blotter one night after everyone had gone to bed and watched Jimmy and Tammy Faye Baker cry on TV because they weren't going to have enough money to keep their show on the air unless I sent them money now. I think that hour or so gnawed a hole in my soul.
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:12 PM on February 5, 2009

Mushrooms, on the other hand... mushrooms are the only substance besides DMT that have caused the common heroic-dose sensation that time has no meaning, reality has always been like this, no memory of having taken a drug or knowledge that the drug will wear off. "Squeegeeing your third eye", as Bill Hicks referred to it. Once on mushrooms, I was on a friend's patio deck looking at the sky, and everything I saw was replaced entirely with geometric spirals. I lost all sensation and passed out. I woke up a few minutes later, I think I hit my head. Sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm still passed out on that deck and everything in the ensuing 15 years or so has been a time-has-no-meaning hallucination/dream, and that I might wake up soon. Or that I died that day and this is the afterlife. Yeah, mushrooms are a helluva drug.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:13 PM on February 5, 2009 [9 favorites]

I must be a total lightweight because I'm trying to imagine driving on acid and I could never NEVER have done it.

Surprisingly, not that difficult, once you can identify the road.
posted by empath at 12:18 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

While it wasn't my first, my favorite trip by far was at the inauguration of Barack Obama. The actual event was interesting, although the sound situation was completely horrible to tripping ears. The most memorable part was defenitly leaving. Theres nothing like two hours being pressed against 1.5 million other people trying to leave the mall via the one unblocked street to make you feel the effects of LSD.
posted by Suparnova at 12:20 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

My favorite mushroom experience was going to Central Park at night with four or five friends. The southern part of the park is deliberately constructed to provide a pleasant walking experience, with various landscapes and little structures and stuff. I'm a literary theory nerd, as are my friends, so it immediately began to seem that I was in a literary work, with characters (my friends), plot development, symbolism, allusions, the whole nine yards--and the same thing happened to my friends. Of course, we spent the entire time analyzing our experience using the methods of Lacanian criticism or something. By the time the night ended I was thoroughly convinced that there was nothing outside the text and that reality was completely made up of textual constructs. It was awesome.
posted by nasreddin at 12:20 PM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

Oh, and when my friend found me, he woke me up, then said "I thought you were dead! What would I have told your dad?" Fucker thought I died and was worried about being in trouble with my parents. Good guy for the most part, but pretty self-centered. Last I heard about him he was living in Miami, strung out on coke and had a tattoo on his back that said "white power", despite the fact that he'd fathered a mixed-race child with a black girl. Yeah, we don't talk anymore.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:21 PM on February 5, 2009

Oh, Metafilter, you have convinced me never to try acid. I'll just be over here makng heebie jeebie noises.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that no amount of reading or hearing about it can prepare you for the actual experience of it. It's like an iceberg, and you're only hearing about the 5% that's describable. 95% of it is happening below the surface, and is totally impossible to put into words, or really to remember very well later.
posted by empath at 12:23 PM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

Always remember two things:

1) keep everybody very small.

2) if you think you can fly, you can't.
posted by The Whelk at 12:23 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I mean, it's not cool to do it, but if you're not freaked out by acid, it's not something that needs to be an Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker moment, y'know?

I admit the capital TROUBLE was a bit more Internet Male than I'd meant to convey. I'm not advocating baseball bats to kneecaps here or the ol "dragged out into the street and be shot" threat. But dosing is a serious act of irresponsible malice. It can have some terrible repercussions, but I'm not going to get into the hypothetical here. I'll just say that I do believe Max should have had to answer for his prank, and the teacher just shrugging it off just doesn't seem right at all.

If they'd talked afterwards and the teacher made it clear to Max just how serious it could've been and Max learned a newfound respect for pharmaceuticals and that's why he's now pursuing that career, that's one thing. But it's another thing entirely for, well, nothing to happen.
posted by Spatch at 12:23 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I agree with being dosed when done in the right company at the right time. I have a buddy who said we could surprise dose him sometime as long as we took care of him all the while, and made certain he had nothing going on for the next day or so.
posted by jimahon at 12:24 PM on February 5, 2009

Max had left a screensaver depicting 12 tabs of Scooby-Doo windowpane acid on one of my classroom computers.

This is where the bullshit starts. It could be Scooby-Doo blotter, or it could be windowpane, but please explain to me how you're gonna get a picture of ole Scoob printed onto gel.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 12:28 PM on February 5, 2009

I hate to be late to the party and a noob, but isn't LSD soluble in water? Hence why spiking the city's water supply is impossible? This guy says he consumed LSD in his coffee. How possible is that?
posted by Submiqent at 12:32 PM on February 5, 2009

Funny, I've often wondered what it would be like to revisit acid as an adult -- having gone through "adult" experiences like marriage, fatherhood, death of loved ones, debt, job loss, and related stresses since last dropping some 25+ years ago. Even under the best circumstances, the tiniest, seemingly trivial issue can snowball into a nightmare of bizarre scenarios that seem all too real (like the teacher's "arrest" under the tree). Methinks a trip at this stage in life would either trigger a really bad experience, or, as Garcia once quipped, serve as a good way to "blow out the pipes."

I'll weigh the pros and cons over some scotch.
posted by VicNebulous at 12:32 PM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

I was wondering about Alex, the cute, blond executive director / longtime professional friend - is he no longer married, or is his wife OK with him writing about flirting? And is Alex OK with it? I know "crushes" are not unusual for married people, but to write about it seems like another level.

Then again, he wrote about how he chaperoned kids while on LSD, so he's either no longer teaching, or he's using enough fake names that he feels safe re-telling the story.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:41 PM on February 5, 2009

The first time I tripped on acid I watched a bunch of nature shows and then inexplicably started screaming in a ludicrous parody of an English accent until my friends had to beat me with pillows. I believe there was also some kind of spazzout in the elevator with the squares. Real Norman Rockwell compared to you spacemen.

Of course the 17th or 18th time I tripped I walked 100 blocks back to my house at 6 in the morning and then woke my dad up to give him a dressing down while I sipped black tea wearing sunglasses and the itchiest wool sweater in the world with no undershirt. I also recall getting very angry with the Terminator at some point during the night before and throwing oranges at the TV.
posted by Divine_Wino at 12:44 PM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Well, different things effect different people different ways. Acid never did much more to me than make me really giggly, super-alert and stimulated, and cause me to see somewhat faint patterns and visual distortions.

Acid always either sent me way, way into myself or got me so hyperfocused on everything else that no matter where I looked I'd end up lost in whatever caught my eye first. That's why I couldn't eat that stupid Dorito. Everytime I brought it anywhere close to my face I just ended up staring at it for about a half an hour.
posted by lysistrata at 12:50 PM on February 5, 2009

I think I pretty much used up my acid nine lives. *Oh please God, I swear, I SWEAR I will never touch this shit again...*

The last moment of the very last trip: I am being escorted by our designated driver out of a Waffle House and my friend is spraying grits like colorful sparks out his mouth and screaming "THESE HASH BROWNS FUCKIN SUCK!!!!!"
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 12:58 PM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

I used to trip at school sometimes. Once I did it at Saturday school - that fun fun Saturday morning detention study hall for bad kids that is never anything like the Breakfast Club - and I started writing backwards. Every letter and every word. I think I filled an entire marble notebook with backwards writing; unfortunately, I never could be bothered to try to decipher it again and then I lost it, so the world will never know of the great backwards prose triumph of my mid teens.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:09 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Just reading this makes me want to start calling old friends and see if I can get hooked up with a few tabs then the inner adult chimes in and tells me I am too old at nearly 31 for acid. Shrooms on the other hand my inner adult apparently has no objections.
posted by hexxed at 1:20 PM on February 5, 2009

"I hate to be late to the party and a noob, but isn't LSD soluble in water? Hence why spiking the city's water supply is impossible? This guy says he consumed LSD in his coffee. How possible is that?"

No, it's the chlorine in most municipal systems. It degrades rapidly in chlorine, oxygen or ultraviolet light.

"I think I filled an entire marble notebook with backwards writing; unfortunately, I never could be bothered to try to decipher it again and then I lost it, so the world will never know of the great backwards prose triumph of my mid teens."

In my Creative Problem Solving class, with that teacher dosed by Vonnegut, one kid kept bragging about how he was at his most creative, interesting, etc. when he was tripping. Teach says, fine, sure, prove it. Take this notebook with you and write down these profound thoughts, and we'll look at it in class (don't peek). Kid brings back the notebook a week later, talking about all the profound, mindblowing shit he wrote in there. Teach opens it up and there's only one page with actual writing (all the rest is loops and loops and loops), and it just says, "THIS PLACE SMELLS!"
posted by klangklangston at 1:21 PM on February 5, 2009 [19 favorites]

if you think you can fly, you can't.

At least test it by taking off from the ground... you don't see ducks lined up waiting for the elevator so they can take off from the roof, now do you?

cue bill hicks rant about idiots on acid
posted by utsutsu at 1:26 PM on February 5, 2009

But now I live near Disneyland, so I want to again, pretty badly.

It seems like a good idea, but it really isn't-- too many people standing in too many long lines.
posted by InfidelZombie at 1:31 PM on February 5, 2009

2) if you think you can fly, you can't.

Same goes for swimming across what appear to be short distances. Most Torontonians will remember Benji Hayward.
posted by gman at 1:35 PM on February 5, 2009

"It seems like a good idea, but it really isn't-- too many people standing in too many long lines."

I've taken mushrooms at Cedar Point. The only troubling part of the day was that I forgot I was wearing my "Nobody Knows I'm A Lesbian" shirt and people kept pointing, laughing and giving me the thumbs up.

THEY ALL KNEW!
posted by klangklangston at 1:42 PM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Boy, there are a lot of tripping stories here.

I took acid/morning glory seeds/shrooms ten or twenty times in the late sixties, early seventies, when I was 16-22. Never had a bad trip, even that time in the cemetery, looking at my blurred reflection in a copper plate in a mausoleum door, thing I was looking into the face of the Death Mother. I still knew I was on LSD. Later, finally got the spiritual experience I was looking for. (I won't bore you with the details.) Stopped.

Tried tripping again twice, years later. All I experienced was sensory/mental derangement. Not scary, but not too interesting, either.

That said, being involuntarily dosed could be a real nightmare.
posted by kozad at 1:47 PM on February 5, 2009

Set and setting. Set and setting. SSSSetttt annnnnnnnd settinginginginginging....

On the one hand, as a fellow traveler I appreciate his ability to roll with this and make it through the event without losing his shit very publicly. OTOH...WTF was he thinking? There's no shame in manufacturing an illness and letting one of the other parents or adults take over for you, especially when you are incapacitated (and I think having to sit under a tree with Dr. Seuss as a companion -- because that's all you can handle -- qualifies as "incapacitated".)

My own experiences with acid have been mixed. I had some amazing experiences with LSD, and it really taught me a tremendous amount about myself and how I think, what consciousness is, what life and death "mean", etc. I treasure those experiences and all that they taught me about myself. But my trips haven't been all rainbow mandalas and china cat sunflowers; I've also had some very anxious trips, when I became so gripped with The Fear that I never wanted to do the drug again. And the bad times were almost always a result of not adhering to the "set and setting" mantra. Involuntarily dosed on the job and responsible for a group of students, in a situation where I *had* to keep my shit together or suffer dire consequences? No thanks, I'll pass and take a sick day instead.
posted by plowhand at 1:48 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

While John Coltrane has some great drone lines for musical centering, my personal faves are Sanders' "The Creator Has a Master Plan" and Alice Coltrane's "Journey in to Satchidananda" The beautiful thing about surviving that period of my life is that when I listen to Sanders these days I get most of the spiritual transcendence without all the hokey visuals and errant distractions despite the embarrassing soberness.
posted by Fezboy! at 1:53 PM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

YOUR visuals might be hokey
posted by flaterik at 1:59 PM on February 5, 2009

Fezboy—Oh, God yes, those are awesome sides too (I tried not to long ago to post a Sanders birthday FPP, but I couldn't find a decent version of "Creator…" online). Transcendental jazz from the late '60s through early '70s really is the best music to listen to while tripping, no matter what the psych fans say.
posted by klangklangston at 2:05 PM on February 5, 2009

either this cat is a abominable writer or this whole story is bunk. i'm inclined to think bunk.
posted by barrett caulk at 2:19 PM on February 5, 2009

"Look, this is how it's going to go. I'm going to ride this out, and you're not going to tell anyone about it. Then you're going to be expelled and brought up on criminal charges for dosing your teacher. Finally, you are not going to tell anyone what you did as it will seriously jeopardize your outcome. Clear?"

"Don't get uptight with me, man. Because if you do, I'll have to give you a dose of medicine. And if I spike you, you'll know you've been spoken to"
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:23 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

1. I also had doubts about the veracity of the tale, but willing to give it a pass at least for the mental images, which were fairly entertaining.

2. Is it strange to not hallucinate when using LSD?

3. According to the story, the kid put "one or two DROPS" of LSD into dude's coffee. If he means pure, liquid LSD, then, yes, "dude would be trippin' balls", as the skatergoons used to say.

...Now I have to read the rest of the things you guys have said, because that's only from the first 15 comments and I got too impatient....
posted by batmonkey at 2:25 PM on February 5, 2009

with that teacher dosed by Vonnegut

Like he was a Vonnegut fan, or Kurt Vonnegut gave him LSD?
posted by solipsophistocracy at 2:43 PM on February 5, 2009

95% of it is happening below the surface, and is totally impossible to put into words, or really to remember very well later.

This is too true. I haven't had any LSD for a really long time. It is fun to read the stories here, but try as I might I can't remember the really important stuff that happened during my 20 or so trips in early adulthood. But it's a deep and cathartic, life affirming thing. Yeah there is also the ha ha ha and melding with plants and wiggling on the floor, chewing on the towels, wow look at the light trail of my cigarette, but that's just the outer surface stuff, small change, that isn't what makes it so excellent and necessary...

(advertising voice: BUT WAIT, THERE'S EVEN MORE!!)

Deep down there is an ephemeral and ineffable revelation, maybe it helps you to see that you are good, that it is good to be alive, life is good, life is love, it is all here with a connected structure and a meaning that can be shown to you for a very short and special time. And even long after you have forgotten it all, you know that it was revealed once and it is still true.

Everyone should try LSD, I mean that sincerely and without reservations. LSD will make you a better person. Sure there are bad trips, but bad trips happen because you aren't doing it right.

Man I wish I knew how to obtain some LSD, what a shame it is illegal and rare.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:50 PM on February 5, 2009 [7 favorites]

Too bad about the Sanders FPP not panning out, klangklangston. Would have had to create an army of sockpuppets to favorite that enough times.

Sanders is also inextricably bound up with my image of NYC having accidentally landed in the city for the first time ever on the day before he played the Iridium back in the middle 90s. This was at the height of my beat generation schtick and felt the gods were speaking to me directly. I can only imagine had I saw that show while dosed. Probably would have crapped my pants and stopped breathing under the weight of all that joy.
posted by Fezboy! at 3:03 PM on February 5, 2009

I had thousands of deep revelations on LSD and epic trips, but my final analysis was that they had no real substance in the end, only entertainment value. I stopped when I started thinking "this is such bullshit."
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 3:03 PM on February 5, 2009

Is it strange to not hallucinate when using LSD?

You don't really hallucinate, per se, as in you don't see things that aren't there, like Jesus doesn't show up and start talking to you about football (DMT, on the other hand...). You will see sort of translucent geometric patterns against the night sky or in a dark room, and you'll have minor visual distortions, like the walls "breathing" or patterns on carpet swirling around.

3. According to the story, the kid put "one or two DROPS" of LSD into dude's coffee. If he means pure, liquid LSD, then, yes, "dude would be trippin' balls", as the skatergoons used to say.

Two drops of liquid will be about the same as two hits of good blotter. It's not a ridiculous amount, but definitely enough for 12 hours of good clean fun.
posted by DecemberBoy at 3:04 PM on February 5, 2009

Tripping did absolutely enrich my sense of humor though.
posted by hellboundforcheddar at 3:05 PM on February 5, 2009

I too have strong feelings about LSD (love it). And driving while twisted is a necessary rite of initiation.

But now I live near Disneyland, so I want to again, pretty badly.

My friend had the same inclination to indulge at the Magic Kingdom. The trip hit its first hiccup when he started throwing up on everybody in line for Space Mountain.
posted by Curry at 3:15 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh hell. I learned how to drive on acid. (Not recommended.)

I randomly decided to drop before gym class one day, not remembering that I had driver's ed later on in the afternoon. It wasn't even my day to drive, but the girl who was meant to be driving was out sick, and next thing I knew, I was whizzing along the Interboro Parkway at what seemed to be ridiculously high speeds. (I was, in fact, going about 25mph.)

(for non-nyc residents, the interboro pkwy is a horrifyingly narrow highway, with numerous sharp turns of doom and no shoulder, upon which no sane & sober human being should ever be forced to drive, much less a helplessly giggling 16 year old on acid. I'm a fucking awesome driver now, though. Hm.)
posted by elizardbits at 3:22 PM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

And driving while twisted is a necessary rite of initiation.

Once, I found it incredibly hilarious that my friend who was tripping couldn't figure out how to work his own remote for his TV, until I remembered that he had just driven the four of us home from downtown Washington, DC moments before.
posted by empath at 3:24 PM on February 5, 2009

Soon, he'll be dosing people for a living. Funny how life turns out that way.

Yes, hilarious.
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:25 PM on February 5, 2009

Questions of veracity aside, I'm glad its very hard to get acid around here. I can't imagine what I would do. Would I be arrogant enough to try and ride it out, or just called the whole thing off? I know for sure no way I could have kept from at least telling the adults I trusted.

Well, who am I kidding. I would have lost my shit in the bookstore, seniors or no seniors, experience or no experience. Yikes.
posted by absalom at 3:26 PM on February 5, 2009

Oh, no, I misread - one drop, which the kid equates to one or two doses. Hm. Pure LSD, anyway, I guess? Lucky if senseless kid.

I'm with the rest on the Scooby/windowpane thing - author has either never actually done any acid and is making this story up completely or...okay, maybe that's a bit extreme, but, still, I think there's a lot of fluff in this story. If he did the things he said he did, there wouldn't be any confusion over inherent properties of solid vs. soaked into printed paper.

Seems it's not super-rare to have no hallucinations. I was starting to think it was freakishly anomalous.

Involuntary/surprise dosing? Ugh. So much lack of care, here. At minimum, this is what makes people feel justified in crazy jail terms for possessing a small amount of a substances that's largely harmless if used appropriately and conscientiously.

In '87, I was in a car with a young lady who was tripping really hard. We'd all been to a punk show earlier and she'd offered to give us a ride to one of the restaurants everyone else was headed to...Denny's or somesuch. She had insisted upon driving but soon had issues with thinking the lines were curving (they were not) and moving around (ditto) and saying stuff to her (please pull over!) and leading her into a local parking lot like airfield signalers - flashing, waving, and lining up along a non-obviously marked path - which, as you can likely surmise, had nothing to do with reality. So, we're swerving along, going from one side of the road to the other, taking sudden turns, going offroad on an esplanade so she can pull into said parking lot, and I'm in the backseat trying so hard to not busybody her into a panic attack. When we got out of that car, I immediately declared I was getting home some other way. We all went in to eat, she ended up leaving to meet other people, and we brought up our crazy ride story as often as possible for months.

Every trip story I've ever encountered is begging to be transcribed here to go with the rest of yours, but time is short. Here's my favourite, which is actually belongs to one of my brothers:

I was at home relaxing after a sodden night out with friends. My phone rings, someone picks it up and hands it to me. Guy on the other end is a friend of the brother and says I need to talk to him...by the way, he's on acid.
"What? Why do I need to talk to him?"
"He thinks his leg has fallen off."
"Which leg?"
"Uhhhh...right leg? I'm not sure. He's freaking out. He thinks it's bleeding." He hands the phone off at this point.
Within a moment, I've got a panting younger brother on the phone.
"Ditther?" (er...that's Irish-Twin-speak for "sister")
"Yep, I'm here, Bopper."
"My leg. It's. Fallen. Off."
"Who told you that?"
"[lists friends, including the one I just spoke to] and they say they can't figure out how to put it back onandI'mgettingscaredanditwon'tstopbleedingandIcan'tstandup!" Then he wails.
"Put [asshole friend] back on the phone. Sit down. Breathe deep until you get the phone back."
Asshole friend delivers a hesitant "...h...h...hello?"
"So, that was fun, huh? You enjoying his bad trip? Making your night better?"
"It wasn't me! It was [list of other asshole friends]! I'm trying to help! Ididn'tthinkhewouldtakeitsoseriously...I'm sorry." Now he sounds like he's going to cry, too. Blessed nineteen-year-olds.
"Tell him you see his leg, now."
[away from the receiver, slightly] "DUDE! I see your leg!" [delay] "He doesn't believe me."
"Go touch his leg. Squeeze it at the knee and calf. Give him the phone before you do that."
"Okay," he literally sniffles into the phone.
"Ditther? I'm scared. Where's my leg? I'm bleeding!"
"You're not bleeding. Your leg is right there. Look at it. You can see it. It's coming out the other hole of whatever pants you're wearing. Look at your socks. See your socks?"
"Yes."
"Do they both have legs coming out of them?"
"No."
"Look again. Is [asshole friend] touching you?" (that sounds kind of creepy, now that I think about it from a remove. huh.)
"N...yes. He is. He's got his hand on my pant-leg."
"Can you feel his hand?"
"No....yes! YES! YES! I can feel his hand!"
"Check your socks for legs."
"I'VE GOT TWO LEGS! I'VE GOT TWO LEGS! THANKS, DITTHER!" *click*

I credit a very large amount of vodka for being able to accept being hung up on at that point as the most logical conclusion to the entire episode. He does not remember any of it.
posted by batmonkey at 3:35 PM on February 5, 2009 [13 favorites]

Isn't that one of Learys Laws, "Thou Shalt Not Dose Thy Friends Unaware"? Not that a kid would know that. Had someone dose me and friend once with a mixture of PCP and Cocaine. I'll not even get into how terrifying that night was. Next day we returned and promptly beat the crap out of him. I'm sure my buddy would have killed him if he thought he could've got away with it.

You dont do that shit. Never.
posted by elendil71 at 3:37 PM on February 5, 2009

Threads like this are why we need anonymous posting.

People who I don't know and are not me have some cool stories to share.

Like the day the Dutch DJ took out 6 different unlabeled eye droppers out of his closet, squirted a few drops of each on different quadrants of business cards and said "I don't remember which is which, but they are all good". The people who I don't know and are not me ate the whole card in a 36 hour period for their first trip.

This story sounds a little bit too embellished, but it is known know that dosing an acid head and dosing a virgin have very different effects. The people who are not me have stayed in houses where every time you eat something from the fridge you risk a trip. And it was fine.
posted by dirty lies at 3:38 PM on February 5, 2009

Apparently I'm really missing out, always wanted to try LSD.

My one experiment with shrooms resulted in massive time distortion and overwhelming horniness.
posted by davros42 at 3:39 PM on February 5, 2009

Ok, so, psychedelic mefi meetup? Anyone? If we wait for summer we can go to the botanical gardens!
posted by fuq at 3:45 PM on February 5, 2009 [14 favorites]

For me, I rarely got visuals during my trip. I would sometimes think I had seen something flash by in my peripheral vision, and I would sometimes have paranoid moments where I thought someone in the crowd was scowling at me or staring at me, but otherwise nothing much.

Coming down, however, I always had two predictable visual trips: 1) patterned surfaces like tiled floors would begin to bubble as I stared at them, waiting to finally get home / fall asleep; 2) momentary "dirty" trips, where suddenly everything I looked at seemed to be covered with a thin layer of grime. The "dirty" trips usually lasted no more than 10 seconds or so, and after they had happened to me a few times, I knew they were just illusions, even when tripping. Also, post-rave, it wasn't out of the ordinary for everything to be covered in grime, anyway.

One huge exception to my "no visuals" claim was this one time at a rave held at the Carribean Cultural Club in London, Ontario in 96 or 97 (I can't recall the name of the promoter, but I think it was Morpheus). A friend of mine hooked me up with her acid dealer but warned me that she had just taken some and they were totally weak. So I bought two and swallowed them right away, rather than letting them sit in my mouth.

A few minutes later, my friend comes back and tells me, "Holy shit! Those tabs are actually really strong, they just take a while to kick in!"

And so, about half an hour later, I was immersed in an undulating, day-glo landscape, and all of the other dancers in the crowd turned into spinning, helical columns of light. At some point, some friendly kids from Kitchener decided to look after me and feed me an orange, which probably helped focus me a bit.

Then shit hit the fan when a notoriously borderline/histrionic member of my friends declared that someone had slipped "heroin" in her water and demanded to go home right away.
posted by LMGM at 3:47 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Then shit hit the fan when a notoriously borderline/histrionic member of my friends declared that someone had slipped "heroin" in her water

You knew that girl too?! Wow.
posted by flaterik at 4:07 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

"Like he was a Vonnegut fan, or Kurt Vonnegut gave him LSD?"

Like Kurt Vonnegut gave him LSD, then Vonnegut proceeded to get shitfaced drunk and pass out on his kitchen table.

Regarding the windowpane thing: Well, y'know, both my folks did a shit-ton of acid back in their days (which is why I have these flipper hands), but I still had to explain to them that strychnine in acid was an urban legend.

Re: Sanders—He's someone that I've never managed to see live, and I'm always afraid that he won't live up to my expectations. His 2003 album with Hamid Drake, called Spirits, was pretty fuckin' rad though (and Drake is always worth catching).

Re: Hallucinations—I never really got them either, at least on acid. MDMA gives me repeated patterns manifesting in the air, but neither shrooms nor acid produces hallucinations outside of the visual distortion range, and I've done a fair amount of good shit. While it could be that there're simply different responses to the drug, which is possible especially with something that wildly subjective, I tend to think of the folks telling the "then I turned into tinfoil and crumpled into the sea" sort of stories as full of shit. You're more likely to hallucinate from alcohol poisoning.
posted by klangklangston at 4:13 PM on February 5, 2009

December Boy- I for sure hallucinated things out of thin air to the point where I would lose any real frame of reference. I'd hallucinate a pattern on the wall but then the pattern itself would distort and then the distortion would distort- overlay after overlay until everything real was buried under a living, breathing alien landscape. I don't think this is that uncommon with the good shit.

Sure, geometric patterns and stuff like that, but when I think "hallucinate", I think like seeing little green leprechauns dancing around a tree and telling you dirty limericks. Seeing objects/people/whatever that aren't really there and interacting with them. As far as quality, I've had it in every form and of every varying quality - geltabs, blotter, liquid straight from the Visene bottle dropped on animal crackers, etc. etc. The extent of the visuals was never anything more than kaleidoscope color patterns and stuff pulsating and swirling around. The mental insights were always more interesting than the visuals. I only got really heavy visuals off mushrooms. Again, it effects different people different ways.
posted by DecemberBoy at 4:13 PM on February 5, 2009

MDMA gives me repeated patterns manifesting in the air

You sure it was MDMA? Often when you would buy "ecstasy" in the late 90s, you'd be more likely to get 2-CT-7 or some other PiKHAL research chemical, since it was easier to just order the shit than it was to illegally produce real MDMA back when RCs were legal. Whenever I had MDMA that I had on good authority was real, it was all physical sensations.
posted by DecemberBoy at 4:19 PM on February 5, 2009

Ok, so, psychedelic mefi meetup? Anyone? If we wait for summer we can go to the botanical gardens!

There will be a 10 year gala meetup some time this year in New Orleans and Amsterdam. There could easily be an optional electric love-in* as a side event to the Amsterdam meetup for those interested. I am eager and willing to provide safe coaching/event management for any neophytes. When the time is nearer we can clarify the details.

It is cheap to fly to Amsterdam from the East Coast. I'd really be happy if my "Come to Amsterdam and take mushrooms" advice was finally heeded by anyone.

*LSD is, sadly, not legally available in the Netherlands, but fresh mushrooms are sold openly.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:20 PM on February 5, 2009 [8 favorites]

I got to hang out with my mum once when I was on mushrooms. It was great.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:23 PM on February 5, 2009

Oh, man, include me in for the psychedelic meetup!!!!

Is there some place where we can bring instruments and play music?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:24 PM on February 5, 2009

For the record, I've taken LSD a couple of thousand times (mostly while living in Santa Cruz in the 80's, heh) and I never felt like a giant colored anything. If I was a HS teacher, I would be hinting to the class: "so, here's my cup of coffee, would be just terrible if you dosed me. Yep. Just terrible."

If you want to see "true hallucinations" (things and people that aren't "really" there) try DMT. LSD just isn't that good for that.

Driving on LSD isn't that big a deal on less than large doses. But don't do it anyway.

MeFi psychedelic meetup? Sure. Could kill two birds with one stone and have it a Burning Man. I just said the wrong thing, didn't I?
posted by telstar at 5:01 PM on February 5, 2009

Most amusing/horrifying sentence I ever heard at an afterparty:

"My mom just ate a whole bunch of mushrooms, puked and passed out in the bathroom."

Sure enough, there was a very nice, very sick, and very tripping 50 year old lady sitting on the bathroom floor, leaning her head over into the tub.

The bathroom wall was covered with holographic wrapping paper, and there was a strobe light in there. It couldn't have been helping her nausea. She manage to recover enough a an hour or so later to join everybody else, but it was a bad scene for her a while.

Kids-- Talk to your parents about drugs. Before its too late, and they end up wearing UFOs and armfuls of candy at a party full of 20 year old ravers, vomiting on the floor.
posted by empath at 5:03 PM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

If you want epic hallucinations, get up out of an armchair really quickly.
posted by turgid dahlia at 5:13 PM on February 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

When I was in my mid-twenties, I decided it would be amusing to take some acid around midnight while staying in the hospital overnight awaiting surgery scheduled for 6:00 AM the next morning to repair and replace some torn ligaments and tendons in my left hand.

I couldn't sleep after that (one of the only times in my life that's happened to me), so I got out of bed in my gown and walked the halls for a couple of hours until a supervising nurse saw me passing by for the third time and made me go back to bed.

All the small glows of light in the hospital were just incredibly beautiful to me that night. I felt like a living astronomical telescope viewing all the most colorful nebulae of the universe. But the muffled cries and groans of people in pain that I heard through some of the partially open doors as I walked past came close to tearing me apart-- I had no defenses against those, for some reason.

The next morning during surgery, which was done under a local anesthetic, I was still quite high. I remember details of the pattern of pink and green tiles on the walls of the OR; I tried to look over at my hand to see what it would look like with the skin opened up and peeled back, but some drapery and a big pillow-like object were blocking my view, probably by design, and the anesthesiologist restrained me when I tried to raise my head too far.

I had no pain, but my sense of touch was still very much operational, and I could feel all the incisions and scrapings of the bones in exquisite detail. The most intense and shocking moments came when my surgeon pounded a nail through the big joint of my little finger to stabilize it and give the tendon a chance to reattach.
posted by jamjam at 5:16 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Holy crap that's amazing, and I wouldn't do that in a million years. I could barely handle Hallowscream at Busch Gardens, let alone major invasive surgery...
posted by empath at 5:21 PM on February 5, 2009

My involuntary dosing story: Back in the late 80's, a friend of a friend won some nice money ($30k?) in the California state lottery, and to celebrate he had a very nice party for his circle of friends, maybe a dozen in all. This was to be a sit down dinner and party at his parent's condo in Marin, his parents being conveniently out of town. We were mostly Dead Heads, of the slacker job holding/college attending variety. None of us were strangers to LSD, with the notable exception of one couple that were friends of the host's brother. They were moderate drinkers but had no experience with psychedelics.

There was some good liquid acid going around at the time, and several in the group had vials. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one prankster (not me) thought it would be a great idea to put a drop at the bottom of each wine glass as he helped set the table.

The meal started with a toast, and we began coming around to the acid sometime during desert. The host may have been the first to figure out what was happening as the conversation cycled louder and louder, and he began to use his spoon to play a counterpoint to the conversation on his wine glass -- sort of an "aha!" moment, as he realized that what he was feeling was something more than just pot and alcohol. All eyes turned to the suspected prankster, who laughed off the accusation in a way that pretty much confirmed that we had been dosed. At that point, there wasn't much to do but go with it.

In retrospect, most of us were actually pretty sanguine with being dosed -- this was a time when none of us had kids or other real responsibilities, and this was a Party-with-a-capital-P, after all -- but the other, non-Dead Head couple was justifiably PISSED OFF, and spent the next several hours in a quieter part of the house, being babysat by the host's brother. Luckily, no lasting harm was done: the acid was very clean and the dilution was such that one drop was only enough for a fairly mild trip. Everyone was invited to stay the night, and the Party rolled on.

Still, as I've thought about this over the years, I've always questioned just what the fuck was going through my friend's head as he dosed everyones wine glasses, and why he didn't give that other couple some non-dosed glasses to drink from? He could have still pranked the rest of us, which would have been wrong, but not nearly as wrong as what he did. My friend wasn't a sociopath, but he was the sort of person who was capable of ingesting large amounts of anything and keeping it together, and always assumed that other wanted to do the same. The best I can come up with is that he figured, (incorrectly!) that everyone at the party had experience with acid, and he didn't want to dose alone.

The outcome of this story isn't very climactic: when we had sobered up the next day, the prankster got a very stern talking to by the host and the host's brother, and he admitted that what he did was irresponsible. He personally apologized to everyone at the party, and AFAIK he never pulled that sort of shit again.

And yes, this is a sockpuppet account, as my main account is tied to my name, and for employment purposes I'd rather keep my drug stories separate from that account.
posted by plowhand at 5:35 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

"You sure it was MDMA? Often when you would buy "ecstasy" in the late 90s, you'd be more likely to get 2-CT-7 or some other PiKHAL research chemical, since it was easier to just order the shit than it was to illegally produce real MDMA back when RCs were legal. Whenever I had MDMA that I had on good authority was real, it was all physical sensations."

Yeah, it was good ol' regular MDMA. Like is common, I'm having trouble articulating this in objective language, but it was extremely similar to the repeated patterns that come when you close your eyes and your brain makes shapes out of eyelid noise; definitely more noticeable in low light. It's only really been present once, though I've had it as background more than once while rolling. When it was present, it was like an overlay of one of those cube designs where the planes shift (like the q-bert background, only monochromatic), in the shape of a cross.

I doubt it was research chems, though I have to say that I was never really able to get ahold of them (the couple of times I had folks on the internet recommend pharmacies abroad, things looked too sketchy to trust with my credit card info), simply because the other body and emotional effects were consistent across sources. I mean, it's possible that someone adulterated the MDMA, but that seems like something they would have mentioned in an attempt to get me to pay more.

I've had similar, but more pronounced, effects when hippy-flipping, but mostly hippy-flipping just made me Bull God horny.
posted by klangklangston at 5:45 PM on February 5, 2009

And yes, this is a sockpuppet account, as my main account is tied to my name, and for employment purposes I'd rather keep my drug stories separate from that account.

mathowie? is that you?
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:49 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Everyone should try LSD, I mean that sincerely and without reservations. LSD will make you a better person. Sure there are bad trips, but bad trips happen because you aren't doing it right.

I appreciate that your goal here is to share joyousness and wonder, but please don't be so absolutist. Some of us (I'm not alone here, am I?) have serious mental illnesses and know well to stay away from serious drugs. There is no way I could do it "right", I don't think. I've had enough traumatic experiences and ended up in the hospital more than once on lesser stuff. For some of us the risk is too great. Too many bullets in the gun for that particular version of Russian roulette.

Seriously though, you never know when someone has an undiagnosed mental illness that will make everything get horrific. Be careful, and know how to get help if you need it, for yourself or your friends. For god's sake at least keep one sober person present.
posted by marble at 5:50 PM on February 5, 2009 [7 favorites]

I've accidentally dosed myself (while cleaning out the freezer I found and ate some unfamiliar looking chocolates; Thanks last summer's house-sitter!). At first I thought I was coming down with some flu-bug, but after a short while figured out what was happening. It was my first trip in 20+ years and it ended up being a fun, if unexpected, ride.

That said, it seems like the worst trips are the ones that I or my friends prepared for, or had some sort of a preconceived reason for. The best ones resulted from spur-of-the-moment "lets drop acid and laugh our brains out" scenarios.
posted by squalor at 5:50 PM on February 5, 2009

"these records are arguing and I need to make them get along... it'd be a lot easier if they weren't warped. I never left my records in the sun, what happened?"

"erik, those records aren't warped"

"oh. hm. at least they're getting along now" *drops the next bassline*
posted by flaterik at 5:51 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Well, that story was worth the paper it was printed on.

I'd drop acid in a heartbeat, provided it was in my own home, where I feel safest.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:21 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

As someone who has enjoyed a wide variety of psychedelic experiences, I gotta say that this kid should have been made to understand in no uncertain terms that giving someone any drug, particularly one as powerful as LSD, is an act of violence that can have dire unintended consequences. Even if you think it will be fun for that person, you could be terribly wrong. It's rule number one in the intoxication handbook, which should also include rules like "understand your drugs - research them before you take them" and "it's neither a contest nor a race - only take what you can take" and "never give someone intoxicants as an act of malice or coercion." One man's groove is another's poison.

I also kind of wish the teacher had said this, after he'd figured out that Max had dosed him:

"Max. Maaaaaaxxxx. I know you've never had a job before, so you are unaware how much it sucks to have to try to hold it together when you're in a position of responsibility and you're tripping your face off. So I have a job for you. You are going to be my special friend all through this trip today. You are going to stay with me, and make sure everything goes smoothly and runs on time and without a hitch. You are going to help keep me on task and on point. You are going to figure out a way to do this without so much as hinting to another soul what is going on. Nobody. If everything goes well, you get out of this with a long stern talking to and a paper to write. If I even remotely suspect you have fucked with my head even a little bit, and believe me, I will know, you will be expelled and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows, among other things.

I'm sure we understand each other, yes? Good, because my legs have turned into noodles and the sky is full of green and purple mandalas. Help me walk, Max."
posted by louche mustachio at 6:35 PM on February 5, 2009 [7 favorites]

I wish it was more readily available. We have great parks and woods around here, it would be swell.
posted by everichon at 6:36 PM on February 5, 2009

I love how LSD is just freakin' abundent in some people's lives. They turn a corner and, bam!, someone's offering to dose them.

Please enlighten those of us who don't have such ready access: how in the holy hell do you find that shit (as an adult with a responsible job &c)?

On another note, I smoked a bowl in a big hippy-dippy love-in rave party in S.F., and was way the hell more wasted than pot ever ought to make me. The one notable symptom, other than being completely out of it for hours, was a lot of teeth-grinding. I assume the sweats and thirst were due more to heat stroke than the drug.

Any idea what friendlies in S.F. might dose their weed with? I'm thinking it might have been E, but I don't think smoking it would be particularly effective.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:52 PM on February 5, 2009

Any idea what friendlies in S.F. might dose their weed with? I'm thinking it might have been E, but I don't think smoking it would be particularly effective.

Weed is just that good these days (or at least it can be). If it tasted nice, it may have just been a really high THC content. California and most of Canada regularly have pot with up to 30-odd% THC. I find that mixing any drug with marijuana seriously heightens the effect. Back in my chronic e days, I'd bring at least a dozen pre-rolled joints to the party. I'd basically light one off the other. These days I'm strictly a hash man. An innocent weed joint can seriously fuck you up when you least expect it. Growers have really perfected the art.
posted by gman at 7:11 PM on February 5, 2009

If that was uncut weed, then my home grow and the stuff I purchase is complete and utter shite.

It's the teeth-grinding thing that makes me think it was cut. I've tripped balls on weed, and never ground my teeth.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:40 PM on February 5, 2009

Bubble hash. Doubleplus good!
posted by five fresh fish at 7:41 PM on February 5, 2009

Please enlighten those of us who don't have such ready access: how in the holy hell do you find that shit (as an adult with a responsible job &c)?

It's really all about knowing where to go & how to go about the business.

First up, take yourself off to the right part of town. Every town has one of these, and it shouldn't be hard to ask around & find out where it is. Saunter casually down the road, not in too much of an obvious hurry, and make brief eye contact with shady looking types who are loitering there. They might say something to you, like "Hey, bro, are you looking for something?"

Give them a knowing look, and stroll around the next corner, giving them a final glance before you turn out of sight.

Within the next two weeks or so, a carrier pigeon should arrive at your house, with the name of a bar or cafe scrawled on a small message. Go to that place, and fill out the answer to #14 down in the crossword in your local newspaper. Make sure that you use a newspaper that's exactly three days old - I can't stress this enough! Leave the newspaper on the table, and go buy yourself a chocolate flavoured milk from the nearest 7-11. Drink 1/3 of it, then shove it right down to the bottom of the first garbage bin that you see. Return after at least 24 hours, but before the garbagemen empty the bins, and you will find what you were after in little ziplock baggie immersed in the remainder of the milk. Note that your friendly invisible contact will have drunk 1/3 of the chocolate milk, so don't get too upset about that; it's a tradition, a bit like leaving milk & cookies out for Santa.

Hope this clears things up for you.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:48 PM on February 5, 2009 [11 favorites]

what
what
what
what
what
whatwhatwhatwhatwhat
posted by not_on_display at 7:50 PM on February 5, 2009

Once in Ensenada, Baja California, I arrived at a luxury hotel after a few weeks in Mexico Sur. Since we were due to cross the border back into the US the next day, we decided to get a luxury hotel room with our left over money. The room and the view was nice, so I decided to drop that evening, which is unusual for me, since I like to drop in the morning and get to sleep that night. Anyway, I was walking the halls very late and looking at the nice painting in the hallway, when I noticed that there was a very loud party happening a few doors down. These guys were whooping it up, and when I walked by their door, I heard them exclaiming things like: "try some of this, asshole...no mine is better"...that type of thing. I wanted to go inside this total party room, but since I knew no one and couldn't think of a good crash, I let it go. The next day when we were checking out, I noticed that the room that had the big party had many Mexican drug cops (recognizable by their headwear) walking in and out.
posted by telstar at 8:06 PM on February 5, 2009

I love how LSD is just freakin' abundent in some people's lives.

On the east coast, it was in abundance from around 1990-2000. It was just one of those things that were around. In fact, when I was in high school in the early 90s, it was easier to get LSD than alcohol-- I mean, I could buy it in home room. Hell-- it was harder to buy regular candy in school than LSD. By the late 90s, I had friends who kept vials of it in their fridge, and they weren't even dealers. It was just easy to find and dirt cheap so they always had some. You'd drop by their house and it would be like -- 'want a beer, wine cooler, sugar cube?' I mean, you could buy a 6 pack of beer for $6 or 3 hits of acid-- what was the better value-for-dollar?

The impression I got was that when they busted that big silo operation out in Kansas in 2000 it pretty much wiped out the supply nationwide, and it hasn't recovered since. I haven't seen it around for years, and I wouldn't have any idea how to find it if I wanted to.
posted by empath at 8:23 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Please enlighten those of us who don't have such ready access: how in the holy hell do you find that shit (as an adult with a responsible job &c)?

No can do. One of the few drugs the US police state has been successful in making scarce is LSD. If you want some crack cocaine however, you are no more than 10 minutes away by car anywhere in the USA.
posted by telstar at 8:24 PM on February 5, 2009

*drool*
It's been 8 years, which is way too long.
posted by grubby at 8:32 PM on February 5, 2009

No need to go to disneyland in my experience. Going to the grocery store was just as cool when dosed and I'm not sure if starring at the ants on the ground at disneyland would really necessitate the cost of admission. But damn if I haven't had some introspective thoughts watching the ants, real or not.
posted by premortem at 8:34 PM on February 5, 2009

Please, somebody, make the drug stories stop.
posted by unSane at 8:39 PM on February 5, 2009

Any idea what friendlies in S.F. might dose their weed with? I

Sometimes, rarely, bowls are dusted with coke, but it's hard to imagine that happening without your knowledge.
posted by flaterik at 8:41 PM on February 5, 2009

I try not to read acid narratives; I'm afraid that when I get around to taking it, I'll be too influenced by them to really see what it's like.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:09 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

"Often when you would buy "ecstasy" in the late 90s, you'd be more likely to get 2-CT-7 or some other PiKHAL research chemical"

1994-95 were all about the 2C-B for me. And Jesus Lapdancing Christ, that was some crazy shit.

"On the east coast, it was in abundance from around 1990-2000."

Yeah, and at 50¢ a hit, it's a wonder I'm still able to form coherent sentences.

I really hope my boss sticks to his usual routine of total internets ignorance here.
posted by elizardbits at 9:10 PM on February 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

I was dosed at a party once, I was so straight edge you could have cut steel with me at the time (maybe not by choice, but I digress). Anyway; I was out with the "Easton Posse" (represet!) roaming the housing estates of Easton in Bathgate and not feeling particularly odd or anything, excepting that everyone seemed to be interested in how I was doing. More precisely everyone wanted to know how I felt.

This alternated between "fine" , "alright" and finally "whit is up wi yeez?"

Brian Feenie finally fessed up that they had dosed my Irn Bru bottle "wi a wee tab" in an effort to get me high (they spent most days high, why not the wee boy frae Canada too, eh?) The Irn Bru must have diluted it to nothing or they didn't actually have acid because I felt NOTHING out of the ordinary (this was a whole bottle, not a glass of it)

Years later I was again involuntarily dosed by a friend and experienced several hours of seriously messed up hallucinations of the Jacob's Ladder Variety that I will take to my grave, but that first time, really nothing.

In high-school I hung around occasionally with a small cabal of alterna-youths who talked big about Dosing a teacher but the "cool" teacher got wind of it and told us that he'd report it to the police if any kind of "weirdness" befell said teacher.
posted by NiteMayr at 9:11 PM on February 5, 2009

Before you guys get too deep into planning the Amsterdam meetup, you should know that you can't get mushrooms in stores there anymore. The ban has been in place since December 1 of last year.
posted by bink at 9:13 PM on February 5, 2009

I try not to read acid narratives; I'm afraid that when I get around to taking it, I'll be too influenced by them to really see what it's like.

Hah.

I think you'll find that fragmentation of consciousness and complete ego-death is not a subtle, difficult to notice phenomenon. I doubt you'll be worrying about how it matches up with what you read about when you're confronted with the howling void of nothingness at the center of reality.
posted by empath at 10:06 PM on February 5, 2009 [6 favorites]

People who dose others without consent are despicable shitheads. I can feel no sympathy for anyone who gets the living crap beaten out of him for pulling such a stunt.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:19 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Okay, after saying above that you can't describe it, I'm going to attempt to describe it.

What you see, in normal life, isn't really what you think it is. You're not a camera, directly translating photons into an image. You're actually 'seeing' a 3d model of the world, generated by your brain, which is BASED on the photons entering your eyes. Most of what your visual cortex puts together though, is based on memory, not sight. That's how you can picture your environment even without directly looking at it, even stuff behind you, or in the other room, or hell, the road you drive to work every day. You know exactly what it looks like without actually being there.

It's how you drive down a road and don't even see that a building that's been there every day for the past 5 years has been torn down until somebody actually points it out to you. Or, when you walk up to someone that you think you recognize, and then as you get closer, suddenly you realize that its not who you thought it was at all-- but there's this moment when you can still see who you thought it was, before the image is entirely replaced by the actual person in front of you.

Your brain picks out patterns, shapes, lines, and takes shortcuts to generate models. If you see a railing go behind a building, and a railing continuing on the other side, your brain creates a model with that railing continuing all the way around and behind it, even if you can't actually see it. You use lines of perspective to determine distance and size, etc.

It's trickery and illusion, evolutionary shortcuts. The point of your visual cortex and eye isn't to give you an accurate depiction of reality, the point is survival. You're creating a physical model of the world and simulating potential outcomes, all the time, you can't help it. No matter how much you want to 'see' the way the world really is, you can't.

And it's not just that you're modelling the world, you're also modelling yourself. Your brain is a bunch of semi-independent processes with nothing really 'in charge'. There's a part of your brain that acts as an ego, but mostly what it does is generate a narrative, about why things happen, or why you choose to do things. You also think of yourself as an 'actor' with 'will' who makes things happen, not something that is simply another consequence of cause and effect, like a rock rolling down a hill.

What seems to happen on LSD is something goes screwy with that model. It starts with a certain 'fuzziness' to reality, at the edges. Things seem indistinct. There's a weird doubling, where, say you look at shadows, and see both shadows and a face, at the same time, or it goes back and forth between them. You're not seeing any sensory stimulus that's aren't there, you're just not interpreting what IS there in the normal way, though if you really concentrate, you can force things to work somewhat.

Eventually, though, the model just totally breaks down. You're not even really capable of interpreting anything any more, you're just kind of seeing raw data flowing through your eyes -- colors, shapes, etc, or maybe not even that-- at that point, its hard to even call it seeing.

And more than that, the narrative that you're always telling yourself about your life and why things happen? First it gets confusing, then sometimes you have multiple streams of thought fighting for attention, then things start to get random, surreal, free association, and then finally, just gone. Cause and effect? Again, things get wierd-- effects happen before causes, etc, but eventually - Gone. The distinction between you and not-you? Gets wobbly, you become 10 or 100 feet tall, maybe you merge with the chair your sitting on, or the girl you're making out with, but that too, eventually -- Gone. And that's where words fail. Time no longer exists, you were never any way but this, there is no you, there is no why. There is only....

An eternity passes. If anybody ever asks me how long it lasts, I always say an eternity. I don't know how long in real life the peak lasts, maybe an hour, two hours? Maybe minutes. But it doesn't matter, because whatever it was, time wasn't involved. When you come out the other side, you are not the same person that went in. Your habits of thought have all been disrupted, and you're building a new you from scratch when you're coming down.

And then you start giggling like a maniac for the next 3 or 4 hours and have really funny, amazing, free flowing conversations with your friends, and you're convinced that you've just discovered the meaning of life, directly experienced god and the infinite, etc, and that you absolutely MUST tell everybody about this.

And you realize that you can't even begin to describe it, except by telling funny (to you) stories about how you locked yourself in the car. And then a few weeks later, you realize that you can't even really remember what it was that you thought was so mind-blowing, and all your friends are sick to death of hearing about it.

But something about you changed, even if nobody else notices it.

What's really amazing to me is how much you can actually 'function' when you're like this. You can have conversations with people, even like get stuff done. I was pretty close to a peak one time when my parents came home, and I ended up having to explain to my dad how to use Word on his new computer, while internally, I was just totally losing my shit. I'm sure my dad new SOMETHING was going on with me, but i mean, i could barely even recognize my dad, or form coherent thoughts in my head, or even see the computer screen as anything but a swirl of colors at that point, and yet i was carrying on a conversation on auto-pilot and using the mouse, etc. It kind of makes you realize how fragmented your brain really is, and how much of what you do operates on the level of the subconscious, when you can do things like ride a bike, or drive or mix records, or god knows what else while consciously, you barely exist any more.

So anyway, that's the best I can do at explaining what its 'really' like, but even that isn't even close. You can nod along, and imagine that you understand what its like, but you simply can't stop your brain from doing the things it does simply by imagining it or willing it so. You can't think your way into not thinking.

The only way to understand is to actually experience it, and even then you'll never really be able to understand and integrate the experience. And that's btw, a GOOD trip. A bad trip is actually exactly the same, except that becoming one with the universe is a terrifying experience, and not full of love. It's hard to know which one you'll have before it happens though. But even 'bad' trips have their good sides.

I used to recommend that everyone do it, but now I don't I think only particular kinds of people are capable of dealing with it, and they know who they are, and don't need any encouragement from anybody else. If you don't think you should be doing it, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
posted by empath at 10:59 PM on February 5, 2009 [49 favorites]

One thing I should add is how natural and real and beautiful all of that feels in a trip that's going well. It may be confusing and scary if you don't just go with the flow, but if things are all going well, everything looks brighter and more beautiful and more colorful and more real, even while all the categories are breaking down and things are falling apart. It's why you can stare at a sculpture or a marble column or flowers (my god, flowers!) for hours. You've simply never seen anything like the way you're seeing it then. There's a certain 'rightness' to everything. Hard to describe, again. But I think I missed that in the initial description. There's just an undercurrent of joy and beauty, and paradoxically, a sense of understanding and purpose to everything.. when it's going well, at least.
posted by empath at 11:17 PM on February 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: {TRiPPiN BaLLS}
posted by metaplectic at 11:38 PM on February 5, 2009

goddamnit, empath
posted by flaterik at 12:47 AM on February 6, 2009

I try not to read acid narratives; I'm afraid that when I get around to taking it, I'll be too influenced by them to really see what it's like.

I don't think you should concern yourself too much with that theory.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:13 AM on February 6, 2009

Brian Feenie finally fessed up that they had dosed my Irn Bru bottle "wi a wee tab"

OK, that's it. I absolutely must trip out with a batch of Scotsmen before I die. Too cute!

Before you guys get too deep into planning the Amsterdam meetup, you should know that you can't get mushrooms in stores there anymore. The ban has been in place since December 1 of last year.

Well fuck me, and you can't smoke indoors either. Why have you abandoned me, Netherlands? I suddenly feel homeless again. Shit.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:02 AM on February 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Quotes from bink's link.

the decision to ban fresh magic - or psilocybin - mushrooms was taken after a 17-year-old French girl jumped to her death from one of Amsterdam's canal bridges in March after taking them

Sounds like they should tear down the bridges, or ban French teenagers. Nobody ever fell off a bridge that wasn't under the influence of magic mushrooms? Fuck does this anger me. The control zealots were just looking for a pretext, I guess they finally found a compelling one.

He said: "It's all the fault of tourists, especially the Brits. They misuse alcohol at home and come over here to do the same with hash and the so called 'magic mushrooms'."

No, it is the fault of the legislators who have decided to curb people's personal freedom.

But a city councillor said: "Despite Amsterdam having the world's most important collection of Rembrandts and Van Gogh and being home to the famous Concertgeboug Orchestra, the City is still perceived as a place where you go to buy drugs."

Funny, I always perceived it as the one place on the planet where I could feel free to be the person I am without committing a crime and risking imprisonment. I have been a contributor to the Dutch economy through multiple visits over many years for this very specific and important personal reason. In the heat of the moment right now I am thinking "FUCK YOU Amsterdam city council," and hoping that, like the butterfly effect, my lost custom is the straw that breaks the Dutch tourist economy.

Honestly, what a very sad day this is for me.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:26 AM on February 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

right now I am thinking "FUCK YOU Amsterdam city council," and hoping that, like the butterfly effect, my lost custom is the straw that breaks the Dutch tourist economy.

you know, i boycotted america throughout the whole of dubya's administration for the same kinds of reasons. it didn't quite work, although i'd like to take credit for the subprime crisis & the upcoming bankruptcy of the nation.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:43 AM on February 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Excellent empath.

Is your dad still typing letters using photoshop?
posted by strawberryviagra at 3:10 AM on February 6, 2009 [4 favorites]

I'll never look at you guys the same way again.
posted by gman at 4:11 AM on February 6, 2009

@submiqent: I hate to be late to the party and a noob, but isn't LSD soluble in water? Hence why spiking the city's water supply is impossible? This guy says he consumed LSD in his coffee. How possible is that?

The MSDS for LSD confirms that it is water-soluble. Not sure why you would think that makes it impossible to spike a city's water supply, unless you're confusing dissolving with disassociation (eg glucose dissolves in water, but the individual glucose molecules remain intact whereas table salt disassociates in water, and its molecules split up into Na+ and Cl- ions. LSD dissolves like glucose does). The real reason you can't spike a city's water supply with LSD is pretty much simple economics - you would need an impossibly large amount of it.

LSD is not a very stable compound - it degrades over time, and with heat - but I see no reason why you couldn't dose someone by putting it in their coffee.
posted by kcds at 5:12 AM on February 6, 2009

I'm sure I've said this before but oh who cares? The first time I had mushies was at a friend of a friend's place and it was in tea and it tasted revolting and I almost yacked. I didn't though. Anyway, we played a bad game of scrabble and then I went to the loo and it was a rainy day and the house had tiles in the bathroom. So I was sitting on the toilet and looked down and fuck me, there were cartoon characters everywhere on the floor. Every last smudge was a face and although they weren't actually talking to me they were very real and all they needed was a bit of shading here and there to make them actual. I still see them sometimes in the flooring that I have now. And then we went back to Brisbane to visit my friend's drug dealer who told us that he couldn't give a shit that some guy in Tasmania had just stalked and killed about 30 people and I was like oh please I just want to go home.

The trips I had just involved teethgrinding and laughing and some guy turning into Loki before me because he had googly eyes and I'd just read "Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul".

I think I prefer the mushies but now I'm old and no-one I know does anything except pot so it's something to tell my grandchildren in order to freak out my kids (in about 30 years time if I'm still alive then).
posted by h00py at 5:22 AM on February 6, 2009

Deep down there is an ephemeral and ineffable revelation, maybe it helps you to see that you are good, that it is good to be alive, life is good, life is love, it is all here with a connected structure and a meaning that can be shown to you for a very short and special time. And even long after you have forgotten it all, you know that it was revealed once and it is still true.

Everyone should try LSD, I mean that sincerely and without reservations. LSD will make you a better person.

N'uh uh. I merrily tripped when I was a kid, but it certainly did not make me a 'better person' as described. That sense of possibility of "connected structure" came from books, and then as I matured, was proved out through the love of my friends and family, and truly living.
posted by thinkpiece at 5:35 AM on February 6, 2009

I remember tripping once while watching At Close Range. I didn't understand what the hell was going on because I thought they were speaking Chinese.
posted by chillmost at 6:12 AM on February 6, 2009

Acid dumped in city water supply.
posted by empath at 7:10 AM on February 6, 2009

I once knew this girl who tripped on the SDSU campus and was convinced that the school was very clever and terribly well funded, because they had managed to work the image of their "Fighting Aztec" into EVERYTHING. Sidewalks, paint, bathrooms, sand, grass. It was everywhere... is what she told me.
posted by msali at 11:35 AM on February 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

empath: I think you'll find that fragmentation of consciousness and complete ego-death is not a subtle, difficult to notice phenomenon. I doubt you'll be worrying about how it matches up with what you read about when you're confronted with the howling void of nothingness at the center of reality.

Your Lacan is showing.
posted by LMGM at 5:02 PM on February 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

More Sartre, I've never read Lacan.
posted by empath at 5:18 PM on February 6, 2009

Well, replace Sartre's "nothingness" with "lack" and make it all about desire and disavowal, and you've got Lacan.

Also, a mirror should be involved at some point.
posted by LMGM at 5:44 PM on February 6, 2009

Stay away from the mirrors.
posted by Manjusri at 8:16 PM on February 6, 2009

Stay away from Sartre.

(he's the most mediocre hack novelist in all history; even Camus seems competent in comparison)
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:01 PM on February 6, 2009

His plays are OK. And once you understand that he had logorrhea, his writing makes more sense (though I have to say that I've never read his novels).
posted by klangklangston at 9:07 PM on February 6, 2009

The Old Wisdom was thus: In the city, trip only at night. For day trips, you want to be in nature.

I've never had a bad trip. I'm not sure I could, really. Acid puts me 'up', in a wonderful sort of way. My feet float above the ground about 10". The leaves on trees turn to gold, to herald my passage, then turn back as I move on. Ego death? Not for me, but maybe my ego isn't that central, anyway. I am me, and I know it. Well, maybe except that one time...

I became aware of the universe. Or, at least, a considerably large chunk of it. Or maybe I became the universe? It isn't entirely clear, nor does it matter too much. But scale can be very elastic, on acid. Star systems and galaxies are like atoms and molecules, and comprise a sentient being. That being becomes aware of the infinitesimal beings within itself, and desires communication. And it was at that point that the line between myself and the over-being became totally blurred.

Set, setting: Just me, 17 years old. Tripping and hitch-hiking, NYC to Portland. But that day was the first time the combination happened where I had acid, weed, music, and a bit of solitude, at the same time. Understand, music can make me trip by itself, especially back then. Someone picked me up and smoked me up (supposedly it was especially good stuff. Who knows, this was 1975). He put some music on, then had to go do something. I listened to the music, and looked out the window. The sunlight hit the clouds in just a certain way, and then it all went macro/micro. I don't recall anything particular about the rest of the day, probably I just mellowed out. The time period was quite short. Prior to this fun ride, I was had just my usual 'everything is beautiful and/or funny' experience. The reason I remember details is because I had a tape recorder with me, and recorded my thoughts.

Interesting fact: The 'acid' wasn't LSD. It was ALD-52, a chemical cousin. It was supplied by none other than Donny the Punk, who considered it a sacrament. Donny is dead now, and they can't put him in prison again. They killed him (AIDS due to prison rape).
posted by Goofyy at 10:04 PM on February 6, 2009 [2 favorites]

Hi Meatbomb!

Well fuck me, and you can't smoke indoors either. Why have you abandoned me, Netherlands? I suddenly feel homeless again. Shit.

The Amsterdam city council is trying to "clean up" the city's image, to attract a better class of tourists. They do that by first taking away all the attractions that bring a certain class of tourist here (hookers and blow, if you will), while apparently hoping that in, oh, several decades the city's image has improved enough to attract a different class of tourists. If those turn out to be too snotty or in possession of enough tastebuds to not visit any of the myriad of tourist-trap steakhouses that currently dominate the city centre, I'm all in favour.

You can still smoke indoors, but only pure hash/marijuana: no lacing your joints with tobacco.

If consuming 'shrooms made you puke because they taste ghastly, before the ban they used to sell it dissolved in chocolate. Worked wonders, apparently.

Meanwhile, this week one of the Dutch government coalition parties complained about receiving a phone call on Sunday about a new rescue plan for one of the recently nationalised banks, and they didn't consider it important enough to violate the day of the lord. WTF, Holland?
posted by LanTao at 5:11 PM on February 7, 2009

Oh, man, on the unexpected mushrooms tip—

I was housesitting for my parents and found these white chocolate things wrapped in foil in the back of the freezer, so I ate a couple and they were delicious. I was supposed to follow my girlfriend in my car back to her parents house in Lansing, an hour and a half drive, so that I could help her with cleaning and covering their pool while they were on vacation.

It was hot, goddamn hot. I was driving a tiny Tercel with no air conditioning, and black vinyl seats that radiated heat like they were radioactive. I was listening to Forcefield's Lord of the Ring Modulators, which goes something like blip bliip bliip woop WOOP woop even when sober.

And then the mushrooms started to kick in. It was all I could do to keep following my girlfriend, especially since that old Tercel couldn't get above 60, and the heat made everything wobble and the music was this throbbing, repetitive electronic cocoon…

When we finally got there, I was in no shape to help anyone with anything. I retreated to their basement, which was cool, and ended up watching, like, two hours worth of community access television. I was deeply concerned with the school board meetings and the electronic bulletin board and the classical music they played behind everything.

My girlfriend was pissed, no matter how I tried to describe what an incredible journey it was, or how unbelievably delicious those candies were (seriously, white chocolate, best mushroom delivery device ever).
posted by klangklangston at 10:39 AM on February 8, 2009 [2 favorites]

If consuming 'shrooms made you puke because they taste ghastly, before the ban they used to sell it dissolved in chocolate. Worked wonders, apparently.

Another trick to kill the taste is to wash them down with citrus (orange, grapefruit) juice.
posted by telstar at 2:32 PM on February 8, 2009

The real reason you can't spike a city's water supply with LSD is pretty much simple economics - you would need an impossibly large amount of it.

Plus, I believe the chlorine added to drinking water would make pretty short work of it. Not to mention the metal pipes, which would probably catalyze any degradation reactions. If adding LSD to a city's drinking supply were possible, I think we would have had at least a report or two of people trying it over the last 40+ years.
posted by telstar at 2:50 PM on February 8, 2009

I'd be careful with the grapefruit juice. It's contraindicated for a number of prescription meds. It'd be a bummer if it had bad interactions with your recreational drug.
posted by five fresh fish at 3:15 PM on February 8, 2009

Yes, grapefruit supposedly clogs up cytochrome P450 liver enzyme 2D6, which means that amine drugs should be rendered stronger, because 2d6 is too gummed up to metabolize them. But repeated personal bio experiments produce no noticeable effects with pre-treatment with grapefruit juice or whole grapefruit with various amine drugs. Of course, humans differ among themselves by a factor of 10 in how fast they metabolize the same drug, so grapefruit may not be the main factor anyway. I suspect the "grapefruit effect" may be a tad exaggerated.

Also, Joe Bageant released a column today in which he contrasted LSD with its antithesis, the current "mental health system."
posted by telstar at 6:03 PM on February 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

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