This is the story of how America got high, told from a personal point of view by someone who took part in many of the events that he reports in this book. Martin Torgoff has spent ten years interviewing and researching this book, and many of the people with whom he spoke are no longer alive (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Leary, etc). His intention was to write a history that could be the basis of meaningful dialogue about how society should regulate drugs. He doesn't romanticise or demonise drug use, but neither does he accept hopelessly glib slogans such as 'Just say no'. With roughly one-third of the population having used illegal drugs, it is clear that many Americans don't just say no. But discussion of drug policy is confined to a small section at the end of the book. This is a history, told mainly through the words of participants. The book covers the major drugs of the century: heroin, cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy, and amphetamines. It begins with the jazz musicians of the 1940's, through the Beat Generation of the fifties, the flower-power of the sixties, the wake-up call in the seventies to the designer drugs of the eighties and nineties. Through this history of drugs Martin Torgoff presents a facsinating social history of America over the last sixty years and shows how the use (and misuse) of drugs have shaped a nation.

Martin Torgoff has been a contributing editor at Interview and a producer for CNN "World Beat." He is a documentary filmmaker and the author of several books, including the bestselling Elvis: We Love You Tender and American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp, which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award. He lives in New York City with his wife and son

Preface

1

(4)

Fearless, Immune, and Ready for All

5

(12)

Bop Apocalypse

17

(51)

Psychedelic Spring

68

(37)

Everybody Must Get Stoned

105

(51)

White Light, White Heat

156

(18)

Next Stop Is Vietnam

174

(22)

Find the Cost of Freedom

196

(62)

The Golden Age of Marijuana

258

(36)

Out of the Closets and into the Streets

294

(14)

The Last Dance

308

(36)

Hangin' Bangin' and Slangin'

344

(22)

Spiritus Contra Spiritum

366

(21)

Nouveau Psychedelia

387

(33)

Just Say Know

420

(36)

The Temple of Accumulated Error

456

(19)

Acknowledgments

475

(2)

Notes

477

(32)

Bibliography

509

(16)

Index

525

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From Chapter Thirteen:The World's Oldest Cyberpunk

TheLos Angeles Timeshad called Terence McKenna "the Tim Leary of the 90s." McKenna had even used his own playful variation of Leary's infamous catchphrase of the Sixties: "Log on, tune in, and drop out." Even Tim Leary called McKenna "the Tim Leary of the Nineties," but that did nothing to diminish Leary's stature in the story of the psychedelic culture. Cyberpunk had more than vindicated Leary. By the winter of 1993, his smiling countenance was being widely featured in a print campaign for the Gap. Twenty years later, the same man who had once been labeled the most dangerous man in America by a federal judge in California was selling blue jeans and T-shirts to a whole new generation as Timothy Leary, Philosopher. Leary had successfully surfed his way right onto the cybercultural cutting edge. He had become whatMondo 2000was calling a "cyber-delic guru....The MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher) of the 20th Century." "The 90s are here," declared William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist, "and the Doctor is in!"

As he looked back and totaled the assets and subtracted the costs of the use of drugs in America since the 1960s, Leary blamed many of his "mistakes" on simple naïveté. "For example, I made the classic mistake that we all make. It was wonderful for thin intellectuals like Aldous Huxley and me to get high and suddenly enjoy the pleasures of the body and aesthetics and sensuality and music: MyGod, this iswonderful! What I didn't realize is that eighty percent of the people out there arenotmotivated, and if they smoked marijuana, no question it could take away what little motivation they might have had. Tragically, in the cases of many younger people I observed, I didn't realize that thereisa real problem with marijuana and young people who would smoke pot in the morning and not go to school -- what's the difference, put on another Grateful Dead record! You know, the last thing I ever had in mind was to create a whole subculture of adolescenthaschischines! I cite this as one of my many mistakes of omission and naïveté, and I blame it on the tendency of every philosopher -- of every human, in fact -- to believe that everyone's likeyou, when of course they'renot! -- "

He laughed, one of those Timothy Leary laughs, bittersweet and full of irony, self-deprecating honesty, and Irish blarney, more about the cosmic joke of the human condition than anything else.

"Oh, yes, we were well meaning good natured primitives back at Harvard. We didn't know anything about computers, nor did we realize anything about the implications of quantum physics, chaos theory, and fractals. We did know that when you had a visionary experience with a psychedelic drug, you were exposed to what we now call chaos. BOOM! You were experiencing a thousand times more information in a minute than in normal life. But we knew we needed to have a new language to describe it. We didn't have the language of technology back then, and now we do."

And so had Dr. Timothy Leary become America's oldest cyberpunk, a "neurologician" who portrayed the brain as "a galactic network of a hundred billion neurons," each one "an information system as complex as a mainframe computer." "The PC is the LSD of the Nineties," Leary declared in no uncertain terms, now speaking the language of fractals, digital information algorithms, virtual reality, and quantum electronic engineering as fluently as he had once spoken the language of transactional psychology and psychedelic transcendentalism. Lately he'd constructed a new philosophical platform based on the legend of the ronin (translated as "wave people"), a metaphor derived from the Japanese word for the samurai who had left the service of their feudal lords to become warriors without masters. It was the cyberpunks who were now the "pilots of the species," as Leary observed, the clear and creative thinkers who used "quantum-electronic appliances and brain know-how," the "strong, stubborn, creative individual who explores some future-frontier, collects and brings back new information, and offers to guide the gene pool to the next stage."

Cyberpunks were "mavericks, ronin, free-lancers, independents, self-starters, non-conformists, odd-balls, trouble-makers, kooks, visionaries, iconoclasts, insurgents, blue-sky thinkers, loners, smart alecks" -- in other words, exactly like Leary. He was certain that the policies of Ronald Reagan had not been what caused the Soviet Union to topple; rather, it had been the yearning on the part of Soviet-bloc youth for the very freedoms represented by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, blue jeans, computers, and -- yes -- LSD. In Leary's mind, the whole Reagan-conservative counterreaction to the Sixties that had demonized the psychedelic movement as misguided and immoral hedonism run amok was to have been expected.

"It happened after the Italian Renaissance, too, when they came in and busted all the naked statues and took down all the Venuses from the museum walls! Quite predictable, and I must say that every time we move it ahead -- and by 'we' I mean the humanists, those who believe in the human spirit and potential and believe you have to question authority -- every time we move it ahead, it's thrown back. But the base camp has been made, and the next wave will come and find your wreckage, and they'll be encouraged to go beyond that."

Of course, there were those in America who viewed any kind of "base camp" that Leary and his constituency might establish on the American cultural landscape as a kind of malignant plant that should be uprooted and eradicated -- just like the marijuana plants of Humboldt County. Those people were hardly downhearted by the news of Leary's prostate cancer in the next few years, any more than Leary was saddened by the demise of J. Edgar Hoover. As the media learned that Timothy Leary was dying and that he planned to have himself cryogenically frozen and "reanimated," journalists began a pilgrimage to his home in Los Angeles, where, for a fee of one thousand dollars, they could take their measure of the man in his final days. Most, of course, were unable to get past the most hackneyed sobriquets -- "High Priest of LSD," "Acid Guru," "Drug King of the Sixties Generation," and so on -- and asked questions like "Do you have any regrets about all the LSD you took, all the drugs that were taken in your name?" As for Leary's response to them, it was usually similar to the words he proclaimed so emphatically that day in his backyard --

"I still honor botanical substances that activate the brain. Ihonorcannabis; Ihonorlysergic acid, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms! I honor at least a hundred new botanical brain drugs which aren't evendiscoveredyet, for all the receptor sites in the brain! I honor the ancient tradition of using the gifts of the vegetable kingdom -- or queendom! Idobelieve that the brain needs them; the brainloveselectrons and psychoactive chemicals! -- "

He was smiling again.

"Hey, the receptor sites arethere! Just like you have lungs -- well, they must wantair! You got a belly, the body must wantfood! You got these receptor sites in your brain, it'sobvious! Most human beingsloveto get high,loveto alter their consciousness withvegetables! That's why you havetaboos! That's why you have theseprohibitions! That's why you have thewar on drugs!Because peopleloveit! The inevitable complication here is that the people incontrol, the top management, always make the idea of altering consciousness or changing your own brain something immoral, illegal, or unethical! OnlyGodcan do that, right? -- particularly if it'senjoyable! Well,naturally, it's enjoyable! Brainsloveelectrons!! Brainsloveto be strobed bycolorsandimages!! But you're notsupposedto enjoy it, right? -- "

Timothy Leary laughed again, delighted by his own rant, forever tweaking the authorities, the theologians, the conservatives -- the ronin on the white horse, without masters, unrepentant, unbowed. He died on May 31, 1996, with the words"Why not?"on his lips. Having abandoned the plans to have himself cryogenically frozen, Leary nevertheless managed to have his ashes shot into space in a capsule. It was, as his official Web site readily pointed out, his Final Trip.

Excerpted from Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 by Martin Torgoff
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.