LSD, Mushrooms and Me

I'm a dud at psychedelics

I’m a dud at psychedelics. I took mushrooms recently provided by a social worker who I appointed as my health care proxy. She is also a death doula who helps people overcome over their fear of death.    She swears by the mushrooms she gets from a local grower to help people reach their inner Buddha.  I agreed to try the shrooms because I’m dealing with a life threatening illness and would like to look death in the eye and tell him he can’t scare me, even with that black robe and scythe. 

I ate a gritty mix of what looked like dirt, which she mixed with honey.  She instructed me to put on an eye mask and headphones with meditative music.   Unfortunately, all this did was put me to sleep. No psychedelic effect at all. 

She didn’t understand. She’d given them to four other people, all of whom had profound experiences.  Then I remembered I was extremely resistant to mind- altering substances. I am un-hypnotizable as well.  In group hypnosis demonstrations,  I’m  always the only one whose arm does not fly up on command. 

My lack of response wasn’t for lack of trying.  I certainly smoked my share of pot back in the day trying to reach an altered state.  But I never really liked it.   All pot did was make me woozy, eat a lot, and go to sleep. I just wanted to be one of the cool kids.  If I smoked with a group I would get into giggling but probably would have done that without the benefit of marijuana.   Now my lungs are shot and I can’t smoke anything.  Yes, I could do gummies but I have no desire to overeat and go to sleep.  And I don’t happen to know a group that giggles.

Alcohol is my drug of choice now that I’m old.  I clam up with strangers and it helps release my inner charm, so I can win over folks who I probably wouldn’t want to talk to if I were sober.  However, more than two drinks and I pass out.   I would never stay awake long enough to be an alcoholic.

Once upon a time I had a couple of awesome acid trips, so I do understand the appeal and effect of psychedelic drugs.   I was lucky enough to take the original Owsley acid which was stronger and purer than any LSD made before or since.  Just in case you’re not familiar with the history of the counterculture in San Francisco in the 1960s (and if you’re not shame on you) Owsley Stanley was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead who also happened to be a chemist Here’s what Rolling Stone said about him, “Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street.”

That is the LSD I had the good fortune to take since I had a hippie boyfriend with connections who managed to score the stuff.  Let me tell you, there was no resisting it   Called blotter acid,  doses were defined by symbols printed on a piece of paper, each about an inch square.  You just swallowed a piece of paper.

 I first knew I was tripping when the hairy tendrils on the pit of the mango I’d just finished eating started undulating.   And when I closed my eyes everything got brighter instead of darker.  Then hippie boyfriend and I fell madly in love while listening to “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane.   The music moved me profoundly despite my not being a fan of jazz and certainly not of the esoteric John Coltrane variety.  I was amazed I actually understood the music, which had been mere noise to me before the acid trip and—unfortunately—after as well.  

While love bombing each other, hippie boyfriend and I took our tripping selves to Greenwich Village and declared our love to everyone we passed.  The smelliest homeless person became a part of our universal love.  He bought me earrings which I was convinced were the most beautiful I’d ever seen (they were actually pretty meh)  In fact our love was so catching that a friend who was also tripping insisted on crashing at our apartment to be around our vibes, and he fell in love with a decorative paper mache fish on my wall.  He sat in front of the fish and kept loudly declaring his devotion to it for hours and would not shut up. 

Hippie boyfriend was so enamored of LSD that he wanted to be tripping all the time. I was horrified. LSD was so intense I couldn’t imagine walking around with that distortion of consciousness more than very occasionally.  

LSD didn’t change my life but it sure gave me some treasured memories.  My great love didn’t last long. Hippie boyfriend dumped me and became a notorious cocaine dealer.  I took LSD a few more times with other boyfriends,  but it wasn’t Owsley acid and bore little resemblance to the real thing.

Fortunately I’m not all that afraid of dying anyway. What I am afraid of is what comes before dying—the 911 call, the ambulance to the hospital, the intubation, the crash carts, the ICU and extraordinary measures.  I don’t want any of that.  Neither do a lot of terminally ill folks but they get it anyway.  Even with living wills and do not resuscitate orders doctors like to do what they do best— save lives—whether or not those lives want to be saved.    We all have horror stories about our parents or other relatives whose lives were extended artificially by the medical establishment.   

If Owsley acid were still around I’d take it.  At my age I’m sure I’d come to a deeper understanding of life and death.  But even without psychedelics I feel better that I now have a health care proxy who understands the health care system and is determined to help me avoid a fate worse than death—being tethered to  a hospital bed hooked up to machines.