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It was nitrous oxide that truly taught me the nature of all drug induced highs, or reminded me of their eternal positives and negatives. I went on a rare, brief, two-week drug jag a couple of days after Dean left town on this new drug, this new nitrous high, and spent a lot of money for my low budget. I was spending forty bucks on two twenty-four canister boxes at Planet K or restaurant supply stores every day. I would do it during the afternoon or at night after smoking some pot which enhanced the effect. For the first few days, I was still able to achieve that floating disappearing high where I became almost invisible.

Sitting at my desk at mid-afternoon, holding the compressed air dispenser barely in my hand, I was listening to Led Zeppelin banging out “Four Sticks.” It had taken me twelve canisters in a row to only begin to reach a vaguely similar, floating high from that first night. I was just combining the gas with only three Vicodin and two Flexeril also which may have lessened the intensity. At twenty canisters in a row, I finally reached a brief ecstatic state. I could see nitrous oxide was also a spinning type of high, a 360-degree continual turn, as I became completely disconnected from reality, suspended in time, or in a pocket without time; No-Time. Time is gone amidst the perception, the experience, of bliss.

One can lose time without awareness of the loss. I didn’t even hear the sound of the large silver cream dispenser clanging to the floor, only briefly opening my eyes to see my empty hand. Still floating, my teeth went numb. I belched up nitrous gas and it appeared as clouds of pink and blue smoke vibrating in my skull, swimming and sinking down in color curtains before my eyes. For some reason, a vision of a woman appeared suspended before me, a beautiful, red-headed actress . . . her name was . . . Julianne Moore? . . . it didn’t matter . . . she was smiling at me, with wholesome sexual longing, the smell of fresh strawberries surrounding her pale, white body . . . nude, freckled and supple . . . a soft, red triangle between her legs, purity and innocence on her parting wet lips, as she beckoned and whispered my name—and it was gone. I was back. I opened my eyes to see I’d gone through a whole box, twenty-four gas canisters, in less than ten minutes. The euphoria had disappeared. I had a residual feeling of groggy relaxation but mostly, I was feeling more nauseous than anything else. It would be my last mild and pleasant hallucination on the drug.

Patricia was beginning to get pissed at my not going to bed with her at night, preferring to sit downstairs sneaking hits on a gas canister, not telling her what I was doing, though she knew, I could see. At the end of the second week, I walked into Planet K one last time to buy a box. I looked around me at all of the young people and the drug paraphernalia, most of which was mainly associated with pot. I suddenly felt immature and foolish and left without buying any more nitrous canisters. I went one full day without doing any gas. I realized fully then that I had been caught in a drug binge much like my old cocaine days as a young man, and was embarrassed even further. I wasn’t even getting the same level of a high as that first night, and yet I had still chased the high. I could remember how the crack pipe became so important to coke smokers, the seemingly endless quest for the same impossible-to-reach initial cocaine high. Cocaine had some of the same level of tolerance problems as opiates and so it was only natural in a way for the mind and body to weaken the will and try to either repeat or prolong the experience of bliss and release.

Nitrous oxide did build up in my system quickly, burning out the pleasure receptors—or, as Dean put it once, “the Fun Juice runs out.” He added that it was also natural for your brain to figure out what you’re trying to do to it and it often tries to stop you. The brain wants to preserve itself in the end, and it rewires or reroutes chemicals and energy in the process. As my tolerance grew, increasingly grotesque images were now suddenly popping into my mind instead of floating colors and beauty. Losing time and swaying, I was seeing indelible images of slimy, yellow and brown rotting teeth, gangrenous, leprous faces and flesh, twisted, deformed and torn, as my mind now stepped in on behalf of physical brain function, telling me clearly with such disgusting and revolting imagery that I had gone too far. After fifty canisters in a row, the foul hallucinations, coupled with mild nausea, were soon enough for my own brain to get me to stop; that, and the realization of what I had been doing for two weeks, wasting valuable finite time I would never get back and less valuable, but necessary, money. I suddenly felt juvenile, stupid. I was able to barely read the last drug observations in my notebook, a scribbled entry called The Side Effects of Bliss that I had been writing when under the influence.

While still feeling vaguely euphoric on a large combination of Vicodin, marijuana, and nitrous oxide, I had noted the following positives and negatives: a numbing of my extremities, a very brief feeling of euphoria, incoherence, drooling, a ringing in your ears, a type of echoing “wow-wow” effect to music, dizziness, a loss of inhibitions, a loss of judgments, blurred or pixilated vision or vision being reduced to a pinpoint, swirling clouds of color or all objects being surrounded by different colors, the air itself becoming visible in multi-luminescent color, large bulky frames of color surrounding letters, people, any visible object or imagined object of the mind, feelings of empathy alternating with apathy, quick flashes of human rot, decay, effluence and horror, a loss of balance and comprehension, or a final transcendence, unlocking some alternative level of consciousness, seeing beatific symbols of ultimate Perfection and Beauty coupled with a sense of connection and understanding, and always—as I peaked—some brilliant conclusion, an answer to the world’s most pressing question, only just outside my grasp, an answer forever fading in significance and meaning, along with the question itself, upon the return of sobriety and regular perception.

The stupefying effects of many drugs have been beginning to bother me more and more as I get older. In talking with Dean on the phone in Dallas the other day, months after our last X and nitrous binge, both of us noted vaguely, in passing, that we hadn’t smoked any dope or taken much of anything beyond the usual ibuprofen and Darvocet for his old injuries and the hydrocodone for mine. We spoke of how we didn’t enjoy smoking pot as much as we used to, unless we had absolutely nothing to do, no thinking, just mindless TV watching, if that.

“If Patricia and I are going out to hear some music at Gruene Hall,” I told him, “I don’t even want to smoke any pot until I get there so it can wear off before I have to drive home. Getting high and driving just makes it harder to drive.”

Dean agreed and we both noted how much longer a small stash of good weed lasted us now since we used it so sparingly compared to our younger days. I said that as I approached fifty years of age, I was finding myself valuing my moments of clarity and sobriety more and more every day, that these were the real me. I had always had a sharp mind and now I wanted to keep it as sharp as possible before my death. Dean’s father had just passed away from Alzheimer’s, as had both of my grandfathers so we knew the disease was likely in our future. It was the ultimate irony and cruelty for those who valued critical questioning thought, rational analysis, a healthy, open-minded curiosity, and the desire for continual lifelong learning, development and growth, to then lose one’s brain functions so thoroughly with the onset of dementia. Neither one of us wanted to quicken that day of Alzheimer’s onset and to find ourselves tied down to a bed in a “rest home” hospital on shitty, anti-psychotic drugs with their horrific, limb-twisting side effects and a brain like Swiss cheese, staring open mouthed at The Price Is Right on TV all day.

“I’d rather fall down dead in the woods of a heart attack and be eaten by coyotes,” I said. “Or overdose on Demerol and fade away for good on a cloud of contentment when I’m in my eighties.”

“Same here,” Dean said. “In fact, I’m gonna make up a list for you and Patricia and Veronica. I’m gonna call it ‘The Test.’ It will be a mental awareness test of ten questions I have to answer if you guys have me laid up in a hospital with Alzheimer’s. If I can’t answer a majority of the questions, if I fail The Test, I want you to inject me with an overdose of morphine. Of course, if I say something like ‘What test?’ then you guys can just kill me on the spot. Use my pillow.”

We talked about our hangovers from that last night and he said his short flight home had been brutal, as was the rest of the day. We noted how it grew harder and harder to bounce back from any drug that was taken in excess as you get older, from alcohol to acid, and said our goodbyes.

Indeed, much like movies, drugs are mostly for kids, young people in their teens and twenties. Most all outside sensory experience, be it chemical, visual, aural, that provides stimulation, dulling, warping, or some noticeable effect on the senses and psyche is a type of drug. Music is a drug, sex is a drug, food is a drug, all of them giving us pleasure or pain in the experience of ingestion. Movies are drugs, a deadly one I was addicted to for years. And of course, television is one of the most powerful drugs in the world, doping up most of us for hours every day and night. Myself, I have five televisions in my home, counting the broken one in my garage. I have spent years upon wasted years on this drug, staring at a rectangular blue box of lighted images with sound and drama in complete passivity, my thought process dulled and slowed to nothing. TV causes serious, psychological, life-altering brain damage. And yet, to this day, I use the drug of television, in combination or alone, more than any other drug in my life.

Smoking pot while watching TV can dumb some people down further so that what you might normally find boring or stupid is suddenly intriguing. For years this worked for me. Now, if I’m high, watching TV suddenly seems absurd unless I am watching some nature program that at least puts me in touch with the natural world through the screen. I’ve been watching TV seriously since the mid-1960s when I started on my parent’s tiny black and white set. It has filled my brain and psyche with more garbage and propaganda than any other ingestible substance. Indelible images of violence, or the most banal and minimal trivia of commerce and salesmanship, still often cloud my mind from such overuse. Dean and Patricia and I walked into a party late the other day. Everyone in the house was already huddled before this gigantic blue screen, watching some show with great interest. It seemed strange, and boring, to see these people staring at this screen, so hypnotized and enthralled. We left immediately.

People are going to “get high” no matter what. Look at any culture in the world and you will find them fermenting some fruit juice to make it a beer to get an alcoholic buzz, or eating peyote buttons, or smoking weeds that grow easily from the ground, or drinking roasted beans for a caffeine pick me up, chewing coca leaves or drinking coca tea for the same basic green tea mild stimulant high, eating, smoking, drinking barks, plants, leaves and liquids throughout our history as human beings to alter our consciousness and either escape or expand or inhibit our normal daily perception of experience. You can disallow getting high forever, but people are never going to stop doing it. I remember one of my friends in junior high dying because she used to sniff model airplane glue; she was a smart kid but she passed out with a bag over her head full of the stuff and asphyxiated. People will sniff gas fumes, huff off spray-paint cans, drink varnish, anything, to get high.

As a boy, I could remember doing a little shtick for my friends at eleven years of age called “turning red.” I had had a mini-nervous breakdown in sixth grade due to problems at home. Filled with anger and depression, I became a tyrant on the playground that year, terrorizing all of my classmates with my intense, unstoppable rages of heightened competition at sports. I yelled so much I lost my voice for days and my face turned red to the point of almost passing out. I noticed that I got a sleepy, dreamy feeling of contentment though, just before almost passing out from screaming at someone in anger. A friend of mine showed me how he could swoon and then pass out, by taking many breaths, then bending over and sitting up quickly. The idiot demonstrated the gag for me once and passed out cold on his driveway and split his scalp open and had to be rushed to the emergency room. I would get the same effect by “turning red,” that is straining my neck, face, and jaw so intensely my face turned red, then purple, and I almost passed out at the school cafeteria table. I always stopped at just the right moment and felt woozy and good as the oxygen rushed back into my brain. My friends thought I was nuts . . .

When I was sixteen years old I was a long distance runner and in perfect physical condition. I remember one day going for an extra-long, eighteen mile run far out into the rice fields and pastures which once surrounded Katy, Texas. Most all of those green fields are gone now, replaced by even more rubber stamp houses, strip malls, and office parks. I remember a moment at almost the end of my run, when I held my arms out beside me and then pumped both of my fists up in the air in a state of sudden, uninhibited enlightenment and happiness. I was there and I was alive. And I knew it was good. This is based upon the fact that all I needed was my self, no outside chemical stimulus, just my self and my body, my will to live, and my awareness. Others have spoken at length and better than I on the runner’s high, but I had it that morning, and can never forget it. The researchers say it is your brain in a panic, releasing endorphins to ease the stress and pain to which you are subjecting your body. Many other drugs have given me a similar experience of happiness over many years and many occasions of use, but with no exertion.

Those who use illicit drugs to help or harm themselves without hurting anyone else do not belong in prison unless they commit a crime beyond using an illegal drug. You have a right to alter and/or simply control your own consciousness as a human being. If you don’t, then you are certainly not “free.” The United States has more of its population in prison per capita than any other “free” or not free country in the world, over two million people in jail, and seven million entangled in the legal for-profit prison business. Millions of these people are there because of the War on Drugs and our out-dated and dysfunctional drug laws that have done nothing to alleviate consumption anyway. Drug addiction is not a disease but rather a lack of willpower. There isn’t even any person that exists as “the drug addict,” the label merely a socially conditioned judgment call as a means of control of the population through classifying and regulating individual behavior; e.g., as Dr. Thomas Szasz notes, no one goes around calling Winston Churchill or FDR “drug addicts” for their nicotine “addictions.”

We don’t put alcoholics in jail for their drinking, nor should we incarcerate any other person for any other drug they are taking in excess. If the harm is only to one’s self, then drug use is a medical, not a criminal problem, if it becomes a problem at all. If this were not the case, then tomorrow morning, alcohol and cigarettes should be made illegal and anyone who manufactures or distributes these drugs as well as the chronic users, should all be thrown in jail according to the American Drug War logic. Alcohol-related deaths are in the tens of thousands in America today, and cigarettes kill over 400,000 people a year in the US while marijuana isn’t killing anyone like tobacco does. Heart disease has the best chance of killing everyone who reads these words which means the obese cheeseburger and pizza “addict” belongs in jail next to the heroin addict. This is the childish but deadly hypocrisy of the War on Drugs.

Of all them, if I was forced to choose, I would say that marijuana is still one of the most beneficial and least harmful drugs in the world, as either a practical medicine or for escape and recreation. Cannabis is in no way remotely addictive by the standard definitions of addiction in relation to heroin or nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine. Anyone that tells you pot is addictive is either a liar or profoundly ignorant. Nor is marijuana a “gateway” drug. In America, alcohol is the gateway drug that dumbs down the masses and keeps the rabble in line. Alcohol and marijuana are so prevalent and commonly used in our society that it is only logical that other, “harder” drugs will be around them. And that depends more on the people you are hanging around with than the drug itself. Myself, though I need less of any and all intoxicants or stimulants to alter or enhance my normal day-to-day reality, I still break them out on occasion.

Two weeks ago, Patricia was out of town, back in LA for a brief three-day trip with her mother to see her grandparents. I was alone and bored, two primary motivators to take any drug. Some friends, at the last minute, invited me to a dinner party in the northern suburbs of San Antonio. I’d already eaten, but agreed to go mainly because these were some of my wife’s coworkers and good friends and they were trying to be nice, to give me some company while she was out of town. I took one hit of X, forty-five minutes before heading north.

I was driving Patricia’s new black Mercedes on Highway 281. Just past the 1604 Loop, I turned left onto Stone Oak Parkway. This area had once been miles and miles of scenic hills covered in cedar, post oak, and brush, filled with wildlife. That had all been bulldozed and razed, the hills flattened, flash-flooding, spring fed creeks drained or tamed. All of the land was covered in such a large mass of similar, suburban, unimaginative home construction, it was easy to get lost for miles in the many generic subdivisions where every street and home not only appeared to be, but was the same. This area is populated with quite a few radical, far right-wing, white fundamentalist Christian Republicans, Texas being one of the largest repositories for this large and powerful group of American citizens. This was the land of the large White Mega-Church, one of the biggest, run by the famously intolerant preacher, John Hagee. With his huge 20,000 strong Cornerstone church congregation on the edge of Stone Oak, and his affiliated media businesses that reach millions more, Hagee speaks to his faithful of the perceived evils of gay people, Catholics, tolerant and nonjudgmental Christians, drug users, Muslims, free thinkers, Hindus, progressives, Buddhists, democrats, liberals, libertarians and independents, a long list of basically anyone who isn’t him. The man and his company make wads of tax-free cash while intervening in American government via his thinly veiled political sermons, all in the name of Jesus Christ.

The Mormon Mega-Churches are also one of the last remaining large corporate, political religious institutions. It was no accident they’d built one of their strange, Masonic lodge-like, mystical and mysterious, marble temples smack dab in the middle of the Stone Oak subdivisions. That night, as I drove in circles, trying to find my friend’s home, I stopped near the new white and gold Mormon temple. I was briefly entranced by the tall glowing angel that sat atop the building, a huge statue of gold lit brightly in the night. I was lingering at the green traffic light, staring at the angel who was holding a golden trumpet to his lips. I realized then it was the MDMA kicking in that had stopped me. Rather than walk into the dinner party a bit paranoid from the original rush and crush of the drug, I turned off the main Stone Oak Parkway, purposefully driving toward anywhere dark, some lonely piece of yet undeveloped land.

I made a right on an isolated road and was pleased when I drove to the pavement’s end. I had left all of the houses and their bright porch lights, the harsh lights of businesses, stores, malls, bars, churches, and the noise and halogen headlights of the freeway. I turned the car around, parked, and opened the sun roof. I was alone. I looked up and the absence of manufactured light was revealing the stars, so many glistening stars in the night. I was listening to Ulrich Schnauss, “A Strangely Isolated Place,” and the two drugs of hypnotic music and mild chemical stimulus drew me up into a different, silent world of unimaginable immensity over the tiny planet I was spinning on below.

I have in the past, and will in the future, stare up into the sky with a mix of wonder and melancholy, knowing I will never travel to see such stars and their planets, solar systems and galaxies. The two drugs only enhanced, brightened, and enlightened my experience on that dark, moonless night. I knew what I was doing; every movement of the day, a conscious, rational decision. As I eased back the seat in my wife’s car, I allowed myself to let go, to lose myself to the limitless universe above me. Feeling successive waves of pure comfort and calm, the happiness passing over my body in time with the music, I knew I was in a perfect moment with my body and soul, a moment I would never have again. For it is the transitory quality of both time and experience, and the realization of such, that gives life meaning.