And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all...
Jefferson Airplane, ‘White Rabbit’
Drugs: my mother in the 1950s standing at the window of our fifth-floor flat clutching a huge white cardboard box of soluble codeine and aspirin tablets. She got them from the doctor on prescription, 100 at a time. Headaches. Later, early in 1962, when I was fifteen, I ran away from my father to her bedsitting room in Hove, where she had a much smaller box containing Nembutal on the chest of drawers. Insomnia. There were eight left in it when I swallowed them a couple of days later, certain that we couldn’t survive each other in the tiny room, and that there was and never would be anywhere else to go. Not enough to kill me, but sufficient, it turned out, to get me out of the room, into the care of a hospital and away from both parents for good.
Before that I had been in Banbury with my father, working in a series of shops on the high street, not allowed to go back to school as punishment for my expulsion. At first I’d stolen the ether from the school chemistry lab, then bought it in bottles from local chemists, telling them it was for killing butterflies. I can’t remember how I knew about sniffing ether – the only prohibited drug used at the school in those days was tobacco – but when I tried it I was entranced – precisely – by the immensity of the time I seemed to have been unconscious in a fathomless and dreameasy world. I liked the aeons away from real it gave me, though in reality it was only minutes. But it wasn’t very long before the endless nether ether-world became inhabited by monsters. An eternity of bad dreams was not what I was after at all.
Five years later, and in another hospital, not the one in Hove they sent me to after the Nembutal overdose, I discovered methylamphetamine – Methedrine. I was nineteen or twenty and a fellow patient shared a glass ampoule of it with me and showed me how to use a syringe to skin-pop into a muscle. Time stretched out again, marvellously, though now without a loss of consciousness. Thoughts paraded in front of me like actors taking their bows on stage, stopping for a time to be considered and then passing on. I watched them while I sat back, my favourite way of being in the world, as audience to my own but autonomous mind. A time-traveller’s way of inhabiting my own interior. I liked that very much. A lot better than the coal gas we bubbled through milk in the patients’ kitchen to get a cheap and available high.
A year later, in a third psychiatric hospital, the Maudsley, I was admitted by the dour Dr Krapl Taylor, who told me that I was a typical addictive personality, and (in a strange non-sequitur) that he would treat my depressed, disordered personality with – I couldn’t believe my luck – Methedrine therapy. Twice a week I saw his crew-cut houseman, who injected Methedrine directly into my vein and then set about trying to get me to ‘abreact’. The idea was to make me distressed enough to have a crisis, which, magically, like a fever breaking, was supposed to relieve me of my depression. ‘You’re worthless,’ he would tell me. ‘I know,’ I’d say. ‘Can I have some more Methedrine, please?’
Eventually, I left the Maudsley in a rage (abreacting, you might say) and found my way to the much-talked-of Arts Lab in Drury Lane. Upstairs in the café, above the exhibition space (Yoko Ono, I think, a little-known avant-garde artist), I turned around in my chair and said to the man who happened to be behind me, ‘Do you know where I can get some Methedrine?’ He did. I had found one of the speed kings of central London, it turned out, and for a while (until the Methedrine high got very much worse than the ether horrors) I mainlined the stuff. I moved into a flat in Long Acre in Covent Garden in which friends of my dealer lived and found myself my first home, at home as I had never experienced it before. Even as a small child with my parents, I had felt like I was in the wrong place with the wrong people. Now, I sat cross-legged on the floor with my back to the wall and watched the thoughts dancing across my brain, in a smoky room of stoned strangers or friends I’d known for only weeks, and in a way that was completely new to me, I was at last where I really belonged.
Of course, I smoked dope, too. I always had a joint ready-rolled by the bed for first thing in the morning, and couldn’t imagine a time – when I tried to picture a future – when I would not smoke cannabis. It seemed ridiculous to choose not to be stoned. I also dropped acid, though with much more trepidation than any of the other drugs I used. I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.
Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip happened to go the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer. Or perhaps it was because I really didn’t care whether I was mad or sane, or more accurately, alive or dead? It’s hard to say, but during that time I was also taking Seconal capsules (a barbiturate, like Nembutal) all day and night, a high dose, prescribed, every four hours. I had discovered another way with Seconal, and sometimes injected myself with it in solution, the effect of which was instant and vacant unconsciousness. There was no other pleasure to be had out of shooting it, except the rush of blankness that filled me up the instant the Seconal hit my brain. I was after exactly that blankness, and also as importantly that millisecond of knowledge that I was becoming unconscious. It certainly wasn’t the permanent madness that a bad trip threatened. But apparently even the risk of madness was preferable to being on nothing at all.
No one thought of the drug-taking as ‘ recreational’. That was a later concept. Even if my particular bent for self-negation was untypical, the drug-taking young of the Sixties I lived with and met also took their drugs very seriously. Not that we didn’t have fun, but having fun wasn’t recreational. We didn’t do recreation. Well, we didn’t do work very much. At our most pompous we told ourselves that we worked at finding out how best or better to be alive. But however we justified it, we really didn’t make the distinction between work and recreation that shaped our parents’ daily existence. We didn’t have to, because, to reiterate, one way or another the State was paying for us to study or take paid work (waitressing in the café in the Arts Lab, dealing hash, bookshop assistant, selling the International Times) very lightly. There was no need to worry, as our parents did on our behalf, about ‘getting on’, because we had no plan to live in a world in which getting on was of any importance. If there was a plan at all, it was precisely to prevent such a world from structuring our future. We were brainstorming ways of destructuring everything to suit ourselves. We were almost grown-ups, it was inevitable that the world would become fully ours eventually, and therefore, with ourselves in charge, it would be completely different.
We were certainly not in the majority, not even in our own generation. There were far more ‘straight’ young people than those of us living self-consciously outside the law, dotted about London as well as most other towns and cities in the country. There were enough of us to produce underground papers to pass the news around, to fill the Roundhouse so that we could celebrate the crowd we made, to keep headshops selling pipes and joint papers, and bookshops like Indica and Compendium, busy if not in profit. But, of course, most people took on the world as it was offered to them. This is always the case. Possibly apart from the generations that came to adulthood around the start of the First and Second World Wars, most people aren’t actively engaged in what any given era is later characterised by. Not everyone in France was fomenting revolution in 1789; only a tiny proportion of the new generation were Bright Young Things of the 1920s. What may have been different by 1967 was how easy it was to opt out of the world of adults and yet find ready-made social networks to support our dissent. That the majority chose not to, made them, in our eyes, wilfully blind. The world was in fact going on as it always had, but it seemed to me and the people I knew that it had no idea what it was in for.
The Stones’ two-and-a-half-minute sneer, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, accurately reflected the way in which we turned our backs on the ‘straights’. We didn’t take drugs to get by, we took drugs to see the world entirely differently. The straight world had our contempt. It wasn’t drugs as such that separated us and them. It was the kind of drugs and the reason for taking them. The Valium-popping wives isolated from reality, trying to keep up with phantom materialism in their suburban villas on Acacia Road or any of the other suitably pastorally referenced streets. The differently isolated working-class women who were also being dished out prescription tranquillisers, to help them cope with their children on the twentieth floor of the high-rise council blocks that were springing up everywhere. Those who colluded with stasis brought about their own doom. We were doing something with drugs, they were just surviving the intolerable world that they had either created or acquiesced in.
Our youthful cruelty was boundless. Youth does cruelty quite easily, not having the accretions of time to deal with, but I remember a glaring clarity as I looked at the bourgeois life and its compromises, the working life and its compliance, and what seemed the direct consequences of both, that may have demanded cruelty to reassure ourselves that we could stay clear of it. Some of the generation that had come to their young adulthood in the Fifties had seen it too and hit the road. It’s a kind of laser-guided vision, a pure beam of light in a crepuscular landscape, that is available to the young when they look at the world that has been made ready for them, which they are about to step out into. You see it in your children when they get that pitying, disdainful smile on their face and don’t bother to argue with you because you can’t possibly grasp what they know. Which is, simply, that they are new and you are old, and that what they see is being seen accurately for the first time ever. And they are right. The compromises that adults make cause much of the suffering in the world, or, at best, fail to deal with the suffering. Acceptance of one’s lot, maintaining a silence about what can’t be said, lowering your expectations for your own life and for others, and understanding that nothing about the way the world works will ever change, is the very marrow of maturity, and no wonder the newly-fledged children look at it with horror and know that it won’t happen to them – or turn their backs on it for fear it will. They know it’s too late for you to ‘get it’, so they smile and leave the room, away from your reasoning, well, actually, increasingly shrill voice. It’s unnerving – especially if you remember that same smile on your own face when you were young. Not everyone, of course not everyone, but that terrible clarity of vision is available to the young of every generation, and those who look become the trouble-makers, the difficult ones, that the elders complain about eternally.
In the second half of the Sixties, if you were of the party that chose to look, you were either hell-bent on getting out of that world, as I perhaps was, or you were going to re-vision it and live the vision. Drugs were just one means, like a spaceship or a spell, of getting through the fog of what ‘they’ called reality. A presently available technology for bypassing what they assumed was the ineluctable way of the world. It seemed pellucidly obvious that it could, with a bit of effort, become our way of our world, of a kind we chose to live the rest of our lives in, not theirs. It was necessary, therefore, like explorers through the centuries who mapped routes to new worlds, to make extreme, ill-considered efforts to find it. I say this with a slight smile aged sixty in 2008. There were, in fact, many moments when it felt exactly like that in the flat in Covent Garden in 1968. Smiling gently on your younger self is one way of dealing with the astonishing lack of change. Timothy Leary describes the knowledge we had that the time had come ‘for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new, empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed, knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum...Politics, religion, economics, social structure are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical.’3
It was easy to be seduced away from a politics which had palpably failed – even a just war had failed to provide peace, and those who had saved the world from Hitler had not prevented the next horror signalled by the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. In 1967, if you looked around, you saw the continuing confrontation of East and West, the Berlin Wall still standing, mass starvation in Biafra, race riots in the States, the war in Vietnam. Fear, hunger, deprivation, the oppression by the strong of the weak. Nothing had changed, for all that we were told how a generation had sacrificed its youth in order to make a decent world for us. And even if that were true, how could that generation sit back with a sense of a job well done when terrible things were happening to people all over the planet? In any case, it is not the job of the young to be grateful, it is their job to tear up the world and start again.
What happened when you smoked a joint and to a far greater extent when you dropped acid was that the world outside your head was utterly changed. It looked, I and others would say over and over again as we tripped, so real. By which, I suppose, we must have meant unreal, except that is not how it seemed. We watched reality become a conundrum as the chemicals we ingested altered the chemicals in our brains. Change and reality were as easy to make and unmake as swallowing a pill or drawing smoke into our lungs. The ‘one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small’ of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was a perfect description of the astonishment at the changes we made happen inside our own heads. We had a childlike wonder that we could produce such weirdness from ourselves – that our own familiar minds had the latent capacity to see the world entirely anew. Drugs were also an unfathomable, fascinating, magical toy – it wasn’t coincidental that we took to blowing bubbles though plastic hoops and making morphing patterns in bright colours with oil and heat. And notice how taking acid dripped on to sugar cubes or blotting paper combined the magical contraption with the favoured, forbidden foodstuffs of our childhoods.
There were still books to read, but now they were the Vedas, Gita, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, books on Buddhism by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, novels and essays informed by Eastern philosophy or drug use by Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Carlos Casteneda, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as John Lilly, writing from his sensory deprivation tanks, and Dr Leary, the professor of psychedelia. This reality game, we discovered, had been played for millennia by other cultures with and without the use of drugs. We read up on oriental religions and philosophies and discovered how the West had got it so wrong, and that ‘Oh, wow, it’s so real’ was not a brand new vision brought about by brand new chemicals at all. All along Buddhism had been saying that reality was not what it seemed, and the tribal societies had chewed and smoked natural substances that took them into the dream country and gave them stories and visions with which to blur the edges of reality and shift gear out of the mundane. It turned out we hadn’t discovered the fast route to re-visioning the world, but we freely partook of its current availability. We had rediscovered it for ourselves, reinvented the point of the prayer wheel and the joint, and were bringing it home. We were investigating and disturbing the self in order to dismiss self. Transformation was our task, change outside from alteration inside. We did it from books: Teach Yourself Altered Consciousness was our generation’s virtual addition to that series of practical self-education books we’d grown up with. We knew the worth of self-education. To start with we eschewed the shaman, the guide, the guru – though soon there would be a great flocking to the East in search of teachers and a stream of teachers heading in the other direction towards these willing students. We just took the drugs and read books. There was a feeling that we could, that we had to do it ourselves. Gurus and guides were just another form of parent. We could take the ancient wisdom in its raw form, mix it with lysergic acid diethylamide, and make it work for ourselves. Like those Victorian, Edwardian and post-war children our parents had thought quaint and safe for bedtime reading, we took ourselves off, made our own way, like Alice, Dorothy, the Pevensies and Peter Pan, to different realities, and assumed with the bravado of youth that we’d make it back to Kansas to tell of what we saw and be able to implement the, by definition valuable, new connections and disconnections our changed minds had made.
It’s very hard to look at the drug culture here and in the States today from the point of view of those who lived through the Sixties, and understand it as anything other than negative and destructive. The supply and demand has become a template for capitalism. It was always the case that drugs were brought in from somewhere else by entrepreneurs and were divided up to be sold by individuals, and some of those individuals were certainly businessmen. But the grimness and the profiteering have become universal. Watch The Wire and you are confronted by the parodic vision of capitalism working perfectly in the projects and high rises. We bequeathed heroin and cocaine to the miserable masses, not any kind of psychedelic solution to poverty and injustice. Luckier kids take Es and party, dance in a trance, and it must be fun – they even call it being ‘loved up’, but it doesn’t seem to have any other cultural aspect attached to it. No books or art, and the music is too mechanical for the likes of my generation to get. The punks were the last comprehensible youth movement, and were a genuine phenomenon for only a flash. And of course, the Sixties drug generation had to watch Thatcher’s babies, the thirty-somethings who dealt in fantasy money, hoovering up cocaine just to keep them on a money-making high. It feels to me, although I know that plenty of people were fucked up by drugs back then, that the party has turned spectacularly nasty and pointless.
We were also a bunch of dissolute, hedonistic druggies. We lay around and got stoned, had sex, listened to music that exalted lying around, getting stoned, having sex, and hymned our good times. Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, Love, Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, Frank Zappa all played our tune from far away on the West Coast of the United States. Their albums arrived in British shops, we bought them, put the records on our turntables, rolled our joints on the covers. We even had some of our own, though it was a little softer, lacking the desperate edge of the Americans. Pink Floyd, the Who, the Stones, the Beatles, the Incredible String Band, the Small Faces, the Animals. The music knew where we were going in our heads and wrote the score. We partied. Perhaps the music was too good, enabling us to stay indoors and just watch and listen. We altered the world hardly at all because, whatever we told each other, and however connected we might have felt sitting in the same room, the search we were on was for the singular, individual experience. To be sure, it was of the interior kind, the kind you can keep still and have, rather than the current much-desired extreme sports, falling-fast-out-of-the-sky sort. But we had about as much effect on the world as someone jumping from a plane does. The straight world wondered what we were up to. They disapproved, they feared, they sent the cops round, and that was all grist to our other sense that we were doing something. But our interiority, our single focus on our inner selves did not achieve anything very much. No new ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry come to mind from those late Sixties days – just an album cover or two. And though the music was remarkable, and much of it was recorded in a haze of cannabis smoke, it was usually mixed by sober technicians and distributed by multinational companies.
‘That’s your problem, man...’ This telling phrase was used to resolve disputes that arose when love and harmony and the new reality failed to get the washing-up done, or the bath cleaned. It was spoken in a tone of voice that meant something like: each of us has to take responsibility for our own soul’s contentment and not impose our constraints on others – man. In the quotidian event it meant that those who wanted a bit of order in the kitchen had to do the washing-up for those who left their dirty plates in the sink. The day-to-day-ness never once looked like another way of being, except, of course, that we didn’t go regularly to work or to war. In America at this time, matters were more serious. The music and the drugs were made for and taken into the war zone in order to make the insufferable tolerable, or to remind combatants that their intolerable existence was someone else’s fault. In the United Kingdom, however much we tried to empathise, and this is the vital difference between our experience and theirs, our memories of that time and theirs, we had only a generational war to fight.
Like children we played cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians in Covent Garden. It involved a lot of cleaning. It may have been my most domesticated period. Whenever there was a rumour of a drugs bust – which was several times a week – floors had to be hurriedly but very thoroughly vacuumed, and surfaces wiped down to catch the bits of hash and grass that had dropped while we made the joints or our friendly dealer cut an ounce from his block. I knew people who had been busted for a speck of hash that the vacuum cleaner had missed. For those who actually went to prison – one twenty-five-year-old I knew for two years for having a couple of grams – playtime stopped. But for most of us, we acted out our underground lives, developed paranoia and outlaw slang with all the solemn delight of Peter Pan’s lost boys. It was a dangerous game. There were people who didn’t stop injecting Methedrine when it started to go bad. Drug doctors did the rounds of certain flats and wrote out private prescriptions for whole cartons of Burroughs Wellcome’s blue and white 12-ampoule boxes. People went crazy, got very ill. There is no describing the come-down from a long weekend on Methedrine. I stopped it when I started to see bugs crawling about all over me and couldn’t catch them. But for a few weeks I lived with a much healthier, more disciplined heroin addict. We shared the kitchen of the flat in Covent Garden. A mattress on the floor, covered with a gold candlewick bedspread to make it more homely. In that period addicts were registered with a licensed general practitioner or clinic, and received from them controlled amounts of heroin. It meant that they could be physically and mentally monitored and, although there was some over-prescription, there wasn’t a great surplus of heroin on the market. This policy was stopped in 1975. In 1971 there were between 6,000 and 15,000 drug users; by 2002 the number had risen to between 161,000 and 266,000. In 1968 the great days of the entrepreneurial drug industry were yet to come, and there was also no organised crime involvement; the black market was mostly from over-prescription by doctors. If you needed heroin you got it for nothing. My boyfriend made his daily rounds, visiting the doctor, the chemist, shooting up regularly, and felt vastly superior to us outlaws. He disapproved of doing drugs. He was sick, he told us when we rolled a joint or dropped acid. We were just messing about. He dressed neatly and with care, washed his hair daily, made sure he ate nourishing food regularly, and kept his equipment tidy in a black leather zip-up case which he carried with him everywhere. He went out each morning and did who knew what, wheeling and dealing, bartering and selling things and sometimes part of his prescription, but not breaking into houses or mugging people on the street for a fix.
When he left for the day, I tidied up, returning our private bedroom to the kitchen everyone in the flat used. I made the bed and put away the apple box we had as a bedside table. When he came home, the morning syringe he had left by the bed was clean. I washed out the drops of blood and drug residue every morning at the sink after I’d washed up the teacups, sluiced it thoroughly with boiled water, taking it apart and leaving it on the drainer to dry. It wasn’t until some weeks into my daily morning routine that I noticed any similarity between my domestic activities and the suburban pill-popping housewives I was never going to become like. Of course, this was a panto version. We played our serious mind-enhancing games, and we played pirates, but like children everywhere we also played house.