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288 Wandering through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on the first expansively warm day of the year, snatching some time out from my work-ridden, pressured, scheduled dailiness, my daughter asleep in her stroller, I found myself thinking, “This would be a beautiful place to trip.” A weirdly anachronistic thought—I haven’t taken any psychedelic drugs in 15 years and have no serious desire to do so now. Even if I could negotiate the unencumbered 24 hours or so I always needed to go up, stay up, and come down again, it’s the wrong time. The vibes, as we used to say, are not to be trusted—there’s too much tension, anxiety, hostility in the air. Besides, right now I lack the requisite innocent optimism. Bogged down in material concerns I once managed to ignore, in thrall to New York’s Great God Real Estate, I feel somewhat estranged from the Tao. “But what if something bad happened?” was my next unbidden thought that day in the park. “I have a child—can I afford that kind of risk?” Which of course answers its own question; a first principle of tripping as I remember it is that the main thing you have to fear is fear itself. Whether or not I ever feel free to take psychedelics again, they remain, for me, a potent emblem of freedom. Somehow they disarranged the grids I’d imposed on the world, untied the Laingian knots I’d imposed on myself. They allowed me, for the moment, to see things freshly—the splendor in the grass, the glory in the flower, the ridiculous self-inflation in my self-hatred—and feel saner than I’d ever thought possible. This was an experience of intense pleasure , emotional catharsis, and enlightenment in its most playful, least solemn sense. My fellow trippers and I were always breaking out into what seemed to straight onlookers like maniacal laughter: sometimes we laughed because the people around us had turned into elegant giraffes and scared birds and angry The Drug War From Vision to Vice The Drug War: From Vision to Vice 289 terriers; sometimes because we realized how silly our most serious obsessions were; sometimes just because, like Lou Reed, we saw that everything was all right. If the vision and the feeling always faded, leaving glimpses, fragments, intimations behind, still they were real—or as real as anything else. They suggested what human beings might be if we grew up differently, if certain kinds of damage were not inflicted. But that was in another country, or another language. If people still take drugs in search of transcendence, they don’t talk about it in public. The one counterculture drug that’s made it into the mainstream is marijuana, and its gestalt has changed radically in the process—where once it was valued as a mild psychedelic, now it’s mostly used, like alcohol, to smooth out the rough edges. These days drugs are a metaphor not for freedom or ecstasy but for slavery and horror. It’s the “hard” drugs—especially heroin and cocaine—that obsess the American imagination; rarely do we see the word “drug” without “abuse” or “menace” next to it. On this issue the ideological right’s triumph over ’60s liberationism has been nothing short of a rout: it is now an unquestioned axiom of public discourse that drugs and drug taking of any but the purely medicinal sort are simply, monolithically , evil. Dope is the enemy that unites Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson, that gets blamed for everything from the plight of the black community to teenage alienation to America’s problems competing in the world market. (Even Lyndon LaRouche features drug pushers in his paranoid cosmology, right up there with international bankers and Zionists.) In this climate, anyone who suggests that the question of drugs has real complexities, that some kinds of drugs and some kinds of drug taking are not a terrible thing and may even, under certain circumstances, actually be, well, a good thing, can expect to be as popular as Paul Krassner at a Women Against Pornography convention. And yet the use of illegal drugs has never been more pervasive, visible, and socially accepted, especially among young people. As I write this, I’m looking at recent issues of Time and Newsweek: in the same week Time’s cover story was “Drugs on the Job,” Newsweek’s “Kids and Cocaine: An Epidemic Strikes Middle America.” How...

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