Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  And finally, just in case you guys at the DEA missed it, High Times magazine presented Late Night host Conan O’Brien with the beautiful Stoney Bong Award for comedy, and he kept it. Hurry, it’s still in his possession. He said that he planned to use it as a glass-eye holder, but that doesn’t matter, you can still bust him.

  GOT VOMIT?

  Ethan Nadelmann, head of the Drug Policy Alliance, has said that “No one should be punished for what they put into their bodies.” Of course, he’s referring to punishment by law enforcement, but the punishment can also come from the insides of a curious experimenter. It’s the risk of freedom.

  Besides the usual suspects, among the substances that have been eaten, smoked, snorted or sniffed in order to get high are morning glory seeds, cough medicine, mace (the food seasoning), rug cleaner, dramamine, kanemanol, nutmeg, banana skins and flagyl (intended for vaginal infections).

  According to an article in the journal Pediatrics, there’s an online drug encyclopedia that gets 250,000 clicks a day. The Web site lists hundreds of mind-altering chemicals, herbs and plants, plus thousands of posts by youthful users about their own particular experiences.

  Every two years, the California Department of Education conducts a survey with the state attorney general’s office. In October 2006, the results of their latest study of 10,638 students in 113 middle and high schools revealed that 15 percent of eleventh-graders, 9 percent of ninth-graders and 4 percent of seventh-graders have been using pharmaceutical drugs without a prescription.

  Guess where they find them: at parties in a game called “pharming,” which involves the use of a bowl of randomly collected pills. Researcher Rodney Skager states, “young people come in and grab the ones that look pretty and take them. This is obviously a really dangerous practice. I have no idea how common it is.” And they find them in their parents’ medicine cabinets, where teenagers have been snatching legal drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin even before trying marijuana or alcohol.

  Kathryn Jett, director of the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, said, “We will be targeting our research now on the issue of prescription drug use to make certain that this does not continue to increase. As a parent, you need to be vigilant as to where those drugs are kept. Or if you have painkillers and don’t need them, you need to dispose of them. If you have painkillers and you do need them, count them—know how many there are.”

  The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of 18-year-old twin sisters in France. Their mysterious symptoms were scaly skin on their legs and hands; they were also unsteady and mentally sluggish. The cause? A bag of mothballs, which was stashed in the the drawer of a night table in the hospital room, and discovered by a cleaning lady. The girls had been using the mothballs to get high, inhaling air from the bag for about ten minutes a day because classmates had recommended it.

  The sicker of the two had also been chewing half a mothball a day for two months. She told the doctors that she continued to use the mothballs during her hospitalization “because she thought her symptoms were not related to her habit.” It took her six months to fully recover. Her sister had only been “bagging” for a few weeks, and recovered in three months.

  Although radio talk show host Michael Jackson has said, “Anything that can make vomit pretty is certainly worth taking,” referring to psychedelics, Prison Legal News discloses what is perhaps the most bizarre example of self-intoxication: drinking drug-laced vomit. Prisoners at the Pine Grove Correctional Center in Canada have been drinking each other’s drug-laced vomit to get high. In fact, one inmate died there as a result of this practice.

  Sonia Faith Keepness was found dead in her cell at the women’s prison from ingesting a lethal combination of methadone and librium. She had swallowed two hits of methadone-laced vomit and taken four pills of librium. Two fellow prisoners admitted that after receiving their daily dose of methadone, they returned to their cells and regurgitated into a container for Keepness. They have been charged with drug trafficking, along with a third woman who provided the librium.

  Methadone is a narcotic painkiller that is prescribed for drug addicts because it alleviates the unpleasant symptoms associated with the withdrawal from heroin. At the Pine Grove infirmary, prisoners in the methadone program receive their daily dose of the narcotic—ironically, itself addictive—mixed with orange juice. They routinely traded their methadone-laced vomit in return for certain favors from other prisoners.

  “Methadone is a powerful drug,” an inmate pointed out. “They wanted to get high, and they were desperate enough to drink someone’s puke.”

  Prisoners are now required to remain under observation for one hour after drinking their daily dose.

  Finally, in September 2007, a Collier County, Florida, sheriff’s Information Bulletin issued a warning about “Jenkem,” a new drug made from raw sewage—a mixture of fermented fecal matter and urine—and included photos of the brown liquid in a bottle and a teenager inhaling the gas produced by the mixture from a balloon in order to achieve a “euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong hallucinations of times past. The high has been described by subjects as a feeling of being ‘out of it’ and talking to dead people. All subjects who used the Jenkem disliked the taste of sewage in their mouth and the fact that the taste continued for several days.” The Bulletin reported that Jenkem “is now a popular drug in American schools.” Word began to spread. By November, a drug counselor on KXAN in Austin was advising parents, “If there is a very funky smell or odor, ask. . . .”

  Could it have been a hoax? Someone named “Pickwick” took credit on the Internet for staging that photo and confessed that his Jenkem was just dough rolled in Nutella hazelnut chocolate spread. But then a DEA offical told the Washington Post, “There are people in America trying [Jenkem].” Was that true or had a hoax transmuted into an urban legend? Certainly it’s true that in Zambia, many thousands of street children have been resorting to Jenkem for over a decade. “Initially, they used to get it from the sewer, but they make it anywhere,” said John Zulu, director of the Ministry of Sport, Youth and Child Development in Zambia. “They say it keeps them warm and makes them fearless.”

  In any case, snopes.com, the Bible of Rumor Research, has not found any evidence to substantiate the original sheriff’s Information Bulletin claim.

  HOW MAGIC ARE YOUR MUSHROOMS?

  There I stood, in San Francisco on April Fools’ Day 1995, with my feet spread apart and my arms outstretched against the side of a car. As I was being frisked by a police officer, I realized that he was facing the back of my Mad magazine jacket, the face of Alfred E. Neuman smiling at him and saying, “What, me worry?” And, indeed, this cop was worried. He asked if I had anything sharp in my pockets.

  “Because,” he explained, “I’m gonna get very mad if I get stuck,” obviously referring to a hypodermic needle.

  “No,” I said, “there’s only a pen in this pocket”—gesturing toward the left with my head—“and keys in that one.”

  When he saw the contents of the baggie that he removed from my pocket, he asked a rhetorical question—“So you like mushrooms, huh?”—with such hostility that it kept reverberating inside my head. I hadn’t done anything that would harm somebody else. This was simply an authority figure’s need to control. But control what? My pleasure? Or was it deeper than that?

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  In 2008, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published the results of a daylong experiment involving psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms.” Although this psychedelic has been used for centuries in religous ceremonies, it’s still illegal. The study, which took place at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and involved thirty-six male and female volunteers.

  Fourteen months later, 64 percent still felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in terms of creativity, self-confidence, flexibility and optimism; 61 percent reported at least a modera
te change of behavior in positive ways; 58 percent rated the session as one of the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives; 67 percent said that the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had. Many spoke of being more sensitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate. According to one participant, “I feel more centered in who I am and what I’m doing. I don’t seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have.” She referred to “taking off . . . being lifted up.” Then came “brilliant colors and beautiful patterns, just stunningly gorgeous—more intense than normal reality,” she added. “I feel much more grounded and that we are all connected. There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened.”

  Head researcher Roland Griffiths stated, “This is a truly remarkable finding. Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in a laboratory. This gives credence to the claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence.”

  Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has been able to break through “the forty-year-long bad trip” that he and other researchers have faced in dealing with the negative fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds in the mid-1960s. He describes this four-decade intellectual Dark Age as being characterized by “enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive.”

  Charles Shaw points out on AlterNet that “What was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga—plant medicines thousands of years old—was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effectve palliatives for the sick and dying. . . .”

  Referring to Doblin’s pioneer work, he writes, “Western governments had to ask themselves what was more important to them: their irrational and erroneous drug propaganda, or the possibility that the millions of lives they had devasted by war, violence and iniquitous economic policies might actually be repaired. In this, the seeds of a psychedelic renaissance were planted.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  As for my psilocybin bust, I got off with a $100 fine and nothing on my permanent record. But I finally understood what that police officer had meant when he sarcastically snarled, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” What was his actual message? Back through eons of ancestors, this cop was continuing a never-ending attempt to maintain the status quo. He had unintentionally revealed the true nature of the threat he perceived. What he had really said to me was, “So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, when you put it like that, sure I do. I like it a whole lot.”

  3. UNDER THE COUNTERCULTURE

  HIPPIES ON THE HITLER CHANNEL

  The History Channel recently presented a two-hour documentary titled Hippies. Co-sponsored by the American Association of Retired People, it was a crude attempt by AARP—considered by some to be a front for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries—to reach the aging baby-boomer market, although the program turned out to be a blatant slur on countercultural history.

  I had been interviewed for a few hours and was dismayed to see that the one quote they used—beginning “It was fun”—immediately followed a scene of police indiscriminately beating young demonstrators at an antiwar rally. Violence galore. You’d think you were watching The Sopranos. Or maybe the evening news. I asked a few fellow participants for their reactions.

  • Roz Payne, DVD producer, What We Want, What We Believe: Black Panther Library: “Throughout the show, I was yelling to my daughter ‘This is shit!’ I had spent about three hours being filmed, but I was cut and chopped into one-sentence bits. My first line was, ‘I took LSD at UCLA’—they left out that LSD was part of the Psychology Department research—it was legal. I felt I was chopped into little sound bites.”

  • Ken Babbs, sidekick of Ken Kesey and the roving band of Merry Pranksters: “The show sucked. Zane [Kesey’s son] said he was ashamed to have had anything to do with it. That picture of a bus, calling it the Ken Kesey Prankster bus—I suppose it doesn’t do any good to point out that it is not Further but someone else’s bus, for as time goes on, whatever anyone portrays as reality works just fine.”

  • Carolyn Garcia, former wife of Jerry Garcia, also known as Mountain Girl from the Merry Pranksters: “Could more negative terms be found? I must have turned it off five times. If I had known the bias of the piece, I would have abstained. I hate being blamed for Manson and riots and people bleeding. What a nasty raft of crap. Well, what can one do about this bash-fest? Peter Coyote was obviously forced at gunpoint to read the script.”

  “I didn’t see the piece,” Coyote told me, “but I’ve sure gotten shit about it. The last thing that we ought to be doing is getting uptight with one another or ourselves over the fraudulence and trickery of other people. I was taken by these guys, and so were a lot of other people. The guy that produced it was a quisling, and I fought with him all through the recording and made him make many changes, but I couldn’t control how he would cut and edit. We’ve all been misquoted before, and used for other people’s agendas. This film is just not a big deal. At the end of the day, the Grateful Dead and the Diggers and the counterculture have already changed American culture irrevocably. There is no place in the United States today where you cannot find organic food, environmental movements, alternative spiritual practices, alternative medical practices, peace movements. . . .”

  In addition to narrating Hippies, Coyote had been interviewed by Lance Miccio, who also interviewed Mountain Girl, Wavy Gravy, Country Joe McDonald, Roz Payne, Ken Babbs, Martin Lee, Lenore Kandel, Fito de la Parra, Buddy Miles, Elsa Marley and myself, among others.

  Somebody else interviewed the right-wingers—including Ed Meese, former attorney general, and Rick Brookhiser, senior editor at the National Review—who were given way too much time to spout their disdain for hippies. According to the editor, Tracey Connor, she was given a script, and she had to find footage to fit that script; then later more script was added, and she said she had to change shots, but then it was too long so she had to cut. But the question is, why was Miccio’s work maneuvered into such a hodge-podge of prejudicial propaganda?

  “What can I say?” he asked me. “Hippies by the Hitler Channel. It was not what I had hoped for. I feel like the guy in Pulp Fiction who said it best: ‘We went into this with the best of intentions.’ Then Samuel Jackson shoots him in the knee. The executive producer [and co-writer], Scott Reda, saved money by not having a director. He fired anyone who objected to his cost-effective vision of what the hippies were about. Although he was alive in the ’60s, I think he did two ’50s and went right into the ’70s. I supplied him with enough real firsthand information from those who were there, but they chose to ignore or manipulate it into a dirty story about dirty hippies. I am sorry to all of you who allowed me into your life so the History Channel could present you in such a slanted, misunderstood view. I am so pissed off that I was a pawn in this bullshit documentary. My deepest apologies to all.”

  In Reda’s hometown paper in Easton, Pennsylvania, the Express-Times, Tony Nauroth wrote:

  “The show was spawned from a book he stumbled across—Hippie by Barry Miles. ‘At first the film was going to mimic the book,’ Reda says—‘very light, from 1965 to 1970 or ’71, but the network kept saying, We know about that, we know about that, we know about that. Literally at our fifteenth draft, they said, Tell us something we don’t know.’ Through intense below-the-skin research, Reda emerged with the fi
lm’s dark direction—fewer flowers and more drugs; lost children fumbling their way around the predatory jungle that the Mecca of hippie life, Haight-Ashbury, had become.”

  However, we can be grateful to other voices for presenting the positive side. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford:

  “The hippies had it right all along. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid, and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.”

  Michael Simmons, who has written more than 125 articles about marijuana, told me, “When I had a medical procedure earlier this week, they made me fill out a form that asked what ethnicity I am. I wrote ‘Hippie-American.’ ”

  And Stephen Gaskin wrote in an introduction to the revised version of his 1970 book, Monday Night Class: “I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. By that I mean that the ethnicity I grew up with was such a white bread, skim milk, gringo experience that it wasn’t satisfying for me. It had no moxie. Now, being a hippie, that’s another thing. I feel like the Sioux feel about being from the Lakota Nation. I feel like Mario Cuomo feels about being Italian. It makes me feel close with Jews and Rastafarians. I have a tribe, too. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the freethinkers, Voltaire and so on, back to Socrates and Buddha, but the wave of revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. And rock ’n’ roll lights my soul and gives a beat to the revolution.”