A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  I continued my fruitless quest. I even momentarily considered trying to log on to the dark web, but since I am only marginally more technologically savvy than my mother, who has yet to figure out how to turn on her cell phone ringer, I realized that with my luck I’d probably end up soliciting drugs directly from the DEA homepage. I only ever got as far as Googling LSD and finding endlessly threaded message boards where eager seekers were told by more experienced keyboard shamans that when they were truly ready the drug would come to them. Obviously, these guys were high. I gave up.

  About a week later, I received a message from my acquaintance. The possibly mythical professor was sympathetic to my predicament. Moreover, he was nearing the end of his life and no longer had use for his remaining LSD. He would send it to me. The story seemed preposterous, but two days later, I opened my mailbox to find a brown paper package covered in brightly colored stamps, many of them at least a decade old. The return address read “Lewis Carroll.” Inside the package, wrapped in tissue, was a tiny cobalt blue bottle. On a scrap of white paper, printed in sans-serif italics, was the following note:

  Dear Fellow resident of Berkeley,

  Because of a request from an old friend, you will find 50 drops of vintage quality in the small bottle. Take in two drops portions (5 mcg per drop).

  Our lives may be no more

  Than dewdrops on a summer morning,

  But surely,

  It is better that we sparkle

  While we are here.

  L.C.

  Weird. Very, very weird. And yet also kind of adorable. And freaky. I was ready, and it had come to me.

  My first order of business was to test the drug. When I began flirting with the idea of trying the protocol, I ordered an LSD test kit. Without the security of the FDA, I wanted to make very sure that what I was taking was actually LSD and not some toxic substitute. Far too often, what is sold on the street as one drug is something else entirely. For example, as the precursor chemicals to MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly) become harder to find, hundreds of new psychoactive substances, some of which are very dangerous, are being synthesized and sold under the name. According to the DEA, the vast majority of what is currently being sold as Molly is in fact something else, often a synthetic cathinone (known as bath salts), methamphetamine, or most likely a combination of a variety of substances, some benign, some very dangerous. My eldest child attends Wesleyan University, where a group of students ended up in the hospital after consuming what they had been told was pure Molly. The kids suffered respiratory distress, and at least one of them nearly died. It took six shocks with a defibrillator and an intubation to save that young man’s life. It appears that what the kids took was not MDMA but AB-Fubinaca, a synthetic cannabinoid commonly known as “Spice” or K2, which is far more dangerous. Similarly, toxic substances have been sold as LSD, leading in at least a few cases to death. I was not about to consume a drug without testing it first, no matter how cute a note it came with.

  From where did I order this testing kit, you might wonder? I already told you I’m too nervous for hand-to-hand purchases and too inept to log on to the dark web. I got my LSD testing kit from the Internet’s largest purveyor of toilet paper, half-hour dramas, and discounted books. That’s right, I bought it on Amazon. And it qualified for Prime two-day shipping!

  Squinting at the fine print on the box through my reading glasses, I read through the directions twice—I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I delicately squeezed a single drop from the cobalt blue bottle into the opening at the top of the test kit and squeezed the rubber sleeve, which broke the thin glass barrier between the drop and the testing solution, allowing them to mix together. The solution was meant to turn bright lavender in the presence of LSD, but I saw only the faintest shade of purple. I reread the directions. Stared again at the solution. Was it even purple I was seeing so very faintly, or was it my imagination? Suddenly I realized what the problem was. LSD is effective at infinitesimal doses. A single drop of pure LSD would contain a massive amount of the drug. For this reason, LSD, even in its liquid form, is always diluted. “Blotter acid,” for example, the most common way LSD is sold, is a piece of paper, generally decorated with some kind of design, soaked in a diluted solution of LSD and perforated into little squares. One single confetti-sized square is designed to contain the standard dose—approximately one hundred to one hundred and fifty micrograms of LSD.*2 If a single drop of Lewis Carroll’s solution contained a mere five micrograms of LSD, it had to have been so vastly diluted that it would barely register on the testing kit. After an hour of Web surfing (there seem to be a limitless quantity of Web sites offering information about psychedelic drugs, including how to test them), I made a decision to have faith that the contents of Lewis Carroll’s bottle would not make me grow either very big or very small. Or kill me.

  I took the drug, and went on to have a really good day.

  * * *

  *1  Stay tuned. You’ll read more about how and why I’ve used MDMA later on in the book.

  *2  Or at least that’s what it says on the Web and in the thirty-two books about psychedelics I bought and neurotically pored over in anticipation of beginning this experiment because I am a good student and an anxious nerd and I like to do my research before taking anything resembling a risk. I haven’t ever actually seen a tab of acid in person. According to DEA data from confiscated samples, the actual range of LSD on blotter is from thirty micrograms (if your dealer’s a cheapskate) to a hundred and twenty.

  Day 2

  Transition Day

  Physical Sensations: Normal. A little draggy because of lack of sleep.

  Mood: Grumpy at beginning of day, but by end of day productive and content.

  Conflict: Even when irritable, I didn’t argue with anyone.

  Sleep: A sleepless night.

  Work: Not pouring out like yesterday, but a solid day’s work.

  Pain: Intense shoulder pain during the night.

  This morning, when I woke up, I thought, “Oh, it’s you.” Not the new-and-improved me of yesterday, who was effortlessly cheerful and affectionate with her children and husband and who wrote more in a single day than she usually does in a week. Just plain old me. About the second day, Fadiman’s protocol notes, “Many people report that the second day effects are as positive or even better than the first day.” For once in my life, would it have killed me to be like everyone else?

  Perhaps I did not immediately experience the typical positive second-day results because I was exhausted from a long night of sleeplessness and pain. I have been in pretty much constant pain since last spring, when I was felled with frozen shoulder, a disorder in which the capsule of the shoulder becomes inflamed and stiff, resulting in excruciating pain,*1 especially at night. Frozen shoulder comes on without warning and for no reason, and can last up to three years. It is debilitating and dispiriting, and it’s surely part of the reason for my current state of anhedonic desperation.

  The symptoms of frozen shoulder are worst at night, and it has been a very long time since I got a decent night’s sleep. The pain keeps me from falling asleep, and wrenches me awake when I roll over. I have tried everything to relieve this pain, from physical therapy to acupuncture, ibuprofen to opioids.*2 In fact, nothing provided any relief until a doctor suggested I try medical marijuana. I resisted the idea at first. I have no interest in recreational drug use; I didn’t and don’t want to get “high.” But the doctor reassured me that I could purchase marijuana devoid of intoxicating effects. It is the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana (or “cannabis,” as the bright young people at my local dispensary prefer to call it) that causes the feelings and mental effects we associate with the drug. Cannabis also contains a related but structurally different isomer, cannabidiol, or CBD. CBD has pain-relieving properties, and acts as an anti-seizure agent, but it doesn’t make you high. Since the decriminalization and popularization of medical marijuana, high-CBD strains have been engineered t
hat all but eliminate THC.

  I followed the doctor’s advice and tried the high-CBD cannabis; though the relief was by no means complete, it did substantially decrease my pain, if only at night, when I allowed myself to take it. How ironic. Addictive and dangerous opioids, fatal at high doses and yet freely prescribed by physicians,*3 did nothing to alleviate the pain of my frozen shoulder, but cannabis, still illegal under federal law and in many states, worked.

  When I taught my seminar on the drug war, I began every semester by writing the question “What is a drug?” on the whiteboard. I divided the board into sections—medicine, drug, food—and then had students brainstorm, calling out every substance they could think of and debating where to place it on the chart. Coffee, which is a stimulant, is a food. What about a caffeine pill? Or nicotine? Are they medicines, foods, drugs? Oxycodone, an opioid alkaloid synthesized in part from the poppy, is a medicine. Heroin, an opioid derivative of morphine, also synthesized from the poppy, is a drug. Do these differentiations make any sense at all?

  America did not always make such distinctions. In fact, for the first hundred years, citizens of this country were at liberty to alter their consciousness with any substance they pleased. Thomas Jefferson planted poppies in his medicinal garden at Monticello and may have used opium—supposedly to treat chronic diarrhea, but perhaps also for fun. The man was hardly a model of propriety. Only in 1875 was the first drug law passed, in San Francisco, and even that did not prohibit a drug but prevented a specific use: the smoking of opium in Chinese opium dens. It was an attack on emigrants from China, who smoked their opium, leaving the more typical American opium user, a middle-aged, white, Southern woman, to tipple from her bottle of laudanum (opium combined with alcohol) in peace.

  During that time and up through the early twentieth century, opioids and cocaine were readily available and frequently used. The Sears Roebuck catalogue, the amazon.com of the time, featured kits with syringes and vials of heroin or cocaine, complete with handy-dandy carrying cases. Cocaine was the official remedy of the Hay Fever Association, and bartenders dropped it into shots of whiskey for a little added boost. Coca leaf and kola syrup were combined with cocaine to create what became, unsurprisingly, the most popular drink in the world. In fact, it wasn’t until 1929 that Coca-Cola became free of the drug, thereafter relying solely on caffeine to invigorate its customers.*4 Bayer pharmaceutical ads from the period advertise both aspirin and heroin. Mothers were urged to lull their cranky babies to sleep with the aid of tinctures containing all manners of opioids, including morphine and heroin. Opium, cocaine, and their derivatives were injected, granulated and sprinkled on open wounds, drunk and otherwise ingested by anyone who could afford them.

  As a result of these patent medicines, addiction to opioids was at an all-time high at the turn of the last century. In 1900, a remarkable 2 to 5 percent of the population was addicted to these drugs. Only in 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act required manufacturers to start listing the ingredients of their products on the labels, did rates drop, perhaps because people became aware of exactly what it was that was hushing their babies so effectively.

  But even then there was no particular stigma against drug use. Eighty percent of addicts were upstanding citizens, employed, with families and dependents. They thought no more of taking their laudanum or cocaine than we today think of having a glass of wine with dinner. The list of notable narcotic users includes Dr. William Stewart Halsted, the “Father of Modern Surgery,” one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital, who first discovered that cocaine could be used as an anesthesia on his patients, and then took to enjoying its other effects on himself.

  The first federal drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, was ostensibly a regulatory act that required physicians to purchase a license to dispense narcotics, and to keep records of their prescriptions. However, because it prevented the prescribing of narcotics solely as a treatment for addiction without another underlying ailment, all of the upright individuals who were addicted but not otherwise ill suddenly found themselves bereft of legal sources. Some kicked their habits, but many others chose alternative paths. Dr. Halsted, for example, after a traumatic period of cocaine withdrawal, switched to legal morphine and heroin, which he used for the remainder of his life, all the while enjoying a prosperous and successful medical career.

  Harking back to the good old days of ubiquitous drug addiction is a ridiculous way to make yourself feel better about having received a package of illegal drugs in your mailbox and embarking on a project that will strike many as lunatic. If I’m honest, the project seems crazy to me, too. I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t desperate. Though I had not considered it before, I think it’s likely that the fact that marijuana—which, like LSD, is listed on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”—helped my frozen shoulder, when dangerous and yet legal drugs did not, influenced my decision to try microdosing. It may be the one time pot has actually been the gateway drug that Nancy Reagan said it was.

  However, when I started Dr. Fadiman’s protocol, I stopped using even the small amount of cannabis that was helping to soothe my shoulder pain. I didn’t want to confuse any results. Moreover, the consequences of mixing drugs, even nontoxic drugs, can be unpredictable.

  When I woke up after my pain-filled, sleepless night, even before I got out of bed, I reached for my laptop with the arm attached to my good shoulder, and reread Dr. Fadiman’s protocol. This time I noticed something I had missed: the protocol can cause sleep disturbances. He writes, “Some people take something to get to sleep at their regular time.” This is something I have to figure out how to deal with.

  Still, I have too many children to indulge in early morning self-pity. I flung back the covers and dragged myself downstairs. It wasn’t until I was in the kitchen, drinking my first cup of tea and ushering my kids out the door to catch their various buses and rides, that I noticed that I had managed much more easily than usual to shrug off my bad mood, even if my shoulder hurts too fucking much to shrug.

  Something is happening. Whether it is all in my head remains to be seen.

  * * *

  *1  Two sentences and I’ve used the word “pain” three times. That about sums it up. Frozen shoulder hurts like a motherfucker. Worse than labor, worse than dental work.

  *2  The term “opiate” generally refers only to those morphinelike substances found in opium (i.e., morphine, codeine, and thebaine). The newer and more inclusive term “opioid” refers to opiates, semi-synthetics (e.g., heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc.), and synthetics (methadone, fentanyl, etc.). Because this distinction can be distracting and confusing, I’m going to use the term “opioid” exclusively.

  *3  And are probably what made Rush Limbaugh go deaf, though they can’t be blamed for the fact that the only voice he’s ever been able to hear is his own.

  *4  They took most of the coke out of Coke in 1903, but it took them a further twenty-six years to perfect the process and entirely rid the coca leaf of its psychoactive substances.

  Day 3

  Normal Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Irritable, depressed, anxious.

  Conflict: Picked a fight with my husband.

  Sleep: Another bad night.

  Work: Weirdly productive considering my crappy mood.

  Pain: Ugh.

  I know the protocol has a purpose, that the two days off are designed both to prevent me from developing a tolerance to the LSD, and to provide the experience of periodic “normal” days so I can better assess the quality of my mood on the Microdose and Transition Days, but it’s the first Day 3 of the cycle, and I already hate it. Once again, the pain in my shoulder woke me in the middle of the night. I miss the peace of yesterday afternoon, the peace that allowed me to wince in pain and then remind myself that frozen shoulder never lasts longer than a year or two. Three, tops. Today, rather than consider the therape
utic effects of time, I grumble that it’s already been a year, I cannot handle two more, and even after the shoulder thaws, there usually remain residual restrictions in movement. Today I have lost perspective. No. I have perspective. I have the perspective that, as bad as my pain is, worse is the humiliation of suffering an ailment whose risk factors are primarily being over forty and being a woman. As if turning the big 5-0 wasn’t bad enough, now I am forced to spend my nights tossing and turning from what the Chinese call “fifty-year shoulder.” George Clooney is fifty-five. Does he have to put up with this shit?

  Last night, as I lay in bed trying to force myself to sleep, I felt an all-too-familiar sensation, one that I’d naïvely hoped the microdosing would short-circuit. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. I tossed and turned, flinging my limbs around, groaning with frustration. My stomach began to roil, and I suddenly remembered the story I’d read recently in the Hypochondriac’s Bible (aka the Tuesday Health section of The New York Times). A woman experiences a heart attack differently from a man. Her symptoms aren’t limited to the left side of her chest and her left arm. Instead of chest pain, she may experience a sense of fullness. I felt full! Also empty. Or maybe neither. I certainly felt something. And my stomach hurt, another symptom. I was sweating, too.