This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 9

A guy who calls himself Mitra and puts his body weight at 175 pounds wrote a 2001 post about combining Ecstasy and 2C-T-7 that is t.i.tled "Aliens Reprogrammed My Brain." It is typical, if any of them can be. Two and a half hours after taking a "very strong" MDMA pill, hisroll is tapering off and I feel very grumpy that I do not have another pill or any acid to bring me back up. I find I usually don't get the most interesting part of the roll until I b.u.mp. I remember that I have some 2CT7 in the closet. I had previously done a small quant.i.ty of it and had not been very impressed. Then some of friends did some of my 2CT7 and they all puked and complained so I had never tried it again. Temporarily forgetting about the negative parts of my friends experiences, I went to the closet and retrieved a premeasured 20-25 mg (not exactly sure) bundle. I snort roughly half of it (~10 mg).

Mitra goes on to describe a trip filled with greater hallucinations than he has ever experienced before, and the reader gets the idea that he has had some pretty great ones. His night over, he a.s.sumes, he goes to bed at around seven the next morning.

[T]his is when the interesting part starts. I am getting some neat very brightly colored closed eye visuals and then something organizes them into some alien combination lock. I realize that it is the pa.s.sword protection machanism too [sic] my mind and something is trying to hack the code. Said something is very good at this and the pieces start falling into place. As each piece falls into place, I feel something shift and open in my mind and a coresponding [sic]physical shift and opening in my body. When something finishes dialing in the correct combination, everything unlocks and opens up like some sort of puzzle box and I am in hyper-s.p.a.ce. . . . I reach back to another place that I remember used to exist and I run a command there called "open the eyes" this works and I snap back into my body and open my eyes.

Such an overabundance of drug information may fairly be called the product of a "Just say no" upbringing. Childhood friends, Fire and Earth both graduated from high school in 1987 and wound up at the famously liberal New College of Florida. The school was at the forefront of the national upswing in Ecstasy and acid use, but the Erowids "kept to the sidelines," recalled Fire. "The combination of anti-drug scare stories and a lack of solid, accessible information made it difficult to come to any sort of rational conclusion about these substances." Earth remembers it the same way. "I couldn't find anything useful. Everything was one extreme or the other," he told me.

So the Erowids set out to collect as much reliable information on psychedelic drugs as they could. At the start, they did so mainly for themselves. Over the next few years, their collected knowledge "pil[ed] up in unorganized electronic stacks in the form of scattered e-mails, URLs, books, and journal references," Fire recalled. When the pair moved to the Midwest after graduation and Fire took up Web programming as a hobby, the data made for good material to play around with.

In late 1994, the Erowids moved to San Francisco, where psychedelic drugs and the Internet were both exploding. The couple soon joined a group known as the Rhythm Society, which celebrated the spirituality of dancing all night, sometimes aided by psychedelics. The group was a presence on the burgeoning rave scene, where it tried to press turntablism and tab-taking into the service of, as its mission statement puts it, "balanc[ing] our individual desires with the goal of harmony among ourselves, our neighbors, and the world."

Such visionary aspirations were in the air. The year before, as Fire put it, the Web had been "navigable largely through hierophantic ASCII interfaces that only a computer geek could love." In San Francisco, they found that text-only sites were fading out, opening up greater possibilities for creative networking. A site called the Hyperreal Drug Archives was then the most popular online resource for psychonautical investigations, but Fire and Earth wanted to do something different with their data collection: provide an objective, accurate, and highly specific catalog of drug information, not an overview of psychedelic culture as a whole.

In early 1995, Fire came up with the name Erowid, and the site went live. Four years later, Erowid moved onto Hyperreal's servers and incorporated the earlier site's information into its own archive. In 2007, it won the right to call itself a 501(c)3 organization. Fire and Earth are careful to keep their personal politics away from the site, but their mission statement does betray their idealism: "Truth, accuracy, and integrity in publishing information about psychoactives will lead to healthier and more balanced choices, behavior, and policies around all psychoactive medications, entheogens, herbs, and recreational drugs."

Until then, the site provides a warning that any drug warrior would approve of: "It is not recommended that any of the activities described actually be carried out. These files are provided FOR EDUCATION and INFORMATION ONLY." At Burning Man in 1996, the couple watched a friend take way too much GHB by confusing the dosage between two sources, so that he "consumed from one (more potent) source but dosed according to the correct dosage for the second (less potent) source," said Fire. After watching their friend go into convulsions, they began putting more and more cautionary information online.

Today, those a.s.sembling at Erowid.org include everyone from casual users to medical professionals. Traffic has grown steadily and now hovers at around 1.5 million unique visitors a month, with somewhat lower numbers when colleges are on break. (To put that in perspective, the New York Times Web site averages between 10 and 20 million unique visitors a month.) Use of the site is "very widespread" among her peers, said Kristen Kent, a toxicologist at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts Memorial Medical Center. "I haven't found any errors. If I did, I'd just write them and tell them." For medical professionals, the site has lifesaving potential. "I haven't been a teenager for a number of years," said Kent, by way of explaining that Erowid is most useful when somebody comes into the ER under the influence of a drug she hasn't heard of. The Erowids were even invited to speak at a national toxicology conference in 2006. According to Kent, they "were very well received."

Schedule I-drugs that the DEA considers to be the most dangerous and have the least medical value-is something of a tribute to Alexander Shulgin. A former Dow Chemical Company chemist, Shulgin, now in his eighties, is a legend in the psychedelic world, having synthesized MDMA in the fifties after stumbling across a discarded recipe. He went on to invent the overwhelming majority of Schedule I drugs, making him the G.o.dfather of all research chemicals. At Erowid.org, he and his wife and collaborator, Ann Shulgin, each have a "vault," a collection of resources that includes a brief biography, interviews, and audio transcriptions. One of the site's membership gifts is a signed set of photographs of Shulgin's lab, a shed behind his Lafayette, California, home. The donation required to get one currently starts at $750.

Shulgin's work doesn't exactly fly in the face of the law, but it does test it. As long as he can show that he's engaged in legitimate research-say, looking for the next Paxil-it is legal for him to create chemical compounds that have never before existed. It's also legal for him to test the drug on himself or on others, a.s.suming consent. If he "accidentally" creates a drug that is mind-altering instead of mood-altering-the litmus test of legality in the United States-he records the recipe online and moves on. Often, the DEA will then cla.s.sify the new compound as illegal.

Shulgin first collected his research in 1991 in the book Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved: A Chemical Love Story, coauth.o.r.ed with Ann and known as PiHKAL. Shortly thereafter, his cooperative relationship with the DEA-he had a license to work with Schedule I drugs and in exchange gave expert testimony for the feds in court-came to an end. The DEA raided his lab, discovered record-keeping irregularities, and revoked his license. Shulgin was undeterred, and in 1997, he and Ann self-published Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved: The Continuation, or TiHKAL. The two books combined are nearly two thousand pages long and include detailed recipes for the production of hundreds of drugs. PiHKAL has sold more than fifty thousand copies and TiHKAL is in its second printing, with well over twenty thousand copies in circulation, says Shulgin. They've both been translated into Spanish and Russian, and both are available in online versions through Erowid.

PiHKAL and TiHKAL don't stop at recipes. They also suggest some of the nearly limitless variations that could be made to each compound to slightly alter the experience it induces, and they include a personal account of drug experimentation. In the entry for 5-methoxy-diisopropyltryptamine, aka Foxy, Shulgin writes that while he was taking the drug, everything "was shaded with eroticism. s.e.x was explosive. . . . Colors on the edges of the wiggles of the eye, a sort of Jessie Allen running design with color contrasts and sparkle. . . . This is a definite sense-distorter. I am not completely sure I like it." In his summary, he concluded that the altered state that he and his coexperimenters entered "was one that they simply couldn't use. They couldn't make intuitive leaps. They were wasting their time."

As long as a chemist can demonstrate that he isn't trying to make something illegal, the discovery process isn't covered by the a.n.a.logue Act. Indeed, some designer drugs were first synthesized with a more conventional purpose in mind-say, mood stabilizers made by pharmaceutical companies. The potent psychedelic AMT-5-methoxy--methyltryptamine-is one such substance, developed as an antidepressant in the sixties and banned for its hallucinogenic effects in 2004. AET, or -ethyltryptamine, is another vintage creation, first sold by Upjohn as an antidepressant in 1961. It was soon shelved owing to concerns that it might cause severe white-blood-cell reduction, but a couple of decades later, street dealers became aware of another, more marketable effect: a convincing simulation of an Ecstasy high. Thirty-two years later, AET was placed on Schedule I.

Until Shulgin tries one of his chemicals, he argues, he can't be sure whether it's psychedelic. That strategy creates risks beyond mere criminality. "There's nothing but danger in taking a large dose the first time. You' re asking for trouble," he told me, describing a drug trial that didn't go well. "The question attached to a new chemical that's never been tried is, How much do you take? I start at the microgram level and move up. When I got to 1.5 micrograms, I found myself running out the back door and vomiting. So I backed off and tried again a few days later with 1.5 micrograms. I vomited again. It was toxic. It may have been amazing and hypnotic at 10 micrograms, but I was never going to get there. I abandoned that line of synthetic exploration."

For Shulgin, exploration is something of an end unto itself. "I don't feel responsible for having created something that some people find interesting and some find useful and others find awful," he said. "I compare it to painting."

It's not surprising that the Web-savvy and the drug-savvy have come together at Erowid. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well doc.u.mented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple's Steve Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." (In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed as a young man.) Markoff writes that Jobs told him that his own LSD experience was "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life."

After LSD inventor Albert Hofmann died, in early 2008, Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies founder Rick Doblin gave me a letter that Hofmann had written to Jobs suggesting that if acid had been so important to him, he ought to consider donating money to psychedelic research. The previously undisclosed letter led to a thirty-minute phone conversation between Jobs and Doblin but no contribution. "He was still thinking, 'Let's put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,'" recalled a disappointed Doblin.

Thinking differently-or thinking different, as one Apple slogan had it-is a hallmark of the acid experience. "When I' m on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into another brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann's one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly "solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead." "It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain," said Herbert. "Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used."

Burning Man, founded in 1986 by San Francisco techies, has always been an attempt to make a large number of people use different parts of their brains toward some nonspecific but ostensibly enlightening and communally beneficial end. The event was quickly moved to the desert of Nevada as it became too big for the city. Today, it's more likely to be attended by a software engineer than a dropped-out hippie. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are longtime Burners, and the influence of San Francisco and Seattle tech culture is everywhere in the camps and exhibits built for the eight-day festival. Its Web site suggests, in fluent acidese, that "[t]rying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind."

At the 2007 event, I set up my tent at Camp Shift-as in "Shift your consciousness"-next to four RVs rented by Alexander and Ann Shulgin and their septua- and octogenarian friends from northern California. The honored elders, the spiritual mothers and fathers of Burning Man, they spent the nights sitting on plastic chairs and giggling until sunrise. Near us, a guy I knew from the Eastern Sh.o.r.e-an elected county official, actually-had set up a nine-and-half-hole miniature golf course. Why nine and a half? "Because it's Burning Man," he explained. Our camp featured lectures on psychedelics and a "ride" called "Dance, Dance, Immolation." Players would don a flame-r.e.t.a.r.dant suit and try to dance to the flashing lights. Make a mistake, and you would be engulfed in flames. The first entry on the FAQ sign read, "Is this safe? A: Probably not."

John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he's certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he's perhaps best known for Gilmore 's Law, his observation that "[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. "What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company," he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there's some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: "To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads," he said.

Gilmore doubts, however, that a strict cause-and-effect relationship between drugs and the Internet can be proved. The type of person who's inspired by the possibility of creating new ways of storing and sharing knowledge, he said, is often the same kind interested in consciousness exploration. At a basic level, both endeavors are a search for something outside of everyday reality-but so are many creative and spiritual undertakings, many of them strictly drug-free. But it's true, Gilmore noted, that people do come to conclusions and experience revelations while tripping. Perhaps some of those revelations have turned up in programming code.

And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the n.o.bel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

It's no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British wire service after Crick's death, said that when he spoke with Crick about what he'd heard from the scientist's friends, he "listened with rapt, amused attention" and "gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said, 'Print a word of it and I' ll sue.'"

Spending time with Alexander and Ann Shulgin, you get the sense that the federal government would have a hard time finding a jury to convict him. With bushy silver hair and a long beard, he exudes softness and kindness. His wife, meanwhile, is everyone's perfect grand-mother-sa.s.sy, warm, and proud. Both possess an earthy sense of humor. "When Sasha feels like he's being worshiped too much, he' ll fart," joked Ann, a therapist who's researched the therapeutic potential of MDMA and other drugs.

The Shulgins have become media darlings, granting interviews to all who call and quickly winning over reporters. Exhibit A is a 2005 New York Times magazine cover story, "Dr. Ecstasy," a deeply sympathetic portrait published at a time when the prevailing national att.i.tude had soured on MDMA. Although Shulgin has been raided twice, neither time led to jail. The incidents were serious enough, however, that he now hangs a sign on his shed informing any visiting agents that his work is within the law.

"As far as the illegality, that's the DEA's concern," he told me. "I can say I' m making antihistamines or antidepressants. If it's psychedelic, I' ll publish it and get rid of it." There's no evidence that Shulgin has profited from his inventions, other than his having been rewarded with speaking gigs all over the world. But his published recipes have allowed the growth of a vast gray market in which others are definitely making some money.

There seems to be no shortage of chemists following Shulgin's lead. He said that in early 2007 he was asked by a colleague to share his working notes on a drug far down the line in the T family, a sulfur-based group of chemicals that gives the user a feeling somewhere between those induced by Ecstasy and mescaline. ("T7 is my favorite of the T family," Shulgin noted.) Shulgin sent him his working recipe, and the chemist, without asking his permission, posted it online. The chemist had a change of heart and pulled the recipe down a week later, apologizing to Shulgin for the breach of trust. But the chemical cat was out of the bag. Within three weeks, a Chinese chemist had duplicated Shulgin's substance, reposted the results, and made the new drug available for distribution.

Shulgin continues to allow his detailed drug recipes and reflections to be posted on Erowid.org. He has also acted as an in-house consultant for those who might be conducting their own chemical research. Want to know why a certain compound turned brown while separating at 50 degrees Fahrenheit? Until recently, users could just click through to a link that asked Shulgin directly. With the chemist now on sabbatical and that link inactive, the social-networking possibilities of Erowid have been pretty much exhausted.

Earth said that the primary reason to keep the site free of socializing is to protect readers. He doesn't want Erowid to be used by law enforcement to entrap those who are looking for accurate information about drugs. Another reason he doesn't allow users to post directly to the site is the supreme importance of providing accurate information. A mix-up of grams and milligrams, for instance, could turn an experience into something very unpleasant, if not fatal. Information submitted by hundreds of users is fact-checked by dozens of volunteers, all of whom have been trained and approved by the Erowids. The info is then rechecked and, finally, posted.

Thus visitors to Erowid.org are confronted by one Seattle contributor's thoroughly vetted "Dangerous Overdose" entry on Shulgin's Blue Mystic: "At about 4 am I came to my senses. I was standing in front of some bank doorway, without my jacket and sweatshirt, wearing only a t-shirt in 30 degree weather[,] a quarter-sized abrasion on my left eyebrow and blood down to my chin. Right knee badly sc.r.a.ped and sore, b.u.mp on the back of my head with some scabbing, abrasion on left shoulder. My wallet was gone."

The site also recounts the story of seventeen-year-old Joshua Robbins, who, Memphis, Tennessee, media reported in 2001, died as a result of taking Ecstasy. Erowid investigated and posted an account pieced together from the recollections of various witnesses, including one who had driven Robbins to the hospital. According to the Erowid version, he had indeed taken Ecstasy, but the substance that probably killed him was 2C-T-7. "He spent the last minutes of his life screaming at the top of his lungs, 'I dont want to die! this is stupid!' and I have a feeling that he was still violent when the people put him into my car and said that he had 'calmed down,'" one of Robbins's friends recalled. The post concludes with a note signed by the Erowids: "Recreational use of research chemicals can kill."

A similar warning from the DEA or the White House would be laughed off. Coming from Erowid.org, it sends shivers through the psychedelic community. The Erowids have even earned the grudging respect of the National Inst.i.tute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which in 2002 invited them to address a conference the organization hosted.

I asked NIDA several times about the invite and was repeatedly told that it wouldn't comment on an outside drug resource. Eventually, though, a NIDA spokeswoman, Dorie Hightower, said that Fire and Earth were invited to speak because Erowid is regularly mentioned in meetings on drug use and abuse.

Nevertheless, other arms of the government deem Erowid a threat. In 2004, after Earth wrote the DEA to correct inaccuracies on the agency's Web site, he received this note in reply: "With all due respect, you will appreciate that it is highly inappropriate for us to establish any sort of dialogue. We are on opposite sides of a very high fence. Please do not contact me again. Thank you."

As a result of the Internet's ability to bring together large groups of like-minded people, it's becoming increasingly difficult for a single actor-say, the state-to crush any given activity, even one that hovers at the edge of legality. "The balance of power has shifted decisively into the hands of the networked public," said VRML coder Mark Pesce. His upcoming book, The Human Network, will describe the ways in which centralized power fails to oppose decentralized, networked power. One chapter, he told me, will explain Gilmore's Law, the tendency of the Internet to defy efforts to censor it.

The feds, in announcing the Operation Web Tryp bust, indicated that it wasn't their Web sleuthing that led to the bust, but dumb luck. They had infiltrated a "rave-style party" at Hampton Roads Naval Base in Virginia, and the sailors confessed they'd gotten their exotic drugs online. "This is the beginning of this operation, it's not the end," promised Ed Childress, a special agent for the DEA, to the Mohave Daily News. "There's more to come."

There wasn't. Five years later, that five-company sting remains the biggest research-chemical takedown in cyberhistory. Demand for research chemicals has always been small relative to that for other drugs, but producers and consumers are still out there. They've simply moved into less conspicuous corners. Adventurous psychonauts now have to work harder-especially to avoid online scams.

Today, offsh.o.r.e dealers use small closed networks, advertise quietly, and make sure to disguise their ident.i.ties and locations. One psychonaut I know who's used such a network-which depends on the tight-lipped loyalty of its patrons to avoid detection-told me that product quality is a.s.sured by the necessarily close community of users. Some private sites even allow for customer ratings and reviews, he said.

When word of the Web Tryp bust broke, I e-mailed another designer-drug connoisseur with the news and got an immediate response: "Nooooooooooooo!!!!" I e-mailed him nearly five years later to ask if he was still buying research chemicals online. He was skeptical of the closed networks my other source described, and suggested that many might not be all that professionally run. It "sounds like the old days," he wrote. "I know i would never order anything now. . . . I prefer to have my weird research chemicals come with COA's (Certificates of a.n.a.lysis). I could get those before-I don't think your local underground psychedelics men are going to provide 3rd party verification on what they are selling you."

He's not despairing, though. Instead, he takes the long view. "I'd say the days of getting your hands on things that will not be good street drugs but may have other interesting effects is down for the count for this round," he said. "But this is a battle as old as history itself, and just like the modern revival of shamanism and alchemy the day will come again when we win back these tools."

In the meantime, he doesn't need any LSD subst.i.tutes. The real thing is back.

CHAPTER 14.

Acid Redux.

The guy in the Cat-in-the-Hat headgear was shirtless, with his shorts around his ankles and his arms out wide, getting a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b on a pedestal fifteen feet in the air. It was a moment before I realized what I was seeing, and I quickly looked away. After all, there was plenty else to see.

It was the middle of the night in Black Rock City, Nevada, the site of the annual Burning Man get-together, and the playa-the festival's town square of sorts-was filled with tens of thousands of mostly young, successful, and attractive white folks, the majority of them from San Francisco and parts north. The playa sparkled with Day-Glo colors adorning bodies and bicycles and "art cars." Some of the last were Mack trucks converted into roving double-decker raves, complete with bars and DJs. It was a spectacle of consumption, hedonism, and philanthropy that was as multifaceted and American a phenomenon as you could imagine, but I was there with just one real purpose: looking, again, for LSD.

When acid disappeared earlier in the decade, its near total absence at Burning Man was the example given by heads to demonstrate the profundity of the loss. "There was no acid at Burning Man!" said astonished longtime Burner Mark Pesce when I asked him about the drought a couple of years before.

When I first wrote about acid's disappearance, in 2004, I relied on published data, some cultural musing, and a lot of personal observation in the form of interviews with dozens of people who ought to know whatever there was to know about LSD. At the end of that story, I cautioned that despite what appeared to be a fairly complete vanishing of the drug, you should never bet against a comeback. By the time I got to Burning Man four years later, cultural musing and personal observation had convinced me that acid was on its way back, though I had no data to back that speculation up.

It made sense, however, given one of the long-standing facts of the drug trade: no matter how major a producer a government takes down, it can't totally rid the world of the two things needed to keep producing and distributing a drug: the will and the way. By taking out Leonard Pickard, the feds may have struck a blow against the way, but surveys and the scene on the playa showed that the will to trip was still very much alive. And where there's a will, well, there's a way.

Drug producers and distributors have always found ways to adapt to interdiction and other pressures against their products. When U.S. meth makers saw the bottom of the boot in the 1970s, Mexicans stepped in to keep the nation tweaking. When the feds brought the dragnet down to Miami and the Caribbean in the 1980s, the cocaine trade similarly moved elsewhere. When U.S. forces pushed hard against Afghan poppy-growers, farmers switched to marijuana. Users, too, know how to adapt. When religious figures turned public opinion against alcohol in the nineteenth century, Americans discovered their love of opium. When LSD fell off the map in the twenty-first century, acidheads turned to subst.i.tutes such as research chemicals, ayahuasca, and salvia. One of the few sustained declines of a drug's use in America in which there's been no obvious subst.i.tution strategy at work involves something perfectly legal: tobacco. Following aggressive efforts to card kids who try to buy tobacco products and to educate adults about the health hazards of smoking, cigarette use has plummeted-and without a single seller or user being dragged off to prison.

But that's in the legal market. In the illegal market, of course, someone's going to get arrested. That threat helps keep the interrelationships of drug makers, distributors, and users and their various products and proclivities hidden to some degree or other. Cause and effect can be hard to discern, and it's usually only in hindsight that we can hope to be even remotely accurate about them. Survey numbers take ages to come out, and they often show only slight movements from year to year. I was able to prove the LSD collapse only because it had happened several years earlier, allowing time for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the emergency -room survey from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) to be published.

Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies, had told me that there were at least three major acid producers up and running in the United States by the time I visited Black Rock City, in the summer of 2007. In conversations throughout my week at Burning Man, festivalgoers generally told me that they'd heard that LSD was making a resurgence, or even that they'd tripped at some point in the last year. But they also insisted that the drug was by no means prevalent.

Nonetheless, a random guy walking through our campsite on the event's last night handed me two hits on blotter paper. The problem for a reporter is that there's no sniff test for LSD. Sure, a chemist could a.n.a.lyze it and tell me what it's made of, but that would require driving with it, flying with it, and otherwise putting myself at legal risks I would rather avoid. At the same time, I didn't want to try it. It had been years since the last time I'd tripped, and my twenty-nine-year-old mind was much less interested in having its doors blown off than my college one had been. "The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could," Bill Gates told Playboy in 1994 when asked about his youthful dosing.

I popped the drug in anyway. An hour later, it was clear the guy was for some unknown reason handing out free fake LSD. I was relieved. But I took another deep breath and, half hoping for the same reaction, ate a presumably dosed sugar cube that a friend had given me earlier in the week. I climbed into the pa.s.senger seat of our rented car as we pulled into the giant traffic jam of departing Burners. This acid was real.

The feeling that came over me as we crawled along was a deeply familiar one. The trip brought me back instantly to high school and college, and the scene around us added to the hallucinatory effect. Picture thousands of people piling whatever bizarre artwork they didn't burn into the backs of, or onto the tops of, colorful vehicles and then lining up for miles in the desert. Even without the drugs, it would have been an unmistakably psychedelic sight. This was the counterculture-or, at this point, subculture-that acid had inspired. It was comforting to know that the two had been reunited after only a brief separation.

Or it was until we came across another, less Utopian vision of psychedelic America a few minutes later: a brightly painted hippie bus, overturned by the side of the road, some of its pa.s.sengers still trapped inside.

Because of the slow pace of the research, as I write, the most recent data available from the feds date back to 2007; DAWN's most recent emergency-room data are three years old-from 2005. (By the time this book is published, new numbers will be available, and I'll post them at YourCountryOnDrugs.com.) A look at the data available now gives a hint of the reversal that's perceptible on the ground at hippie festivals. The percentage of young adults who claim to have used acid in the past year had been falling steadily in both the federal survey and in the Monitoring the Future report, which is produced by the University of Michigan and tracks drug use among teens. In 2005, the numbers for acid began to reverse, rising in both studies for the first time in years. The increase wasn't huge, because the numbers are so small, but it was a b.u.mp nonetheless. In the Michigan survey, which has more up-to-date numbers for high schoolers, the number has continued upward, bouncing from 1.7 percent in 2006 to 2.7 percent in 2008 among twelfth-graders. The numbers for twelfth -grade use in the past thirty days showed an even sharper move, from 0.6 percent in 2006 and 2007 to 1.1 percent in 2008-a rise the researchers deemed highly statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level. (Most year-to-year moves are too small to be statistically significant even at a lower confidence level.) The DAWN numbers show a bounce, too, although because the study's methodology was changed, the data from the second half of 2003 onward cannot be directly compared to the data before it. DAWN, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, isn't a scientific survey; it merely records the "mentions" of drugs by patients entering emergency rooms. (For instance, if you visited the ER with a broken finger, doctors asked if you were on drugs, and you said, "Yes, LSD," you'd go down in the LSD column, even if you were fibbing or the acid had nothing to do with your injury.) But DAWN data are still a good rough measure of drug trends. Between 1995 and 2000, mentions of LSD by emergency-room patients remained relatively stable, hovering at around 2,500 for each six-month period. But in the second half of 2001, LSD mentions dropped below 1,000 for the first time. In the next six-month period, they fell below 500.

Using the new methodology, DAWN found 656 mentions in the second half of 2003. That jumped to 1,953 over all of 2004, roughly a 50 percent spike. The next year saw 1,864 mentions.

There's evidence that att.i.tudes could be changing about LSD among even the youngest of teens. The Michigan survey shows a steady decline in the number of eighth graders who see "great risk" in using LSD once or twice. Around 40 percent thought that the drug was high risk in the early nineties; only 20 percent thought so by 2008, with much of the decline coming after LSD vanished. "Disapproval" of acid-a metric taken separately from risk perception-has also tumbled, falling from nearly 80 percent in the early nineties to close to 50 percent in 2008.

Few have spent as much time measuring and thinking about such numbers than the University of Michigan's Lloyd Johnston, lead researcher on Monitoring the Future. I had last talked to him in 2004, when I was writing about acid's disappearance. This time, I called before the 2008 numbers were available and told him that the drug seemed to be making a return. He immediately pointed to the perceived-risk numbers.

"Perceived risk," he said, "is it." After decades of going over the data, Johnston said, he has become convinced that the leading indicator of a coming "epidemic" is almost always a change in the perception of the risk inherent in the use of a given drug. When we'd spoken a few years before, he'd told me how surprised he'd been to see LSD use drop off so sharply, because there was no corresponding rise in perceived risk. Rarely, if ever, had he seen such a phenomenon, leading him to conclude that the decline must have been due to a supply shortage, as I had argued in my Slate piece.

During acid's absence, the risk that teens a.s.sociated with it continued to fall. "What I have seen is a portion of kids who are perceiving much less risk in LSD. That means that they' re more susceptible to having a new epidemic," Johnston said. He also wasn't surprised that the decrease in perceived risk occurred primarily among the youngest kids the survey addresses.

"The eighth graders are often the first to show movement up or down," he said. "They don't have established sets of att.i.tudes yet, so they' re more susceptible to changes in the environment and more responsive to that in the short term. Most of them weren 't around when there was the last LSD epidemic." Because the initial collapse of acid was due to economic rather than cultural reasons, and because youthful att.i.tudes have become increasingly tolerant toward the drug, LSD seems poised for a comeback.

"There's a reemergence of new suppliers. I have no doubt that's in the process of changing," Johnston said. "I think we may be seeing a swing of the pendulum soon, and maybe you' re getting an early indication of where it's coming from."

On May 13, 2008, Dr. Peter Ga.s.ser, a Swiss psychiatrist, gave a dose of LSD to a patient. He did so legally, launching the first LSDa.s.sISTED psychotherapy study in more than thirty-six years. Ga.s.ser, funded by Doblin's Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies and approved by the Swiss government, enrolled twelve patients who'd recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness and were having difficulty coping. Acid aficionados consider LSD to be a "transitional" drug-that is, it can be beneficial during transitional periods in your life, not only the coming-of-age years examined by the Michigan survey, but also the slide into death that each of Ga.s.ser's patients was facing. Acid inventor Albert Hofmann, before his own pa.s.sing in April 2008, personally raised money for Ga.s.ser's study.

The scientific world, at least, is undergoing something of a psychedelic renaissance. Since 2001, fourteen studies involving such drugs as DMT, Ecstasy, ayahuasca, peyote, and mescaline, many of them paid for by the Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), have begun or been approved in the United States. Dr. John Halpern at the Harvard Medical School has a study in development that looks at LSD's ability to alleviate cl.u.s.ter headaches. Halpern, who was a good friend of Pickard's before his arrest, published results of a similar, though less clinical study, in the journal Neurology in 2006. Halpern and two other researchers interviewed fifty-three people who'd used magic mushrooms or LSD to try to combat their "s uicide headaches"-excruciating ordeals often likened to being stuck in the eye with a hot poker or having a stake driven through the top of your skull. 'Shrooms worked for 25 of 48 users, and acid worked in 7 of 8.

Researchers in Switzerland, the United States, Spain, and Israel are all studying the use of MDMA for posttraumatic stress disorder. With thousands of soldiers returning from war, there's no shortage of subjects. Psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer is leading one such project in South Carolina, in which a therapist walks a patient through his or her most traumatic experiences under the influence of Ecstasy. Charles Grob at UCLA's Harbor Medical Center, meanwhile, has nearly completed research into 'shrooming's impact on end-of-life anxiety. And in 2001, the FDA approved research by the University of Arizona, Tucson's Francisco Moreno into psilocybin's effect on nine patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, after published case studies showed that people who'd 'shroomed on their own had found an improvement in their condition.

No matter how rigorous such studies might be, America has shown just about zero capacity to learn from its long and complicated history with drugs. Show me a quotation celebrating cocaine and playing down its dangers, and I couldn't tell you whether it's from 1980 or 1890. If technology continues to quicken the pace of drug trends, c.o.ke's next honeymoon could be right around the corner.

It takes about seven years, say drug-policy experts, for folks to realize what's wrong with any given drug. It slips away, only to return again as if it were new. Using drugs responsibly requires an educated understanding of the risk you' re taking. It requires knowledge of the downsides, because the upsides make themselves known pretty d.a.m.n quickly. While getting high might be fun, getting addicted isn't. Getting fired or arrested isn't. Getting your kids taken away isn't. After reading several rooms full of books, surveys, and memoirs about drugs and drug use and talking with recreational users, addicts, and nonusers alike, I've realized that when we' re talking about the decision of whether to alter one's mind, we' re talking very basically about what it means to be human, about the meaning of life, about hopes, dreams, fears, and all of that-stuff that, as Barack Obama might say, is above my pay grade.

Will kids start taking acid again? Sooner or later, yes. And the return of Phish for a three-day concert in March 2009 will surely whet the appet.i.te. Will adults start bingeing on c.o.ke again? Barring an impossible victory in the U.S. drug war abroad, the answer is the same. To do so is human, and we live in a country that's always considered itself a grand human experiment. Whether Americans are more inclined to use drugs than other people depends on which type of American you mean. On one hand is the can-do idealist with a pa.s.sionate faith in either religion or the republic who abhors intemperance. On the other is the libertarian individualist who wants not to be trodden on and believes that drug use is an expression of freedom. The vast middle, naturally, has always been a muddle of both. Sometimes one extreme takes over for a while; sometimes the other.

The past few years have seen a slight recession in antidrug att.i.tudes. In every election season since the early nineties, we've moved farther from personal drug use being an issue for presidential candidates. Al Gore, John Kerry, and George Bush, the three major candidates to run in 2000 and 2004, all admitted to getting high; Bush is widely alleged to have also used c.o.ke during his party-boy days. Obama wrote about snorting "a little blow" in his first book, 1995's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and when he was asked if he inhaled, said, "That was the point." In 2008, John McCain's denial of having ever done drugs was almost apologetic; he reminded audiences that he missed Woodstock because he was "tied up." Even McCain's hard-line evangelical running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, confessed to having smoked pot.

Some slivers of recent pop culture have dealt with American drug use in a more realistic way, too. In August 2005, the cable channel Showtime introduced the series Weeds, which follows the tribulations of a widowed suburban California housewife who, in need of a career, decides to sell marijuana. A critical success and breakout hit, the show was described by the New York Times as "transforming for Showtime." As of this writing, the series has been renewed for at least four more seasons and drew 1.3 million viewers to its season 4 premiere. AMC subsequently launched the copycat Breaking Bad, about a high-school chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer who becomes a meth dealer. HBO's critically celebrated The Wire preceded both series in its humanization of those involved with the drug trade and refusal to moralize on whether it should exist. All three shows treat drugs as something that's simply there. It's not much of an insight, perhaps, but it's something.

And it's something the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge. No matter how entertaining the drug war might be on cable television, in the real world it remains grim business. In 2007, the United States set a record for marijuana arrests, collaring 872,720 potheads. A full 775,138 were busted for possession, which far exceeds the number of people arrested for all violent crimes combined.

Even as LSD receded and the Grateful Dead and Phish retired, the hippie-fest circuit continued to grow. Today, an energetic fan of jam bands could catch a festival pretty much every weekend somewhere in the United States from spring through fall. The All Good Music Festival & Camp Out, launched in 1996 at the height of the last acid boom, is modestly sized. It draws around twenty-five thousand people, and at the twelfth annual version of the event, held in the summer of 2008 in the hills outside Morgantown, West Virginia, about half of the attendees appeared to be college students.

One night was headlined by Phil Lesh & Friends, a group that plays mostly Grateful Dead songs led by a former ba.s.sist with that band. The next night brought Widespread Panic, still touring, followed by a 2 A.M. show by the Dark Star Orchestra, a Dead cover band that plays entire concerts start to finish, complete with the original dialogue between songs. Even the mistakes are repeated.

At Phish's final show, in Coventry, Vermont, back in 2004, a friend had said to me, as we waded through knee-deep mud to go from our tent to the stage, "I' m glad they' re quitting so we don't have to do this anymore." At that show, only a few folks were wandering around offering "Doses, doses." Four years later, at All Good, it seemed as if every tenth person was offering it up. Later that summer, the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Vanessa Marie Griffee, a thirty-one-year-old woman in Eugene, Oregon, and charged her with LSD distribution. The feds had busted a man in North Carolina who told them that Griffee would mail sheets of acid to "post offices that were located near music festivals and hippie gatherings," including to a P.O. box near that summer 's Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming.

The first dealer who stopped by our campsite at All Good showed us a stack of sheets of blotter paper and another bag filled with sheets of the gel tabs that had been popular in the nineties. He said that a friend had recently arrived from the West Coast and brought "tens of thousands" of hits with him. ("This place is flooded," he lamented of All Good.) A friend bought a strip of ten hits for thirty dollars, significantly less than the ten or twenty dollars per hit that had become the norm post-2001. The dealer told me that he was having no problem unloading his wares at that price. A couple of our campmates were happy to sample them, and they stayed up until ten the next morning.

The next guy through also displayed dozens of sheets of acid. He was asking a similar price, but he said that his product wasn't moving as quickly as he'd like. "Either you want to trip or you don't," he said. I asked him about the LSD shortage in the early years of this century, and he said that he'd met Leonard Pickard in the Lot in the late nineties, but had a.s.sumed that the acid kingpin was another typical old Deadhead. Later, someone showed him a Rolling Stone story about Pickard's bust and trial, and he put two and two together.

The dealer mentioned that at the same time Pickard was taken down, another member of a different Family was put out of commission when someone gave him a ma.s.sive dose of LSD. Because the Family member was diabetic, he was killed by the very drug that he had helped to manufacture. The story is the kind of legend that's common in the drug world-and close to impossible to verify. "I saw the funeral notice," the dose-man argued.

A more entrepreneurial dealer, a man from Indianapolis who called himself Rino, said that few people at All Good had asked him for acid. "You have to push LSD," he observed. But once he let people know that he had it, he said, he was able to move it fairly quickly. He'd also heard of the diabetic Family member who ate a huge dose and died. Following that and following Pickard's arrest, he recalled, LSD had doubled in price virtually overnight.

He scoffed, though, when I suggested that it had disappeared for a time. "I could always find it," said Rino, before charging us thirty dollars for ten hits of fake acid.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Without the help of Leonard Roberge in shaping and editing this book, it would be little more than a few half-baked ideas and three hundred pages of data. Leonard helped cull out the parts you would have skipped over and ridiculed me whenever I tried to get away with not thinking an argument through or grappling with counterexamples. Before moving into book editing, Leonard was an editor at the Washington City Paper, where I was a reporter. The City Paper's loss was my gain. His former boss, Erik Wemple, taught me pretty much everything I know about writing and reporting.

Eric Nelson, my editor at Wiley, deserves a giant chunk of the blame/credit for this work, too. I can 't count the times I rejected his advice only to realize months later that he 'd been right all along. And there's no doubt the book wouldn't exist were it not for my agent, Howard Yoon, suggesting the idea and helping to guide it to completion. He even came up with the clever t.i.tle.

Slate's Jack Shafer took a chance on my first article about LSD way back when. A trend watcher's greatest nightmare, he has helped me resist the urge to make sweeping claims that aren't backed up by reality.

My longtime friend Jamal Wilson built the Web site Your CountryOnDrugs.com and was always looking to chip in some of the psychonautic tidbits that make the subculture so vibrant. (Check out Exodus 16:13, man.) I owe Harold Tripplehorn a huge debt for checking out books from the Library of Congress that had long gone out of print. Jeff Hild, too, helped with research both in the field and in the library. James Sappington was an able research a.s.sistant on many field excursions, as was my brother, Greg, the member of the family with the writer's gene. My mother, Cindy Quinn; father, George Grim; and stepmother, Melissa Grim, deserve credit for not disowning me when I began writing and reporting about drugs and in fact encouraged me the entire way.

Lisa Burstiner produced the book, and with her sharp eye caught a number of embarra.s.sing typos and mistakes. Jim VandeHei and John Harris, my old bosses at Politico, were kind enough to let me take a significant amount of leave to write this book, however nervous they may have privately been as to what I'd come up with during that time.

Dave Jamieson and Rebecca Sinderbrand read portions of the book and gave thoughtful, and free, feedback, which was most appreciated. Christian Parenti talked me into joining him in Bolivia, convinced (correctly) that there would soon be an uprising and that we'd be among the only journalists there to cover it. He generously shared his driver, fixer, and translator.

Elements of this book have appeared in Harper's, Slate, Salon, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, In These Times, and Politico. The editors there helped shape my thinking, and I thank them for that. Reason magazine's Radley Balko opened up s.p.a.ce on his must-read blog, TheAgitator.com, for me to post large chunks of this book while it was in rough form. His talented and (thankfully) critical readers caught errors of fact and reasoning in the early drafts, and the book is better because of it. Call it crowd-editing, I suppose.

Jon Hanna, who organizes the annual Mind States Conference, was always willing to do what he could to help me find sources that might be able to move this book forward-and he puts on a great conference, too. You should check it out. Some of the people I met there, too, have given generously of their time and knowledge, including Mark Pesce, Coco Conn, and Josh Wakefield. Alexander and Ann Shulgin are quite possibly the two kindest people I've had the privilege of meeting, and both were a great help.

Troy Dayton, Tom Angell, Aaron Houston, Bruce Mirken, and Paul Armentano routinely shared what they knew with me. Eric Sterling has a wealth of information and lent it to me willingly. Rick Doblin is one of the best resources a writer on drug policy and drug culture could ask for. His organization, the Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies (maps.org), is doing great work in this world and is in need of support. If you make one contribution to a drug policy organization this year, I'd suggest considering his. Or consider erowid.org, the amazingly thorough online store of objective information on drug use. The site's founders, Fire and Earth Erowid, were immensely helpful in the writing of this book. They often found errors in the sections I shared with them, and for that I'm grateful. Any errors that remain are my own.