jokes, please, about people “dying to get a hold of these drugs.” But the path to legalization does seem to go through the doctor’s office before it gets to The Doors of Perception , as Aldous Huxley called his serious, thoughtful, scholarly book about getting stoned out of his gourd. Which, really, is the point of drugs... Not that we ‘60s “heads” weren’t “like, really into” serious, thoughtful, scholarly excuses for drug-taking. Back in 1902, William James, philosopher, physician, and “the father of American psychology,” wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience : ... our normal waking consciousness... is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness quite disregarded. This was James’ excuse for getting stoned out of his gourd on nitrous oxide. None of us had sat down and read The Varieties of Religious Experience . But we all knew about the laughing gas. More contemporaneously, psychology PhD and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary was on the college lecture circuit advocating that we blow our minds: “... these wondrous plants and drugs could free man’s consciousness and bring a new conception of man, his psychology and philosophy.”
I went to hear Leary speak when he came to my school and... I refer the reader back to the first sentence of this Letter From the Editor. I got the Leary quote from an anthology of 1960s Esquire articles that was sitting on my bookshelf. In 1968, Leary wrote a piece for the magazine that starts out as an account of a 1960 psychedelic drug experiment supposedly for clinical research purposes supposedly conducted under controlled circumstances. It ends with two naked beatnik poets – Alan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky – wandering around Leary’s house while his teenage daughter is trying to do her homework. Leary also spoke at my friend Dave Barry’s school. Dave has a better recollection of the experience, which he recounts in his book Dave Barry Turns 50 : Naturally, being college students, we did not rush out and take a powerful, potentially harmful drug that we knew virtually nothing about just because some guy told us to. No sir. First we asked some hard questions, such as: “Where can we get some?” Then we rushed out and took it. We participants in the ‘60s drug culture did want to open “the doors of perception.” There is indeed a lot about life, the world, and the universe that we don’t perceive in our ordinary day-to-day consciousness. And we could have perceived a lot more of it if we’d taken courses in biology, botany, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and the other hard sciences instead of getting wasted and spacing out on the slideshow in Art Appreciation 101. (“Darkness at Noon” – easy A. The doddering professor had been
American Consequences 9
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