Blowing our minds

When I stopped doing drugs in 1989, I had a tangled web of feelings about them. I was uncomfortable with recreational drug use, but also equally uncomfortable with the creed of abstinence. And then I was uncomfortable with the "be smart don't start" anti-drug phenomenon. I wanted to go back to the sources to see how all the attitudes about drugs -- both for and against -- formed in this country. I wanted to know how we went from marijuana and psychedelics, drugs that opened things and appealed to your senses -- to coke and Quaaludes, drugs that numbed you and were really about ego, in which your pleasure centers lie to you and tell you that you're experiencing pleasure. I wanted to understand how all of this affected my life, my generation, and the whole culture at large.

There's a lot of wisdom accrued over generations that hasn't been passed on. I call it the "Temple of Accumulated Error" in the book, which is a phrase I ripped off directly from my friend Wavy Gravy. There are several generations now that have amassed significant life experience with illicit substances -- underground folk wisdom about what they really do, how they can help us, how they can distort and damage us. I think our culture has far more to learn from people who have actually taken drugs than from those making and enforcing the policies that prohibit them. And I'm talking about everyone from the most horrific addicts to the most responsible kind of casual users, and everything in between. To me it's a no-brainer. Bill Bennett can't teach you anything about drugs, except to tell you that you're a bad person for using them.

Your book journeys from the beats smoking dope all the way to the ravers taking Ecstasy. The transitions from one drug to the next in culture make a lot of sense. So do you buy the so-called gateway theory?

Nixon always said it: "Marijuana is a halfway house to something else." Of course, that something else was supposed to be heroin, and since the 1950s that's what parents had been telling their children. I don't think anyone would deny that there are a large number of heroin addicts who started out on marijuana, so in that sense it's true, but it's also true that a lot started out on alcohol and nobody is calling that a gateway drug. But here's the big picture of it: 60 to 70 million Americans have admitted to trying an illegal drug at one time or another, almost one in four. Given that some 20- to 30 million of them were regularly smoking pot at one time, and given that there were never any more than between 300,000 to 700,000 heroin addicts (a very high estimate) at any given time, just do the math. Even if all of those heroin addicts actually did start out uniquely with marijuana, it's a small percentage. In fact the gateway theory is a perfect example of what U.C.-Santa Cruz sociologist Craig Reinarman calls "the routinization of caricature": how we take worst-case scenarios and anecdotes about drugs and make them seem routine, part of an "epidemic."

Hence, the drug laws.

I think drug enforcement is the closest thing this country has ever come to actual fascism. When I look at the erosion of civil liberties that gained speed in the '80s, I see tremendous injustice. It's been a long time now since the actual facts mattered about drugs in this country. You tell the same lie over and over again for so many years and fewer and fewer people will be apt to stand up and say: "This is a big lie."

And that big lie is?

The big lie is that all these drugs are the same and should all be classified as one sort of evil. We have 60 million Christian conservatives in this country, the most activist wing of the conservative party, who truly believe all drugs are the tools of Satan.

If we really don't start talking about drugs honestly, we're never going to get anywhere with drug policy reform in this country. The right wing likes all drugs to be lumped into evil substances, with no differences among them.

What were the most memorable moments in the decade you spent working on "Can't Find My Way Home?"

Two moments stand out in particular: I had a wonderful conversation with Ram Dass that really brought the psychedelic experience to life. It gave me such insight into the excitement that these guys felt. They felt it could reengineer human behavior and thought and literally remake society. They thought they could use it to access mystical experience and wisdom, be used as a spiritual tool to provide conscious and tangible contact with the Godhead. They really did believe that they were on the verge of something as revolutionary as the papers of Sigmund Freud.

The other time that comes to mind is standing on the front porch of Silvia Nunn's home in South Central L.A. Sylvia Nunn blew my mind. A 30-year-old Blood deep into rock cocaine -- she was an example of a full lifetime in the gang culture. She spoke with an honesty and truth about her life that was both chilling and moving -- drugs, homicide, getting shot, suicide attempts, the deaths of family members, the vicious cycle of drugs and crime and vengeance -- and how desperate she was to escape it. She broke my heart, and it was her humanity that did it -- this wasn't some media caricature of a gang-banger but a gifted person with incredible intelligence, heart and goodness -- who was obviously trapped in the life. The whole reality of her life was brought home one night when we were chatting on the front porch of her family's home around sunset and she casually informed me that it was "drive-by time" -- her way of telling me that I could die at that very moment just by being there on the porch with her.

Next Page: "There's no more crystal-clear example of the revenge of the right wing for the 1960s than the drug war"

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