Blowing our minds

What parts of drug history have been well documented in the last 60 years and which haven't?

The media coverage of drugs in this country has been pitiful. The phrase I use is "sensationalized superficiality," since the coverage suffers from both of those things and has since the 1930s. Still, for every aspect of drug culture since World War II, there have been a small handful of works that have rendered it powerfully. Dizzy Gillespie's autobiography "To Be or Not to Bop" about his relationship with Charlie Parker and what was going on in the black community with drugs at that point, and Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land" were tremendous tools for me.

The psychedelic era has been the best covered. There was a time in the late '60s when some young knowledgeable journalists starting writing about both drugs and culture -- a whole crop of people at Rolling Stone who could write about drugs and culture from real experience -- David Dalton, David Felton, Joe Ezsterhas, Greil Marcus, Hunter S. Thompson. Then there have been lesser-known works like Marco Vassi's "The Stoned Apocalypse" -- it's an amazing glimpse at how the psychedelic culture evolved into a strange sexual spiritual New Age cult on the West Coast. Once you come to the end of the '60s and '70s, the cocaine and Studio 54 era, it gets spotty.

Lenny Bruce believed that pot would be legal because of all the law students smoking pot in the '60s. Law students still smoke weed, but marijuana is still illegal. What happened?

Somewhere along the line the left abandoned the drug issue. They had to, since they were so vulnerable, as it was with the right-wing critique of the welfare state and liberal approach to the Cold War. By the 1980s, with coke and crack, drug culture was getting very toxic. So the Democrats were extremely vulnerable about drugs and jettisoned the whole progressive drug policy -- they gave up on harm reduction, education and decriminalization -- and marched in lock step with Republicans in the drug war. And the right wing was able to exploit it masterfully. There's no more crystal-clear example of the revenge of the right wing for the 1960s than the drug war.

During the famous 1967 Be-In, Allen Ginsberg looked out at 30,000 tripping people and whispered to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "What if we're all wrong?" Do you look at some of the drug cultures today and wonder the same thing?

The answer to that question probably won't become apparent for another three to five years when you guys have come out the other end and really start digesting the experiences you've gone through. For many of us who took psychedelics back in the '60s and '70s, it was like being in a whirlwind, and we didn't get real perspective into the glories and follies of our experiences until years later, when we could look back much more objectively on how they may have changed us or changed the culture.

When you first did drugs with your friends, you write, "We thought we could solve the ancient and infinitely complex mysteries of man and his place in the universe simply by lighting up a joint and listening to the Beatles." Does every generation need its own version of that scene?

Every generation wants that experience, and I don't know that that's going to stop. One of things that's the ultimate folly of the whole agenda of prohibition is this idea that drug use can be unlearned by culture -- that it can be eradicated. It's now deeply embedded in the cultural psychology of this country.

There's something to be said about how that generation in the '90s was trying to find its own identity, to write its own story when it came to drugs. There was a continuum that went from psychedelic culture of the '60s to the MDMA culture of the '90s. It had to do with mostly the different nature of the substances. LSD was a wild roller coaster ride -- like ripping your soul out and throwing it down on the kitchen table and staring at it for six hours in its bloodiest state.

Next Page: The war on drugs would've happened with or without Reagan

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