Sorry, I'm actually writing the book.
It's called
Human Consumption, I'm about 40k words in and growing, it is about us, really. I'll share a passage:
If anyone is interested in reading what I have so far, hit me up. It's online in a PDF but I only share it with select people.
THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM A LARGER WORK IN PROGRESS SHARED WITH SELECT FRIENDS & REVIEWERS. NOT FOR FURTHER DISTRIBUTION.
You were enjoying yourself thoroughly…a great night, great spread of drugs, weird but interesting company, and Katja, her slim, effervescent, feline beauty and presence beyond description; but at the same time since that first time underneath the seats at the college stadium where you’d seen your first show and bought your first hit, you were at the same time, looking for an in. At the same time. Whether you knew it or not. Your mind now was on Katja and this intricate and hypnotic dance with her and the constant presence of Mark and the testosterone fueled, warlike dance between the two of you, like peacocks. That dance just got a lot more complex. Two very volatile ingredients mixed. Story of your life, even if you didn’t know it yet.
Mark grabs you, strongly, but affectionately, by the shoulder.
—My man. Let’s go inside. I’ll introduce you to someone I think you’ll find interesting.
The four of you enter the threshold of the house and are greeted by a very large, very stoned stereotype of a hippie in his late thirties, bulging belly barely concealed by a concert from a tour in 1986, barefoot, shorts despite the weather. The apartment is squalid and filthy, there’s a hole in the ceiling, which slants a bit, a naked stovepipe and no stove, clutter, clothes, empty beer bottles, ashtrays everywhere, a stool with a electric hot-coil burner where the stove ought to be, it’s cord connected to a precarious-looking extension taped to the wall and hanging by the same to the ceiling, connected to yet another power-strip, and another extension cord and again in such a tangle you can’t figure it out, a coffee table with laptop computer, on, playing a Phish show, with the visualizations pulsating on the screen, surrounded by discarded bottles, crushed up cigarette packs, and three ashtrays. There’s a few folding chairs and a filthy couch.
...
Small talk ensues. About the show. Hushed speculations about Black Pete’s health. Talk of upcoming concerts and events, joint after joint was passed around and DMT and lines of coke, MDMA, ketamine. Not wanting to be a free rider I offered doses of DOC which a few people took on sugar or candy but few people wanted to take now that the sun was full ass up and it was nearing 7:30 in the morning.
Most people were fading. As for DOC, Katja and I were well into your first peak, which while energizing, nearly so as a small dose of speed, more or less meant sitting on the couch watching trails in the smoke and colors and lights in the music. She rested her head against my shoulder, held my hand, we felt as one vast expanse where this brilliantine magic played out, a plane crackling with energy, geometric squares and lines and arcs. She felt so soft and light. And the world dissolved in white light and dull geometric shapes.
Most psychedelics come in waves like that. The two of you come out of this sort of trance, and are invited into Felix’s room. Felix had a pretty impressive collection of drugs. Synthetic analogues of psilocin and mescaline, mostly, that is, manmade fantasies on the backs of the structures of what’s found naturally in certain mushrooms and cacti. Hence, your DOC, which added a methyl group at α-position of the phenethylamine (which creates an amphetamine, Alpha Methyl PHenyl EThyl Amine) and exchanged one of the methoxy (at positions 2, 4, and 5; which in either an unsubstituted phenethylamine or an amphetamine will result in a psychedelic drug—the phenethylamine being mescaline; the psychedelic amphetamine being DOM—quite different and quite more potent) groups on the core phenyl to a chlorine, thus creating a new drug, quite different again from mescaline, or from DOM.
Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin was an ex-Navy man and a chemist working at a large corporation; he got for them a patent so profitable that he was essentially given lab and a free reign to do whatever he’d like. He wound up, while freelancing doing analysis and such for the DEA, among other things, rediscovering the psychedelic properties of MDMA, and creating well over 200 new drugs which he published in two volumes called PiHKaL and TiHKaL; respectively, phenethylamines and tryptamines I have known and loved.
This also launched or at least enabled a huge underground movement in people making and exploring these drugs. One of the really subversive things that Sasha did was that he provided not only descriptions of routes to synthesis for the drugs that he was describing, but did so not necessarily in the most obvious way to a professional chemist, but, it is alleged, to make it easier for the underground to procure precursors (of which there are unlimited variations, precursors to precursors to precursors and so on) and reagents, popularizing things, at least within a very small clique. This didn’t go over with law enforcement, of course, and he was raided and harassed, but never jailed, and remained a grandfatherly elder statesman type.
But anyway, I’d gotten my hands on some DOC, one of Shulgin’s creations, through some friends, and I was eager to try more, so I was keenly excited to see more. Felix wound up trading me about a dozen capsules, two decent doses of six different drugs—5-MeO-MiPT, 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MiPT, all based on the psychedelic molecule in mushrooms, but chemically altered by substituting one group of atoms for another; another phenethylamine, 2C-T-21, and some kind of speed, “a substituted cathinone,” he said, “trust me, it’s the next big thing, give it a try and give me a call”—all this for the thirty or so doses I had left in my bottle of DOC, which he didn’t have and didn’t know where to source it from.
I was quite satisfied. A win/win. But I felt like I got the better end of the deal. Variety is the spice of life and all that. We exchanged numbers and all that; I had a prepaid phone for this stuff that you had in your backpack, so I pulled it on, turned it on, and put in his number. He opened up a drawer to reveal at least a dozen mid-90’s SIM card phones sprawled out, each one with a colored sticker and an obscure notation on it, he poked around for a moment and picked one out, took my number too, plugged it into the wall and turned it on.
—Two weeks, he said.
I nodded.
—Good to make your acquaintance. I’ve already met a few kids into this stuff in the city. We should get together sometime.
—Yeah, sometime …, he said, hesitating. Trust needed building. Made sense enough.
Friendly again, he continued to show us his collection, clearly proud. Katja was quite interested, actually, she was on the brink of dealing with this stuff I suppose. Unusual for a chick, really; it’s a very male hobby, it’s a bit like collecting baseball cards or comic books or something, but Katja loved an altered state of mind and loved novelty, so there it was.
He started in with the plants. Kanna, kratom, kava, Syrian rue … you didn’t really give a fuck … but then something caught your attention.
—Datura.
Solonacæ datura stramonium; a plant of the deadly nightshade family, that ought to be enough to put one off—this was a drug that you’d pretty much gathered was bad news. One of the first ways you’d really stared to learn about drugs was online, in the late 90’s in particular, a site called Erowid, which among other things collected so-called “trip reports,” narratives of people taking drugs and their own experiences of doing so. Most of them were insufferably boring, people talking about all these metaphysics and these far-out thoughts that they’d had that they figured were so deep, but more so were cliché, but there was a particular subset of them, called Trainwrecks and Trip Disasters, which was about what it says it was. There was an uncommon number of stories about this plant, which had long ago convinced you to leave well enough alone—it is a member of a class of drugs known as the anticholinergic deleriants; they have very little in common with psychedelics, really, as the term is generally used, and as far as the experience goes, but they will fuck you up and they are genuinely, in the most literal sense, hallucinogenic, that is, they make you see things that aren’t there; not actually the primary thing that, say, acid does to you, colors shift and walls breathe and fractals float, yes, but you with this horrible shit, some characteristic experiences include talking to people who aren’t there, smoking imaginary cigarettes—absolute loss of control.
...
One of your friends in high school had such luck as to have one of the plants in his backyard, and he brewed the tea with some regularity, at first he was able to hold it together, and began talking about communing with the spirit of the plant and it’s teachings—the story is a common enough one for therein lies the path of delusion, but it ends with him, furiously under the influence, burning a human-heighted bush of the horrible shit on the freeway and dancing about in the nude and a sort of war-paint from his mother’s makeup case, he wound up, of course, arrested, and about a week inpatient psych. Eventually he could laugh it off, but that impressed upon you that this was shit not to be fucked with.
But Felix, self-styled “urban shaman,” that he was is handling these seeds, passing them from his left hand to his right and speaing of their virtues, they will impart spiritual power and direct your consciousness—
—I don’t think I want any of that horrible stuff, bro. Read too many horror stories on Erowid and shit.
—Yeah, but that’s just dumb kids. Earth and Fire said they put that shit up as a warning because mad dumb kids read Erowid too. But they impart a spiritual power, if you use it right …
You’d about heard enough of this shaman crap, the name drop made you a little quizzical, he was in this whole culture that you’d mainly only been reading about. That little red flip phone would definitely ring in that apartment in the next two weeks. Not for any fucking datura, that’s for sure, but Felix seems like the guy to know.
Fucking datura.
But Katja was apparently interested. Strongheaded chick. Just as you were speaking she took a few, without much thought or discussion, washed them down with a swig of orange juice and vodka.
Alarms are going off—
