Drugs

HAHA good thread. I could not right any kinda of substantial material when on anything... it's hard enough when i'm tired and I look back at notes and think, "Was I on something?" Maybe if you're a poet, or writing about the affects of drugs! There's an idea get blasted and just write stuff then have it published under the tilte, "STUFF I WROTE BEFORE I HIT THE BATHROOM TILE!" God there must be a publishing house in the US that would eat it up! =)

I wondered why I was writing so much poetry lately!! Tai loving the world and all that floats in it.rofl

leftboy wrote: > Just wondering what other people thought about drugs in > relation to writing. I'm not saying that drugs are a good > thing; far from it. But has anoyone else found e.g. that pot is > a useful imaginative stimulant? you may note looking thru my > profile that my poems do have a bit on this.... any comments? No way. I don't think imaginative stimulants are good. If amazing authors like Maya Angelou and Stephen King took stimulants, that'd be bad. You wouldn't have their ORIGINAL work, right? It's like steroids. Everyone's on baseball players' cases because some of them take preformance enhancers/steroids. Steroids for writers? I don't think so.

Drugs is one of those subjects where it would seem the less you know, the better a position you are in to judge.

I think that more realistically educated you are about drugs the better. I think all schools should educate pupils about ensuring a safe passage through a drug experience. I mean, how many schools teach their children that, for example - if you digest lsd in a bad mood, you'll have a bad trip. If you digest in good spirits, you'll have an enjoyable trip. Info like that is invaluable to people contemplating experimenting with drugs. I have a wealthy library of drug lit and I intend to give my kid full access to it. At least I know that, if my kid considered taking drugs (which, let's face it, she'll be exposed to them at some point in her life) then I'll know that she's wise to them. Most kids aren't and the authorities are not also fighting against drugs, but fighting against their own ignorance in many cases for not relaying the important facts. What are statistics worth to a person about to smoke marijuana? bugger all.

drugs are bad..."PERIOD!"

I agree. I reckon out of at least 14 years smoking pot I've had the ability on a couple of occasions to write stuff down and you're right, the vividness of visions and also the clarity of thought is impressive. I remember lying on a bed and witnessing, in my minds eyes, lines of poems being written on to a page and being narrated in my mind. Oh, the numerous times I've been stood in the bathroom before bed and I've just stood there at the sink gazing at the running water hearing sounds dancing and somersaulting off the basin. But, again, I suppose it depends on how physcially affected you are by pot. I tend to switch off and lose myself and while it's emotionally and intellectually stimulating and enlightening I just can't be arsed to pick up a pen and write. I do find though that after 10 years or so after originally contemplating a thought whilst stoned, that the contemplation can return unexpectedly and aid a piece. I agree about acid and mushies showing alternative states of conciousness but I've yet to find a writer who can bring the vision back. I mean, have you read Timothy Leary?? lol.

Just pause and really think for a moment. The brain is a a contextual engine, everything that it learns and comes to understand about 'the world' is forged not in isolation but in relation to repeated and reinforced connections over time... otherwise known as experience. This is not magic, connections become writ physically into your brain through what YOU do, how YOU interact. There is NO short cut to insight. Any insight worth having is one that is acquired through really working your brain, being open minded and fighting off the comforts of idealistic thought and solutions... and certainly not through altered perceptions. Insight that comes at the 'press of a button', and in a state when you have overly tampered with the normal workings of your brain, either through flooding it with chemicals or taking a hammer to it, is insight you cannot use when your brain reverts to its normal state which hopefully it will. Drugs are pleasurable, because they temporarily warp reality through making one stupider and thus easier to please. It is why they can be fun if used carefully, sparingly but not as a substitute for your normal sober state. As PG admits in his post above (common sense too)... if you make your drug taking habitual enough (especially with cannabis)... eventually you do build in permanent stupidity into your brain as that is the context you have exposed it to (see first paragraph). In answer to your question. NO!

Interesting llegspider. We are born with a given level of perception and awareness. Species have many different levels of perception and awareness. There is a toad that can only perceive it's prey and nothing more of this earth. What if we were to alter the toad's perception and awareness and allow it see the sky, the pond it lived in, human beings staring down at it and other such? Would that not be worthwhile an experience? Our levels are set for our basic survival requirements. Would the toad consider this a warping of reality? (if it could). I would consider it a warping of the toads reality. But not my own. Therefore if I warped my own reality through the use of drugs, who is to say that this is making one stupider? Then we come to the age old drugs and alcohol debate....let's not get into that, eh. :)

PG you had better pay attention this... for frankly what am I about to say bores me more than it ever could you.... What you acessed at aged 14 was a reward state... a brilliant one no doubt... one worth striving for no doubt... But you 'cheated' did you not and you have continued to do so since then... because my friend, salvation does not come that easy... And sadly, you have payed a high price for it. That is evident even if one compares your last two posts in their sentiment. In your lucid moments you know it, yet how to roll back the years of waste? Are you man enough to admit you may have been wrong all these years? Sadly few are. Clearly, if you accessed that state through the use of drugs it exists in the brain and is there for an evolutionary purpose... and wait for it, theoretically at least is achievable through other means... One of my endearing memories of last year is of my 6 year old daughter in the children's swimming pool, punching the air in self delight saying 'Yes! Yes! I can Swim' at the moment she finally overcame her fear of letting go and pushed on into the water without any swimming aids... she had been trying for months before and despite her teachers and my encouragement and exhortations... all empty.. until she achieved it for herself. Could not stop her after that and since then she has made excellent progress. You know, I have since seen the same look on her face when she has been offered an improptu Icecream. Care to guess which meaningful events connotations will last her a lifetime? Lefty, there is nothing wrong with the 'vision, impression and feeling' that you get in and of itself... The problem is how you access it. In this day and age of tailor made brain parmaceuticals... and even more fine tuned ones on the way... would you compare the drug induced feelings of love and empathy that you get with complete strangers overnight with one forged over time in a relationship with someone over time. Look... one has context and the other one has little or not. It is that simple, It is why ravers slunk away shamefacedly and emptily the morning after an MDMA fest. Drugs if used very carefully and sparingly in the right context are entertainment... nothing more. If abused (become a way of life), they interfere with the normal maturing processes of the brain and effectively stop you learning strategies to cope with the tribulations of life by leading you up a fools path... the evidence is all around you... as a regular drug user you will find your normal sober state harder and harder to cope with as you get older... it is the path to doom... unless you wake up. Then I am afraid you have catch up to do. Here is a challenge, instead, set out to craft a brain through open mindedness, questioning and learning... fight off dogmatism of any description... and maybe through time you can access reward states not far off your drug induced ones.. ones that are only a step away, despite the vagaries that life throws at you.. ones laced with meaning because they are based on a contextual foundation built through your efforts. It is possible. It has been done before.

And Lefty if you wish to read quite articulate descriptions of various drug trips you will find no better that this site. I for one found it fascinating... http://www.erowid.org/

I had a conversation with a pharmacologist about lsd once. We shared the same history of 'drug abuse' and he informed me that lsd lacerates the nerve endings. It made me feel squeemish. Then he reeled of a list of what widely used conventional medicines do to the body. ugh.

You get back home, after a hard days work, relax, take some drugs to 'wind down'... I beat my wife and kids one minute, take some drugs and in the next minute access the same pleasure state as you do. Assuming the feelings and buzz we get is of a similar nature, what is the profound difference in what you and I are experiencing? If the experience comes at the switch of the button, and anyone, anywhere can access it at any time, irrespective of what has happened before, what is the real value of it? Drugs are a form of cheating... self cheating.. because frankly some times we deserve to feel shit until we can work out a strategy for how to cope with whatever is troubling us in our everyday lives. Feeling shit (brain pain) is a sympton that we need to aquire more knowledge... not that we know too much (and that it is bad). Resorting to drugs in these cases is cheating. Regular drug users by definition are cheaters, primarily of themselves.... for they hanker after this alternative reality wherein they opt out of having to deal with the real issues around them, be it poverty, relationships, abuse, disease or plain existentialist pain... The first and only thing you should learn from drugs when you first experience them is how tenuous is this thing we call reality really is. It being so easy to thwart, it should become obvious in an instant that 'reality' is a handshake ,a negotation between you and the experienced outside world.... that there are many possible realities out there (indeed at least as many as there are people) and that through our concious choices we have at least some control over where this takes us... and our goal in life should be to extend our level of conciousness and not to diminish it... Now, if you are going to fuck around with the potential of the very instrument that defines you... your brain... by knowingly dousing it overwhelmingly with brain chemicals that thwart its normal function.... is it not common sense before you embark on this journey that high chances are that the 'YOU' that you find yourself will be a diminished one.. rather than a more enlightened one. You will never know yourself of course, how about asking those around you who have known you and have had no particular axe to grind.... Drugs are the equivalent of digging a hole and the deeper you get the more you shut out the light (switching off your consciousness as you go along)... and those around you that are non-users their voices fade away as they become more and more part of an amorphous whole (the 'them', the 'authorities', the 'brainwashed' etc) as you sink further into paranoia. A Test? Ask yourself truthfully how many of your 'inner circle' are not fellow drug users. Drugs and freedom. What a joke that drugs give you more freedom. Is the nicotine addict freer before or after his addiction. Is the alcoholic freeer in comparison to when he was not addicted. If you start to rely on your drugged state for anything meaningful or substantial in your life, you are self chipping away at your freedom. Ask your dealer if drug users are easier to control than non users. If the authoritries wanted to control you they would give you even more drugs... in fact you can argue that they are increasingly doing so through the increasing prescription of psychoanalytic drugs through the NHS. You want to be freeer, stay clean. There is not such a thing as a separate 'YOU' and the thing that you separately do, that is take drugs or indulge in this or that obsessive behaviour. There is only that one jelly blob in your head, and everything that you repeatedly do becomes you... so my advice is to do lots of little different things and fight off any big ideas with a stick... And yes the traditional 'environmentalists' have got it wrong too... nature is something you try and wrest control from too... else you put up and shut up when you get a natural disaster like the recent tsunami...

Try listening to music when you write as opposed to drugs. Music stimulates the mind and feelings and can be a great writing tool. Good lluck.

c'mon lefty. you started the goddarn thread :)

So through drugs you reduce yourself to an evolutionary state of a few billion years ago... and you hail that as an achievement?? (You know, take a hammer to your brain and ina a few minutes you can reach an evolutionary state before even then... mushy single cells.. . is that even more of an achievement?) You are only agreeing with my point that drugs interfere with human consciousness... the most advanced form that we know there is and reduces it to something less than it is/could be. You cannot trump evolution by smoking pot my friend. The mere idea should strike you as ridiculous. In truth, to claim that you can imagine what it feels like to be a tree is in the realms of poetry whilst to claim to literally 'understand' what it is to be a tree is in the realms of madness, drug induced or not. "I KNOW I am Jesus, a dragon, a pea, a chair" Why should I take you seriously? Just concede (or else I will not bother with this discussion any more) that this 'knowledge' was imparted to you when your brain was not working as designed... in fact when it was deliberately thwarted in its normal function by a previous decision by you. Thus the 'info' is less reliable than it could be... to claim anything more shows that damage has set in Everything we become is in relation to everything else we experience... as I have said before, the brain is a contextual engine, so for 'experience' read 'connections physically writ over time'... that is how knowledge rational or emotional is arrived at. The appropriate control of emotions is knowledge too and that is achieved over time starting from childhood and increasingly into maturity... it is why as an adult you don't go to pieces and terrible distress just because your icecream has flopped to the floor. As I have said before, taking drugs (ie flooding the brain with neuro active chemicals) lets you access emotional states but does not by definition heap a load of connections into your brain which led you there... thus no wisdom, no knowledge, just entertainment. The problem is and it is common sense, if you spend a lot of time in these warped emotional states YOU WILL build up connnections while in them thus engraining stupidity into your brain. Consciousness starts from childhood and increases as you get older... it does this as a matter of course, if it is not stunted for any number of reasons, not all of them to do with drugs... To be taught to have a a self-questioning mind (one that questions its own assumptions, not of others) and to be provided a rich, varied experience full childhood is the key to abetting rather than stunting this process.... Taking drugs at the age of 14 is the equivalent of throwing sand into a finely honed engine (your brain) to find out 'what happens' then sit in the very car and drive happily away... It is only those that are further along the path that can tell how far you could have travelled, YOU will never know. If you are going to poke a stick around an engine at the very least you should read the manual first. At 14 how much can you know anything about anything? Drugs are most dangerous in the hands of the ignorant (of wahtever age) and that is why they should remain banned. Now before you do the idiotic comparative thing so fond of the drug addled community... but these guys have never taken drugs and see how stupid they are etc anyway it is better than alcohol etc etc I say by common sense you should be comparing yourself against a potential self: blob between ears = brain + time = me mashed blob between ears = sodden brain + time = diminished me Is that not obvious? Are you going to be smarter by not taking drugs, maybe. Are you going to be stupider as a result of taking drugs, most probably, but hey I wont know anyway so what is the difference.... sings 'I am a Tree...' Repeat after me: I take drugs to be stupider, because occasionally, being stupid is fun. I ought to be careful, doing this often will invariably make me more stupid, even though I will not realise this. Being stupid is of less value to being less stupid. If you don't get it you never will, need I say it may be too late for you.... To return to your original point, I think it is why 'drug wisdom' (ha ha) does not carry into the world of the brave... it is because sadly it is tripe nonsense. Unless you are so brain addled than it makes pefect sense to you of course. And in my biased opinion (I concede), it is cannabis that is the most dangerous of them all because of the invidious and subtle way that it works... time is telling and will tell... read the latest research on its long term effects.

What a fascinating thread! As one who been known to partake I come heavily down on the 'bad for creativity' side. I don't think drugs do much for your imagination - it's all there if you let it go - and it's far more coherent and contextual if it isn't done under the influence.

Llegspider: Incidently I never took drugs at the age of 14. I was 17 when I started smoking pot, and 20 when i started taking E, acid, mushies etc. I'm 25 now and have managed to avoid brain damage so well that I am currently taking a Masters. Funny that. You say: "Just concede (or else I will not bother with this discussion any more) that this 'knowledge' was imparted to you when your brain was not working as designed... in fact when it was deliberately thwarted in its normal function by a previous decision by you. Thus the 'info' is less reliable than it could be... to claim anything more shows that damage has set in." I like how i have to agree with you to continue this debate! However i do agree (not 'concede': this is not about point scoring,) that my knowledge of plant consciousness (for example) was imparted when my brain was not working "normally". I would not say designed because who designed it? God? There's no god, no telelogical principle. But can't you see that in doing so I added something to it? A psycho-active drugs alters your brains state, gives you new perceptions, new visions, new awarenesses, new states of being. This is (to me, as a person and as a writer) fascinating. Not everyone can deal with this; some cannot conceive of altered states, or view them with immense suspicion. I would guess that would be you, eh? Your consciousness is largely built up through habitual thoughts and connections. Drugs can dislocate this, defamiliarse the world, give you that freshness of impresion that babies have. This to me is of real value. I do not say that drugs are a 100% good thing: far from it. Anyone who is addicted is in a sorry state; anyone who overindulges is indeed playing with fire. They take more than they give. But they do give! Like alcohol, there will be a comedown of some kind,a s your brain readjusts. That's when it "takes". I knew when it was time to stop, for sure. But the glimpses of infinity, the awakening of personal aspects, the altered states... all so interesting.

Leftboy, PG said he started taking drugs at a raw 14... we (including him) will never know what he could have been had he not lost his way then. 17 is not far off. What I am addressing is not whether one should or not take drugs... but what you stand to gain (nothing of value) and what you stand to lose (everything of value) by taking them.... Look at the following two views of the same person in the same time and place: From within: A feeling of complete wellbeing and in esctactic communion with the godhead From without: Rolled up in the gutter, covered in faeces and piss, defecating and with a needle protruding from the groin (this description not made up - overheard yesterday on news from a resident in relation to busting of a crack house on their estate) In that moment, the feelings he has tapped into are as genuine as anything he will ever feel, I agree... I am not criticising them per se (how can I, I would like to 'feel' like that)... And yet.. Can you really argue that there is anything of 'value' in human terms that he has he tapped into for himself or for anyone else for that matter? Forget the archaic substances with their blunderbuss effect of the past, everday day now (and in the future) there are rolling out even more subtler drugs from the laboratories... Want to feel a feeling of 'love lost with a slight hint of nostalgia' just selected the blue button on the menu Sir... How about 'holy messianic rightiousness' the yellow button and plant consciouness etc etc Is being hooked into a machine like this knowledge? I call it slavery. What of Poetry of Art of Stories of Experience? I have tried to argue over and over again that value is context... that in the human condition, context is all, and context is that which is aquired over the time through the use of our given faculities. Extending the context that is inscribed within our brain is tantamount to expanding our consciouness.. by constantly choosing paths that lead to other paths (rather than cul de sacs), you have a chance of increasing your grasp and understanding and thus fashioning greater aspects of your world... There are NO short cuts to wisdom. Unless you are arguing that the effects of drugs are an inherent property of the chemicals themselves (clearly nonsense), you have to agree that the 'states' you access through them exist within the brain already. Theoretically therefore you can access these states by working at expanding your cosnsciousness... so that they are a 'learnt' process and they remain accessible all the time (not evaporate leaving you back where you started - rolling in faeces)... those should be your goals if you have a wanderlust within your mind (the wisdom of enlightenment). I have also argued that by virtue of how the brain works, taking drugs regularly damages your brain in ways YOU will be by definition ignorant of (see fellow lying in gutter above). You want to know the positive/detrimental effect it has had on your life thus far? Ask your loved ones and friends (non users)... and listen. Drugs are fools gold and lead you down a blind alley... Any subsequent path away from drugs means you have to retrace your steps to where you branched off.... The true language of drug use and experimentation should be cowardice, slavery, anti adventure, anti creativity, anti knowledge, anti free will and freedom (however you wish to define these concepts)... anti consciousness and thus anti humanity... Taking drugs is opting out... We may all do it from time to time... To make it your lifestyle and boast about is prime drug-fuelled idiocy. Most important of all, do it with a modicum of understanding of what you are really undertaking here. What concerns me is the ignorance and myth that is bandied about this subject.

1legspider - Lost my way? My way to what? I have never taken any drug that I could become dependant on. Never. I haven't taken ecstasy because if even one life is lost to a drug then it deserves to be obliterated period. To date no lives have been lost to lsd, magic mushrooms or marijuana. When you consider how many lives have been lost to alcohol abuse and conventional medicine then you enter an entirely new arena. What are your views on that? You cannot throw everyone into the same pot and say that drugs are detrimental to everyone. Drugs affect personalities in different ways. I found my drug taking days to be fun and I look back on those days with warmth and humility. It's just another life experience to me. Stepping out of my habitual mind is no big deal to me. I don't have a disciplined path to higher consciousness - life is too short and meaningless for that. If I can open the doors, step out occasionally and marvel at just how much is out there then that's ok with me.

For 1legspider:- All this talk about drugs being detrimental to health and it is common knowledge that lsd, mushies and cannabis have never claimed a life. Tell me - how do you feel about participating in and therfore being supportive of an economic model that's so gross with inequalities it has caused pain, suffering and death to millions of people around the world. How do you feel about religion? What about the food you eat? The car you drive? Does the company you work for care for the envionment? What is your politics and how many lives has it destroyed? How do you rate these next to a gram of psilocybin? If you want to discuss health well let's discuss it.

Very very balanced debate, but it's always gonna be like two people speaking separate languages. The main problem I came into with regard to drugs is continued use for the sake of it. When I get pissed, I have an alterior motive - to "scam some chicks" as my friend puts it. Smoking weed just to do it, to unwind etc. is very bad, as your thought proccesses tend to just go on and get darker, more paranoid. If you're smoking to write, starting to write then getting one going is the best way - as llegspider has mentioned countlesslly, the inspiration has to be there, from human existance. Then you can get a skewed viewpoint on it. Although things that seem terribly funny/moving when stoned are, more often than not, not. Somebody mentioned ADHD drugs:Ritalin. These are now the only way I can work through the night writing something for school. I don't have ADHD but I've always had very bad concentration, especially when it comes to writing something long. I took them for my Eng. Lit. AS modules and I do not remember what I wrote, however I managed to get 116/120. This is definately 'cheating' as llegspider puts it, but if something allows you to do something better, why not do it? I only take it when I have a severe workload, as it is VERY easy to get addicted to; I have only done it a few times, less than 10. When writing with drugs, it is very easy to alienate the reader if they have not done said drug, but that is true with most experience that gets penned. Somebody else mentioned that nobody has pinned down a good general description of a trip - because it is impossible to describe in 'human' terms. But if everyone was ripped all day the world would be a completely different one for everyone. All in all, as of yet, my writing is pretty poor in many ways, for starters I don't read enough poetry yet I try to write it. Adding drugs to the equation just makes it more confusing for me and any readers. But truly inspired and altogether accessible writings are out there, like the aforementioned Fear and Loathing, my favourite book. Chris PS for Leftboy - I wrote a poem about my only magic truffle trip, chaq it out http://www.abctales.com/Members/JazzPirate/poems1/kitchen/view (don't know how to hyperlink, sorry)

Chris. How can it be cheating when you are merely either enhancing or depressing what you have in you already? You spoke in the other forum about bipolar and as so you'd agree that htp's increase serotonin and therefore enable you to live a somewhat balanced life? Is this cheating? I mean, are those who eat health food in order to improve their figures cheating? Are athletes cheating for ingesting high glucose? We all take 'stuff' one way or another to improve our abilties. Drugs fall into the same catergory for writers and artists. I've seen people who were otherwise introverted and speptical really open up when 'under the influence,' unravelling beautiful minds, blossoming with idea's and claiming that their experiences had changed them. I agree about the cannabis intake. There's definately a link between pot and mild psychosis. Deffo!

I only meant cheating in regard to the fact it was an exam; it is like sportspeople taking PEDs in that way. You're right of course though, we all take things to make us better. And I like to think that if everyone took ritalin in that exam, there wouldn't be too much of a change in the overall result. The doctor prescribed me some citalopram hydrobromide (Celexa) and I tried it. After that one day I spent afterwards, I've decided that if being depressed sometimes is the price I have to pay for being able to think, I'll pay it. Doesn't mean I won't still complain though :) My friend never ceases in telling me all these stats he's found for links between psychosis and cannabis, and I can see where he's coming from. He says he'll never touch the green again and I've cut down drastically, but I never did it that much in the first place...although I do admit it probably contributed, and I never used it in a creative way especially. Chris

Nice one. I could never even lift a finger TO write after a session. Sometimes I would lie on the couch or in bed and see poetry unfurl itself before me and bygod did it make sense, but I always knew that by morning it'd mean fuck all. I took 40mg citalopram for 6 months. It did bugger all. I've realised now that the cipramil is a pill the psyches allow the docs to pescribe because it's mild and doesn't do bugger all anyway. It's one of those that, mixed with the right amount of affirmation, can work wonders, in that it's designed to have the smallest possible effect on your system but MAKE you feel asif you're getting better simply because you're 'doin' a drug. Psychosomatic. they're good at that, the docs and pysches. My shrink told me that his objective was to make me better in the shortest possible time. It's good for his for career. He'd try and talk me better. I could have crawled into that interview room naked and covered in cat shit and he still would have crooned, "Ah! See you're feeling better then!" When I first told him that I'd seen fireballs in the night sky he picked up his dicataphone and muttered, "witnessed time travellers re-entering the earth plane," and he'd look at me to see whether he'd made me laugh, or grin or whatever. "Ah! You're regaining your sense of humour, definately getting better." Honestly, I don't know about private, but NHS shrinks have a set agenda and it's to get you in and out of there as quick as poss. I've been seeing him for 5 1/2 months now and he's not done a fucking thing. Not that he has a miracle because that's what irritates them. They know fuck all about the condition, mate. If you don't become one of their triumpths, you're putting their profession into disrepute. There are so many people out there alone and living with mental illness and there's bugger all anyone can do about it. That's why it's a lonely journey. You know, I can, without a shadow of a doubt, put cannabis down to my condition. You just know!

Who knows, everything in life seems to have some sort of purpose, wouldn't we agree. Drugs have been used since the begining of time !

although i wouldn't advise people to take drugs unless they know exactly what they are, what the drug is going to do, and what the person can do if they encounter difficulties while taking the drug of there choice. tip of the day; eating graipfruit and oranges is a good way to get of E & lsd, i found that out myself as i eat a lot of grapefruit,,,

Good tip, Ms.d. I often ensure that there is plentiful vit c available if I plan to indulge in more than 5g of mexican. It's educational. This is what gives this thread it's value.

Damn straight. There are so many ways of perceiving the world that not to try another way seems ungrateful..! I also use other methods, more intellectual, but drugs like pot and mushies can let you see and feel and think in such different ways that I find inspiring. p.s. I don't recomment anyone takes drugs unless they know exactly what they're doing. check my poem to see how it can go very very wrong...

You can read any newspaper in the land to see how it can go wrong.

Again - I would never indulge in any drugs which have cost lives. Ecstasy - no. Cocaine, herion - definately not! Anybody who does this I consider to be total wasters. I've seen friends have their lives ruined - totally destroyed by these drugs. Mush - is my friend :)

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience. To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home?. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or auto-hypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about." Aldous Huxley The Doors Perception/Heaven and Hell

That was:- The Doors OF Perception/Heaven and Hell

It was probably the Doors' perception as well; Jim Morrison thought he was Blake!