pavlovs_dog

we were somewhere around barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
..The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
... The only thing that really worried me was the ether.
...........................................................................

anyone ever had these kinds of days? just finished reading "BRAVE NEW WORLD" again, and the whole concept of soma awakened a hunger that i haven't felt for a long time. i remember reading the PDR cover to cover, the mid-90's edition where ketamine was still listed and the hallucinatory side-effects were typed in BOLD print, I remember dog-earing "THE PILL BOOK, " getting amped over exciting names such as adderall, dextroamphetamine, amphetamine sulphate, phentermine hcl, dreamily studing the joys of percocet, percodan, vicodin, lortab, oxycontin, tylenol-3, dihydrocoedine, morphine, dilaudid, the mysterious fentanyl patch, pentazocine, coedine #4, then on to secobarbitol, phenobarbitol, xanax, valium, all the other assorted barbituates and benzodiazaprines engineered for a fun night on the town, then on to the wierd anti-parksonians guaranteed to cause powerful and vivid hallucinations. the next step to "THE PSYCHEDELIC ENCYCLOPEDIA," teasing me with the wonders of mescaline, LSD, psylicibin mushrooms, DMT, STP, peyote, salvia, MDMA, ibogaine, ayahuasca, ketamine, PCP, and even the premordial amanita muscaria mushroom that r. gordon wasson theorized was the beginning on ancient man's concept of religion. then to the profoundly brave and enlightening books "PIKHAL : A CHEMICAL LOVE STORY," and "TIHKAL: THE CONTINUATION" by alexander and ann shulgin, which outline not only the synthesis but the effects of every phenylthylamine and tryptamine yet discovered (A. shulgin has a phd. in biochemistry from u.c. berkely, and dosed both himself and his wife with gradually increasing amounts of the chemicals he discovered.) shulgin
then were john c. lilly's studies of various psychedelic drugs while immersed in sensory deprivation tanks, and whose writings inspired the movie "ALTERED STATES."

all this study before i was old enough to vote. of course, i have never tried any of these drugs, but the question is - is knowledge of a thing as good as experiencing a thing? does one need to break through one's boundaries, even if they are illegal, in order to become a better person? can one assign a quantitive value to one's actions and compare it to the value of the consequences? is a thing necessarily GOOD if the positive outweighs the negative?

for inquisitive minds... web page