The American drug companies don't want to cut into profits, which would seriously be the case if people could get the same effects from simply growing a flower and smoking it. Whether it's from a hemp or poppy, gardening cuts out the middleman. You can medicate yourself and who needs a pharmaceutical company. The best pot requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowers, dry them, and smoke them. The best opium requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowering bulbs of the California Poppy (The state flower!), dry them, and smoke them. The minions of Satan want to sell you their chemical services but no one needs Vicodin or even morphine if they can just grow a flower, which also includes the byproduct of ending international drug smuggling. Given a choice between going downtown and trying to score some heroin or growing a flower, what would most people do, especially those simply seeking a painkiller. Pot and the poppy are the primary plants for the pharmaceutically self-regulating, and all people have to know is to garden.

 

ANTITHESIS: Big corporations are only there to help.

Thank you Bruce Shoemaker: "Joe Bologna in My Favorite Year playing a Sid Caesar like character. The original story is credited to Mel Brooks who was a writer for Sid's Your Show of Shows."

This would be my wife. I was on the telephone to a friend at the time when she literally attacked me ... I did a quick retreat from the phone and attempted to deal with the problem. Couldn't and my best course of action was to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. A quick call to the police took the problem out of my hands. My wife spent about six weeks in the hospital and is now on meds to control bi-polar manic depression. A very scary experience.

- anonymous by request

 

Michael,

    I was a freshman in college in an all-male freshman dorm, at a time when the legal age to drink was 18 (mid-seventies). Two to a room, 16 rooms in a rectangle surrounding a central bathroom with 4 stalls, 6 sinks and 4 showers.

    Joel was just another guy, across the rectangle, 4 doors away. Except as the first few weeks went on, Joel stopped taking showers or going to class. He started popping up in socially strange places, asking increasingly unacceptable "favors." For me it started when I was peacefully taking a crap, and Joel's by now scrubbled face popped over the top of the stall door. "What ya doing?" "Taking a shit Joel." "Oh, want to go for a walk?" "Ah, no thanks." And then off he went.

    Soon it took physical restraint by two, then three, of us to keep Joel from sneaking into the bathroom when someone's girlfriend needed to use the toilet. He'd beg, on his knees, "Be a pal, I won't tell anyone." By the end of the second week, Joel was barely sleeping at all, and his roommate was looking for other rooms to sleep in at night.

    Sometime in the third week of the semester the van pulled up outside the dorm, and several rather burly men in white uniforms grabbed Joel and hauled him downstairs to the van, and then off to the mental 'hospital'. Joel fought all the way out, and screamed "I'll get you all, I'll come back and kill you all."

    We found out Joel was on some anti-psychotic drug, which he'd quit taking almost immediately upon arrival at school. There was no news after that for a few days when the local radio put out a bulletin that Joel had smacked a cook over the head with a fry pan. He'd then jumped out the kitchen window and was on the loose. Lots of nervous freshman that night as we all went to bed with baseball bats, tennis rackets, etc. next to the bed. Joel was caught the next day trying to get into his mother's house and taken back to the mental 'hospital'. He tried to escape one more time, only this time when he jumped out the window he was unfortunately on the second floor, and broke his back in the jump.

    I didn't hear any more of Joel for two years. One night at a University-sponsored party downtown, I was watching a band play and thinking about getting another free beer when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Joel. Out of the 'hospital' and back on his medications. He apologized for all that had happened. We talked for nearly an hour, exchanged well-wishes for the future, and Joel walked out into the crowd.

    I never saw, heard of, or from Joel again. I think of him when mental health/illness is brought up, and always wonder just where the line should be drawn.

    Thanks for the opportunity to write about that Michael. I always enjoy Dareland.

- Kurt Ferguson

 

    Go mad? Yes.

    In front of my eyes? Not exactly. Actually, it was me.

    Me and the pain killer Lortab don't play well together and I've known this for several years. Last year, I caught pneumonia and I went to a minor emergency clinic. The doctor prescribed Notuss for my cough. I asked her, does this have Lortab in it, and she said no.

    So I started taking it. It was good. Very good. Very mild. No cough. Day two, some feelings of anxiety, but nothing serious. Night three - I woke up with no sense of self identity at all. None. I didn't know who I was, where I was, or what I was doing there. Instead, my entire world consisted of a series of thirteen numbers, which I compulsively began to add together. When I added the thirteenth number to the equation, suddenly I was me again, but with a nice unbroken memory of when I was not me at all - when I was a series of 13 numbers to be added together. It scared me so bad I sat up the rest of the night afraid to go to sleep, afraid of losing myself again.

    The next day, I Googled Notuss and found that it contains hydrocodone, which also goes under the prescription name Lortab. Useful information, that.

    Anyway, I included a variation of this experience in a short story, called "The Sum of Man," which is going to be published in Nature Physics later this year.

- Jeff Crook

 

    Hey, Michael:
    I'm really kind of reluctant to answer this because it's intensely personal and embarrassing, not something I want plastered all over the internet, but true.
    In 1984, my sister (a huge LSD/Timothy Leary fan) convinced me to take a hit of LSD. A single hit, not multiple, and it was apparently perfectly fine stuff, she took more than one of the same stuff...no harm, no foul. I on the other hand, didn't fare so well!
    That night, as I tripped alone in my apt., I began to hear "voices", that told me I was basically the most horrible person that ever lived, that I didn't deserve to live, and called me every bad name in the book. Unfortunately, when the trippin' ended, the voices didn't...all summer long I heard the same thing and my brain devised an elaborate explanation as to what must be going on (neighbors crawling into the crawl space above my apt. and watching me through pinholes in the ceiling and talking badly to me in order to make me horribly depressed and kill myself).
    Indeed, after an entire summer of that living hell, I eventually did give in to the voices urging me to commit suicide. I was about to run out of weed and had quit my job, I had no money left and would probably be homeless, so I gave in and took a bottle of sleeping pills with my last bowl of smoke.
    In the 3 months that I'd been hearing these voices, my 2 cats had gotten to the point where they wouldn't come anywhere near me, and they had been very sweet, loving cats before. After taking the pills I went to bed and went to sleep, only to become conscious an hour later with both cats on my chest, with their faces right up in my face, meowing really loudly. It scared the hell out of me, so I lumbered up and went and told my sister what I'd done (she lived in the same building). I had to do the whole ER/stomach pump thing. Long story short, I was put on an anti-schizophrenic med and within a week the voices were gone. I only had to be on those meds for about a few months, and never had a problem with schizophrenia, in any form, again.
    I know that this sounds unbelievable but, trust me, you can't make this stuff up! Most people don't find the LSD/crazy part so unbelievable, but that it was healed so quickly and efficiently by the Navane or that I'm not still crazy at some level. Maybe I am...maybe we all are! I think people have always thought I was a little "off" because, like you, my I.Q. is quite a bit higher than normal and I just don't think like the average person! But I'm here to tell you that "crazy" truly IS a matter of brain chemistry!!!
- anonymous by request

 

    I think the only time that happened was when I was about age seven, one day when my mother was angry at me for something. Based on something from a cartoon I had seen, I guess, I put a book inside the back of my underwear to protect me from the blows. Instead, this made her go off even worse and she really beat us bad.

    That was the only time she ever hit me, though.

    What bothers me more is your idea about "mad." Most people believe that when a person goes "mad," there's no relief. You either lock them in an asylum for the rest of their lives, or you do the humane thing and kill them.

    There's a role playing game called "Call of Cthulu" which says there are gods far more powerful than Jesus or anyone you've ever heard of, they're evil, and even knowing anything about them drives you mad. In the game, when you lose all your "sanity," you become one of the minions of these monster gods. A good, honest family man will pick up a knife and slaughter them, and anyone he runs across. Why not? He's mad.

    Mind you, I've been to two shrinks in my life. Neither of them did any good. I believe psychiatry is a three-card-Monte game, that you have to solve your own problems, and shrinks take your money and provide absolutely no help. But to say that there is absolutely no help for anyone who has mental problems, that "mad" might as well mean "dead," is scary. Unfortunately, it's also the most accepted belief in this country.

    So, understand how I'm reacting to this question you're asking. I think you're opening a can of black mambas. And, by the way, the short story you opened this particular DT column was profoundly depressing to me.

- Tom Reed

 

    Hey,

    Well, since you asked:
    Years ago, a friend of mine had a urinary tract infection - a pretty rare thing for men, but he hit the jackpot. He saw the doctor, got antibiotics for it. The side effects listed "psychosis". Nobody ever gets the side effects.
    He hit the jackpot again.
    He still lived with his parents at the time. When his reality went off the tracks, he was simply lost. He was fucked in the head and a part of him knew it; we talked on the phone. He told me weird shit. I was concerned and asked him for more detail, trying to wrap my head around it.

    He said he'd write it all up for me, there was too much of it to go into it on the phone. I said okay.
    The next day he sent me a long, long document by e-mail. It was detailed and hopelessly fragmented at the same time. In it, he told me things:
    When he was six or seven years old, he went out in the nearby woods with a girl of his own age. He said he had a surprise for her - it was a plastic bag full of glass bottles they could break. He broke some. She got scared -- of him. The next day, he woke up and the cops were
there. They asked what had happened to her. Nothing, he told them. He admitted to breaking the bottles and said he was sorry. The cops thought that was significant. They _knew_ something, but my friend didn't understand what it was.
    A few years later, he met with a shrink a number of times. The shrink gave him bottles and asked him to give them names. He did so. She said, no, no -- give them female names. They talked about breaking bottles. He liked to do it. He showed her where he'd done it, but there was nothing there -- someone had cleaned the shards up. While they were looking at the spot, other people were combing the area for signs of rape...
    I got the creeps.
    He told me I later lived with the girl - now an adult, of course - who went to the woods with him. When he came to visit us, she accused him of raping her. In his memories, on the pages he sent me, this girl was ubiquitous; she was everywhere -- she hung out with us, she went out with a friend of ours, she seemed to know everyone and everyone knew her, and especially what she was saying about him.. and everyone kept it in mind when they looked at him. She conveniently only had a presence in his memories when she could accuse him; at other times, he seemed to forget about her. He was constantly being accused of sexual assault by his friends and family, but nothing ever came of it. He was constantly defending himself against charges of largely unspecified perversion.
    Another constant element was one of seeing a psychiatrist and being medicated in various ways. Most importantly, there was a strong element of shame and ostracism, brought on by things he couldn't remember and couldn't understand, and by seeing a psychiatrist; in these memories, he was always an outsider, always manipulated by others who disdained him and suspected him of perversion. A lot of this happened in secret - his psychiatrist was called a speech therapist, drugs were administered to him clandestinely, he was constantly in a situation where he was asked to keep something that had to do with his treatment or incidents that involved him a secret.
    Misunderstandings were also a constant presence in his memories; people kept hearing him wrong and always interpreting everything he said or did in the worst possible way. When he said "yes", they thought he was admitting to being a pervert. But that went both ways; when they called him "sick", he'd reply, "yeah, I have a cold", for example - in these memories, he never seemed to understand why everyone misunderstood him, and he never seemed aware of the subtext - or even the obvious content - of what people are saying to him. It was only after it was said that he understood what had occurred, and then he was always shamed by it.
    He told me his aunt tried to poison him. She brought him cake. She had laced it with Depo-Provera. I looked Depo-Provera up online -- it's an American contraceptive for women, not available here in Finland. It's also used in the chemical castration of male sex offenders in the States.
    I got the creeps again.
    They were also feeding him progesterone, which is, among other things, used in the hormone therapy for transsexual women. He told me that he remembered a number of times when I'd made fun of the size of his penis. He remembered when I, his father, his uncle and his cousin gathered around and did the same. I didn't remember any of this. He told me it happened a few summers ago, when we were on a holiday together with his family. On the phone again, I pointed out that although it was true that we'd spent summers together, that was when we were much younger. His chronology was all over the place. This obviously confused him for a moment, but then he just moved on.
    They brought in lawyers to press him and hackers to go through his files. A hacker installed a back door on his computer. His password was "no more pain", written backwards...
    It went on and on, for 23 pages.
    As far as I know, none of this really happened. I asked his parents about some of these things, just to see if they were based on real events, but I don't think there was an incident with bottles and cops, for example - but then, I'm not at all sure they'd tell me if there had been; his mother had a morbid fear of embarrassment of all kind, and sometimes it seemed like most human activities short of sitting down or cooking dinner were embarrassing to her.
    My friend's memories had changed retroactively, and even though it was a terrible and jumbled mess, he couldn't see the inconsistencies and impossibilities -- as if an eight-year old could be a serial rapist, for starters. But this was a temporary thing; it was induced by the medication, and it abated. Once things started to go back to normal and his psychosis became weaker, he could understand that what he was thinking was insane -- but if he thought too much of it, then it all made sense again, he told me; any argument against these things being true got instantly and retroactively rationalized away, as if the argument had never existed...
    It was strange and beautiful and scary to understand that this wasn't just depression or obsession or some other, reasonably commonplace mental problem; this was a case of a man literally losing all touch with reality, and in his mind, suddenly none of the old rules of causality or logic or relativity no longer worked. You couldn't reason with him because his world operated on an entirely different principle; anything you said to him, or anything he thought about, became a building block in his psychosis.
    And though it seemed impossible at the time, eventually, things simply went back to normal. His reality fragmented, and then it put itself back together, and that was that. It was a strange and creepy ride for everyone concerned, and while I admit that a part of me finds it utterly fascinating, I don't envy him the experience.

- MR