THE ECSTASY OF PAUL HADEN

His death, in a West Side apartment with a pot of chemicals boiled
dry on the stove, mystified not just his friends and family but his
initiates and customers as well

One sunny Sunday last June, the small park at the centre of
Strathcona, usually filled with Frisbee players and Chinese seniors
and hipster kids recovering from the previous night's partying, was
transformed.

A festival-style tent went up. Folding chairs for 200 were put out
for the large crowd of guests. These guests-some in suits, some in
batik-print shirts or gauzy flowing skirts-covered a wide range: a
doctor, a banker, a filmmaker, a writer, a lab technician, a
stripper, an architect. There were so many people that a few dozen
ended up having to stand.

As people took their places and a guitarist played quietly, a parks
employee asked one of the guests, "Who's the famous person having the
funeral?" The man he asked, Joe Brites, repeated his answer during
his eulogy for his long-time friend: "He wasn't famous. But he was
much loved. You would have liked him."

Paul Haden's body had been discovered the previous week in his
Kitsilano apartment. The body was near the door, as though he'd been
trying to get out. There was a 22-litre container of ecstasy
chemicals boiled dry on his stove. Various surfaces of his Balsam
Street suite were covered in a varnish from the residue. Haden was 44
and worked as a lab technician. Police said he had no criminal record
and was unknown to them.

His mysterious death attracted a flurry of media coverage because it
was on the West Side, because it was the first death anyone knew of
caused by a drug lab, and because the 23-suite building had to be
vacated while hazardous-materials crews disposed of everything in the
suite and then dismantled the apartment itself. Bloggers and Internet
commentators were briefly scathing about the jerk who'd caused so
much trouble. And then the story disappeared.

A few speakers at the memorial service expressed sorrow and regret at
the way Haden had died. Far more talked about a man who had been a
unique force in their lives, rambunctious and funny and never
interested in living by the rules. The kind of perpetual boy who adds
glitter and charming outrageousness to the lives of the more
conventional. "In some ways, time stood still for Paul," said his
former UBC roommate, David Downie, a banker who works in Ontario but
visited his old friend regularly.

Haden kept tarantulas as pets, and on at least one occasion lost them
in an apartment he was sharing. He'd phone up to embroil friends in
his latest escapade with the words "Dude, I've got a situation." The
last of the die-hard carnivores, he'd arrive at relatives' houses
with pounds of meat he'd insist on cooking up for a feast. Then he'd
announce he was going on a diet of beer, coffee, and chicken wings.

But there was another side. He was someone people turned to for
comfort and help. He would sit at a sick friend's bedside for hours.
He was a hugger, and he had an exceptional ability to connect with
people from wildly different walks of life. (A stripper at his
memorial said she came because he'd been a regular at the bar where
she worked and she liked him.) At least half a dozen people at the
service called him their best friend.

But one woman hinted at something about Haden's life that others
hadn't. "Paul was a philanthropist. Even the manner of his death was
philanthropic," said Kelly Attridge, a biologist who had lived with
Haden until a breakup two years previously. "Paul believed in what he
was doing with such passion that he put his life on the line for it."

Some in the audience had no idea what she was talking about. Others
knew all too well. They knew that Haden was not just another sad
Vancouver story, a guy from a good family caught up in the city's
battle with drugs. Instead, he was a central figure in a submerged
subculture that has received little notice as the city agonizes over
the ravages of street drugs in the Downtown Eastside. That subculture
is made up of middle-class professionals and arts types who have
turned to hallucinogens in recent years, drugs they use on special
occasions, sometimes to enhance a group celebration, sometimes to
enhance a voyage to their inner selves.

Using language evoking the optimism and spirituality-seeking of the
1960s, they're part of a North American renaissance that promotes the
psychotherapeutic or spiritual or just plain consciousness-expanding
uses of plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin, peyote, and
ayahuasca, and chemical variations of the same: LSD and MDMA, also
known as ecstasy. In the growing academic literature, those drugs are
called entheogens instead of psychedelics to emphasize their use as
psychoactive substances that facilitate spiritual experiences. Their
users and advocates see them as fundamentally different from the
legal and illegal drugs wreaking havoc everywhere, which tend to
promote detachment and isolation. Entheogens, they say, foster a
sense of goodwill, bonding, and community, as well as inducing a
positive state of self-exploration.

Haden was the underground chemist to the local chapter of that
tenuously connected group, which includes simple users as well as
those with an evangelical faith in the power of drugs. Some got to
know him through the usual friends-of-friends channels. Others
gravitated to him through an informal secret-handshake kind of
network. In the last few years, many got to know Haden through shared
pilgrimages to Burning Man, the legendary annual Nevada festival that
creates an instant experimental city, an explosion of art and
hyperkinetic celebrations of everything creatively unorthodox. This
past August, his friends at Burning Man memorialized his death by
taking his plastic-bagged ashes up in a plane; one emptied them into
the air during a parachute jump-an act entirely befitting the spirit
of both Haden and Burning Man. (It's now captured for perpetuity on YouTube.)

In Vancouver, Haden supplied free LSD to people who used it in
controlled sessions under the guidance of one of the few therapists
who are exploring it as a treatment method. He would take small
groups to a friend's Mayne Island cottage and spend a leisurely day
with them; they would take one thing or another that would send them
into a quiet, contemplative orbit for several hours. And he sold or
gave away those drugs to many more. At least once, he supplied a
party of about 200 people from the arts world.

There were no signs that he had a massive operation or made much
money from it. There were reports of cash rolled up in cans and
stashed in books, but police have not confirmed them. He owned
nothing more valuable than a beat-up 15-year-old car and dressed like
the fashion-disabled science geek he'd always been. He was also more
than just a supplier. "Paul made an extraordinary contribution to the
community," said a friend I'll call Alan. "Most of the underground
chemists have no moral or spiritual orientation. It's purely
materialistic. But Paul was a mixture between a priest and a scientist."

Another man, whom I'll call Michael, a well-known writer, said much
the same. "He had this scientific side and this deeply spiritual side
as well. He really thought he was making the world a better place."

Alan and Michael were two of several people who called me
spontaneously as word spread that I was doing a story about Haden's
death. None of them felt able to speak publicly, because of their
fear of repercussions. It's not local criticism they're worried
about, although they know that they'd be labelled as people who
glorify or enable drug use. It's the far-reaching consequences.

"Most of us are professionals, and most of us need to go into the
U.S. I personally wouldn't have a problem going public in Canada, but
I have business in the States," said Alan. Even Haden's family, who
had little or no idea about his other life, won't speak publicly. The
case of local psychiatrist Andrew Feldmar weighs heavily on all of
them. Feldmar was on his way into the States for a regular trip to
see his son two years ago when a border guard Googled his name and
found a reference to Feldmar having taken LSD in the 1960s. Although
it was not illegal at the time, Feldmar was banned from entering the States.

In spite of their anxieties about being associated with Haden, they
also seem compelled to help create a record of who he was and the
impact he had. "All of us are, 'Oh my God, we've lost an incredibly
precious person.' He was known as the expert. He was known as the
guide. It's a huge loss," said Alan. "We don't know another chemist
who has stepped up to the plate. I don't know what we're going to
do." Another man, an academic, wrote:

"I hope you can do Paul justice. He was not a criminal." It's an
acknowledgment that Haden himself would have welcomed, they say,
because he felt so strongly that he was bringing peace and love to the world.

Haden's interest IN that role began a long time ago. He was the baby
brother in a lively family of five kids-four boys, one girl-who grew
up in Kingston, Ontario. Their father, Philip, was a psychiatrist
who'd fled the English class system for more egalitarian Canada in
1955. Their mother, Jessica, was the other pillar in a smart,
academic, unpretentious family. They were 1960s parents, and their
children were encouraged to discover their passions, not compete for
conventional success. The Hadens spent their summers on an island in
Northern Ontario, where the kids explored, canoed, and collected
snakes-one of Paul's several lifelong interests.

Philip, especially, encouraged his children to experiment-with
boundaries. Paul was most like his father: scientific, curious, a
little rebellious, and inclined to think that rules were for lesser
beings. When Paul and a brother tried "bomb-making" in their preteens
(Paul, the chemist who detached the small detonator from a fireworks
rocket; his brother, the miniature casings maker) and blew a crater
in their back yard, Philip came out, surveyed the scene, and said
calmly, "Okay, kids, no more bombs."

And when a teenaged Paul expressed an interest in trying mushrooms,
his father was alongside him. Philip, a Freudian by training and
belief who was involved with LSD research in the 1950s, supervised
Paul's first experiment.

Haden's life in his 20s and 30s was marked by the same curiosity,
restlessness, and lack of interest in the conventional. He moved to
Vancouver in the late 1980s and did a degree in biochemistry at UBC
and then a lab-tech course at BCIT. But instead of settling into
steady research or lab work and a climb up the professional ladder,
he moved around from job to job, occasionally out of work. At one
point, he was a researcher for a drug that worked as a bowel
anti-inflammatory. At another, he dove for sea cucumbers and scraped
out their intestines to look for concentrations of useful enzymes. He
was co-author of an academic paper titled "Loloatins A to D, Cyclic
Decapeptide Antibiotics Produced in Culture by a Tropical Marine
Bacterium." When he died, as a lab technician at Burnaby General
Hospital, he was testing vials of body fluids. Toward the end of his
life, he seemed more happy and settled, and closer to his family. He
was thought to be planning to propose to his girlfriend.

No one seems to know when he started producing drugs, although it had
probably been going on for well over a decade. He'd always smoked
pot, as an after-work thing. And he was curious about drugs, as his
father had been, interested in their effects on the brain-less a
druggy guy than a science geek. He produced drugs with a partner at
one point, but after the partner went to jail in 1994, he restricted
his efforts to a relatively close circle. It's hard to pinpoint his
activities exactly, though, because-as those at his memorial
discovered-he had many groups of friends and kept them compartmentalized.

Alan said Haden didn't believe in using drugs in party situations,
that their experiences were like retreats. But Michael said that
Haden also supplied and participated in parties. He told one friend
that it was a bad idea to do ecstasy more than a couple of times a
year. Another friend said Paul was a responsible drug user, but also
an enthusiast: "Hallucinogens, yes; stimulants, yes; downers, yes;
you name it, yes."

And still others knew nothing about any of it and were simply baffled
by the way he died. "I stand here with a broken heart because there
is no farewell this visit, only goodbye," said David Downie, the
college roommate. Haden's boss at Burnaby General, Nancy Cunningham,
said his death shocked everyone there; they had had no suspicions
about his other life. "He was the greatest guy to work with. He was
never late and he was really accurate," said Cunningham. "He'd only
been here a year, but everybody liked him."

Despite Haden's spiri-tual goals, he created chaos in his last act.
The Friday night he died, four people in his building reported
smelling something strange, feeling nauseous, and vomiting. The whole
place had to be evacuated. The owner had to spend $140,000 stripping
his apartment to the studs to reduce-down to 0.1 microgram per 100
square centimetres, as per the city's environmental health bylaws-the
chemicals found in his apartment: palladium chloride, palladium
bromide, phosphoryl chloride, acetone, hydrochloric acid, and the
ecstasy precursor chemical MDP2P.

For police and fire services, the incident was a frightening example
of the dark side of drug labs: they're easy to set up and they're
portable, meaning that in a condo city like Vancouver they can be
anywhere, potentially putting hundreds of lives at risk. Paul Haden's
family ended up with none of his belongings, not even the hard drive
of his computer, which held 20 years' worth of photos.

And he left behind a community of people who couldn't fathom why he
was cooking chemicals in his apartment in such an unsafe way. Some of
them mourned that he paid for the consequences of prohibition with
his life but are not uncritical of what he did in the end-and they
say he would have been the one most horrified by what he unleashed.
"There was something grossly weird about what he was doing," said
Alan. "There was an out-of-character shoddiness, and it harmed a lot
of people." His friends are blaming not just him, says Michael; they
also blame themselves. "There's some part of us that feels complicit
in his death. We were the demand for that product. We were part of
the machine that consumed."

What exactly took Haden's life? Ironically, not the noxious fumes of
the drug he was purifying. There weren't enough toxins in the
apartment to have killed him. The coroner has told the family that he
died of a heart arrhythmia, and had been dead for at least a day
before he was found.