GLIMPSES OF HEAVEN

When I go, I want to go like Aldous Huxley. As he lay dying from throat
cancer in November of 1963, he wrote a note asking his wife to inject him
with LSD-25. He experienced his demise in an unfathomable state of
awareness, as she whispered into his ear affirmations of comfort and love.

It seems a beautiful way to leave the planet, and I'd like to think that
Laura Huxley was equally blessed for her act of devotion, with its
inevitable contact high. How often does anyone get a glimpse of heaven,
even at one remove? How often should we?

Jay Stevens, a writer based in Vermont, has taken most of the psychedelics,
or designer drugs. "Hell, almost as a mark of professional responsibility,"
says the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Published
in 1987, it remains an exhaustive and illuminating social history, as well
as a threat to the more authoritarian impulses of government. Last year,
eight books were banned by the increasingly repressive regime of Russian
president Vladimir Putin and Storming Heaven was among them.

LSD was discovered in 1943, initially touted as a powerful therapeutic tool
in treating alcoholism. It was even briefly in vogue as a competitive tonic
for corporate America -- until executives returned from their LSD retreats
with an awakened spirituality and little concern for the relentless pursuit
of profit. The CIA would get unknowing subjects high and then shadow them
to make observations. Maybe it's not the drugs that make users paranoid.

Stevens doesn't seem paranoid. "I'm a deviant, so be it." He gives
thoughtful and articulate answers over the phone. And he'll whip off a
lengthy email about psychedelics, politics and mankind's next evolutionary
step forward. He co-wrote a book with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart
about rhythm being one of mankind's most ancient spiritual connections.
He's a Taoist and a maple syrup farmer.

Stevens interviewed first-hand every key living LSD figure from the Huxley
generation to the Beats to the Hippies and beyond. He has, I believe,
singular insight into the lost promise of this powerful drug.

"What I think of as the Huxley generation, a lot of them really reached a
kind of wisdom through [LSD]," he says. "I used to refer to them as the
Happy Greyheads. When I was doing the research for the book they were in
their late sixties, they all were happy and they all attributed it to their
work."

A likely reason is that their research was condoned, and they saw
themselves as being within society. Stevens argues that successive
generations of psychonauts have suffered diminishing returns. "I did not
meet a lot of happy boomers. I really did not feel they had reached any
particular wisdom. Some were torn apart by the '60s."

He partly blames the enormous counter-insurgency that was brought to bear
by a fearful government. He details this early escalation of the drug war
in the second volume of his LSD trilogy, Burning Down the House, which is
due out next year. "The drugs were already making you a little crazy," says
Stevens. Under the threat of government muscle, "you did not find the same
sort of happy fools."

As for the current generation, Stevens notes that the proportion of young
people who have tried psychedelics remains at a remarkably steady 10 per
cent of American high school seniors. In Ontario, the figure is 4.5 per
cent. "But I think for most of the kids doing it, it's simply one more
extreme experience that they can engage in, not much different than binge
drinking."

Then there's the unsafe street supply. Or, as I advised a friend last year
as he prayed for his girlfriend's recovery from a bad Ecstasy trip: I won't
do chemicals until I'm rich enough to employ actual chemists. Says Stevens:
"Taking street E once a week is incredibly stupid from a whole lot of
perspectives."

Stevens believes in psychedelics as a powerful enabler of self-discovery,
but you have to keep your wits about you. I asked about possible damage
from an acid trip about 20 years ago, when I had hoped to rewire my
homosexuality out of existence. Three years later -- in Vancouver, of
course -- a particularly fresh batch of blotter acid brought that bottled
sexuality raging to the fore.

"On the question of damage: oh absolutely," Stevens replied. "They used to
say that the bad trip was the best trip, in terms of dredging up
psychological material that would make Messrs. Freud and Jung dance a jig.
But who needs that shit when they got a 9-to-5 job to go to and
relationships to maintain? We do not live in a culture that is going to
allow you to work through the gobbledygook at your leisure."

Recently, Stevens has been very abstemious, unwilling to risk screwing up
the next two volumes of his life's work. "The most famous example of
psychedelics doing this is Michel Foucault, who completely reversed the
direction he was taking with his archeology of sex work after taking LSD.
And retaking it and retaking it, etc."