Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories

  Foreign chemists always seemed to do a good job catering for sufferers of diarrhoea and hypochondria. Furthermore, the happy Mediterranean pharmacist did not seem troubled that the customer might experience effects over and above mere cure and soon beg for more. British high-street chemists, on the other hand, were nothing more than drug-squad officers dressed in white. One had to be ill to get high. But many medicines continued to be purchased for reasons other than the usual ones of rectifying the irregularity of the discharge of bodily fluids and easing pain. Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Panadol, Anacin-3, Datril and Tylenol, all of which were manufactured initially for headache relief but are now often acquired for use as sedatives and, more puzzingly, for neutralising the quite pleasant comedown effects known as jet lag. Mix acetaminophen with codeine, and one might be lucky enough to get a small rush of euphoric bliss. Ready mixes of these two narcotics could be found in Tylenol #3 and Phenephen #3. Ibuprofen, found in Advil, Midol, Motrin, Panprin, Rufen and other mild painkillers, was discovered to have the additional qualities of relaxing muscles and producing mild visual distractions. Some fortunates even hallucinate when taking the decongestant pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, found in everything from Vick to Children’s Sudafed.

  Need a lift? Catch a flight to Malta, go straight to Valetta’s Freedom Square, which has long housed the inviting shelves of Chemimart. Buy some Stilnox, the crème de la crème of sleeping draughts, very similar to Mandrax. Then go to Paris. At the Champs Élysées and avenue Matignon are real drugstores called ‘Drugstores’, where one can by very sexy sleepers (Dornomyl). From Paris go to Milan, where the Farmacia Bracco will sell you Novalhina, which will kill any pain as it smoothly knocks you out. Then go to Spain where you can still neck a Dormidina for siesta and pop Prozac for pleasure.

  But it still requires a visit to the Third World to get serious about chemistry shopping. Sample South-East Asia, where benzodiazepine medications, for example Valium and Librium, are widely used tranquillisers that definitely require prescription in most parts of the world. Not so in Thailand, where the authorities react quizzically to concern about its widely documented potential for use as a recreational drug. A regular Bangkok chemist will happily supplement your Valium supplies with some Rohypnol, ten times stronger and rapidly gaining street cred as a date-rape drug.

  Psychedelically, Britain is far behind the Third World, quite a way behind Europe, and wrestling with America for last place. In fact, Britain is even worse than America, where many over-the-counter medications with reputations of inducing euphoria and a good night’s kip as side effects are, unlike here, available without prescription. These include Aleve, Naprosyn and Novonaprox, preparations containing naproxen, an anti-inflammatory non-steroid, which took me quite a long and relieving way from pain. A mate of mine had bought them for me at a Manhattan chain store called S & M Pharmacy. He’d also legally scored far more interesting dope called secbarbital and sold as ‘Big Reds’. These actually produced a slice of long-lasting silent giggles.

  The United States even outclasses European countries when it comes to the availability of some particular over-the-counter drugs. Melatonin is the best example. It can be bought in Boise, Idaho, but not in Amsterdam, Paris or Madrid. The presence of adequate melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, induces sleep and reverses the ravages of time. Benefits supposedly range from its gentle effective sleeping aid to an extremely powerful free radical. (Free radicals are molecules that are highly corrosive to the cells of the body and are believed to be one of the major contributors to the ageing process. They are formed as a by-product of the body’s normal chemical processes, particularly of the reaction between oxygen and fat.) Melatonin is also claimed to be an immune-system enhancer, as well as a confirmed inhibitor of jet lag.

  If not allowed to breeze into Miami, do not despair; hop on a plane to Johannesburg and buy some melatonin at any high-street chemist. While there, stock up on Syndol, a strong soporific spiked with codeine.

  So, if you want to keep stoned, keep rolling or keep moving.

  Julian Keeling

  Drugstore Cowboy

  FOR OTHER CHILDREN it was entering a sweetshop that made them feel like a kid in a sweetshop, but it was a trip to the local chemist that invariably aroused the finer feeling in me . . . It was the pills and powders and preparations, the tinctures and mixtures and linctuses. It was the bank of square, dark wood drawers with exotic abbreviations like ‘sticta. pul.’ or ‘sur. papav.’ that stimulated my nameless longings.

  Worryingly, my appreciation was not just an aesthetic one, for, even when I was only label-high to a bottle of codeine linctus, I had come to understand the benefits of a slight chemical shift. At the age of seven I was already faking stomach aches in return for a generous dose of Kaolin & Morphine, a mixture that would spread warmth throughout my body.

  At boarding school my quest continued. Throughout the winter I would line up after breakfast in the hope of being doled out a sweet spoonful of Gee’s Linctus for my perpetual cough. It seemed to have pretty much the same effect as the tummy-ache medicine and I was not surprised to discover later that anhydrous morphine was again the active ingredient in this opiate squill mixture. Also, thanks to some advice from my older brother, I experimented with some tablets called Do-Do. Each pill contained 18.31mg of ephedrine, the same variety of speed that precipitated the downfall of the footballer Maradona during the 1994 World Cup finals. I found that the drug worked extremely well with alcohol, enabling you to carry on drinking long after you were too drunk to drink any more. The downside was the strain it placed on the heart muscles and the tendency to produce bizarre hallucinations at inconvenient times. It was hard to get my homework done when, for instance, my housemaster – in bondage outfit, but with the tail of a mermaid – would make unscheduled visits from the electrical socket.

  Over-the-counter drugs are cheap, they’re easy to get hold of (provided your pharmacist isn’t some bitter old fuck with a chip on their shoulder because they failed to get into medical school), and there’s a wide range of pleasures available. My staple diet is opiates, which come in a bewildering array of pills and sticky liquids. The king of these pills is Paramol. They come in a sinister black packet with a partially eclipsed blue sun, so similar to a pinned-out eye that you wonder if their real market might actually be the recreational users.

  Other opiates are on the market in bottles, each one strong enough to get you into a fairly nice nod, or at least make things comfortably blurred around the edges. They will also soothe your nerves after an E too many or a night on the nose – at least that’s what my friends tell me. I’ve given up all those class-A drugs. They’re illegal; they’re expensive; you have to buy them off dodgy people; the doses are hard to predict and, worst of all, they’ve become socially acceptable. Raving the night away on MDMA or spending hours in the locked toilet cubicle of a fashionable nightspot now makes you feel like a regular pillar of society.

  But spending my days on a grand tour of west London’s better-stocked chemists, faking the symptoms of a bizarre range of ailments and telling outrageous fibs to a mistrustful pharmacist, makes me feel subversive, delinquent and different.

  And it makes me feel young again.

  Drugstore Cowboy, 1996

  Jim Hogshire

  The Test

  I DRANK ABOUT eight ounces of DM cough syrup. I was feeling kind of achy and wanted to see if it would kill pain. Previous smaller-dose experiments had shown me that the stuff could cause confusion and restlessness, but I couldn’t remember how much I’d taken.

  Soon enough, pain went away, and I went to bed a couple of hours later. It was midnight. I felt neither awake nor asleep, sort of like a typical narcotic high, but no great shakes. Mildly content, kind of nodding – just not as pleasant.

  At four o’clock in the morning I woke up suddenly and remembered that I had to go to Kinko’s copy shop and shave a week’s worth of stubble from my face. These ideas seemed ver
y clear to me.

  That seems normal enough, except I HAD A REPTILIAN BRAIN. My whole way of thinking and perceiving. It was like I was operating with a medulla only.

  I had full control over motor functions, but still had the impression that I was ungainly. That’s because I felt detached from my body, as if I was inhaling nitrous oxide. I got in the shower and shaved. For all I knew I was hacking my face to pieces – or maybe not. Since I didn’t see any blood or feel any pain, I had no worries about it. In fact, ‘feelings’ were so shallow or nonexistent that I probably couldn’t have felt anything like anxiety. I lost any sense of time.

  I knew I was capable of performing various actions, but could not conceive of any consequences to those actions. Had I looked down and seen another limb, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It was very much like being a passenger inside my own body.

  During this experience I gained the sort of insight associated with acid or dreams. Like a dream, you aren’t surprised by the absurd (an extra limb) and, like an LSD trip, you realize the absurdity of it all. But without hallucinations.

  The world became a binary place of dark and light, on/off, safety/danger. When I felt a need, I determined it was hunger, and ate almonds until I didn’t feel the need any more. Same thing with water. It was like playing a game. Staying alive, but with no fear at all. I sat down at my desk and tried to write down how this felt so I could look at it later. I was very aware that I was stupid. I wrote down the word ‘Cro-Magnon.’

  I thought I would have trouble driving but I had none. I felt ‘unsafe’ confronting the dark street but then this feeling disappeared when I crawled into the ‘safe’ car. Luckily there were only a couple of people in Kinko’s and one of them was a friend. She confirmed that my pupils were of different sizes.

  I was fucked up.

  There was no way I could make any subjective decisions or know if I was correctly adhering to social custom. I didn’t even know how to modulate my voice. Was this too loud? Do I look like a normal human? Outside, my friend shivered, so I asked her if it was cold, because for me there were only two temperatures – tolerable/intolerable (I found that out in the shower). I guess I wasn’t cold since I had no urge to change locations.

  I understood that I was an entity in the big contraption called civilization and that certain things were expected of me – but I could not comprehend what the hell they might be.

  All the words that came out of my mouth seemed equivalent in meaning. Instead of saying ‘Reduce it about 90 percent,’ I could have said ‘Two eggs and some toast, please,’ and these two phrases would have been the same. The whole world broke down into elemental parts, each of equal ‘value’ to the whole, which is to say, of no value at all.

  I sat at a table and read a newspaper. It was the most absurd thing I had ever seen! Each story purported to describe a thing or event, or was supposed to convey ‘news’ of a reality of some other location. This seemed stupid. An article on a war in Burma was described as ‘the war the West forgot.’ It had an ‘at-a-glance’ chart that said Burma was three times the size of the state of Washington.

  This was meaningless, and I knew it. The story did not even begin to describe the tiniest fragment of the reality of that place. From a vague recollection of my pre-reptilian days, I knew of things called ‘complicated.’ But the paper’s pitiful attempt to categorize individuals as ‘rebels’ or ‘insurgents’ or to describe the reasons for the agony was literally ridiculous. I laughed out loud.

  I found being a reptile kind of pleasant. I was content to sit and monitor my surroundings. I was alert, but not anxious. If someone had come at me with an axe, I would have acted appropriately. Fight or flight. Every now and then I would do a ‘reality check’ to make sure I wasn’t masturbating or strangling someone, due to a vague awareness of non-reptilian expectations. At one point, I ventured across the street to a hamburger place to get something to eat. It was locked up and yet there were workers inside. This truly confused me, and I considered trying to break in, and make off with food. Luckily, the store opened (now that it was six a.m.) and I entered the front door like a normal customer.

  It was difficult to remember how to do a money-for-merchandise transaction and even more difficult to put words into action, but I finally succeeded at the task. I ate bite by bite until I was full. If I had become full before finishing the hamburger, I think I would have simply let it fall from my hand.

  The life of a reptile may seem boring to us, but boredom has no place in a reptilian brain. If, as a reptile, something started to hurt, I took steps to get away from it. If it felt better over here, that’s where I went. Writing this, twenty-four hours after becoming a reptile, it seems that my neocortex is reconnecting. Soon, I hope to be human again.

  As a reptile I still believed in God. I didn’t feel like praying (which seemed ludicrous), but there was no diminishing of my belief. Why? Is a purely human question. As a reptile, questioning my existence was none of my business. I just didn’t care. Become a reptile for a while; it straightens out a thing or two.

  From: Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill

  Marketing, Art, History & Consumption, 1999

  Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray

  The Decadent Gardener

  A FEW YEARS ago, Durian, Heinrich and I took a house in Slovenia with no intention other than idling away the summer. It was a peasant house with a small garden and along one side of the house there grew in abundance a plant which I recognised as henbane, Hyoscyamus Niger. I watched the plant with an interest bordering on obsession throughout the summer, as I waited for its seeds to ripen. When this occurred I collected a quantity and set about preparing them.

  I discovered that there are two ways of experiencing henbane. One is to make a sort of paste from the seeds and to rub it into an area of the chest close to the heart. The other is to roast the seeds and inhale the fumes. Feeling unconvinced about the first method, I decided to start with the second. I took a handful of the flat, greyish seeds and placing them on a metal plate, I heated them slowly from below using a spirit stove. I watched with anticipation and unease as the seeds began to swell. Shortly after, their shells burst and the fumes began to rise. I inhaled deeply . . .

  It was not long (although I cannot say how long) before it became clear that the fumes were beginning to penetrate my consciousness. The first effects were physical and I began to feel very unsteady on my feet. My head was aching and I experienced a sickening dizziness. Also my mouth and throat became parched, to the point where I could barely swallow, let alone speak. I began to feel frightened. One might have thought that this was related to having taken the henbane, that it was a fear of poisoning or death. But it could not have been, as I no longer had any idea how I had got into this state. No, it was just a vague, unspecific terror. I remember looking in a mirror and this increased my anxiety. My face had swollen and become livid. The flesh on my head had grown much heavier and I could feel the bulk of it weighing about my cheeks, distorting the shape of my face. My eyes stared out at me, enlarged and black. I had trouble fixing my gaze on the mirror as it kept moving back and forth. Soon not just the mirror but the entire room was on the move. I had to clutch hold of something to stop myself from sliding rapidly first to the left then to the right. My senses were diminishing. Sounds began to fade and the objects in the room began to darken. My peripheral vision became lost in a grey fog, I was drenched in perspiration by now and as the darkness deepened, sight was replaced by a series of terrifying hallucinations. A thin stone column with an elaborately carved capital suddenly presented itself to my sight. It stood in front of me and was looking at me. I tried to move my head to avoid its gaze but found I was unable to. My body no longer responded to my wishes. I was paralysed. The gaze of the column became unbearable. I was overcome with a terrible sense of shame and terror towards this. My whole body seemed to be shaking uncontrollably. As I stood there, unable to move, the column slowly dissolved and reformed in the
shape of a grotesque infant. Its face was hideously contorted in a silent scream. It appeared to be in great pain, but I felt no sorrow or pity for it. I knew that it bore me ill-will, and I desperately wanted to escape its malevolence. There was something deeply violent and almost satanic about it. At this point, a whole host of images crowded around me – weird animals, talking plants, a cloud of tiny black insects, demented voices whispering urgently to me, as if semi-human creatures were trying to crawl inside my ears. It was as if I was inhabiting the world of a medieval text, a bestiary of madness. All the time I was trying to move, to escape, but my legs refused to respond. A wave of sickness rose up in me, to the point where I was sure I would collapse, although at the same time I knew that this would not bring me unconsciousness. The grotesque visions would continue to haunt me.

  The next stage which I remember was both the most horrifying and also the most exultant. Between the waves of nausea, I experienced moments of profound well-being. These were accompanied by a feeling of bodily disintegration. Although I was paralysed, it appeared that parts of my body were beginning to detach themselves and take on a separate existence. My head was stretching upwards and at any moment would be parted from my body. Simultaneously, a sensation of flight began to take hold of me. With this came a relaxation. As I experienced the terror of my dissolving body, I abandoned myself to my hallucinations and I was soon at one with them, drifting through a gloomy sky and over a strange, crepuscular landscape. This was little short of euphoric. The terror had lifted and I accepted the horror of the images which presented themselves as a matter of course.