My High Dose Psychedelic Trip

Several weeks ago I was relaxing, talking with two younger friends both between the ages of 25 and 35.  They told me about their camping trip the previous weekend, when they took magic mushrooms.  Their experiences were quite different. One had a very pleasant, joyful good time while the other had a pretty intense trip that was both pleasant and unpleasant.  They appeared to be struggling to make sense of it. I wanted to share with them what happened to me while tripping as a very young man. But instead of the story I write about here, I just said something about a “bad trip” and didn’t share the way I was hoping to at the time. Since then, I have reflected on my experience and write about it here. Hopefully my story can be useful to others even as the process of recalling it is useful to me. 

When I was a teenager, I dropped acid, took mescaline, and used psilocybin.  We all have memory nodes that are central to our early experience; events that feel like milestones and that serve as demarcations in our lives.  My life before and after experiences. My last trip was one of those.  Here’s the story of that trip that I took 40 years ago.

My father ended up moving us every 5 years or so as he took new positions at his company. In 1964 we moved from the working class Grand Rapids suburb of Kellogsville to the much more affluent East Grand Rapids, where I entered 7^th grade. Willie was one of my first friends in the new neighborhood and lived a block away.  Willie and I along with another friend Don smoked marijuana for the first time probably at age 15.  We took the hinges off of his older brother’s cabinet where he had his stash locked, and we emptied out a few cigarettes and filled them with our purloined pot.  Smoking that “wacky towbacky” led to one of the most enjoyable laugh-fests I have ever had, a perfectly wonderful time. Soon, we were getting high pretty regularly on weekends (dope was always for me a weekend special occasion deal, like going to the amusement park).  We fell in with the “weekend hippies” who congregated at the park fronting Reeds Lake, just down the street past the Jr. High School.

A few years later we started dropping (taking LSD and other psychedelics). It must have been the summer between sophomore and junior years, when I was 16. I was never on the selection committee, so I don’t really know what was in the “blotter acid” or the “window pane”, or the “psylocibin” or “mescaline” that we swallowed), but I did have trips. My memory of those experiences is very sketchy.  I remember one time tripping out on the music and the album cover of the Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesties Request (the 3-D version of the cover). Another time was prior to a high school dance.  At East Grand Rapids High School, these dances were called “spreads”.  One of my not so close friends, a kid that was smart and savvy and a bit ahead of the curve in risk-taking arranged the acquisition of some psilocybin or mescaline, which we took before going to the spread.  Once inside, I remember us either creating or joining a circle of heads (the label in those days given to kids using drugs) sitting in a circle on the gym floor, watching our trails, doing what I can’t remember but I do not recall any dancing.  It was a sort of sit-down-groove or protest or something, or maybe someone was trying to levitate the high school, I don’t recall.  That’s it for memories of my other tripping, even though I had dropped a couple other times as well. I do remember feeling a fair amount of anxiety and fear surrounding the loss of control involved in these journeys, and as a result, I had decided to stop dropping.

Of course, peer-pressure enters the picture!  “Just a quarter hit, Kough” (my nick-name at the time, my middle name and mother’s maiden name, pronounced Coe.)  I remember being in a car and taking the dose.  Then we’re walking in an affluent neighborhood of East Grand Rapids, picking up Max, an acquaintance who was a friend of a friend.  He was tall and had very curly hair which he wore in a massive “fro” and he was long-stride walking in a fashion that recalls John Lennon from the cover of Abby Road. I recall feeling like we were all walking into something edgy, unpredictable, exciting and maybe dangerous. 

I can’t remember being involved in planning this, but we ended up camping. 

Our campsites were in a wooded area near an elementary school on the far side of Reeds Lake. None of us had attended this school since it was on the other side of the lake.  As we were “getting off”, we visited the school playground at dusk and must have done some swinging and sliding. I vividly remember the walk back to the woods and the tents because the grassy field we cut through was teeming with multicolored bright shining snakes that seemed mildly concerning, but mostly just amazing.  Back in the tent, I remember it started raining and me leaving the tent in the rain.  I was powerful.  I could spread an arm, and knock some trees down, extend the other and become even more grand and powerful.  But this didn’t seem like I had power over, rather I experienced it as me being a part of everything, as cliché as that may sound.  It was pure bliss.  I ascended into the sky, expanding out and becoming transcendent, beautiful, wonderful, very very happy.  But suddenly, without warning and like a sudden gut punch I was falling from the sky, spiraling down and losing my sanity, my grip, my sense of well-being.  Ultimately, I felt like I was losing everything, and the feeling was deep, deep sadness and fear. Everything broken.  This last turn into darkness may have been triggered by one of the group coming into my tent during these visions, and saying something like “Rob, you are crazy, or losing your mind”, or something totally fucked up like that.

The next thing I remember is “waking up” in the tent at night, the tent illuminated by a lantern or flashlight. Several people were looking at me asking if I was OK.  I was, I knew where, who, and what I was but for some reason, I could not speak, couldn’t connect.  I remember just looking blankly at my friends (and some who I didn’t know well at all). I think I had a small maybe reassuring smile.  Anyway, they let me be and I fell asleep.

When I next awoke, it was early morning, everything was quiet, everyone else apparently asleep.  I got out of the tent and started walking.  I must have walked around this pretty unknown woods for a half hour or so, and when I returned to camp, I looked down the path toward the road where our cars were parked, and noticed a police car pulling away. Cops had come to see what was up with these long haired,  bead wearing “hippies” from across the lake. But ultimately, nothing came of it; Spider had eaten his pot while riding in the cruiser to the station, and after a brief interrogation, the police delivered the group back to the campground to clear out.  

I remember a girl who I did not know well at all being the first of the returning group to come to me and shower me with her loving and caring words and smiles of reassurance; everyone was relieved that “Kough” had returned to camp and hadn’t wandered off to his death or who the fuck knows what!  To this day I wonder who she was and why I don’t know or remember much else about her.  I guess she was an angel.  Writing about her now I feel deep gratitude.

I had made plans to go to a movie that day. A fellow grocery bagger where I worked at Veschio’s Grocery had invited me when we had last worked a shift together, and even though I judged him to be a nice guy but hopelessly straight, I had accepted. I went to the movie, but pretty much felt like a deer in the headlights, overwhelmed by the heaviness and intense normality of everyday life.  I had been to heaven and hell, and now I’m putting Campbell’s soup, milk and eggs into paper bags and going to movies with unhip straights?  I had returned to normal life, but with a strange new asset in my portfolio.

What long term effects did this trip have?  It certainly led to my total avoidance of psychedelic drugs from that point forward.  How much impact it had on creating my sense of self as a special yet deeply flawed, perpetually anxious being I can’t know. Paraphrasing Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues from his 1968 song Legend of a Mind about Timothy Leary and LSD, I had “flown so high and swooped so low”.  Some of that feeling of disconnection from others and anxiety about how to re-enter the everyday world that I had going to the movie that day is still with me.

 

It’s impossible to overestimate the power of psychedelic drugs. It seems clear that in a very small percentage of people using psychedelics persistent harms including the onset of psychosis occur after drug use, although there is no evidence of causality. There are many case reports of profound benefit. (see reassuring information below). Anyone contemplating using psychedelics can benefit from doing research and reading first.  There’s a lot of information out there; I can recommend the following resources, listed at the end of this post.

As far as using for pure recreation, I can’t recommend it even though as I have reported here, I have done that myself.  If you do, make sure you are with a trusted companion or companions, with at least one person who is not high, and in a safe location away from environmental dangers such as traffic, crowds, etc. That said, in the proper setting and with good preparation, I think the use of psychedelics holds promise for profound benefits.  I look forward to seeing research into this field evolve. Perhaps once again, with a deep respect for their power, I will once again use psychedelics to change my mind.

Podcast episode (from Making Sense with Sam Harris):
https://samharris.org/podcasts/177-psychedelic-science/

Book (How to Change Your Mind; What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence :
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/books/review/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind.html

Reassuring information regarding risk of high dose psychedelics:
https://michaelpollan.com/psychedelics-risk-today/ 

Lots of resources with links:
https://michaelpollan.com/resources/psychedelics-resources/