Christmas in Mexico 1963

Three Kings: Mexico City Christmas

CHRISTMAS IN MEXICO 1963

1963 was a big year for me. I had passed all my exams at Stanford and was beginning my thesis work under Walter Meyerhof using a small particle accelerator in the basement of the Physics building. With some lady friends from the Psychology department, I had just experienced my first acid trip which opened up for me new worlds of possibility. In this excitable mood I decided to spend my Christmas in Mexico, packed my gear into a big duffel bag and hopped a bus down to Guadalajara.

Where I met a fellow American named Dave Whitaker, who was married to an anthropologist in Wisconsin, and was, like myself, looking for adventure. Both of us were bearded and scruffy and attracted a lot of attention. Since 1963 predated the hippies, we were called "existentialistas" or sometimes "Fidelistas". In Mexico City we met several young men from the University who were eager to practice their English and wanted to show us the hot spots. Dave & I lived in a hotel a few blocks from the Paseo Reforma park right in the center of the city, within walking distance of the Metropolitan Cathedral and several other famous landmarks. We had been warned not to drink the water so we subsisted on beer and food we bought from the ubiquitous street vendors. At one of these stands, I was served slices of goat cut right off the animal and stuffed into a big tortilla.

Mexico City taco stand.

One day Dave and I decided to see the ocean and took a bus to Mazatlan where for the first time I was able to swim in ocean water as warm as a bathtub. The Mazatlan beach is crowded with expensive hotels, but behind the hotels sits a typical Mexican village. We stopped in a cantina and immediately became the center of attention. At a table inside, four Mexicans invited us gringos to play a drinking game. They produced a "shock box" made of a lantern battery, an automotive spark coil and a rheostat for controlling the voltage. I had played with such devices in my physics class in high school and knew how they worked. In this cantina game, you would hold a tin can in each hand and see how much voltage you could endure. The loser buys beer for everyone. This game was a nice way to interact with good-hearted guys who didn't speak your language. And after buying three or four rounds of beer for the Mexicans, we gringos shook hands with the winners, happily took our leave and traveled back home to Mexico City.

Pulque is a peculiar Mexican beer brewed from the agave cactus and sold only in special bars called pulquerias. Pulque is the color of milk and is known as the drink of the working class. As luck would have it, there was a pulqueria right across the street from our hotel. Each of us dared the other to try this exotic brew and I would taunt Dave by calling him Señor Pulque in hopes that he would try it first. That never happened. And I am still ignorant of the taste of this working-class brew, a situation I very much regret.

Dave did introduce me to another exotic substance -- not pulque but "speed". As that time you could go to any pharmacia and buy Dexadrine in various forms without a prescription. (Even though every bottle was clearly labeled "Not for sale without a prescription".) I loved speed. It made me feel as super smart and as fearless as I knew I really was. And I could stay up and party all night. "This is a drug I could get addicted to," I said. But unlike acid, which seems to give you insights into the nature of consciousness, the speed high is completely empty, a mere revving of the engine of ordinary awareness. And when the drug wears off, the downside is horrible -- like somebody has been using your body for weeks. After this brief experience in the streets of Mexico City, I said goodbye to amphetamines as a future drug of abuse.

Tenochtitlan, the Temple of the Sun

While Dave was busy with something else, I decided to take a trip to one of Mexico's most famous archeological sites -- Tenochtitlan, the Temple of the Sun, which is located a few miles north-east of Mexico city. I rode a bus, complete with people carrying live chickens, to the site, ignored the little kids trying to sell me "authentic" clay figurines, wandered around the various buildings and then decided to climb to the top of the Sun Temple.

I was almost to the top and flanked by two women, when one of them turned to me and asked me one of the strangest questions I have ever heard. "Did you know," she asked, "that this temple was built by Jews?"

Actually I didn't know that. But I was informed by the two women, who happened to be Mormon archeologists, of their belief that one of the Lost Tribes of Israel had sailed to the New World and founded new civilizations of which the Temple of the Sun was one part. Since I was a mere physicist I could come up with no facts to refute their claim so I listened intently to their story. And eventually after reaching the top of the Temple, the women led me down, across the yellow tape, to meet their Mormon colleagues who were busy excavating some new walls covered with paintings of jaguars and other exotic ancient Jewish iconography.

Another taco stand

Later, after my trip to Tenochtitlan, Dave and I were walking in Mexico City with a bunch of locals who were testing out their English (which was much better than our Spanish) when we ran across a guy in a vacant lot who was selling marijuana. I was curious because I had never tried this substance but one of the Mexicans warned us: "Don't try that stuff. It make you crazy. Let's go get drunk instead." Ignoring his warning I bought a bag of it to take back to our hotel. Most of the Mexicans left but two followed us back.

Our room was on the third floor with a window facing the main street. And to make the scene complete, a neon sign outside our window was flashing lurid colors across the bed.

We rolled the stash up into a big cigar using a page from a Mexican newspaper and passed it around. The two Mexicans were lying on the bed and Dave and I were sitting on the floor. The neon light was flashing off and on. It looked like a typical sordid drug scene you might see in the movies. It was my very first time smoking marijuana.

Dave and I both saw spiders. Big spiders crawling all over the ceiling and across the walls. But they were comical spiders like something from a Disney cartoon. We burst into laughter at this shared hallucination. There were spiders running all over our room. And they were really very very funny.

Meanwhile the Mexicans on the bed seemed to be having a bad trip. They had stopped speaking English and were screaming in their own language about Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Perhaps they were having a religious experience but it seemed not to be a pleasant one. Perhaps they had "gone crazy" as their comrade had suggested might happen with this loco weed we bought in the street. We had no chance to assess their condition because as soon as they calmed down sufficiently, they ran out the door and we never saw them again.

These days, most people interested in experimenting with drugs start out with marijuana and graduate to the "harder stuff" but for me it was just the opposite, For Nick Herbert, on Christmas Eve 1963, in Mexico City, for better or for worse, LSD became a gateway drug to marijuana.

El gringo existentialista

I Thought You Said

 

I thought you said this was "just pot".

Nick Meets the Galactic Telepaths

Nick Herbert parts the veils between worlds

In the early 60s I had experimented with the then-legal consciousness-expanding drugs LSD and peyote (available by mail from a ranch in Texas) and was ready to explore the effects of a substance considered so satanic by the American government that it is classed with heroin and its use forbidden even to sober scientists.

For me legal LSD and peyote acted as gateway drugs to the illegal use of marijuana.

At that time the street price of marijuana was $100 a "key" (kilogram = 2.2 pounds) which was broken down into "lids" (each about an ounce) which sold for between 5 and 10 dollars--the so-called nickel and dime bags. Unlike today's powerful sinsemilla buds, yesterday's marijuana was mostly leaf which had to be separated from seeds and stems. And to obtain pot, one had to have connections with a (technically) criminal underground. For the sake of science I made such connections and learned how to "clean a key" and "roll a joint". My mind seems to have an affinity for this forbidden substance and I have since had many unusual experiences with cannabis in various forms.

One evening I was alone in my house in Los Trancos Woods when Paul and his wife Miriam dropped by. Paul was a Stanford med student (now a therapist in So Cal) who was interested in psychedelics and psychodrama. I rolled a joint and we "got high". Someone suggested that we read aloud and I proposed "The Song of Songs". "I hate the Song of Songs," said Miriam. "Let's try this," she said, picking up an old college humor magazine from a pile of books. Miriam began to read and pot's ability to make the lowest silliness seem profoundly funny began to kick in. We laughed at Miriam's every word.

We laughed and laughed. And then something strange happened. It seemed to all three of us that there was only one person laughing. We had merged minds, so it seemed, into one laughing entity. "It's the sound," Paul conjectured. "It's the sound that's uniting us." So shocking was this new experience that we quickly came down. Drawing pictures on a napkin, Paul gave a mock-scientific explanation of the cannabis molecule's action on the brain which we all found funny but we were now laughing separately not as one being. They invited me to a party but I claimed to be too stoned (on one shared 60s joint?) to be good company. Paul and Miriam left and I stoked up the fire in my living room and prepared to enjoy an evening by myself.

Then inside my head the voices began to speak.

They claimed to be an ancient group of galactic telepaths traveling through space mind-to-mind rather than in clunky metal ships. "Here is what we do," they said and suddenly I experienced a kind of LSD trip. Then they turned off the "mind ray" and I become completely normal. They took me in and out of this odd psychological space several times to show off (I suppose) their prowess in the mental realm.

Then the aliens revealed the purpose of their visit. They were inviting me to join the conspiracy of galactic telepaths. They told me that some of my friends were already members. Unlike "Tony the angel" whose voice projected a clear persona, these alien voices seemed colorless, like ticket agents or office clerks. My initial response was that if this community really existed its goals would differ from human goals as much as human goals differ from the goals of fishes. This group must by necessity be non-human. So by joining it I would in some sense be betraying the human race.

The aliens seemed to understand my misgivings, but assured me that although I qualified for membership, there was no pressure to join. Then they withdrew from my mind and left me alone.

For the next few days I was obsessed with this contact and tried to discover other members of the group. Some of my psychedelic pals in the Stanford psychology department were prime candidates but they all shrewdly denied being galactic telepaths.

If this offer was real then I missed my chance to meet a million alien beings, to learn startlingly new truths about the mental and physical universe and to hear dozens of alien ethnic jokes.

On the other hand, if this experience was a message from my larger self, it may have been a prescient hint concerning the nature of quantum tantra--a more intimate way of doing physics that may look less like the physics of today and more like the sort of science practiced by galactic telepaths.

Managing Marijuana

Will you VOTE YES on Proposition 19 ?

In a few weeks (Nov 2) California voters will have the opportunity to vote to restore our God-given right (see Genesis 1) to grow and enjoy the fruits of every tree and plant that the Earth provides--in this case restoring our right to grow and utilize the plant called "marijuana". Supporters of Proposition 19 claim that its passage will ease California's budget woes by providing a brand new source of tax revenue, by reducing the police, legal and prison cost of enforcing marijuana prohibition and by generating new jobs for Californians otherwise unemployed. There is also the hope that taking the huge prohibition-generated profits out of pot by making it legal will deal a serious blow to outlaw drug cartels without firing a single shot. As a small side benefit, if Prop 19 passes, even scientists might be allowed to study this fearfully prohibited plant just as freely as we study radioactive plutonium, brain poisons and lung cancer.

Growing and using marijuana is a natural right. Like alcohol prohibition before it, marijuana prohibition has caused more serious problems than the plant itself without significantly reducing its use. Proposition 19 makes a lot of sense. Only drug dealers, moralists and spineless politicians (afraid of being perceived as "soft on drugs") are against it.

But what about the kids? Under our present system marijuana is easily available to children who buy it from criminals in an unsupervised way. Under Prop 19, it will still be illegal to sell pot to minors. Since 1976, Amsterdam has effectively decriminalized the use of marijuana by adults. I am not aware (are you?) of an epidemic of irresponsible Dutch adults selling lots of pot to Dutch teens.  Prop 19 means a return to privatization of California's marijuana use. It lets parents not the police  assume responsibility for their own and their children's attitudes towards pot.

Nick Herbert supports Proposition 19 and dedicates this parody of Joyce Kilmer's Trees to its passage:

LEGALIZE THE GREENERY

I think that I shall never see
(a-sittin' in my sauna)
A poem as lovely as, let's see,
A grove of marijuana.


Her leaves reflect a lovely green
Her blossoms give off spice
Her perfume draws the honeybee
Methinks I dwell in paradise.


Writers, poets, music crews,
Use ganga as a door to Muse
And ardent lovers spread her fame
As aid in Aphrodite's game.


Three thousand years her jagged leaves
Have helped good doctors treat disease
And holy men from every sod
Have praised her as a way to God.


Wise men from the Middle East
Considered fine hashish divine
They taught that pot restrained the beast
Beheaded fools who misused wine.


If I can sell baby-killing aspirin
Alcohol, rat poison, gasoline
Tobacco, dynamite 
and all the guns you need
Why can't I trade 
a single ounce of weed?


While stuffing pockets with our wealth
The politician schemes to stay in power
Screams: only I 
can save you from yourself
By ordering cops with guns 
to bust a flower.


Is pot really so bad for you and for me
That we have to call out 
the bloody marines
Our back yards to assault, 
our assets to seize
In prisons to lock us 
for "growin' o' the green"?


I sing the spirit inside the seed
I praise the gorgeous Goddess weed
Poems are made by fools like me--
and Dylan Thomas
But only God's the force that 
thru the green fuse drives cannabis.

Young Barack Obama enjoying a God-given right.

Going Dutch

Luc Sala 50 Jaaren

Ten years ago, during the waning days of the 20th Century, I traveled to Amsterdam with Al and Sun to celebrate the 50th birthday of Luc Sala, Amsterdam businessman, psychedelic visionary, candidate for the Euro Senate and provocative television producer. I was surprised to see so many canals--this city is rightly celebrated as the Venice of the North--and beautiful old buildings. People had recommended that I visit Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to see the Rembrandts and Van Goghs but for me experiencing Amsterdam itself, especially at night, was worth a dozen museums. The city is compact and easy to navigate, bounded on the North by the River IJ (pronounced "eye") on which sits Central Station where trains, subways and trams converge. Central Station is near the site of the famous dam on the Amstal River that gave Amsterdam its name.

Centered on Central Station, a series of semi-circular canals of increasing radius cut the city into C-shaped ribbons full of churches, houses, shops, plazas, public buildings, the whole symmetric pattern criss-crossed with numerous bridges. The Dutch are as serious about their pleasures as their work--a nation of rational hedonists. Amsterdam has a boisterous night life and in the early morning hours groups of people can still be seen rushing about in the streets even in parts of the city far from the entertainment district.

Amsterdam's CENTRAL STATION
Hub of city's transportation web

Coming from America which enforces a different brand of liberty than the Dutch, I was naturally curious about Amsterdam's legendary "coffee shops" where adults supposedly can purchase and consume marijuana and hashish without fear of arrest. A tourist newspaper published by the comedy club Boom Chicago gives the straight dope on Amsterdam's coffee shops here.

I wanted to tour as many coffee shops as possible to get a feeling for how people behaved when they could freely consume as much cannabis as they pleased. Alas, I only had 10 days to spend in Amsterdam and the city held out so many other temptations that I was only able to inspect one shop, The Blue Bird (thank you, Katerina Oetjens), on the edge of the Red Light district, where I bought a big chunk of hashish without being arrested. I was curious about the percentage of people who smoke marijuana in a nation where it's legal compared to the percentage of folks who smoke it in countries that pay cops to arrest you for smoking it. My first observation was that The Blue Bird in the afternoon was not particularly busy--people were not crowding into its doors to get high.

Luc Sala's birthday party was held in his TV studio and because of the delicacy of camera lenses, a strict no-smoking rule was enforced. Anyone who wanted to smoke, whether tobacco or marijuana, had to retreat to the stairwells of the narrow multistory building. To get some idea of the percentage of pot smokers among sophisticated Dutch adults I too went outside and toked up (for the sake of science) "the Dutch way", mixing tobacco and marijuana in the same joint. From this one-time survey I estimated that about 10% of the people at Luc's party smoked pot. The rest merrily chose to alter their consciousnesses with various ethyl alcohol concoctions while a surprisingly large number consumed bottled water and soft drinks.

To me it seemed that the percentage of people that smoke pot in Amsterdam is roughly the same as in the USA. By far the most popular intoxicant in the Venice of the North is ethyl alcohol. I shared my estimate with Luc Sala and he concurred. Most people in Amsterdam don't smoke pot, he surmised, because they consider it lower-class.

Here is a real paradox, it seems to me, for sociologists to ponder. The Dutch legalize pot and through taxation derive from it a considerable revenue. America criminalizes pot and spends billions on law enforcement and prisons. And the result: In both countries about the same percentage of people use marijuana.

Another paradox: I was talking to some young Americans about drugs and asked them what was the first drug they used. Marijuana, of course. Why marijuana? I asked. Why not beer or wine? Because you don't need an ID to buy pot.

Nick and Al wading in the NORTH SEA near THE HAGUE

Calculating the "Cannabis Number"

A classic Gary Larson cartoon depicts the "Libraries of Hell". All the books are labeled "Word Problems". Most people in high school hated word problems. I liked them, was good at turning concepts into math which is probably one reason I was attracted to physics. Carrying out the computations was another matter; I was and still am inept in arithmetic. Let my computer do the computations, I say: doing arithmetic is demeaning to humans. Solving word problems, on the other hand, is a worthwhile pastime.

A few days ago, while soaking in my outdoor tub (like Archimedes who is rumored to have made fundamental physics discoveries in his bath) I was pondering the 4:20 phenomenon in which first the time 4:20 PM and later the date 4/20 became associated with the smoking of marijuana. I was concerned that this number seemed arbitrary and wondered if it might only be an approximation to a more precisely defined "cannabis number" -- a number that is more than a mere human convention but is instead a perfect mathematical concept that dwells not only on Earth but in the eternal world of Platonic Forms. The Cannabis Number CN -- a number that can be calculated mathematically.

So here is my proposal: the exact "cannabis number" is not 4:20 but that time shortly after 4:20 when the Big Hand exactly overtakes the Little Hand. More precisely CN is the number of minutes past 4:20 at which this coincidence occurs.

One might even imagine that 4:20 is the approximate time to start smoking but the veils between worlds actually open at the somewhat later time expressed by the cannabis number.

CANNABIS NUMBER
When the Big Hand overtakes the Little Hand
When the Little Hand lies underneath
When the Big Hand covers up the Little Hand
When the Little Hand's on the bottom
And the Big Hand's on top
That's when the doors must open
That's when we must smoke pot.

That's how Nick defines CN. But what is the numerical value of this "cannabis number"? I leave this calculation as a problem for my readers. Please post your answer in the comments section. Hint: the problem is not as hard as the problem faced by the Russian at the blackboard.

Cannabis? Yes!

Cannabis? Yes!

"Die Luft der Freiheit weht."
(motto: Stanford University)

Surely the very Bedrock of Liberty is this:
The freedom to cultivate my garden
Anyway I please.
Anything less is tyranny.

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."

See also
"Wearin' o' the Green"
"Obama is IRISH!!"

William B O'Shaughnessy vs George W Bush

In the 1840s, Irish physician William Brooke O'Shaughnessy had the distinction of introducing products of the cannabis plant into the British pharmacopeia on the basis of medical experiments he had conducted in India. 

According to Wikipedia, after graduating from University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1829, O'Shaughnessy joined the British East India Company and moved to Calcutta where he studied botanical pharmacology, galvanic electricity and underwater conduction. He validated folk use of cannabis in India, discovered new applications and ultimately recommended cannabis for a great variety of therapeutic purposes. A man of many talents, during the years 1853-5, he installed 3500 miles of telegraph across India and wrote numerous manuals and reports on his telegraph inventions. In 1856 O'Shaughnessy was knighted by Queen Victoria for his work on the telegraph.

Modern experience has amply verified and expanded on O'Shaughnessy's pioneer work demonstrating the medical efficacy of cannabis and its relative safety compared to synthetic drugs. However, in blatant contradiction to scientific fact, the US government insists on classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance "having no currently acceptable medical use".

The American War in Iraq is based on a lie: that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs.

The American War on Drugs is also based on a lie: that marijuana is useless as a medicine.

If an order to fight or a law of the land is based on a lie, is a citizen still bound to obey it? And what sort of country would compel its citizens to obey laws based on lies?

Forbidden Knowledge

We scientists are accustomed to investigating forces of nature ranging in strength from the whisper of a single photon to energies that rip entire galaxies apart. Our calling is to uncover the secrets of the universe no matter how difficult, terrifying or dangerous the quest might be. But are there questions too dangerous for science to ask, places no scientist should be allowed to go? Do there exist--in the words of the old B-grade monster movies--THINGS THAT NO MAN SHOULD KNOW?

Apparently so. The US Government has published a big list of them. Science keep out!

What are these realms too dangerous for science to investigate? Some Brobdingnagian force more powerful than nuclear fusion? Some hideous virus that could end all life on Earth? What monstrous horror lurks behind the forbidden door? Weak hearts should read no further. Are you ready?

The forbidden substance is---marijuana.

Yes, ma'm. Scientists can't study marijuana (without becoming criminals). And they can't investigate dozens of other perfectly normal molecules classified as Schedule 1 by our paternalistic bosses. These hysterically dangerous substances, legislated off limits to scientists, include mescaline, LSD, psilocybin. MDMA and more than a hundred other molecules you've never heard of. And marijuana too, of course. Hands off pot, Doc, unless you want to be locked up with murderers, armed robbers and rapists for a long, long time.

Are we living in the Middle Ages or what?

Fortunately some reasonable folks are trying to change this absurd situation for the better. One such group that's working to make science legal again is MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) who are lobbying Congress, obtaining funding for research, and educating the public about the advantages of seeking knowledge rather than legislating ignorance about these substances "too dangerous for science to touch". 

MAPS used to be located in Florida but has recently moved to Ben Lomond, CA, only a few minutes drive from my Quantum Tantra Ashram in Boulder Creek. Last year I stopped by, introduced myself and got to know these science-friendly strangers who persuaded me to contribute an article to their newsletter about Nick's first psychedelic experience way back in the '60s. It's called "Doctor Quantum Drops Acid" and is available in pdf form at http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v17n2-html/index.html. Lots of other good information on the MAPS site about how one might successfully investigate these substances that some people find glorious, life-enhancing and even divine while others find them so fearsome they will put clamps on normal human curiosity and make outlaws of scientists for merely doing their job--which is to explore the unknown, no matter how dangerous.

It's a bad situation. Call up your Congress critter and ask why he/she hates science so much.