The flower-power game
PERSONAL COLUMN KENNETH ALLSOP
I was a drug-addict—the hard stuff, not this niminy-piminy cannabis—for two years. I was in an almost permanent state of high. I had my connection established, and the two shots a day were clockwork, of the best morphine- synthesis .heroin. Hypodermic bliss: literally the Land of Cockaigne.
This was legal. This was no love-in but a lie-in; far from being one of the Beautiful People, I was in an ugly frame of mind. I was in hospital at the end of the war. I had mul- tiple operations on my mutilated right knee, the source of pain of a dazzling degree I hadn't hitherto known existed; a pain which danced from a neuralgic throb in the marrow of the bone to symphonic cadenzas played with hot saws across my nerve-strings. The dope came with the rations, routine jabs to induce sleep and sanity. I accepted it thankfully as an eiderdown insulation, but it assumed an inde- pendent value. I desired the beatitude, the sickly mimosa mist of euphoria between wake- fulness and dream. I was reading a lot of decadent fin-de-siecle poetry and prose. I can't decide whether it was my narcotic-inundated bloodstream washing me in that direction or the writing itself saturating my dope fantasies; but it was in green swirls of absinthe and Turkish cigarettes that I lived, the cloying satanism of Huysmans and the clammy religious ecstasies of The Hound of Hearen; I was clothed in the vulgarly sumptuous gold brocade of Corvo's evil cardinals and breathed the Burlington Arcade incense of Firbank. The pain itself had a part in the sublimity: muted from its or- chestral gales to a pizzicato of Swinburnian masochistic anguish.
I don't believe I much liked this airless arabesqued Cloud Nine but it was perhaps heroin's natural replacement for the sanitary dinginess of the ward. The particular realm to which drugs transport you probably pro- vides the individual with his antithetical needs. What interests me now, amid the drug ex- plosion, is that although my mechanism quickly regeared itself (the increasing eager- ness for take-off, that voluptuous free-fall through the celestial void) I equally strongly wanted out. While I didn't realise that I was addicted, or even really know what was being incessantly pumped into my system, under the swansdown layers of enchantment a knobbly pea of distrust kept me restless. Without think- ing through to the decision, a surviving instinct prodded me to lay off.
As an ex-junky, I am not spelling all this out to flaunt my strength of will and grit. To be honest, backbone isn't, as it were, at the forefront of my character. I am pretty slobby within; like Lord Darlington, I can resist everything except temptation. I was involun- tarily exercising a measure of what I, attuned to my metabolism, could handle. I was instinc- tively avoiding what medicine calls 'avalanche conduction'—uncontrollable reactions from a stimulus. There's a look-who's-talking factor here, because I write-not only as a hedonist but also as one whose daily intake of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol is unstinted. But my coffee, cigarettes and whisky are (I think, I hope) adjuncts, not essentials. I would hate to have them snatched from me but I wouldn't shudder to a paralysed halt without them. I can define
these limits for myself only intuitively by an unease if dependence on an intake becomes too marked, whereupon a counteraction automati- cally cuts in. This has happened with sleeping pills. I am insomnia-prone, so happier with a bottle of Seconol in my bedside drawer, an emergency sleep-bank. Yet I loathe the bar- biturate hangover which lingers dully through the day and has to be topped up at night, for I resent the loss of edge, mind like butter under muslin. My compulsion is to unhook myself the moment I can.
What worries me about the present public discussion is the use of sweeping generalities. I was asked to but didn't sign The Times ad- vertisement demanding the legalisation of marijuana because I suspect that the abolitionist case that pot is as innocently harmless as a bowl of Krispyflakes might not be wholly true for all, flower people and flowerpot men. There is still huge ignorance about both the biologi- cal and psychological effects of drugs. The us had a narcotics problem long before it was t distinguished as such. Back in the 1890s Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalogues recommended a remedy for 'the morphine and opium' habit, but sold equally freely was bottled laudanum for all farmhouse ills. In 1900 one in 400 Americans was an addict. Combing the lyrics of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones won't prove anything trendy about a minstrelsy of dope: 'Willie the Weeper,' an American tradi- tional pop song from seventy-five years ago, :was about a hop-head; in the 'thirties Bebe Daniels sang: 'Every kiss, every hug, seems to act just like a drug/You're getting to be a -habit with me.'
But in pre-hippy times narcotics in the us were a working-class, and largely a city _slum, anodyne. One wonders how much bear- ing this has on the Federal Narcotics Bureau's activities. It's said in New York that the fuzz sweep around the edges, where drugs geo- graphically spill over into white, middle-class, suburban and college districts, leaving the reefer fumes wreathing undisturbed over the hard- core tenement zones. James Baldwin once re-
marked that but for 'junk and Jesus the streets of Harlem would run with blood.' To update Marx, perhaps now opium is the opium of the people.
Now drugs, bursting out of their confines, are becoming the sanctioned cop-out of the young disaffiliated from a society they see as far more unreal and corrupting than an 1 SD trip. The pressures of the 'straight' populace, really touched for the first time, will require an unemotional examination of the subculture of the fix. Conceding that marijuana may be no worse than a vodka-on-the-rocks, we shall have to consider that even the horror stories of heroin may not be ubiquitously true. For most people the reward of the first shot is nausea and vomiting, so violently disagreeable that they've had enough. You have to persist to get to like sliding a needle up the median cephalic vein of the arm to switch on your closed-circuit colour TV. This is the crucial territory for exploration: the predisposition for joining the ceremonial, the ritual of the injec- tion, the warmth of the secret brotherhood of acidheads, a role in the drama of the under- ground dope opera.
The pleasures of addiction may be intensified by the sense of being a romantic outlaw, with a bandit's code, language and style of career, and heightened by harshly punitive laws; but it's arguable that the legalisation of marijuana might drive to the hard stuff those at present getting sufficient illusion of derring-do from illicit reefers. That immaturity is the key is suggested by the important, but disregarded, work of Dr Charles Winick, who has found that in Manhattan heroin use is -concentrated in the twenty-five to thirty-nine age group, and that—in contradiction of the 'hooked for life' dogma—there are regular users who around forty naturally taper off. One forty-three-year- old jazz musician said: 'There were just longer and longer periods between the times when I took a shot. I guess you could say I diminuendoed out of it.' Few can explain why they stop, but it is plausible that it relates to the advent of middle age, together with stability and confidence, and the decline of a need for artificial, boosts.
Not surprisingly the alarmed opposition to a developing British drug culture, aided by a Top People Use Pot fashionableness, is bring- ing out the colourful crusaders. One clergy- man has denounced the pro-cannabis movement as being riddled with Communists, and a lady correspondent in the Sunday Telegraph adds another link to the chain between marijuana and heroin by putting her finger on masturba- tion as the starting point in this malignant pro- gression. Apart from not being drawn to masturbating Communists, my central doubt about making even more anaesthetics readily available is that, as I have no urge to get stupid drunk on meth, similarly I don't wish to be deadened by dope, to surrender my senses, to sell my birthright of reason for the message of pot. I cling--not with entire conviction- to the faith that the way to tackle problems, personal and international, is by applying clarity, intellect and action, not by lapsing into a never-never land of inertia. On the other hand, while in the words of Dr Strangelove the great nations increasingly act like gangsters and the small nations like prostitutes, and as the theory of rational adult thought is almost invariably defeated by the practice of infantile violence, I confess I can see only too plainly the attraction of twitch7 ing to flower-power and crying 'Cannabis, here I come.'
Previous page
