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  I had no close friends my own age, and I probably wasn't considered anyone else's best friend, either, but I knew some interesting older people. When I was around eight, there was a boy named Franklin who lived down on Oxford Street and he was all of 14. He built fantastic model planes made of balsa wood and rice paper, held together with airplane cement, which he flew overhead in the air. He would go across the street to Live Oak Park and turn the propeller around and around, until the internal rubber band was triple knotted, then he would put a little magical liquid paraffin on the tail surfaces and strike a match and start a small fire. When it was properly burning, he would let it go and we would watch the streak of orange going across the sky to crash in flames.

  My mother had felt it best that I attend the schools that reflected the system's dedication to the "modern" aspects of education, such as experimental teaching methods and child psychology. There was one school at each level that was assigned this state-of-the-art role, and I hit each one. Most of these avant-guard experiments eventually went belly-up, along with the other experimental phenomena which were, and still are, so much a part of the Berkeley philosophy.

  Like most other bright kids, I learned not to volunteer answers in class when it was obvious that no one else had them. It caused resentment and fierce looks from my classmates, and made me stand out, and I didn't want that. So I challenged myself in a way that nobody else had to know about. I would try to come up with answers at test time without having more than glanced at any of my books, relying only on what I'd learned from the blackboard and discussions in class.

  In Junior High, my only pleasure was in the music and poetry classes. And mechanical drawing. I can't remember anything else.

  In high school/1 did well in everything that was simple and obvious (such as chemistry and physics and mathematics and, as I have already mentioned, music) which would flow with no work at all, but anything that required arbitrary and illogical organization (such as grammar and history and spelling) would defeat me, since they were unpredictable and capricious.

  An interesting measure of this dichotomy could be seen in my senior year of high school, where I took two examinations in preparation for college. One was called Subject A, a University of California requirement, given to everyone who might actually be admitted to the university, to assure the admission committee of one's basic literacy. Can you spell? Can you make subject and verb agree? Do you split infinitives? Can you write an essay? I totally failed this exam, so I had the pleasure of looking forward to the taking of "Bone-head English" in my freshman year at Berkeley if, indeed, I were to go to the University of California.

  However, the second exam was a competitive contest for a National Collegiate Scholarship for a tuition-paid enrollment at Harvard University. This one I managed to pass; in fact, I passed it with a sufficiently high score to win an all expense paid scholarship to Harvard. I accepted the scholarship and went east to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was 16 years old.

  At Cambridge I took lodgings in Wigglesworth Hall right on the Harvard campus itself, and enrolled in freshman courses in math, chemistry, physics and psychology, with a secret desire to really connect with organic chemistry. I found myself a student in a social system which was completely alien to me. Everything was measured on the basis of who your family was, where you'd taken your preparatory studies, and just how much money your family had. My family was unknown, I had gone to a public high school, and neither my parents, as teachers, nor I, as the son of teachers, had any wealth or any immediate prospect of acquiring it. Hence, I rated as a non-person. Furthermore, I was younger than most of the others, so I spent the year without developing personal relationships with anyone. I was a fish out of water, and I was miserable.

  The United States was involved in World War II, and the armed services gave the music of adultness and independence. In my second year at Harvard I joined the U. S. Navy's V-12

  officer's training program, which would lead to a commission if I could only complete my baccalaureate in some subject. But my scholastic record was abysmal, and I knew I could never survive another two years. I abandoned officerial hopes and found myself at Pier 92, the enlisted man's gathering point in New York City. I survived six weeks of mid-winter boot camp at Sampson, New York, and manipulated myself into a training course at Norfolk, Virginia, emerging with a third-class fire-control rating. My involvement in World War II was an experience that included some adventures, certainly, but there were so many negatives that I would just as soon not recall most of it. One event, however, I will always remember, because it led to an observation that shaped the rest of my life. I discovered the remarkable world of psychopharmacology and, most important of all, the power of the mind over the body.

  I was on a destroyer escort (the USS Pope, DE-134) in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of winter, in the middle of the anti-U-boat campaign, in the middle of the war. We had just finished making an anti-submarine search in the area of the Azores. All during this part of the war in the Atlantic, one of the centers of military activity was the port of Ponta Delgada, in the Azores, where the United States made available a large supply of fuel to the neutral Portuguese who, in turn, made it available to anyone who chose to pay for it. So the German U-boats came in and fueled, then the U.S. destroyers came in and fueled. The only rule was that no two different flags could fly in the harbor within 24 hours of one another. The cat and mouse game in the Atlantic, just outside the harbor, was extremely dicey, and led to all kinds of nasty military interactions. But, now, having fueled up and gotten back out to the open sea intact, we set a course for England. There was a lot of boredom, and some moments of acute fright, then something happened in the way of a personal trauma. About a thousand miles off the coast of England, I developed a severe infection, from some unknown source, on the face of my left thumb. It localized itself at this unusual place and went down through the flesh and tissue directly to the bone. It was very painful, and I was being attended to by our ship's medical corpsman, affectionately referred to as the Chancre's Mate.

  The course of treatment had a simple goal: I was to be protected from pain. Surgery was said to be absolutely necessary, and there was no way to perform it at sea. So my thumb problem got worse and worse, as did the chop in the Irish Sea as we approached England, and I was given, with regularity, modest injections of morphine.

  This was my introduction to the effect of a drug on the perception of pain. The man with the needle would interrupt a good rolling poker game to ask me how I was feeling. I would look at my thumb and say, "It's a little worse," or "It's a little better," and put my arm out for another morphine shot, then immerse myself again in the poker game. I knew the pain was there, and I could report on the intensity of it with accuracy, but it didn't bother me. I could play poker, I could deal, I could judge the opposition, and I could bet shrewdly, and I came out ahead more than behind. My left thumb was viciously painful, but the pain just didn't get in my way. It was fascinating to me that one could be hurting, in agony, and that the administering of a little bit of a chemical that came from some poppy flowers somewhere, could make it all quite unimportant.

  This is what is meant by central analgesia. The pain is not deadened; it is still there. The site of action is not the thumb but, rather, the brain. The problem is simply no longer of concern.

  Morphine is a pretty remarkable drug.

  When we docked at Liverpool, I learned that the Navy hospital no longer existed and that the Army was now running things. Their hospital was located at Watertown, near Manchester, which was quite a way inland. I was scheduled to be taken there by ambulance - not right away, but pretty soon. In the meantime, my own personal home, the USS Pope, was tied up just outboard to the British counterpart vessel, a frigate which had been christened the HMS

  Wren. And since I was a petty officer, and there were allied petty officers aboard the Wren, I was invited aboard to share rum and companionship.

  I remember myself in snug quarte
rs, rum in hand, being given moral support for my imminent relocation to some remote hospital owned and operated by the Army. The memory is of friendship and laughter. Rum, too, is a pretty effective drug.

  Then came a big monster of an ambulance which took me from Liverpool to Watertown and delivered me to a white-coated Army staff. A young nurse volunteered to make me comfortable with a glass of orange juice, to relieve my thirst, but at the bottom of the orange juice I saw an unmistakable layer of undissolved white crystalline solids. I wasn't going to be hoodwinked by a bunch of soldiers! The juice was obviously a sophisticated cover-up for the administration of some dramatic sedative or presurgical anesthetic which was expected to render me placid and unconcerned about the medical procedures they had planned for me.

  I resolved to prove my masculinity and control of the situation by simply denying the white crystals their power. I would drink the whole mixture down, but I would stay awake and alert.

  I would be wheeled into the surgical bay as an attentive sailor who would challenge the Army surgeons with analytical perception and penetrating questions which would reveal to them the integrity of my mental status.

  It didn't work. The drug that rested undissolved under my orange juice was undeniably a pretty effective drug, because I succumbed to it and went completely unconscious. I have no memory of the intravenous Pentothal anesthetic that was administered to me for my surgery.

  And I was later told of the unprecedented half-hour I required for recovery from it.

  The bone infection was surgically removed, and to this day my left thumb is almost a half-inch shorter than my right.

  Now I found myself somehow attached to the Army during my convalescence, stationed far from the coast of England and, again, a fish out of water. I was a sailor in an Army installation.

  I discovered that the Army pay-code identification number was exactly one number longer than that of the Navy pay-code, so I quite logically added one number to my identification and spent Army money in all the local bars. The people who lived in the area were familiar with the Army crowd, but not used to a Navy uniform in their neighborhood. However, since I was wandering about without any attention from the local military police, it was presumed that I was with some allied military force - the Dutch, maybe, or the Free-French. In any case, there was no way that I might be one of the enemy. And since my left hand and arm were all bundled up in a monster sling and bandage, I was undoubtedly someone hors de combat and the buying of a drink for me by the local gentry was the least they could do for a swab who had given his left arm for the Motherland. Nice duty. Eventually I healed, and had to become reoriented to military reality, but in the meantime I had learned a couple of facts.

  The first was simple and not exactly surprising: there was no communication between the Army and the Navy, which meant that the pay chaos which I had instituted by the addition of a small integer was safely lost in the shuffle.

  The second fact was not expected at all, and it was this that started me on my career as a psychopharmacologist. I was told that the white "drug" which was undissolved at the bottom of my orange juice glass, and which had finally plopped me over the line from being an alert and defensive surgery candidate to being a comatose subject available to any and all manipulation by the operating physician, was nothing but undissolved sugar.

  A fraction of a gram of sugar had rendered me unconscious, because I had truly believed that it could do just that. The power of a simple placebo to radically alter my state of consciousness impressed me deeply. The contribution of the mind to the observed action of a drug was certainly real, and I decided it was possible that this contribution was a major one.

  Over the intervening years, I have come to believe that the mind is the major factor in defining a psychoactive drug's action. One has been taught to assign the power of a drug to the drug itself, without considering the person into whom it goes. A drug by itself can be a powder, a spoonful of sugar, without any curative value whatsoever. But there is a personal reality of the recipient of the drug that plays a major role in the definition of the eventual interaction. Each of us has his own reality, and each of us will construct his own unique drug-person relationship.

  The shock of the orange juice sugar caper led me to try to explore any and all tools that I might use to define that relationship. And when the tools that are needed are not, in fact, known, they must be discovered or created. They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness (such as sugar when it is believed to be not-sugar), or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or daydreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape from responsibility.

  All of these are treasures of the spirit or psyche that allow exploration along paths which are undefined and completely individual.

  I decided right then, and with total conviction, that drugs probably represented the most predictable and reliable tools for such studies. So I would become a pharmacologist. And, considering that all of the action was located upstairs in the brain, I'd better make that a psychopharmacologist.

  I eventually returned to the West Coast and entered the University of California at Berkeley.

  They had lost all records of my Subject A trial, and allowed me to repeat it. I failed it again, but - pleading various stresses and infirmities expected of a World War II veteran -1 was permitted to let it drift for another year. My third effort was a rousing success, as I was by then completely familiar with the structure that was expected. My prepared essay (it dealt with a hypothetical pre-Egyptian nuclear civilization) was perfect in tense and subject agreement, and immaculate in punctuation.

  CHAPTER 2. MESCALINE

  Mescaline: a magic name and a magic compound. My first encounter with this word was just after World War II, when I returned to Berkeley and managed to work my way into the University of California, finally to become located in the Chemistry Department. The usual process for undergraduate students in chemistry was to pursue a mountain of highly technical courses, and get a B.S. in Chemistry, within the College of Chemistry. I chose, rather, to explore a wider variety of topics, and to accept an A.B. in the College of Letters and Science.

  From there, I wandered over towards the more medically directed disciplines, and explored the area of biochemistry.

  I had learned a valuable lesson as a violin player who loved to play in string quartettes. There are a lot of violinists, and most of them are very good. But every quartette needs one violist, and there really aren't enough of them. As a so-so fiddler, I was hard-put to participate in chamber music, but as a so-so violist I got a lot of invitations to play. The parallel to chemistry is exact. As a so-so chemist, I found myself accepted but rarely in demand. But in the area of biochemistry there were very few chemists (at least at that time) and I became a top-flight student. After a few years of courses and an uninspired research project, I wrote a dull thesis and emerged with a Ph.D. degree from a major academic institution, the University of California.

  During this 1940-1950 period, there was almost no attention being given to the alkaloid, mescaline. In fact, the entire family of compounds of which mescaline is a part was virtually unknown. A few articles had appeared which talked about the "mescaline psychosis," and several publications had been widely circulated decrying the evils of Peyote as made evident by the ruin which had befallen the "simple" American Indians. In the area of serious and thoughtful texts, there were the writings and the famous maps of Alexander Rouhier in 1926.

  There was the treatise by Kurt Beringer, which described the responses of many scores of subjects to effective doses of mescaline, administered almost always by injection. His book, "Der Meskalinrauche siene Geschichte und Erscheinungsweise," (1927) has never been translated into English. Weston La Barre wrote in 1938 of the Peyote religion. That was pretty much it.

  I was completely intrigued. Here were cultural/ psychological, and religious describers of the action of a compound
that appeared to have magical properties. The material could be easily synthesized. But I remained obedient to an invisible hand which rested on my shoulder and said, "No, do not taste yet." I read all the more recent literature about it that had appeared, the essays of Aldous Huxley in the mid-1950's (the exuberant Doors of Perception and the more cautious Heaven and Hell) and the generally negative reflections of Henri Michaux (Miserable Miracle). But it was not until April of 1960 that a psychologist friend of mine, Terry Major, and a friend of his who was studying medicine, Sam Golding, reinforced my interest and provided me with the opportunity to be "baby-sat" on an experience with 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. It was a day that will remain blazingly vivid in. my memory, and one which unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life.

  The details of that day were hopelessly complex and will remain buried in my notes, but the distillation, the essence of the experience, was this. I saw a world that presented itself in several guises. It had a marvel of color that was, for me, without precedent, for I had never particularly noticed the world of color. The rainbow had always provided me with all the hues I could respond to. Here, suddenly, I had hundreds of nuances of color which were new to me, and which I have never, even today, forgotten.

  This world was also marvelous in its detail. I could see the intimate structure of a bee putting something into a sack on its hind leg to take to its hive, yet I was completely at peace with the bee's closeness to my face.

  The world was a wonder of interpretive insight. I saw people as caricatures which revealed both their pains and their hopes, and they seemed not to mind my seeing them this way.

  More than anything else, the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me. I was in familiar territory, a space wherein I had once roamed as an immortal explorer, and I was recalling everything that had been authentically known to me then, and which I had abandoned, then forgotten, with my coming of age. Like the touchstone that recalls a dream to sudden presence, this experience reaffirmed a miracle of excitement that I had known in my childhood but had been pressured to forget.