The Advocate

Fear & Loathing in Amsterdam

Anonymous

This winter saw the passing of a number of remarkable human beings. Some were praised in the public spotlight, others were left relatively unsung. There were the celebrities—like Ossie Davis, Sandra Dee, Bonnie Raitt’s father, Arthur Miller, Lucien Carr—and then there were the thousands of deaths that don’t make the newspapers, that might resonate only on a personal level.

Hunter S. Thompson’s death had celebrity writ-large all over it and, at the same time, touched me in a way the other departures have not. Thompson, best known for his “gonzo journalism,” could arguably be called America’s first and foremost embedded journalist. Whether the subject was biker gangs, the machinations of Washington insiders, or psychedelics, Thompson immersed himself in his subject, breaking through to that other side Jim Morrison told us all about and reporting things the way he found them there.

I read about Thompson’s death on-line in a in an Amsterdam internet café. My wife and I were on holiday and I was taking full advantage of the city’s drug policies. Drugs are decriminalized in Amsterdam. They’re not legal, but the Dutch view drug abuse as a medical problem, not one necessitating prison. They also seem to understand that there is a difference between drug use and drug abuse. Coffeehouses and cafés, like herring stands and French fries with mayonnaise, abound in Amsterdam. The difference between a coffeehouse and a café is that in coffeehouses, you can buy marijuana in addition to coffee. It’s funny walking into a coffeehouse and asking to see the cannabis menu, comparing the varieties—from White Widow to Bubblegum, organically cultivated to hydroponically grown, from space cakes (think marijuana brownies) to hashish—and prices (which ranged, in general, from six to twelve Euro per gram of marijuana). The Dutch are enlightened, at least when it comes to their drug policies.

Smart drugs are also available in Amsterdam. Mushrooms, herbal ecstasy, peyote. The doors of perception are readily cleansed in Amsterdam, and there is no fear that you’ll be busted by the authorities for mere possession of said substances—aside from the paranoia that is a natural accompaniment of some of the drugs, one of the side effects that can lead to a bad trip if one isn’t careful. Compare that to America, where over two million people languish in cages, many for relatively minor drug violations, and a sixty-something year old man named Tommy Chong can spend over a year in prison for selling bongs over the internet. Strange days indeed.

So Thompson was dead—by his own hand—and I thought it was only fitting to celebrate his life and works in a way he himself would have smiled upon. Having tripped the night before on Mexican mushrooms, I went looking for a different experience. The proprietor in the Smart shop explained what one could expect from Philosopher Stone’s, pebbly-looking mushrooms originally grown in Florida providing an intense philosophic exploration accompanied by vivid differentiations of colors and sound. “Eat these,” he said, “then go check out a museum.” For 15 Euro, one couldn’t go wrong. Two hours later my wife was effectively my tour guide, having not imbibed the mushrooms, which were starting to take hold. She was sober, which meant I was safe in public not to make a fool out of myself, but it also meant I had to accompany her as she enjoyed a European shopping spree.

The so-called psychedelic drugs have a way of tapping into your emotions that other drugs lack. If you’re feeling down, tripping on shrooms or LSD probably isn’t the way to go. You may dwell on the negative emotions and find yourself experiencing a “bad trip,” huddled in the corner of your room, arms clasped to knees drawn up to chin. My wife led me from store to store, where she perused the shoes and jewelry and I stared at the manufactured goods, mulling over consumerism and capitalism as the walls and racks of items expanded and contracted with each breath. At one point I found myself caressing a boot, smelling the leather and the cow it had come from, seeing the field the cow grazed in, wondering if the cow had been a happy cow, munching on the grass, ruminating, cogitating, perhaps really enjoying life before being turned into footwear and hamburger. Fortunately the boot was on a rack and not on someone’s foot.

Up until this point, I’ve been misleading the reader. My wife did not have to “drag” me from store to store, which is usually what happens when we go shopping. I went along willingly, enjoying the sights and sounds of the city. And neither do I believe psychedelic drugs “cause” what one experiences after having ingested them. As psychedelic pioneer and fellow space cowboy Alexander Shulgin noted in The New York Times Magazine several weeks back, having imbibed peyote he found himself inundated with sights and thoughts that “had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid … I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” As Timothy Leary would point out, “Your mind is God.”

And that’s something the anti-drug crusaders fail to recognize but Hunter S. Thompson did. Psychedelics are keys. They open doors in the mind that have been effectively shut by millions of years of evolution away from the primordial seas. In our normal waking life we experience five senses, readily identified and handily segmented. Trip on LSD, shrooms, mescaline or the like and you will feel music, you will delve into your unconscious without $125-an-hour therapist fees. Psychedelics break down the barriers that have proven evolutionarily necessary for us to survive on the savannahs, allowing us to experience tastes, sights, thoughts, sounds and tactile sensations in ways that are otherwise impossible.

Psychedelics may also reveal truths to the user. For example, when I trip, I am always struck by the feeling of “oceanic consciousness” that pervades existence. One realizes what one’s motivations are. Insecurity and fear are heavy for all of us. Non-existence looms as a large pool, actually more like a vast ocean, the surface of which is rippled and pocked as fish explode from its depths, arc towards the wondrous sky and dive back down to disappear. We’re the individual fish, thrust into this world from the vastness of non-existence, ascending for a time, unaware of the pool beneath us from whence we all came, peaking and then catapulting inexorably back into the soothing depths. “Life is a waterfall,” as System of a Down lead vocalist Serj Tankian sings. “We’re one with the river and one again after the fall.” Along our trajectories we can communicate with others if we choose to do so, but within the pool it doesn’t appear possible.

Communication being so fundamental to this life, to existence and our democratic participation in it, we take it as an intrinsic good. Then a guy like Hunter Thompson comes around, tells us about his drug-fueled nights of insane madness, of the fear and loathing, and many write him off as a kook. Commenting on his father’s suicide by .45-caliber, Juan Thompson told the Associated Press, “One thing he said many times was that ‘I’m a road man for the lords of karma.’ It’s cryptic, but there’s an implication there that he may have decided that his work was done and that he didn’t want to overstay his welcome; it was time to go.” Thompson requested that his ashes be fired out of a cannon.

Above the Singel Canal in Amsterdam, right where the flower market begins off the Vijzelgracht Straat, looms the Mint Tower. As my wife and I emerged from our shopping spree and made our way to our room where I would do my best to melt into the crack separating the two mattresses of our king-sized bed, the Mint Tower greeted us against a blue sky dotted by puffy white clouds. Trippers will understand. There are things—places, spots, monuments—that stand out when one trips, and these things don’t leave. There is a bond between the tripper and the object. Once I viewed a sunset on the beach on acid, and it was the most beautiful/terrible thing I have ever seen. It was the genesis and destruction of humankind encompassed in one red orb slipping under the horizon. When you trip, you can go from tears to laughter within the same breath.

Million Dollar Baby cleaned up at the Oscars but drew flack for supposedly supporting euthanasia. One thing those who attempt to impose their morality on others fail to recognize is: this is it. Here on Earth, completely at random or by divine ordination (depending on one’s religious views or lack thereof), here we are for the time being. Instead of making existence harder for one another, we should be focused on making life better and more fulfilling, on exploring our place and limited time in this vast universe. None of us ask to be born, but, thrust into existence, we attempt to make the best of it. Hunter S. Thompson understood these simple truths. Further, he grasped Morrison’s reminder that “no one here gets out alive.” Thompson lived his life his way, and there is much exemplary in that life.

The author is a doctoral student at the GC.