04-16-09 Both you and Jerit have made statements about my relationship—your assumptions & conclusions about my relationship with drugs in terms that I find disturbingly-mis-described. I gave up white sugar in my early 20s, & corn syrup shortly thereafter; as I did mono-sodium glutamate & sodium benzoate. I have never felt the need to have a prescription, let alone, a regular one, or for over-the-counter drugs. The half-dozen times when I was put on antibiotics, pain-killers, or anti- imflamatories, I quit them as soon as I could. I guess that I have a high pain tolerance because I always just threw the pain-killer downers away before too many days had passed. None of those short term exceptions ever left me in the least bit desirous of having any more, let alone demanding another prescription for. I've never liked what I'll always think of as downers. I guess that pot works fine for all the littler ills, because beyond caffeine—and I didn't start drinking coffee until I was 28 years old—and nicotine, I think it's my only addiction to a 'drug.' Drug is really not the correct descriptive term; I prefer: smokable-euphoric. I never sampled any of the frowned-on stuff until I smoked pot in either late 1965 or early 1966, at 25 years old, already. ¶ It is my belief that the naturally-occurring psychoactive substances shouldn't be lumped together for inclusion in DRUG talk. I think that they demand an entirely different paradigm of analysis that should be used when judging DRUGS in your use of the term: “my drug use.” I make use of this quote from letters from both you & Jerit. & this is what I'm trying to attempt to set you both straighter on the clarity with which you ought to thinking behind your use of those words, instead of couching them in such incorrectly-negative of terms. To this day, I do not have a medicine cabinet, per se. A bottle of aspirins which is probably past its use-by date & I better buy a fresh one, though I've maybe only used 10 of them in 5 years!; & five tiny ¾ ounce tinctures of some herbs; and an ounce and ¾ orange liquer that usually lasts me about six months. ¶ My memory of the effect of psychoactives on me will never allow me to accept this (naturally-occurring) stuff to be confabulated into the sour DRUG talk connotations. I guaran-damn-tee you that I would be long long dead now, if it weren't for the genuine enlightenment I was so blessed to receive as a result of these investigations over the single years between wives & kids, age 26 thru about 32 in '72. I had lost any further sense-of-need for the continued use of them, anymore, because I felt that I had learned all there was to learn from their use and had quit before meeting Francine in early '73. I can only personally assert this for my own sense of these mindbending natural substances—and though the original pharmaceutical grade Sandoz labs (of Switzerland) LSD-25 was not naturally-occurring, I lump its effect in with all the naturals as the experience is quite the same. And I will never endorse their use to anyone else, due to the serious negative potentials that can, will, and do occur in minds less open to being pried open and cut to the kind of uncomfortable quick that I know full well can happen from having been in the thick intimate observations and interactions with thousands of people who were also using psychoactive substances and I saw a lot of folks who were not 'handling' it very well at all, and seemed not be enjoying it as much as I was, or in the quite the same way. I always was pleasured by its effect and never had even one 'bad trip.' I have seen it all, as goes the expression; enough to ever be feeling motivated to discourage others when I become aware of their curiosity-to-try. ¶ I was already a quarter of a century old before I tried any of that stuff, and it was to be almost another decade before the stormy speed-usage times. I never spent the grocery or rent money on looking for more speed. So much was just offered that I learned, early on, to just take a polite sniff off the corners of a line of speed, and pass the mirror onto the guys, and a few ladies, too, who had the big bulging eyeballs for the whole two lines, one up each nose. This was during the Redlegs years; which coincided with the Francine/ boat years, approximately. ¶ I have never liked, craved, or used all the DRUGS that I classify as downers. reds, dope, I mean real dopey/ dope/ drugs. I even know enough about how cocaine works to unequivocally and permanently place it squarely surely in the downer category, as far as I'm concerned. Opiates were (& are) never other than in the downer class; except for their excellent pain-deadening properties in cases of broken bones or other seriously-painful injuries, when it's a godsend. I like how smoking opium knocks my body so far out of itself that my headful-of-ideas go technicolor and paint wildly hallucinatory collages all over the inside walls of my cranium, made cavernous as a basketball arena by the effect—narcosis, to use the clinical term. I have only had this experience ONCE in my whole life, so that can't be called “my drug use” as if it was some monstrous abomination, or something. 3 weeks in 1980—29 years ago—was the extent of my investigating cocaine; that is all, period. As a localized pain-deadener, its use has some validity, but it doesn't do a damn thing that pleasures me. I hate to disappoint your expressed opinions' validity-of-supposition. Take that back; I am glad and love to be able to express this retort to your writing “my use of drugs” that has festered as a bothersome sense-of-injustice in my being for a very long seeming time. In earlier times, I felt that neither of you would be able to accept my protestations and attempted clarification of your classification of my use as “abuse.” Yes: You wrote “drug abuse” too. The only even slightly abusive use of mine that many if not most would agree with my determination that I abuse, is the weed, whose flowers are every bit as 'effective' as those of tobacco. So: Take what I have said here and try to find a fairer, more accurate bunch of descriptive terms to think of my 'drug' use in, which was never abuse, really, except for maybe a few of those very first LSD-25 experiences, which ended when I used the last of it on the night in May (?) of '67 when I went to sit in the front row at the Fillmore Auditorium, surrounded by three-front-rows-full of a bunch of screaming and swooning young black females, to swoon my own guitar-player enthusiast's swoon over Jimi Hendricks' bold, bad, beautiful (to me, for me) way that he had with the rendering of his licks. Sexy as hell, and I'm not even gay... pure animal charisma on fire and burning brighter than bright... animal magnetism on parade in all of his glory—what else can I say! So: Here is as accurate of a history of my drug use investigation experiences for you to maybe make some slight or larger reassessment because of. Many kindest regards from me
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