I took acid for the first time in 1996, when I was 19. It was the one drug I had always been curious about, due to its reputation for expanding the mind and giving the user hallucinations. I came of age at just the right time; the coke-fuelled craziness of the 1980s had given way to the first wave of ‘recreational drug use’, where speed, ecstasy and (to a lesser extent) acid were the substances of choice for those looking to enhance their weekends at raves or dance clubs.
My best friend at the time, George*, was introduced to the drug scene by his brother Paul. I don’t remember how George broached the subject with me, but I will never forget the night I took my first trip. It was called a ‘Rolling Stone’, and the little square of paper he handed me featured the lips-and-tongue logo for which the band it was named after was famous. I would take acid again many times in the next year or so, but nothing was ever so strong as that first Rolling Stone.
I felt like I was melting. The accompanying anxiety was almost unbearable. When I tried to take a sip of the soft drink I had bought from a nearby service station – and what an ordeal that simple transaction had been – my lips seemed to be disembodied from the rest of me, like a proboscis. I told George, and another friend who was along for the ride, that it felt like I had “inflatable teeth”. Everything I heard sounded warped. On the peak of the Rolling Stone’s high, existing was so intense that I almost wished I was dead.
When I finally came down, got some sleep and got a decent meal into me, I swore I would never again do acid. But an odd thing happened: a few days later I started to crave that altered state of mind. Just talking about our experiences made me excited.
Aside from that first night, the trip I remember best was one that George and I took alone. That was unusual; mostly we did drugs with a group of friends and at a club, but that night we were in the upstairs area of his father’s factory, where we often hung out at night. The trip we took – a Penguin, I think it was called – was intense, but not Rolling Stone intense. Perhaps because of the quiet and the intimacy, the high had a different quality to any we had experienced before. A weird thing happened: we started to communicate in verbal fragments. That was all we needed, you see, because our minds filled in the rest. We began to contemplate the insignificance of our existence in the universe, and I remember sensing the presence of something god-like.
Around this time, George and I began to explore spirituality. He believed he could see and manipulate auras. He bought dreamcatchers and crystals. And he believed he was in touch with spirit guides, who could show him what path to take in his life. I remember one night we were sharing a poker machine – we were unbent aside from a few beers – and decided to let the spirits or the universe or whatever guide whether we chose red or black for the chance to double our money. We had an improbable run of eight or so correct selections. Wow.
But there was a niggle in the back of my mind. While I was open to the idea of a spirit world or a higher power, when I was straight I just wasn’t feeling it. And even when I was skull-blown-off high on acid, I still couldn’t see auras or feel the presence of my spirit guide.
Shortly after first taking acid, we had also begun taking ecstasy and speed. These better agreed with me than acid – no paranoia, although the comedown from ecstasy was a bitch – and were more fun. They made me feel good. But then I started to notice a disturbing pattern.
One night, while on mild ecstasy, I was driving home from a club when my car ran out of petrol. The fuel gauge was busted, but I had never been caught short before. I had to call my parents at midnight or whatever time it was and ask them to bring me a jerry can of fuel. Another time, I ran into an old martial arts buddy, who told me our instructor had returned from Hong Kong. I had lapsed in my training after he left, not much caring for his replacement, but agreed to resume now that he was taking classes again. On the Saturday morning when my friend came around to pick me up for training, however, I was coming down off an E and told him, with a stupid sophomoric grin on my face, that I wasn’t really up for training. That was the last time I ever saw him. On another night – and this was the incident that really made me take a step back and examine myself – I forgot I had promised to pick up a mate from work and bring him to the club where George and I were partying. When he called to ask where I was, I was well and truly off chops on a smacky pill and had no hope of operating a motor vehicle. I ended up having to ask George to pick up our friend instead. I will never forget the look of contempt – I’d almost call it hatred – on his face. I thought I would die from shame.
In the days that followed I pondered that fuck-up and came to a conclusion: That wasn’t me. I had my faults, like anyone, but I was never late and I never let a friend down. The drugs had turned me into someone else, someone I didn’t like. A lot of ‘problems’ and ‘bad luck’ in my life were stemming from the irresponsibility that drug use bred. I didn’t stop overnight, but wound down from every other weekend to seldom. When I met my wife at the end of 1997, I pretty much stopped altogether.
George didn’t. If anything, his drug use seemed to escalate. His brother was worse still, a genuine addict, and one day the two of them got in a fistfight over absolutely nothing. As Paul’s girlfriend at the time said, “This is fucking wrong.”
Sometime around this period – I can’t remember exactly when – George told me he was going away for a while. He was going to housesit for his uncle in Queensland. This announcement came out of the blue and I was saddened to hear it, but I never questioned it. On some level I thought maybe it was a good idea for him to get away from life as he knew it. When George returned (was it six months or a year later? I’ve forgotten) he had put on a bit of weight and he sported an enormous beard that made me think of Stephen King in his younger days. We picked up our friendship where we had left off, as if we had never spent any time apart. He seemed to have dialled back on the drug use, too.
One night, a few years later, we were on the beers at the house my wife and I were renting. Boozy nights were common there, as our long suffering neighbours would attest. Anyway, George and I had drunk our fill and we walked across the road to the park nearby, talking. We got chatting about our experiences on acid and I forwarded the opinion that the ‘higher communication’ we had shared was just delusion. The run of luck on the pokies had been just that: pure luck and nothing to do with guidance from the universe. Drugs were fun, but in the end, they were a waste of time.
George was, to put it mildly, appalled. He had invested so much of his life in drugs and the accompanying ‘spirituality’ that he took it as an affront to have them dismissed with a few sceptical remarks. He asked me in disbelief if I really thought everything we had experienced together amounted to nothing. I was drunk enough to be blunt in my reply that I did.
Not long after that, George and his girlfriend – whom he had met through my wife – wiped us. It started with them sending a text message, on New Year’s Eve, that they had decided not to attend our New Year’s Eve party. That seemed shabby treatment from the man I considered my best friend, and my wife was irate enough to call back and ask what the hell. In the end they grudgingly came, but that was pretty much the end of our friendship. I never found out why George decided not to be my friend any more, not for sure. Most likely, I thought, it was due to a mutual friend, Anthony, with whom George had a falling out. George decided maintaining his friendship with me just wasn’t worth the hassle if he had to cross paths with Anthony all the time.
I thought the story of George and me had ended on that New Year’s Eve of 2006-2007, but several years later there came an unexpected epilogue. One Saturday night I, Anthony and another friend, were tossing back a few beers at a local pub. The subject of George came up and I wondered out loud why he had decided to abandon an entire social circle just because he couldn’t tolerate one of its members.
Anthony, his tongue loosened with more than a sensible dose of alcohol, revealed a secret he had promised to keep (and he had for many years, long after he and George were no longer friends). It turned out that George and his brother, who had been working in an electronics warehouse, had been stealing equipment and then selling it. I’m sure you can guess what they bought with the proceeds. Anyway, George got caught and was charged with theft. He was sentenced to home detention, ankle bracelet and the whole bit. All that time he was supposedly in Queensland, George was in fact cooped up in his parents’ house only a suburb away.
Suddenly, I understood a little better why George didn’t want to be in the proximity of a man carrying such explosive information – a man who could be emotionally volatile at the best of times. I still didn’t comprehend how George could just switch off our friendship, as if it were nothing more than a lamp, but at least I had a clue as to why.
Nowadays, whenever I see people calling for this or that ‘recreational’ drug to be legalised, I feel a little sick to my stomach. “Someone who is stoned or on ecstasy doesn’t become violent,” the pro-legalisation types point out, “not like people who are drunk.” Or they post videos like this one, showing how soldiers on LSD became incapable of engaging in battle. But that only enforces the point of this memoir. Alcohol is upfront and in your face. If you have too much of it you become incompetent and the injurious effects are evident the morning after – you wake up with a broken wrist or your wallet missing. There are clear warning signs that you need to rein it in. Drugs, on the other hand, are insidious: when you’re in their grip your life can seem enhanced, and it may be years before you realise they have in fact been eating away at your soul. Those soldiers might have lost the urge to fight, but they also lost the ability to do anything useful.
I was lucky. I was an open-minded person, but I was also a realist, so while I was receptive to the idea that drugs like acid and ecstasy could expand the mind and make a person more emotionally and spiritually sensitive, in time I came to see that what they ‘gave’ me was artificial; fool’s gold. I much preferred the high I got from spending time with my girl or writing a story or watching a good movie.
Even though George hurt me, I came to pity him. He had built his self-worth on a convincing delusion and paid the price for it. He was always a proud person with a strong sense of morals, and the humiliation he felt when he became a convicted thief must have been overwhelming. He has since married and had a child, and I hope he has found happiness. It saddens me that we aren’t sharing this stage of our lives together. Sometimes fortune forces friends down different forks in the road.
But was it fortune? Or was our friendship just another victim of our substance abuse?
* Names have been changed.