1
I remember a date: the first of July, 2016. That afternoon I came home after a few days on Fire Island, back to Brooklyn, to the brick building off the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway. The air was humid and the streets smelled of trash. The steel door of my apartment fell shut. The bed, the table, and the chairs were all where I had left them. I had a suntan that I wanted to show to someone, but there was no one to see it. I lived alone.
The apartment was a studio. It had brick walls, exposed pipes, and wood floors marked with paint. It had my teakettle, my pots and pans, and a table that was also my desk. It had my solitude. The studio was on the third floor, in a corner of the building. I had moved here a few months before, in winter, when the heat blew from a giant vent like a desert wind. Now it was summer, and the city’s noise poured in through windows that were taller than I was. On one side they looked out on a white-painted warehouse next door, and in the afternoon the room would illuminate with flashbulbs from a photo studio there. On the other side I had a view of rooftops and a redbrick housing complex on Bushwick Avenue. In the evenings, the complex’s walls would turn pink for an hour in the setting sun. The unencumbered sky rose up above it, impervious to the city and everything humans had ruined below. Pigeons and seagulls flapped in slow orbits. The jets flew north to LaGuardia in a steady, unceasing line. The colors of dusk would make a gradient of orange and lavender, the rooftops would turn gray and dowdy, and my private domain, my apartment, would be bathed in soft evening light.
The day before, lying on the beach on Fire Island, I had been looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and wondering what would happen next. Maybe I would be invited to a party. Maybe a relative would die. Maybe an unexpected writing assignment would arrive. Maybe there would be another mass shooting. Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come.
I lay in sunlight that had traveled through the vacuum of space. I sensed I was on the cusp of a change. I pictured each cycle of life—friendships, relationships, phases of experience—as an arc that emerged from a horizontal line. At any point along the line, a tangle of arcs hovered above like the ribbed vault of a cathedral. Some curves were in the process of rising, and some in the process of falling.
2
I had met Andrew on a cold evening in late April. That night, I had given a lecture in Brooklyn for a series of talks called IRL Club. In his invitation, the organizer had described IRL Club as “a casual evening of slideshow presentations by cool people, ‘from the internet.’ ” The theme of the evening was “altered consciousness.” The other presenters included the author Tao Lin, who was writing his book Trip, about psychedelic drugs, and a woman who spoke about autonomous sensory meridian responses, the bodily sensations some people experience when watching women with long nails pressing buttons on cash registers, or hearing crinkling paper. The speaking fee was $150.
The event was held in a warehouse event space near the polluted Gowanus Canal. In preparation for my lecture about altered consciousness, I had made a digital slideshow on Google Slides. I titled my speech “How I Think About Drugs,” which I typed out in twenty-four-point black Arial font. I arrived early, then waited in the wings offstage, drinking a beer and watching Tao give his lecture, “Specific Effects of Psychedelic Drugs on Me.” The effects included “advertisement for a Don DeLillo reading showing his face seemed like a powerful non sequitur” (psilocybin mushrooms); “said incoherent things about Harry Potter then passed out” (cannabis); “realized I’d convinced myself while unconscious to go to the beach” (salvia); “alien occupation” (mushrooms again); and “sobbing” (cannabis, ingested, baked in an oven). After DMT (“my life a vague myth”), it was my turn.
I began “How I Think About Drugs” with a slide showing an advertisement for an antidepressant. In the ad, a smiling blond woman in a pink shirt poses with a beach behind her, as if she were out at sea on a boat. “I’m ready to experience life,” reads the text floating next to her head. I hadn’t tried very many drugs before the age of thirty, I explained, referencing the ad, because of my commitment to this single drug, the antidepressant called Wellbutrin.
I took Wellbutrin (I continued) from 2003 to 2004, and then again from 2006 to 2012. I started taking it the year after I graduated from college because I wanted to be as decisive and active as those I perceived to be more successful than me. Wellbutrin had an amphetamine-like effect. It confirmed my love of stimulants. On Wellbutrin, my hands shook slightly. I slept less, I ate less. The chemical in Wellbutrin, bupropion, is also used to help people quit smoking. It deactivates the part of the mind that craves small sources of chemical solace in the middle of the afternoon. My sweet tooth disappeared. The pill made me skinny, impatient, quick to anger, productive, multiorgasmic. The drug seemed to raise my heart rate. It made my body weak in a way that was unfamiliar. It made me dizzy. It made my ears ring. Its effect on me was immediate and tangible. I stopped crying on the subway. I could get out of bed in the morning. I could get all the same things done that the people around me were getting done. I turned forms in on time. I wrote emails. I made decisions.
I avoided other drugs in the seven years that I took Wellbutrin, I explained in my lecture, because I worried about interactions, but also because I had little interest in them. I switched to a slide with a collage made of photographs I had found on the internet: images of a 1960s-era hippie; a 1990s-era kandy raver; Nancy Reagan; Hunter S. Thompson; a hemp necklace; Ewan McGregor crawling out of a toilet in the movie Trainspotting; an antidrug ad that read “Ecstasy Today; Agony Tomorrow”; psychedelic art by Alex Grey; and other images meant to convey the myriad negative impressions of drugs I had received as a young person, all of them specific to my generation. Drugs, I explained, were incompatible with my ideas of success, good health, and the clear exercise of reason. The druggiest kids I knew in high school had in fact ended up living out the nightmares that the propaganda had promised, and spent their late twenties and early thirties cleaning the bathroom in Goodwill, stuck in halfway houses, and trying to regain custody of their children. I knew all this because of Facebook, where they testified on their anniversaries of getting sober. Addiction could generate a war within a person, a struggle of life and death, a storm of trauma and debasement, but one we had been taught to see as self-imposed. This could happen even to a person with every advantage in life, who has the good fortune to live without fear of poverty, hunger, fascism, bombs, drone warfare, or an especially dysfunctional family. In avoiding drugs, I thought I was avoiding that kind of self-generated squalor.
Not taking drugs was easy (I continued, squinting out into the darkness of the audience but unable to discern any faces) because I had not been the kind of young person to whom anyone offered drugs. Had they offered, I would have taken them, but my friends were like me, bookish and obedient, exploring their maladjustment through literature, music, art, and film, and not shifts in consciousness, sexual adventure, or alternative living arrangements. My chemical experiences as a college student in the early 2000s were limited to nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and cannabis. Once, a boyfriend in college had given me a little peach-colored triangle of the amphetamine Dexedrine. I nibbled off corners of the pill in the computer lab and wrote a play, taking breaks only to go to the water fountain for my dry mouth. Dexedrine induced a euphoric trance state of production, but in the days after I took it, I found I wanted to die with more intensity than usual.
I switched slides again, to one where I had arranged a list of drugs according to a grid. I explained how I unconsciously categorized psychoactive substances according to the distinctions set out by the federal government in the early 1970s. The category I thought of as “drugs” correlated exactly with the government’s definition of a federally banned Schedule I substance. Heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, and cannabis were “drugs.” Then I had a category that I called “sort-of drugs,” which meant off-label use of pharmaceutical painkillers, antianxiety medications, and amphetamines like Dexedrine and Adderall. Unlike “drugs,” a person could casually use “sort-of drugs” without a sense of impropriety or loss of reputation. Republicans, moms, and other people who expressed concern and disapproval about cocaine would readily take a Xanax on a bad day without moral qualms. The problem with the “sort-of drugs” category was that its pills were considered safer than “drugs” even when they were more dangerous. As an example, I reminded the audience of the failure of millions of Americans, including many doctors, to understand that opioid painkillers interacted with the human body in the same way as heroin. Unlike “drugs,” pills were cute; they rattled in their little amber canisters like candy, and there was something childlike about the way adults received their diagnoses of pain, anxiety, depression, and deficit of attention. We filled our prescriptions for “sort-of drugs” with a bustling sense of importance and authority, and altering our brain chemistry was done with a veneer of officiousness and responsibility.
My drug-taking habits, I explained, did not change until I stopped taking Wellbutrin, which happened after I sold my first book and quit my newspaper job. I became a freelancer, which meant I could be depressed without a boss commenting on my bad attitude. I stopped taking the pills during a stay in San Francisco in 2012, around the time of my thirty-first birthday. I didn’t notice any symptoms of withdrawal. San Francisco helped, with its bracing fog and scenic vistas. I would run from the Mission up to the Panhandle and back, and my body became strong again. Six months passed and I didn’t notice the absence of the antidepressant at all, except that I needed to sleep more.
No longer taking Wellbutrin made me less scared to try other drugs, but as is usually the case, my sudden personal interest in them was the channeling of a broader social change, as the drugs also became easier to find, after a period in which they had been less available. The first decade of the millennium had coincided with an “acid drought” in parts of the United States. First the Grateful Dead had stopped touring in 1995, ending a network of distribution. Then there had been a major federal bust at an acid lab in Kansas in the year 2000. Surveys that monitored drug use and discussion documented a marked decline in people using LSD. The price went up, and it became scarce. In 2002, Joe Biden, then a senator, introduced the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy, or RAVE, Act, which held promoters liable for drug use at their parties and hastened the decline of the network of underground raves that had expanded around the country in the 1990s. In my twenties, when I lived in New York, in Little Rock, and in Miami, the most available drug had always been cocaine (or, at least, speed sold as cocaine), never psychedelics or MDMA or ketamine. This was also the decade when hundreds of thousands of people became addicted to prescription opioids and methamphetamine, and consequently when drug overdoses became a leading cause of accidental death in America. A generation raised on televised “this is your brain on drugs” propaganda, cautionary tales of 1960s acid casualties, and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs about heroin had no warning system in place for OxyContin dispensed by a physician. Perhaps this is a subjective opinion, but the 2000s were not a time of psychedelic experimentation—the dominant drug reference in pop music was cough syrup.
But by the second decade of the new century, you could buy and sell psychedelics and MDMA on the dark web, and Kanye started rapping about parties melting like Dalí and Rihanna began singing about diamonds in the sky. Psychiatric researchers were beginning to recategorize them into the less stigmatized category of “medicine,” as potential treatments for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even as a possible treatment for addiction to other drugs. White, upper-middle-class professionals began to accept that psychedelics could in fact be compatible with their notions of capitalist success and would not harm the career or social prospects of people who were otherwise dedicated to conformity. In 2012, newly freed from Wellbutrin, I heard someone on National Public Radio talking about tripping on mushrooms; I read an Oliver Sacks article in The New Yorker where he recounted his many psychedelic experiences. “Many people experiment with drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, in their teenage or college years,” wrote Sacks. “I did not try them until I was thirty and a neurology resident.” This was interesting to me.
In November of 2012, six months after I quit Wellbutrin, a friend asked if I wanted to smoke DMT. I was traveling with this friend to Rhode Island. The weather was cold, and outside the window of a high-ceilinged room lit with Christmas lights and candles the trees were stark and bare in the darkness. The friends we were visiting had a trio of especially active cats, who followed us into every room and congregated on its highest perches. The DMT we had was the waxy orange kind. We weighed out a dose on a piece of aluminum foil and took turns freebasing it with a glass pipe. I sat on a mat on the floor. My friend held the lighter and pipe for me so I could focus on vacuuming up as much of the smoke as I could. I inhaled an acrid vapor that smelled like burning plastic. I have trouble smoking anything, and struggled to hold the substance in my lungs. It hurt my throat, and my respiratory system fought to expel it. I suppressed coughing, exhaled, lay back on the mat, and covered my eyes with a scarf. The pain in my throat grew in dimension into a vast underground cavern inlaid with geodic crystals. The act of swallowing echoed with the steady drip of a stalactite. A buzzing drone filled the room and my vision tightened into geometric patterns of purple and green. I failed to get enough smoke in my lungs to “break through.” DMT has a reputation for producing ornate filigree palaces, praying mantises, and titanium space elves. Some people describe a tear in the fabric of the universe. I just saw some patterns that faintly buzzed in the marker colors of my childhood—the “bold” jewel-toned spectrum that Crayola started selling in the early 1990s. But that this cognitive experience could be generated by the interaction of my brain with a chemical found in plants amazed me. I understood that the human mind had evolved to access this realm. That our biology enabled us to trip could not be an accident. I wanted to understand more.
So, I explained to the audience, altered consciousness became a course of study. In 2013 I decided to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible. I would tell this to my friends as a joke, except it wasn’t a joke. It took time to figure out how to even find the drugs, and it was already July of that year when I tried my next psychedelic, ayahuasca, which was trendy in 2013. A friend added me to a Facebook group called “Love Is the Medicine.” I met a man named Juan at a coffee shop in Park Slope, I gave him some cash, and three days later I went to the Catskills for a “ceremony.”
The neoshamanic ayahuasca scenes of the twenty-first century were the culmination of centuries of colonization and syncretism, followed by decades of hippie modernism, jet travel, the internet. They were a symptom of a mindset that saw the whole world’s cultures, gods, and horticulture as a kind of buffet from which the missing object might be found.
Copyright © 2024 by Emily Witt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
