Cyberia: Making Connections: Distribution and Manufacture

CHAPTER 6
Making Connections: Distribution and Manufacture

For some cyberians, making sense of things and feeling the connections with other trippers is not enough. They use psychedelics to forge new connections between cultures, people, or even individual atoms. It is important to them that the real world, and not just the psychedelic space, consciously reflect the interconnectivity that underlies reality. Just as a fractal exhibits self-similarity, the psychedelic subculture should reflect the quality of a single trip.

LSD distributors, in particular, believe that acid functions as a twentieth-century psychic grease, allowing modern people to move their mental machinery through the ever-increasing demands of an information-based society. (Acid, unlike mushrooms, can be mass-produced, too.) Leo is an LSD dealer from the Bay Area who believes that his distribution of psychedelics is a social service. One of his favorite distribution points is the parking lot at Grateful Dead shows, where thousands of people mill about, looking for “doses.”

Tonight’s concert has already begun, but most of the crowd of young merchants who follow the Dead don’t have tickets for the show. Instead, they wander about the lot, smoke pot with one another, and prepare for the concertgoers who will exit the arena in two or three hours.

Leo is well into his own acid trip of the evening (he says he’s been tripping every day for several months) and sits in a makeshift tent, explaining his philosophy to a young couple who make falafel and beaded bracelets. While his rationale is the result of a few years in the military and a few others with skinheads, he does express the psychedelic concept of interconnectivity and networking from a modern cyberian standpoint. The Deadheads (who many cyberians feel are still caught in the sixties) are deep into a conversation about how they can feel their “third eye” while tripping, and how it makes them feel connected to everything in the world. Leo shakes his head scornfully.

“The sixth sense of society as a whole also lies in its connectivity and its ability to intercommunicate. When society becomes enlightened, its third eye happens to be that connectivity. That’s the evolutionary factor.”

Leo tries in vain to get them to understand the concepts of feedback and iteration, and how they relate to human society connecting through telephones and the media. The bong gets passed around again, and Leo tries a different tack.

“I’m attempting to work this on a subversive level by distributing a large amount of LSD throughout the U.S. and trying to reach other countries, too.” One of the Deadheads laughs, just liking the sound of breaking the law. Leo rolls his eyes and stresses the global significance of his subversion.

“LSD’s definitely an interconnectivity catalyst for the countercultures and subcultures that we’re tuned in to. We’re able now, with our information-age technologies, to know about groups and countercultures who are communicating together and sharing common resources and information–like all you Deadheads living in this parking lot. As these groups develop their own identities, they gain a certain amount of awareness about themselves as a collective conscious. That offers a channel for catalytic tools like LSD to be exchanged, putting all these groups on the same wavelength.”

The falafel merchant shrugs, too stoned or too straight to understand Leo’s point. “I don’t get it. Is LSD making this happen, or is it happening so people can get more LSD?”

“LSD is part of and a result of this interconnectedness. It’s mind expansive and group-mind expansive. And what it does is act as a catalyst for culture and individuals. Now that we’ve left the industrial age and come into the information age, the rate information exchanges is increasing exponentially. It’s very fast; you can look at it in binary terms. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two–that’s how fast the information multiplies. What’s going on is, the way people learn, is they cause an imprint in their subconscious, and then they’re able to build a type of structure on their imprint which represents their knowledge. And how they see their own knowledge is their own wisdom … it’s their knowledge of their knowledge.”

Both Deadheads are lost now. The girl has started mindlessly unbeading a bracelet and the boy is reloading the bong. But Leo doesn’t care that he can’t make an impact on these people. He just continues to reel out his run-on sentences into the datapool in the hope that they get picked up morphogenetically.

“LSD primes the mind for subconscious imprintation–makes it more susceptible to it. We’re able to learn more information at a faster rate because we’re able to imprint ourselves at the same rate as the information is being developed, because in the LSD state you’re able to conceive such a vast quantity of anything. When I’m on LSD sometimes I can think in broad terms and sometimes I even gain vocabulary that I’ve never used before and I’m able to retain that in the future.”

“If you gave us another hit of your LSD, Leo,” the bead girl smiles, “maybe we’d know what you’re talking about, too.”

This is where traditional, sixties-style tripsters differ from their cyberian offspring. The sixth sense, or “group mind oversoul,” to which Leo has dedicated himself (but which these old-fashioned-type Deadheads can’t understand) is the locus of awareness that most cyberian psychedelic explorers seek. Whether it be Mariah in Elf Land or Leo in the LSD distribution net, the cyberian difference is that psychedelic activity now becomes part of an overall fractal pattern, experienced, in one way or another, by everyone.

While Leo draws the lines of interconnectivity between users and groups of users, other reality designers at sublevels of the psychedelic fractal network are more concerned with the lines of interconnectivity between the very atoms of the substances they take. Becker, Leo’s LSD source, is a twenty-eight-year-old chemistry grad student with a strong background in illicit psychopharmacology. His experience of psychedelics is on a different fractal order from that of classical personal tripsters or even Leo and other cultural catalysts. Becker knows about drugs from the inside out, so his answer to any drug’s problems lies in its chemistry. If a drug is illegal, alter its chemistry to make it legal again. If a drug is too short-acting, figure out a way to stunt the user’s ability to metabolize it.

Leo arrives at Becker’s attic laboratory discouraged from the Deadheads the night before. He’s wondering if Becker can whip something up with better transformational properties than those of LSD.

Becker has just the answer. He spent all of last night creating his first batch of 2CB (in chemist’s lingo, 4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine). “It’s called Venus, and it’s a synthetic version of mescaline, with a few designer improvements.”

Becker’s problem with mescaline, another organic psychedelic, is that it is metabolized by the body very quickly. By the time the user begins to trip heavily, he’s already on the way down. To figure out how to modify the substance, Becker took a large dose, then went on an internal visionquest into the chemical structure of the active mescaline molecule.

“The native mescaline molecule is a ring. I saw how the methoxy group which hangs on that ring could be pried off easily by the metabolism, rendering the molecule impotent in an hour or so. By replacing that methoxy group with bromine, which can hang on much tighter, the drug becomes ten times stronger. The body can’t break it down, and it goes much much further because it can stay planted in the brain’s receptor site that much longer.”

“But how much do you have to take? And how do you know it’s not toxic?” Leo asks, fingering the white powder in its petri dish.

“It’s less toxic, Leo, don’t you see? Plus it’s much more effective, so you don’t have to take as much. That way you don’t get any side effects either. I’m on it right now!”

Leo had dropped a tab of acid about two hours ago but it wasn’t doing anything. He licks his finger, dabs it in the mound of powder, and puts it on his tongue.

“That’s a pretty big hit,” Becker warns. “Probably about eight doses.”

Leo just shrugs and swallows. He can handle it. “How fast can you make this stuff?”

“That’s the joy. It’s really simple to make. Just think of it as stir, filter, wash, and dry. That’s all there is to it.”

As Becker goes over an ingredients checklist for a mass-production schedule, Leo collapses into a hammock and waits for the new drug to take effect. Both believe that they are on to something new and important.

By designing new chemicals, psychopharmacologists like Becker design reality from the inside out. They decide what they’d like reality to be like, then–in a kind of submolecular shamanic visionquest–compose a chemical that will alter their observations about reality in a specific way. Then, Leo, by distributing the new chemical to others who will have the same experience, literally spreads the new designer reality. The world changes because it is observed differently.

The other reason to make new drugs is to create unknown and, hence, legal psychedelics before the FDA has a chance to classify them as illegal. A relatively new law, however, has made that difficult. The Analog Substance Act classifies yet-to-be-designed chemicals illegal if they are intended to serve the same function as ones that are already illegal. This law was passed shortly after the “Ecstasy craze” in Texas, where the new, mild psychedelic got so popular that it was available for purchase by credit card at bars. As a result, according to Becker, “Lloyd Bentsen put a bee in the bonnet of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and it was stamped illegal fast.”

But rather than simply stamping out Ecstasy use, its illegality prompted chemists like Becker to develop new substances. Like computer hackers who understand the technology better than its adult users, the kids making drugs know more about the chemistry than the regulatory agencies. The young chemists began creating new drugs just like Ecstasy, with just one or two atoms in different places. In Becker’s language, “Thus, Ecstasy began to stand for MDMA, MDM, Adam, X, M-Ethyl, M methyl 3-4-methyline dioxy, also N-ethyl, which was sometimes called Eve, which had one more carbon, or actually CH2, added on.” This flurry of psychopharmacological innovation prompted the Analog Act, and now almost everything with psychedelic intent is illegal or Schedule 1 (most controlled).

Despite its illegality, Ecstasy, even more than LSD and mushrooms, has remained on the top of the cyberian designer-substance hit parade. LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline–all powerful, relatively long-acting psychedelics–bifurcated, so to speak, into two shorter-acting substances, the mild, user-friendly Ecstasy, and the earth-shatteringly powerful and short-acting DMT. Both drugs can be found in many carefully manipulated chemical variations, and epitomize the psychedelic-substance priorities in Cyberia.

The E Conspiracy

The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear, flight, fight, lust, and territorial paranoia are temporarily disconnected. You see everything with total clarity, undistorted by animalistic urges. You have reached a state which the ancients have called nirvana, all seeing bliss.

–Thomas Pynchon on MDMA

Cyberians consider Ecstasy, or E as it’s called by its wide-grinning users, one of the most universally pleasant drugs yet invented. While negative experiences on Ecstasy are not unheard of, they are certainly few and far between. Everyone knows somebody who’s had a bad acid trip. Ecstasy does not carry the same stigma, which may be why people don’t “freak out” on it.

As Dr. Schoenfeld explains, another part of the reason may be that some of the substances aren’t yet illegal, so users don’t have the same negative associations and paranoia. In addition, according to the doctor, the Ecstasy drugs are nonaddictive and shorter-acting.

“As you know, there are drugs being used that the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] isn’t aware of. Once they get aware of them, they’ll try to make them illegal; but people who take substances are becoming aware of these new drugs, which are nonaddictive, and which don’t last as long as the other drugs used to last. They don’t have the same adverse effects. For example, there are a few reports of people having bad experiences with MDMA or occasional freak-outs, but it’s highly unusual. And even with LSD it wasn’t that common to have freak-outs. You’d hear about the cases where people tried to fly or stop trains or things like that, but compared with the amount of use there was, that was uncommon. With a drug like MDMA, it’s still less common for people to have bad experiences.”

But E is not just a kinder, gentler acid. The quality of the E-xperience is very different. Bruce Eisner wrote the book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, still the most authoritative and enlightening text on the drug’s history and use. His scholarly and personal research on the chemical is vast, and he describes the essence of the E-xperience well:

“You discover a secret doorway into a room in your house that you did not previously know existed. It is a room in which both your inner experience and your relations with others seem magically transformed. You feel really good about yourself and your life. At the same time, everyone who comes into this room seems more lovable. You find your thoughts flowing, turning into words that previously were blocked by fear and inhibition.

“After several hours, you return to your familiar abode, feeling tired but different, more open. And your memory of your mystical passage may help you in the days and weeks ahead to make all the other rooms of your house more enjoyable.”

The main advantage of E is that it allows you to “take your ego with you.” Acid or even mushrooms can have the unrelenting abrasiveness of a belt sander against one’s character. E, on the other hand, does not disrupt “ego integrity” or create what psychologists call “depersonalization.” Instead, the user feels as open and loving and connected as he might feel on a stronger psychedelic but without the vulnerability of losing his “self” in the process. If anything, E strengthens one’s sense of self, so that the issues that arise in the course of a trip seem less threatening and infinitely more manageable. E creates a loving ego resiliency in which no personal problem seems too big or scary. This is why it has become popular in the younger gay and other alternative-lifestyles communities, where identity crises are commonplace.

E-volution

“You touch the darkness–the feminine, the gross, whatever you see as dark,” Jody Radzik explains to Diana as they hand out flyers in the street for a new house club. “When you’re on Ecstasy, the drug forces you to become who you really are. You don’t get any positive experience from a drug like cocaine; it’s a lie. But with Ecstasy, it can have a positive effect on the rest of your life!”

Jody and Diana are on their way to a club called Osmosis, a house event which occurs every Thursday night at DV8, a downtown San Francisco venue, for which Radzik serves as promotional director. Promoting house, though, is almost like promoting Ecstasy. The drug and subculture have defined and fostered each other. Osmosis is proud of the fact that it mixes gay, straight, “glam,” and house culture, and Radzik–a gamine, extremely young thirty-year-old with a modified Hamlet haircut and a mile-a-minute mouth–credits E with their success.

“There’s a sexual element to house. E is an aphrodisiac and promiscuity is big. In everyday life men usually repress their `anima.’ Ecstasy forces you to experience what’s really going on inside.” Diana (who runs her own house club down the block) is amused by Jody’s inclination to talk about taboo subjects. Jody goes on proudly, exuberantly, and loud enough for everyone else in the street to hear. Being publicly outrageous is a valued personality trait in E culture adapted from Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.

“E has a threshold. It puts you in that aahh experience, and you stay there. It might get more intense with the number of hits you take, but it’s not like acid, which, with the more hits you take, the farther you’re walking from consensus culture. With E, your ability to operate within the confines of culture remain. You can take a lot of E and still know that that’s a red light, or that there’s a cop here and you don’t want to fuck up too much. On acid, you can be completely out of your head, and walking in a completely different reality.”

So E is not simply watered-down LSD. While acid was a “test,” Ecstasy is a “becoming.” Acid involved a heroic journey, while E is an extended moment. The traditional bell curve of the acid trip and its sometimes brutal examination and stripping of ego is replaced with a similar vision but without the paranoia and catharsis. By presenting insight as a moment of timelessness, E allows for a much more cyberian set of conclusions than the more traditional, visionquest psychedelics.

Rather than squashing personal taste and creating legions of Birkenstock clones, E tends to stimulate the user’s own inner nature. Hidden aspects of one’s personality–be it homosexuality, transvestitism, or just love and creativity–demand free expression. All this is allowed to happen, right away, in the E-nvironment of the house club. Reintegration on E is unnecessary because the E-xperience itself has an immediately social context. If anything, the E trip is more socially integrated than baseline reality. E turns a room of normal, paranoid nightclubbers into a teaming mass of ecstatic Global Villagers. To Radzik, the club lights, music, and Ecstasy are inseparable elements of a designer ritual, just like the campfire, drumbeats, and peace pipe of a Native American tribal dance.

Arriving at the club in time for the sound check, Jody and Diana dance a while under the work lights. Jody’s diatribe continues as he demonstrates the new hip-hop steps he picked up in Los Angeles last week.

“The Ecstasy comes through the house music. The different polyrhythmic elements and the bass … this is current North American shamanism. It’s technoshamanism. E has a lot to do with it. It really does. I get a little nervous but I’ve got to tell the truth about things. But the system is probably going to react against the E element.”

Diana cuts in: “And then they’ll just shut you down like they closed our party last week.” She takes a cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.

Jody still dances while Diana stands and smokes. Neither he nor the E culture will be taken down that easily. “E is an enzyme that’s splicing the system. E is like a cultural neurotransmitter that’s creating synaptic connections between different people. We’re all cells in the organism. E is helping us to link up and form more dendrites. And our culture is finally starting to acknowledge the ability of an individual to create his own reality. What you end up with, what we all have in common, is common human sense.”

The E-inspired philosophy borrows heavily from the scientific and mathematics theories of the past couple of decades. House kids talk about fractals, chaos, and morphogenetic fields in the same sentence as Deee-Lite’s latest CD. Jody’s “cultural neurotransmitter” image refers back to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which is the now well-supported notion that planet Earth is itself a giant, biological organism. The planet is thought to maintain conditions for sustaining life through a complex series of feedbacks and iterations. A population of ocean microorganisms, for example, may regulate the weather by controlling how much moisture is released into the atmosphere. The more feedback loops Gaia has (in the form of living plants and animals), the more precisely “she” can maintain the ecosystem.

Evolution is seen more as a groping toward than a random series of natural selections. Gaia is becoming conscious. Radzik and others have inferred that human beings serve as Gaia’s brain cells. Each human being is an individual neuron, but unaware of his connection to the global organism as a whole. Evolution, then, depends on humanity’s ability to link up to one another and become a global consciousness.

These revelations all occur to house kids like Jody under the influence of E. This is why they call the drug a “cultural enzyme.” The Ecstasy helps them see how they’re all connected. They accept themselves and one another at face value, delighted to make their acquaintance. Everyone exposed to E instantly links up to the Gaian neural net. As more people become connected, more feedback and iteration can occur, and the Gaian mind can become more fully conscious.

Jody and Diana both believe that house culture and the Gaian mindset literally “infect” newcomers to the club like a virus. As Osmosis opens, Jody watches a crowd of uninitiated clubbers step out onto the dance floor, who, despite their extremely “straight” dress, are having a pretty Ex-uberant time.

“This looks like a group of people that might be experimenting with Ecstasy for the first time. They’re going to remember this night for the rest of their lives. This is going to change them. They are going to be better people now. They’re infected. It’s like an information virus. They take it with them into their lives. Look at them. They’re dancing with each other as a group. Not so much with their own partners. They’re all smiling. They are going to change as a result of their participation in house. Their worldview is going to change.”

Indeed, the growing crowd does seem uncharacteristically gleeful for a Thursday-night dance club. Gone are the pickup lines, drunken businessmen, cokeheads, and cokewhores. The purposeful social machinations–getting laid, scoring drugs, or gaining status–seem to be overrun by the sheer drive toward bliss. Boys don’t need to dance with their dates because there’s no need for possessiveness or control. Everyone feels secure–even secure enough to dance without a partner in a group of strangers.

Whether that carries into their daily life is another story. Certainly, a number of new cyberian “converts” are made each evening. But the conversions are made passively, as the name of the club implies, through Osmosis. Unlike acid, which forces users to find ways to integrate their vision into working society, E leads them to believe that integration occurs in the same moment as the bliss. The transformation is a natural byproduct–a side effect of the cultural virus.

As club regulars arrive, they wink knowingly at one another. Jody winks and nods at few, who gesture back coyly. The only information communicated, really, is “I am, are you?” The winkers are not so much the “in” crowd as the fraternity of the converted. They’re all part of what one T-shirt calls “The E Conspiracy.” These are the carriers of the cultural virus. No need to say anything at all. The E and the music will take care of everything (wink, wink).

“The sixties went awry because they wanted a sweeping cultural change to go on overtly,” explains Radzik, nodding to two girls he’s sure he has seen before. They wink back. “And that didn’t happen. What’s different about house is that no one’s trying to `spread the message.’ It’s more like, we’re into it because we love it, but we’re not out to convert people. ‘Groove is in the heart’ [a Deee-Lite lyric]. We just want to expose people to it. People decide that they’re into it because they respond to it on a heart level. I think the bullshit’s going to come apart of its own accord.”

So is this a dance floor filled with socially aware, fully realized designer beings? Certainly not. It’s a dance floor filled with smart kids, sexy kids, not-so smart kids, and not-so sexy kids, but they do seem to share an understanding, in the body, of the timeless quality of bliss and how to achieve it through a combination of dance and E. Even the music, playing at precisely 120 beats per minute, the rate of the fetal heartbeat, draws one into a sense of timeless connection to the greater womb–Gaia. The lyrics all emphasize the sound “eee.” “Evereeebodeee’s freee,” drones one vocal, in pleeesing gleeeful breeezes, winding their way onto the extreeemely wide smiles of dancing boys and girls. It’s just the E! Likewise, the way in which E infiltrates society is much less time-based and confrontational than was the case with acid. E infiltrates through the experience of bliss, so there’s nothing to say or do about it. The “meta” agenda here is to create a society with no agenda.

As Jody screams over the din of the house music, “Fuck the agendas. We just have to manifest our culture. You have to trust your heart. That’s what Jesus really said. And that’s what E does. It shows people they have their own common sense. They realize, I don’t need this!”

Bruce Eisner shows up at about midnight, exploring the house scene and its relationship to Ecstasy for the second edition of his book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. A veteran of the sixties and just a bit too old to fit in with this crowd, he almost sighs as he explains to E-nthusiastic clubbers how E’s preservation of social skills and ego make it a much better social transformer than the psychedelics of his day.

“In the sixties, we were sure we were going to have this revolution that would change everything overnight. And it never came. We got the seventies instead.”

A few girls laugh. They were born in the seventies. Bruce smiles slowly. He’s got a dozen stoned kids hanging on his every word, when in fact he’s trying to understand them.

“With E, you don’t get so far out, like on acid, where you lose touch with the physical world. It allows you an easier time to bring the insights back in. Huxley talked a lot about the importance of integrating the mystical experience with the worldly experience. He had that one trip where he decided, `The clear light is an ice cube. What’s important is love and work in the world.’ And love and work in the world is what Ecstasy shows you. It’s a model for enlightenment, and the challenge is bringing that into the real world.”

So maybe revolution has become evolution as house culture awakens to the fact that there is method behind Gaia’a madness, and that Darwin wasn’t completely right. Life naturally evolves toward greater self-awareness, and we don’t need to push it anywhere. The universe is not a cold sea of indifference but the warm, living waters of an oversoul composed of waves of love–Gaia’s morphogenetic fields. The mock self-assuredness of the “me” generation gives way to the inner wink-wink-say-no-more knowing of the E generation, as the sixties bell curve finally touches down, and ego fully reintegrates into a postpsychedelic culture.

16 comments August 29th, 2005