Maynard's Drug Years

[Calfium Jay]

AENIMA could not have been made without the aid of magic mushrooms and Persian hashish.

Fact.

[ilikecheese]

I'm on drugs right now and so is everyone else.

[liz]

Didnt MJK once say

"Spend 10 years doing drugs, then spend the next 10 years trying to get to that place without them" ??

Drugs are definitely a short cut to some experiences that can most probably be achieved through practices such as meditation or marathon running.

What if you had arthritis or no feet;
what else may help one attain true enlightenment,
peace, love, and harmony (three-part as well as figuratively)?

If by enlightenment you refer to the 18th century movement that had at its base the questioning of society; then an earnest attempt to clear your mind of preconceived ideas and to try and look upon the world with fresh eyes, and the application of your reason, might do it. Again drugs help.

[M0G]

That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.

Well said Marcus. I am not waving the anti-drug flag. I have done drugs. I do regret doing hallucinogens but thankfully I grew out of that before doing any significant damage. Sure as shit watched others crash and burn though.

I have no problem with someone smoking weed on occasion or having a drink. I have no issue with medical professionals studying hallucinogens as possible treatments, be them ancillary or direct. What I find disheartening is how quickly people spout off at the mouth without having done any research at all on the given subject. Far too often those same people who are full of uninformed opinions go out and do something stupid and then seem mystified when the outcome is not what they expected. I am not saying that is the case with Liz, rather simply make a general observation.

Liz did make a statement about not having a degree in nutrition before she eats. I find that logic flawed. No one is saying you need a PhD, but you should study nutrition. Every person should have a working knowledge on nutrition and digestion. If you put anything in your body you should understand how your body breaks it down and and the impact it will have on the body.

[markuspoop]

^Obviously can't take credit for that quote. All HST on that one. Still pretty solid though.

[liz]

That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.

Well said Marcus. I am not waving the anti-drug flag. I have done drugs. I do regret doing hallucinogens but thankfully I grew out of that before doing any significant damage. Sure as shit watched others crash and burn though.

I have no problem with someone smoking weed on occasion or having a drink. I have no issue with medical professionals studying hallucinogens as possible treatments, be them ancillary or direct. What I find disheartening is how quickly people spout off at the mouth without having done any research at all on the given subject. Far too often those same people who are full of uninformed opinions go out and do something stupid and then seem mystified when the outcome is not what they expected. I am not saying that is the case with Liz, rather simply make a general observation.

Liz did make a statement about not having a degree in nutrition before she eats. I find that logic flawed. No one is saying you need a PhD, but you should study nutrition. Every person should have a working knowledge on nutrition and digestion. If you put anything in your body you should understand how your body breaks it down and and the impact it will have on the body

I am interested in the drug experience you had that you regret. Unless you feel it damaged you in some way that seems like an odd response.

I get terribly concerned with the uninformed opinions that are out there and many of them from governmental agencies and anti drugs campaigners. As a parent I have been very concerned that my kids received the right information about drugs and are able to make informed choices not based upon hysteria.

Personally I do my research before I try new things, I also clear the decks and plan for contingencies, it makes for a more comfortable experience (but that's just me).

Let's not ever lose sight of the most devastating drug on the planet by the way. Alcohol. We all know what that can do to us and still we imbibe it.

All things in moderation.

[ilikecheese]

Sveikas

[Calfium Jay]

Drugs are stupid. I watched a bunch of my friends do drugs for the best part of 1997 - 2005 and was constantly reminded by them, at the time, as to how "great" drugs were. Then I spent the best part of the two following years being reprimanded by (ex) friends for "not being there when we really needed you" when they were all coming down off various substances and experiencing withdrawal symptoms and the like, recovering in psych wards all across Melbourne.

Fuck off. I don't need you. Drugs aren't cool. A 3 year old can pick something up and put it in their mouth. There's nothing hipster about it.

[liz]

Drugs are stupid. I watched a bunch of my friends do drugs for the best part of 1997 - 2005 and was constantly reminded by them, at the time, as to how "great" drugs were. Then I spent the best part of the two following years being reprimanded by (ex) friends for "not being there when we really needed you" when they were all coming down off various substances and experiencing withdrawal symptoms and the like, recovering in psych wards all across Melbourne.

Fuck off. I don't need you. Drugs aren't cool. A 3 year old can pick something up and put it in their mouth. There's nothing hipster about it.

Your friends were obviously drop kicks. Don't blame the drugs.

[264zn]

So long story short; we don't know what the band took and when? Or if they continue to dabble while writing/performing?

I would like to think those mid to late 90s shows were just the band in the moment doing their thing without anything much harder than a few drinks and a smoke. But looking at their somewhat dull performances these days, it's hard to know if their just old and decrepit...or stone cold sober.

[hellboy]

So is the question here that drugs help with creativity, or that drugs are bad for you? There's not much doubt that drugs are "bad" for you (with varying degrees).

As for lubricating creativity, it would work for some and not others. Maynard is one it's appeared to work for. I'd suspect the success rate would be less than 20%.

[Calfium Jay]

Your friends were obviously drop kicks. Don't blame the drugs.

I have yet to experience one drugs story that ended with ..."and they lived happily ever after". There's no happy ending when it comes to hard drug use.

I'd just as soon watch a film by M Night Shyamalan than use drugs.

[iloveposters]

Baba Ram Dass got tired of the whole 'i need to ingest lsd or mushrooms or else i can't feel enighlightment' shtick that his good friend Tim Leary had so aggresively clung to. Baba Ram Dass and Tim Leary took getting high to a whole new level, only consuming psychedelics for months.

Anyone interested in reaching enlightenment without drugs should check out Baba Ram Dass: Fierce Grace. It's on NetFlix and YouTube. Very interesting perspective from someone who abused psychedelics for many years, although they did help him realize there was atternative ways of thinking. Tim Leary AND Baba Ram Dass both say that they learned more within 10 minutes of ingesting magic mushrooms than they did a lifetime studying psychology (they were professors at Harvard).

I no doubt don't dismiss the role of psychedelics in evolving the human mind. Bill Hicks doesn't either. But to cling on to that perception, as Tim Leary did, that drugs are THE way, is something I cannot stand behind at all. There are natural ways and alternative ways to drugs to find peace within yourself, expand your own consciousness, and to be a loving and compassionate human being.

Baba Ram Dass said that when he met his guru in India after he gave his guru the drugs he said something along the lines of, "Getting high only allows you to be in the present of Christ for a moment in time. Wouldn't it be more efficient to instead of getting high, to BE high all the time so you can stay in the present of Christ for eternity?" Of course Majaharajie was using the term Christ to describe to a Westerner enlightenment.

Smoley: That's interesting, because I heard someone say the exact opposite thing a few days ago, someone who's had a fair amount of experience with these materials [cf. Myron Stolaroff's article in this issue]. He said sometimes people take a very high dose and go out into the ionosphere or wherever without necessarily coping with the personal issues that they need to get through. It becomes an escape rather than a transcendence.

Ram Dass: We're not saying opposite things; we're saying them from two different places. I'm keeping psychedelics primarily as a sacramental chemical, for a profoundly spiritual transformation. I'm not interested in it particularly for psychotherapeutic uses, for coping, adaptive, psychodynamic uses. I would rather change the root essence of the being, and then let them figure out what to do about change, politically, economically, ecologically, socially, the choice is - and it's not your choice, really, it's your karma, your evolution - whether you're going to freak, freeze, try to hold on, become fundamentalist, ultranationalist, violent, ethnic, prejudiced, etc. or you're going to say, "Wow! Here we go. Let's ride this wave," and change is seen as a creative opportunity.

Then the question is, how big a change can you handle? And the funny thing about psychedelics is that a little destabilization is worse than a lot, because if you go out far enough so that you psychologically die in the process, then it's profoundly transformative. Otherwise it leaves you with a certain dread and fear and psychological instability, because there's always a place you pushed back. Either the chemical wasn't strong, their psychology. Psychology just doesn't interest me that much, considering I'm trained as one, it's just personality, it's not worth lionizing or reifying so much.

There are some researchers who are just getting licensed by the DEA, the National Institutes of Health, and so on to do an MDMA study with terminally ill cancer patients. Now I've worked a lot with cancer patients, and I've worked a lot with psychedelics, so I was a consultant to this thing. It was a double-blind study, it was all the stuff you do in science, and I said, "You can do it, but you're basically trivializing the use of this chemical, and the society is making it safe for itself not to upset its apple cart." I'm much more of a revolutionary; let's pick up the pieces rather than building it bit by bit. That was part of our problem at Harvard-

Jay Kinney: So would you have a more positive feeling about somebody doing Ecstasy and going to a rave and dancing all night if they were perceiving that in a tribal, spiritual context, than somebody who was given Ecstasy by his psychiatrist and told, "Here, do this with your wife and this will be a healing experience for your neuroses"?

Ram Dass: Well, I think if a husband and wife take Ecstasy together, that's great. I don't like giving something to somebody; I like being with somebody in the process. I don't like the alienation that comes from the doctor-patient or experimenter-subject relationship. So I would have a resistance to that.

In terms of going to things like a Grateful Dead concert or a rave, it's tricky. It can go either way. To me the deepest experiences come in a quiet atmosphere or in nature. Because of the unpredictability of the atmosphere in social situations, you have to keep up a certain kind of defensive structure that keeps you from going as deep as you could. So I find those not optimum conditions, and most people seem to plateau very quickly on the kind of experiences they have. They don't go as deep as they could. I don't have anything against it; I don't think it's wrong morally, but I don't think it's necessarily the optimum setting.

Read more at: http://www.mindspring.com/~bobby2/recen ... delics.htm\

In the recent QnA, Adam Jones says he stays sober. He gets high off life and art. Blair posted a few years back around 2006 I would like to say that the band and others had a picnic where everyone brought LSD and traded with others, kinda like a grab-bag, and everyone got really fucked up. When I met Maynard back in 2010 he definately didn't seem 'all-there', although when I struck up a conversation regarding his wine and food he completely came out of his shell and was eager to converse, and his entire demeanor changed. Prior to talking about the wine and food, I completely thought he was really high on something. This is just an assumption. It could just be how he is.

[hellboy]

I have yet to experience one drugs story that ended with ..."and they lived happily ever after". There's no happy ending when it comes to hard drug use.

I dunno, plenty of rockstars would probably disagree with you.

[liz]

So is the question here that drugs help with creativity, or that drugs are bad for you? There's not much doubt that drugs are "bad" for you (with varying degrees).

As for lubricating creativity, it would work for some and not others. Maynard is one it's appeared to work for. I'd suspect the success rate would be less than 20%.

I don't agree with the bolded at all. There is little doubt drugs taken in excessive quantities can be bad for you but moderates amounts of many can be beneficial, physically as well as emotionally.

Regardless of your view regarding the propensity of drugs to cause damage I see little to invalidate the claim that they enhance creativity. The nature of drugs is that they offer us new perceptions and can alter our emotional landscape. When we are able to express from this different vantage point how can you argue that our creativeness is not enhanced?

Nick Cave now maintains that heroin was holding him back creatively, Damon Albarn that it inspired him. There is little doubt that some of our most successful musicians have dabbled in drugs to varying degrees. There is a symbiosis that I feel as a listener when combining the two. They both are capable of shifting our chemical balances. Perhaps there is no creativity anywhere just a changing chemical landscape.

[Calfium Jay]

Yes, but at least rockstars have their fans and their millions to fall back on when times get tough. When yr unemployed, 35 years old, single, have a criminal conviction and most of your friends have deserted you because drugs turned you into an "evil, paranoid cunt", then coming down off drugs is pretty much as rock bottom as it could possibly get.

And that's the only drugs story that I have ever seen friends live out.

[liz]

Yes, but at least rockstars have their fans and their millions to fall back on when times get tough. When yr unemployed, 35 years old, single, have a criminal conviction and most of your friends have deserted you because drugs turned you into an "evil, paranoid cunt", then coming down off drugs is pretty much as rock bottom as it could possibly get.

And that's the only drugs story that I have ever seen friends live out.

Flippancy and more observation about your social set aside your experience is sad. I will observe that excessive drug use is most likely to be a symptom and not the cause of a fractured life.

My own experience is of mostly happy and successful people (in terms of stable employment and healthy friends/family relationships) that still go out and take the odd party drug, although not so often as we did in our younger days. Its a time constraints thing.

[UndKeineZwEier]

Where would be Lil' Wayne be without the gallons of cough syrup he drinks everyday?

[xZ1mM3r]

Where would be Lil' Wayne be without the gallons of cough syrup he drinks everyday?

He'd still be terrible. The drugs don't help him lol

[joeypants]

Our minds are chemical interactions. Tinkering with those interactions, IMO, is a natural part of discovery, both of ourselves and our world, and I don't envision a day when I will ever stop (I'm saving intravenous use for my 90's). There is no doubt that certain drugs (particularly psychedelics) allow us to experience the world in very different ways and the interesting thing is that this isn't limited to the drug experience itself. When new pathways are opened they remain open for at least a time and can allow us to relate differently to the world even when the drugs are no longer physically active within us. They do give us new perspectives and ideas.

The idea of drugs being a habit that Maynard may have kicked, is to misunderstand the idea that people have used drugs from our earliest recorded history, that they do not need to be considered a nasty habit and they can be a normal natural part of life's journey; as they are for the smartest most creative people I know.

Yep. I haven't done any psychedelics (unless you count a couple nights of massive hash intake...) or "hard drugs" (anything other than pot or alcohol) in close to 7 years. But I still "feel the effect" and reverberations of my stint using them in incredibly powerful and positive ways. They were a wonderful tool in helping me become who I am today, which I think anyone who knows me closely would attest is a far better person than I was before that period in my life. I did "the work," but I also couldn't imagine having gotten to where I am without my psychedelic explorations.

[xZ1mM3r]

Our minds are chemical interactions. Tinkering with those interactions, IMO, is a natural part of discovery, both of ourselves and our world, and I don't envision a day when I will ever stop (I'm saving intravenous use for my 90's). There is no doubt that certain drugs (particularly psychedelics) allow us to experience the world in very different ways and the interesting thing is that this isn't limited to the drug experience itself. When new pathways are opened they remain open for at least a time and can allow us to relate differently to the world even when the drugs are no longer physically active within us. They do give us new perspectives and ideas.

The idea of drugs being a habit that Maynard may have kicked, is to misunderstand the idea that people have used drugs from our earliest recorded history, that they do not need to be considered a nasty habit and they can be a normal natural part of life's journey; as they are for the smartest most creative people I know.

Yep. I haven't done any psychedelics (unless you count a couple nights of massive hash intake...) or "hard drugs" (anything other than pot or alcohol) in close to 7 years. But I still "feel the effect" and reverberations of my stint using them in incredibly powerful and positive ways. They were a wonderful tool in helping me become who I am today, which I think anyone who knows me closely would attest is a far better person than I was before that period in my life. I did "the work," but I also couldn't imagine having gotten to where I am without my psychedelic explorations.

i agree with the way the can positively affect you, however, its not a guaranteed thing. And they can have very different effects from person to person. Not against drugs, or for them for that matter; just stating my opinion.

[joeypants]

Also, there hasn't been anywhere close to enough research done on any of the common psychedelics to definitively state one way or another how "bad" they are for you. I certainly don't advocate their use for just anyone at any time. Many people just can't handle it, or aren't in a place to handle it. But there's no denying the positive effects they have for many people, and I know my own brain and body pretty well, and I haven't felt the first negative effect from any psychedelics I've ever ingested. Ever.

Cocaine or Opiates? Entirely different story. Not discounting the creative boost some artists have gotten from those things ( ), but there's no denying how awful those can be on your body and mind.

[BlindnCynical]

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

[joeypants]

Our minds are chemical interactions. Tinkering with those interactions, IMO, is a natural part of discovery, both of ourselves and our world, and I don't envision a day when I will ever stop (I'm saving intravenous use for my 90's). There is no doubt that certain drugs (particularly psychedelics) allow us to experience the world in very different ways and the interesting thing is that this isn't limited to the drug experience itself. When new pathways are opened they remain open for at least a time and can allow us to relate differently to the world even when the drugs are no longer physically active within us. They do give us new perspectives and ideas.

The idea of drugs being a habit that Maynard may have kicked, is to misunderstand the idea that people have used drugs from our earliest recorded history, that they do not need to be considered a nasty habit and they can be a normal natural part of life's journey; as they are for the smartest most creative people I know.

Yep. I haven't done any psychedelics (unless you count a couple nights of massive hash intake...) or "hard drugs" (anything other than pot or alcohol) in close to 7 years. But I still "feel the effect" and reverberations of my stint using them in incredibly powerful and positive ways. They were a wonderful tool in helping me become who I am today, which I think anyone who knows me closely would attest is a far better person than I was before that period in my life. I did "the work," but I also couldn't imagine having gotten to where I am without my psychedelic explorations.

i agree with the way the can positively affect you, however, its not a guaranteed thing. And they can have very different effects from person to person. Not against drugs, or for them for that matter; just stating my opinion.

Oh god, totally. It's not a guaranteed thing at all. In fact, if you haven't done any "research" or searching of your own (trying hard to not use too much hippy-dippy bullshit lingo here...), I can almost guarantee you that you'd come out of a mushroom or lsd trip with little more than a case of the giggles and some stories that only you and your friends will find interesting.*

For me (and most others based on what I've read and heard over the years), it is a tool to forcefully open new perspectives. They will grab you by the hand and show you new perspectives on everything whether you want to see them or not. Gaining new perspective is a powerful thing, and an important one. Traveling the world is one way to gain one very important kind of perspective, meditation is another, as is stepping outside your comfort zone in any way. Psychedelics are yet another powerful way of attaining new perspectives, and ones that you can't quite get with other methods.


*edit: some people will also come out of it terrified and raving like a lunatic. Buy the ticket, take the ride...

[basejumper]

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These Drunks are Wasted!!