drugs

The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself. And do you see why I had to leave? As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself.

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.

Does not people's preoccupation these days with drugs, alcohol, medication and self deception prove that the truth not only hurts, but it is torture to bear?

Look, lady, I__ not going to bullshit you. I need to smoke enough crack cocaine to communicate with aliens. Give me all the money you got!

A gut full of heroin and the looming possibility of bunking in an overcrowded cell in Kerobokan to await my death makes you feel a bit sorry for some of the things you've done.

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

Evans turned away, did something with his left eyelid for the benefit of the other two. "It's got him," he smirked. "He's tuned-in from now on."Time started to slow up and act crazy. Minutes took much longer to pass than they had before. It was hard for him to adjust himself to the new ratio, he got all balled-up. When it seemed like half an hour had gone by, the radio would still be playing only the first chorus of the same selection that had begun a good thirty minutes before. Otherwise, nothing much happened. Vinnie was doing a good deal of muffled giggling over there on the divan. The stranger who had been sitting reading the paper got up, yawned, stretched ponderously, and strolled out into the hall, with a muttered "Happy landing!" by way of leave-taking. He didn't come back again any more.Turner looked down one time and a quarter of an inch of charred paper was all that was left between his fingers. Then the next time he looked there was a full length cigarette again.

Fortunately for me, I came out of ray misadventures with drugs and alcohol with my life, health, and soul pretty much intact. I know many who didn't. It's not harmless. I've lost many friends to that way of life. Some have died. Some have simply fried their hard drives for the rest of time or live in a perpetual chemical fog. I'm betting not one of them would say, "It was worth it.

There are lasting consequences for using drugs. I'll still be paying for my prior use.

Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.

I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, __hen I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

About a week earlier I had finished a book (on the Hell's Angels, scheduled this fall by Random House) and I felt that I needed about a week of total degeneration to cool out my system. To this end I went down to Big Sur and Monterery and filled my body with every variety of booze and drug available to modern man. For six or seven days I ran happily amok - spending money, sitting in baths, and futilely hunting wild boar with a .44 Magnum revolver. At one point I gave my car away to a man who paid $25 for the privilege of pushing it off a 400-foot cliff. - to Max Scherr editor, Berkley Barb 7/20/1966

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they__e willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.

I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.

Taking drugs is stupid. Why mess up your brain like that?