Howard Marks - Former drug smuggler, intelligence servoce 'assett', now author and performer

"Even John Esam, one of the beat poets who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall’s Wholly Communion, graced the premises with his presence. He turned up unannounced in my room and offered to sell me some LSD, which I had never heard of. Each dose was in the form of a sugar cube. The cost of each treated sugar cube was £3. John Esam told me it was like hashish, but infinitely more powerful and not in the least bit illegal. He was telling the truth on both counts. I purchased a few cubes and stored them away for use on another day. I made enquiries among my firneds. A few had heard of LSD, but none had taken it nor knew anyone who had. It was all very mysterious. Someone said that LSD was like mescaline, which Aldous Huxley had written about. Someone else said that a Harvard scientist, Timothy Leary, had experimented with LSD and written about it.

About a week or so later, I was invited by Frances Lincoln, a vivacious Somerville student, to come to her rooms for tea. On the strangest of impulses, I decided that this would be an opportune moment to take one of the sugar cubes, and I ate on about an hour or so before my appointment. No discernable effect had occurred by the time I left Balliol, and when I reached Somerville I concluded that I must have been well and truly conned into the purchase of this so-called wonder drug. Halfway through eating my teacake, the effects suddenly hit me. The pictures on the wall came to life, the flowers in the vases breathed heavily and rhythmically, and the Rolling Stones record that was being played sounded like a Handelian heavenly choir singing to the accompaniment of African tribal drumming. It was impossible to explain to Frances what was happening inside my head, but she was politely intrigued by my descriptions. When the four Beatles on the front of the album cover of Please Please Me jumped up and played, I said I ought to leave. Frances escorted me back to Balliol and left me at the front gate. I wandered around the quads and the Junior Common Room in a giggling stupor. Fellow students were used to seeing me in various states of intoxication, and I doubt if my condition occasioned any alarm. At about midnight, a full eight hours after ingesting the sugar cube, the effects wore off, and I went to bed. The next few weeks, spent partly in Oxford and partly in Wales, were devoted to finishing off the sugar cubes. Several friends joined me in this experimentation. John Esam came again, and I purchased more sugar cubes. I took one which resulted in what came to be generally known as the ‘horrors’. These are extremely difficult to describe. Instead of finding the LSD experience an amusing, interesting, thought-provoking state of instant Zen, replete with benign and wondrous hallucinations, one finds it frightening and grave, and one experiences instant psychosis. Flowers no longer gently breathe. They turn into werewolves and bats/ The hallucinations turn into menacing demons. It’s not funny, and I became uncharacteristically depressed and perturbed about the meaning of life, its futility and my identity. Although the severe effects wore off after the usual time period, the problems they caused remained. I was convinced that then only way to resolve these problems was to take more LSD to try to come to grip with whatever was disturbing me. This didn’t work. The ‘horrors’ continued to manifest themselves in diverse forms.

Between acid trips I read anything I though remotely relevant to the LSD experience: Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Doors of Perception, and Island; Evan Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Sidney Cohen’s Drugs of Hallucination; and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. None of these did anything to dispel the intense depression I was suffering. I became unusually introverted, morose, suicidal, and probably crazy. My miserable demeanour did nothing to deter people from maintaining the almost non-stop ‘happening’ at my college rooms, but it seemed to have less and less to do with me. I just sat discontentedly in the corner, occasionally smiling weakly at whoever came in….I ceased being morose, reverted to my previous heavy indulgences in sex, alcohol and marijuana, and did not take LSD again for a number of years. Mr Nice: Howard Marks, Vintage 1998 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mr-Nice-Howard-Marks/dp/0749395699/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208289091&sr=1-1 ********************************************************************************************************************** Another view of Marks' meeting with John Esam can be found in David Leig's biography of Marks:

So Esam banged on the door: 'Hi, we've been told you're a groove.' His project was to sell Howard some acid. He had a pocketful of sugar-cubes at £3 each. 'What is it?' 'LSD. It's much stronger than hash. Impossible to describe. Like a weekend in Paris, but cheaper. I can get you as much as you like. I'm making it at home in the kitchen.' Howards liked the idea of a new high. He took a cube and went off to keep an invitation to tea with a girl in Somerville College. Then the face of a painting on the wall began to animate. The shadows started to breath. Waves of delicious physical sensation swept over him. When he urinated, it felt like an orgasm. Time melted. Howard liked it. The next time he took LSD, in his familiar room with the net, he got the horrors. Julian and Terry Deakin, who were with him, spent hours trying to reassure him. 'It's ok, it's just the other side of the coin. Hold on Howard.' 'I don't know who I am! I don't know my name|I think I've died! There isn't any difference between being alive and being dead. It's the ultimate reality! The horror!' He was screaming, and crying and whimpering.

High Times: The Life and Times of Howard Marks by David Leigh (Unwin, 1985) _______________________________________________________________________

Kenny Everett - DJ, Comedian, TV personality

I once took an acid trip with John Lennon on the Weeybridge golf course, of all places. John and his sort of court jester friend Terry Doran had just come out of a club called the Speakeasy in London...and the next day John asked me if I wanted some LSD. I thought, 'Yes, John. Anything you say John. Tell me to turn into a picked gherkin and I'll do it.' So we popped this stuff ino our mouths and ten minutes later I was wondering exactky what I was and wehere I was and why I was and was I why and who where was... John said 'Let's go for a walk,' and I remember it was raining very gently - the sort of upper class fine rain you could only find in posh places like Weybridge. It was very quiet and the air smelled of pine trees as we wafted along, dressed in psychedelic cloaks. We walked on to the golf course and suddenly a helicopter landed. I've no idea why and it's just the sort of surreal thing you'd imagine when you are tripping, but it definitely happened. Or was it a bird? I had no idea what was happening to my brain as the chemical worked its way around my untuored particles. It's impossible to describe a trip, but it's a bit like 2001 on toasta nd for a while you believe you've discovered the secret of life and the emaning of the universe. A few hours later, when the chemical has used up ten billion of your brain cells, it deposits you back at square one and leaves you simply bewildered. You can't remember anything about the secrets you've supposedly been taught while tripping because the experience is so far removed from anything your real brain can handle. It would be rather like someone from the twentieth century wandering up to a caveman and saying, IHi, there are some great things coming, you know, like colour television and the microwave oven and the wheel - the wheel's a round thing with spokes and it will help you get to places and make machines function.' The modern-day man would then disappear leaving the caveman scratching his head, 'Wheel? I remember it was a great idea, but I can't remember exactly what it was or how it worked.' LSD is extraordinary and interesting stuff, but not to be recommended. It was all just part of the times, and after the trip with John I experimented many times with the stuff over the years until I came to the conclusion that real life was actually just as jolly and much more interesting than any hallucination. A couple fo months after my psychedelic round of golf with John I was in the Abbey Road recording studios where the Beatles were recording I Am The Walrus.... When he got to the line about getting a tan from standing in the English rain, he stopped and said to me: 'Reminds me of that day on the Weybridge golf course, he Ken,' to which I replied: 'What'? 'You remember,' he said, 'the Weybridge golf course... the rain...get a tan from standing... oh, forget it.' I'm sure he thought I was a complete lemon... or was it a bird?

 The Custard Stops at Hatfield by Kenny Everett, Willow Books, 1992 (there are many more references and stories about KE and LSD in this book) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Custard-Stops-at-Hatfield/dp/0002180405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208695298&sr=1-1 *******************************************************************************************************************

Shane Ritchie: Popular TV entertainer, Alfie Moon in TV soap opera Eastenders

Talking of his days in a theatre company called Moonshine:

It was during my time at Moonshine that I tried LSD for the first time. In the spring of 1979 I went to a party in a flat above a carpet store and was given a tab of the stuff by a friend of one of the actors.  Some of the carpets were stored in the spare room and I remember unravelling one and opening the window, thinking I'd got myself a flying carpet. Luckily someone dragged me back from the window ledge and I never touched the stuff again. Of course, people had tod me not to do it and warned me it coul have that effect, but warning's weren't enough for me. I needed to know for myself what it was like. I needed to put my hand in the fire.

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