My Psychedelic Story

I was born in 1971, and grew up smack dab in the middle of the War on Drugs. Apparently, there were people licking the backs of postage stamps, going to the top of a 37-floor building, and jumping, completely out of their minds. I saw it on After School Specials.

Has this *really* happened? Maybe, but nevertheless, it became a part of our culture growing up. Poor, poor GenX! Stay away from drugs!

In reality, though, worse things happen in this world that aren’t caused by drugs. School violence isn’t new, and it affected my life forever, starting in 1988.

It was February 16, 1988, my 17th birthday. The bell that ended homeroom rang, and we all filed out to our lockers, ready to take on the day and get to 1st period. For me, that was Spanish class.

At 8am that morning, a locker was blown up. It was right across the hall from mine, about ten feet away. I saw a teacher over my right shoulder shove an injured student, Dave, down the hall to the nurse’s office.

I looked down, and there were blood splatters everywhere. A couple hit the back of my pant leg, and my math book had droplets on it (I didn’t notice this until the end of the school year when I turned my books in). I stood there, a kid, in shock, until we were told to get to our first period classes and wait there.

My home town sits 13 miles east of Buffalo, NY. There were more cows than people in our town. My graduating class was less than 200, and there weren’t even 1000 people in our high school at the time.

The High School was cliques and bullies. People had their groups, and treated the others like shit. Typical High School, nothing out of the ordinary, especially for the 80s. There were bullies, both boys and girls, but nothing was ever done about it. The older girls bullied me for years, and I only got through it by ignoring them.

There was one kid, Jeff,who had been bullied for years. He did the lighting for the drama club, and, like every other nerd or geek, got picked on incessantly. This changed in February 1988, when he decided enough was enough, and he crafted a mercury switch pipe bomb.

A mercury switch means that as soon as a heat source touches it, it blows up. Jeff made one and put it in Dave’s sneaker, knowing he had gym class first period. He had obtained the master key to the lockers the day before, with help from a friend.

Dave opened his locker, saw something in his shoe, touched it, and it exploded.

We were instructed to go to first period and stay there. At the time, I was in 11th grade. We had a foreign exchange student from Spain at the time, also in my grade, and I have a younger sister, Lisa, who was in 9th grade at the time. Our classrooms had phones to call each other, and I had to check in on them to make sure they were ok. Even though *I* was the one 10 feet away, as the oldest, it was my duty to make sure everyone else was doing ok.

It wasn’t until several hours later that we were released and sent home. Keep in mind, there were no cell phones in 1988. There certainly wasn’t an internet in that tiny town. But, as small towns go, everyone had a scanner and knew what had happened immediately.

I don’t remember the rest of my 17th birthday, because I was in shock. Was there a party? No idea! I only remember my mom waking me up during the 11 o’clock news and telling me it was Jeff. His family and mine went camping a lot together when we were little.

It wasn’t long after this that a friend gave me a hit of LSD. I was 17, we were in the very hallway where the bomb had gone off, and here I was, taking my first dose of psychedelics. She saved my life. (She is now a grandma and when I thanked her, she didn’t remember, but I sure did!)

I stayed home from school to take that first hit of LSD. I listented to “Damage” on cassette from Black Flag, over and over again. I watched my hand tracks. I laughed a lot and had the best day ever.

I started dropping (this is the term of “taking acid”) every day on my way to school. My HS boyfriend, his cousin, and I were always together, and this was how we started our day Senior Year. By the time I graduated, I had taken at least 100 hits of acid. I think I broke the stigma of “7 hits of LSD makes you insane,” which was another piece of bullshit we were taught during the War on Drugs.

Years later, in 2004, I took my last drink of alcohol. I had gone through a divorce, met a guy who ended up being a hardcore drunk, and I got sucked into it. My father was an alcoholic, as well as both of his parents. On my mother’s side, I had an aunt in recovery from alcohol. It runs rampant in my family tree.

This month, I celebrate 20 years of sobriety from alcohol. I’m convinced I’m successful in my sobriety from that first hit of LDS in 1988. There are more and more studies and articles on alcoholics getting help from psychedelics. It’s estimated there are over 30 million people in the USA with AUD (alcoholism is now called Alcohol Use Disorder).

The science is there, and it’s an exciting time to learn about how psychedelics help with many different addictions.