A Really Good Day(52)
Do it like we did, I tell my children. Don’t waste that first experience. Save it for your soul mate. I anticipate that they will take this advice about as readily as they take my advice about what to wear, whom to date, and whether to get a tattoo, but I wish they’d listen to me on this one. Because your first time really should be special.
* * *
*1 ?Once, I picked up an economist at the Roxy and went back to his place. I’d use the word “pleasant” to describe the experience, though. Not “glorious.”
*2 ?This is in stark contrast to LSD, for which, as I’ve stated before, there are no verifiable fatalities.
*3 ?And, yes, I realize this is perhaps expressive of a certainly excessive if not near-pathological frugality, but I’ve always been penny-wise, pound-foolish. Witness the number of shoes in my closet, all of them bought on sale, most either a half-size too small or too large.
*4 ?I realize that for some of you the prospect of talking for six hours about your relationship seems like the very definition of a bad trip. If so, MDMA is not for you. Actually, I take that back: MDMA is especially for you. Hundred bucks says your spouse would agree.
*5 ?T. Amoroso and M. Workman, “Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy.”
*6 ?Off-label drug use is when a doctor prescribes a drug that is approved for treatment of one condition, to treat a condition for which that drug is not officially indicated. For example, Zoloft is an antidepressant, but it is also sometimes prescribed off-label to help men who suffer from premature ejaculation. This, I think we can all agree, is a win/win.
Day 23
Transition Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Fabulous. Truly delightful.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Adequate.
Work: Decent.
Pain: None!
Transition Day is a joy. It’s a delight. I’m nearly giddy with pleasure, though this has much to do with the fact that for the first time in over a year I am pain-free. My frozen shoulder has thawed! It doesn’t hurt! I still have restricted range of motion—I can’t yet buckle my bra in the back—but I don’t care. I don’t care if I have to spin my bra around to bring the buckle to the front for the rest of my life. The absence of pain is a marvel. A miracle.
Humans live forever on the Hedonic Treadmill; whatever our life experiences, whatever our transient miseries or joys, we eventually revert to a mood set-point that depends not on circumstance but on individual predisposition. Lose your legs in a car accident, win the lottery—it makes no difference. Within a few years, hedonic adaptation will take over, returning you to your personal set-point of contentment or misery. That is, except if you suffer from chronic pain. Research has shown that chronic pain is among the only experiences that have the capacity to shift your happiness set-point toward the unhappy end of your spectrum. This does not surprise me. If someone offered me a million dollars to go through the last eighteen months of pain again, I’d not only refuse, but I’d cram that money up the person’s ass, in low-denomination bills. This shoulder has not only made me miserable; it’s made me miserable to be around. But today? Today is glorious. It feels better than a million dollars.
Which is a good thing, since today I’ve been investigating an area of LSD research that is so outrageous, so horrible, that I have to find a tremendous equanimity to keep from spouting off like a wild-haired, lunatic conspiracy theorist. It’s all I can do not to drag a soapbox out to Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus and start ranting about a CIA program, run by Nazis, that gave LSD to unsuspecting citizens.
Instead, I’ll allow myself a little bit of ranting on the page.
At the end of World War II, the U.S. military set up an agency called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, whose mandate was to implement Operation Paperclip, a program in which U.S. military and spies fanned out across Europe, seeking German scientists and engineers to bring home to America. Even before the war with Germany had ended, the Cold War was in full swing, and the U.S. government was desperate not just to obtain the knowledge these men held, but to keep their ideas, research, and abilities out of the hands of the Soviets. President Truman was adamant that no actual Nazis be brought back to the States, but the generals and spies ignored this edict from their ostensible commander-in-chief. When confronted with Nazi war criminals like the infamous Wernher von Braun—inventor of the German V-2 rocket and dedicated exploiter of slave labor, who was personally responsible for flogging and torturing people, and whose program resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands—the army and intelligence services whitewashed records, expunged files, and erased evidence of Nazi Party membership. They not only brought the most evil of criminals back to the United States, but gave them the highest of security clearances.
Among the scientists brought back to the States were Nazi chemists who had experimented on prisoners at Dachau, using mescaline. The newly created Central Intelligence Agency, eagerly searching for biological weapons that could both start large-scale epidemics and be used to target individuals for assassination, found out about these Dachau experiments. Their interest was piqued, even though the experiments were, by all accounts, failures. Torturer-physicians like the Nazi Colonel Hubertus Strughold*1 had tried to use mescaline to elicit absolute obedience in their victims, to no avail. Nonetheless, the spymasters eagerly embraced these physicians and their experiments, and arranged for them to continue their work in the United States.