Program Notes
Guest speaker: Lorenzo Hagerty
This relatively short podcast features the audio portion of a film by Tom Huckabee and George Wada in conjunction with “The Starck Project”, a documentary soon to be released. The short film consists primarily of an interview with Lorenzo Hagerty dealing with the introduction of MDMA (Ecstasy) to the street scene in Dallas, Texas during the 1980s.
The Starck Project
The Starck Project’s Facebook Page
VIDEO FEATURES
https://vimeo.com/67246327?width=800&height=600
/*
Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)
Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada on Vimeo.
The Cosmic Dance Scene
If you aren’t already familiar with the world-wide dance scene, this trailer will give you a feeling of where it was in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqb8B1p1wLk&rel=false&width=640&height=480
/*
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:29 ►
And, as promised, here’s a short podcast that may be of some help to you should you ever find yourself confronted with someone who claims that MDMA,
00:00:34 ►
or ecstasy, or molly, or whatever you want to call it,
00:00:37 ►
but pure MDMA is what I’m talking about.
00:00:40 ►
If somebody claims it burns holes in your brain,
00:00:42 ►
well, maybe this is something you ought to let them listen to, because, well, it doesn’t, as long as it’s pure.
00:00:49 ►
What many people are unaware of is that, while MDMA had been used for therapy for several years without raising much of a fuss, it was in Dallas, Texas that it first became a street drug in a big way.
00:01:06 ►
street drug in a big way. Somehow, although I had never been involved in the drug scene before 1984,
00:01:13 ►
I wound up becoming involved in the promotion and distribution of what was at the time a legal substance. One of the focal points of the Dallas scene at that time was the Stark Club, which was
00:01:19 ►
such an in-place that Madonna even moved to Dallas for a while just to be closer to the action there.
00:01:26 ►
So when Michael Caine began producing a soon-to-be-released documentary about the Star
00:01:31 ►
Club, he sent a production team to my home and spent most of the day interviewing me about my
00:01:37 ►
involvement in that scene. But since my interactions with the Star Club were very minimal, the
00:01:42 ►
interview didn’t dig up any sound bites of direct interest for the movie.
00:01:46 ►
So the time and expense of the interview seemed to be a loss.
00:01:50 ►
However, Tom Huckabee and George Wada, who interviewed me and who supervised the camera crew,
00:01:56 ►
took those many hours of me talking and cut it down to about 29 minutes,
00:02:01 ►
thus creating a short film that is tentatively going to be made available
00:02:05 ►
as a bonus feature on the DVD release of the Stark Project movie.
00:02:10 ►
And the audio of that feature is what I’m going to play for you in just a moment.
00:02:15 ►
I think that you’ll get more out of it, actually, by watching the video, which really is a lot
00:02:20 ►
more interesting thanks to the photos and the video clips that Tom and George added.
00:02:25 ►
But if you haven’t had time to see it yet, this short podcast will give you a little better idea
00:02:31 ►
of the history of MDMA as it found its way to the street. In the program notes for this podcast,
00:02:37 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us, you’ll find some links to the Stark Club project itself.
00:02:49 ►
And through those links, you’re also going to see some wonderful photos, videos, and interviews with some of the celebrities who were regulars there.
00:02:53 ►
And since you obviously won’t be able to see the film’s credits, I’m going to read
00:02:58 ►
them both before and after the interview in the place that you’d normally see them in
00:03:02 ►
the film.
00:03:04 ►
And now, Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.
00:03:16 ►
A Dogpaw Production.
00:03:19 ►
M3 Films and the Stark Project presents
00:03:21 ►
Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate,
00:03:24 ►
a film by Tom Huckabee and George Wada featuring Lorenzo Haggerty.
00:03:31 ►
Well, I’m Lorenzo Haggerty, and I was born in a small town outside of Chicago
00:03:34 ►
back in actually 1942.
00:03:37 ►
Irish Catholic family, altar boy, Boy Scout.
00:03:42 ►
My dad was a World War II vet, so I marched in the parades. I went to the parades.
00:03:46 ►
We had a lot of Fourth of July and patriotic events. I was pretty much a flag-waving American
00:03:51 ►
growing up, just like everybody in my age group, I think, was at the time. Well, I joined the Navy.
00:03:57 ►
I went to Officer Canada School and became a naval officer and served with the Navy in a destroyer
00:04:02 ►
off the coast of Vietnam. And while I wasn’t engaged in hand-to-hand combat,
00:04:06 ►
there were some things that we did, some missions we were involved in,
00:04:09 ►
that I felt pretty bad about.
00:04:11 ►
And that’s when my opinions started changing.
00:04:14 ►
I went to Vietnam with the Navy as a war-supporting patriot,
00:04:18 ►
and I came home very opposed to the war.
00:04:20 ►
But I still had a couple more years to do in the Navy, so I didn’t say much. I saw the
00:04:26 ►
hippie movement going on. Tim Leary was making the news with acid, and I thought, well, he’s probably
00:04:31 ►
ruining the youth of America with all this drugs he was talking about, but I didn’t really pay much
00:04:37 ►
attention to it. I was basically involved in being a naval officer, which I loved. I really enjoyed
00:04:43 ►
my time in that service, but I was gone
00:04:45 ►
all the time, so I didn’t get to see my family very much, and so that’s when I decided to get
00:04:49 ►
out of the Navy. Prior to my first experience with MDMA or ecstasy, I had had zero drug experience
00:04:57 ►
except for alcohol and caffeine, and never even smoked pot. I was a lawyer in Texas, and not only
00:05:04 ►
would I lose my law license if I got
00:05:06 ►
caught, they were putting people in jail for 30 years to life for a single joint, and I wasn’t
00:05:11 ►
going to risk that. In 1984, the spring, I got a call from a friend in Mississippi. He was a lawyer
00:05:17 ►
friend, actually one of my closest friends, and he said, do you know anything about ecstasy? And I
00:05:21 ►
said, what do you mean? He said, there’s a drug called ecstasy. Dallas is where it’s all happening. I said, no, I don’t know anything about it, but
00:05:28 ►
why do you want to know? And he said, it sounds like something we ought to check out.
00:05:32 ►
At first, I didn’t know where to look for MDMA, except I did know that my wife had a good friend
00:05:37 ►
who was a model in town, and she ran with a pretty fast crowd. At least it was fast to me.
00:05:42 ►
And so I called her, and we went out and had lunch one day and I said
00:05:45 ►
so Judy do you know anything about this thing called ecstasy and she had kind of a sheepish
00:05:51 ►
smile and said what do you want to know and I said where do I get some how do I try it and she said
00:05:55 ►
well I can help you there and so we arranged I came over to her house on a Friday night and
00:06:02 ►
she was rushing out on a date but had this friend come
00:06:05 ►
by who I didn’t know at the time and he gave me a little instruction. He just said, now you’re going
00:06:10 ►
to feel really good but you’re not going to go crazy or anything and so I took the pill. I think
00:06:15 ►
it was 120 milligrams but nothing really happened that I felt was happening that I wasn’t seeing
00:06:21 ►
wild pictures. I wasn’t going crazy. So I said, nothing’s happening.
00:06:26 ►
So he gave me some more. And hours later, I said, nothing’s happening. He gave me some more.
00:06:31 ►
And that was really a mistake because I had an over-the-top trip. And when she came home
00:06:38 ►
from her date, my eyes were strobing like that. And it kind of panicked her because she’d never
00:06:42 ►
seen that before. And she’d been music, or she’d left some music,
00:06:46 ►
and the only tape that she’d left was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors.
00:06:50 ►
And we must have played that two dozen times.
00:06:53 ►
I got so imprinted with that music that you can play that today,
00:06:57 ►
and I will flash back into almost an ecstasy trip.
00:07:01 ►
It really has an imprint on me.
00:07:03 ►
But I got tired of that music finally and she’d come
00:07:06 ►
home and she was worried about my eyes strobing and she went into the back room to do something
00:07:10 ►
and I wanted different music. So I started walking out. I walked out and I’m walking down the street.
00:07:15 ►
She thought I was going to get in my car and leave. But there was a cassette tape there that
00:07:19 ►
my oldest son had a tape of Kitaro, Kitaro’s Key. By then, she had taken some ecstasy, too.
00:07:26 ►
And so we just, the rest of the night, we laid there, and she and I and this other guy, just talking.
00:07:33 ►
And I talked to some about my Vietnam experience.
00:07:38 ►
I talked to her some about my difficulties in my marriage.
00:07:41 ►
I talked about trouble with my business.
00:07:44 ►
difficulties in my marriage, I talked about trouble with my business, and the two of them had been through this enough with people taking it for the first time that they more or less
00:07:50 ►
let me do all the talking.
00:07:51 ►
And so I just kind of vented and talked and in retrospect it was probably some sort of
00:07:56 ►
a therapy session, but it did change my outlook about things.
00:08:00 ►
I’d been under a lot of stress and I no longer felt the world was caving in on me.
00:08:04 ►
Everything felt good again. The day after that first MDMA trip,
00:08:09 ►
I went home and I, you know, by then I was in the thralls of MDMA still,
00:08:15 ►
you know, the afterglow, and so I was very truthful and honest. I went home and I
00:08:19 ►
said, you know, I didn’t tell you the truth. I didn’t leave town last night. I
00:08:21 ►
went over to Judy’s house and I took this drug, ecstasy. And, you know, the first reaction, of course, was not extremely positive,
00:08:30 ►
although she didn’t freak out or anything because she trusted Judy. She trusted me. She knew that
00:08:34 ►
we weren’t having an affair or anything. And I said, you’ve got to try it with us. And I said,
00:08:39 ►
maybe just you and me. And a week or so later, we tried it and it was amazing. We told each other a lot of
00:08:46 ►
things that were bothering us about each other. We just had a really clear and frank discussion
00:08:51 ►
about all the little things that after you’ve lived together for 12, 13 years, start building
00:08:56 ►
up. And what we discovered, and this is something I’ve discovered about that substance is when I was in the state with my wife that I lost my fear
00:09:08 ►
of being completely honest with her. It was like truth serum. I could tell her anything,
00:09:13 ►
and since I knew she was in the same state I was in, she could accept it and not get angry at me.
00:09:19 ►
And that next day after our first experience together, she was exactly in the same place I was in.
00:09:26 ►
She wanted to do it again. She thought this was really magical material.
00:09:30 ►
She could see with me that it was something that could actually change the world.
00:09:36 ►
Dallas in the mid-80s was a wild and crazy place.
00:09:39 ►
I mean, it was an oasis of money on the North Texas prairie.
00:09:42 ►
You could get money for any kind of business.
00:09:43 ►
Everybody was making a lot of money in real estate.
00:09:46 ►
I think I wound up having five cars at the time.
00:09:48 ►
Ecstasy just sort of was the frosting on the cake of a real exciting period
00:09:52 ►
in the business structure, the social structure of Dallas,
00:09:56 ►
because while it was a buckle on the Bible belt,
00:09:59 ►
there was a lot of repression that had to come out.
00:10:03 ►
It was so much of a churchy town that I’d go to the Catholic church with my family on Sunday morning,
00:10:09 ►
but I’d go to the Baptist church in the afternoons to make business deals and to be seen by the right people.
00:10:15 ►
Ecstasy reached a lot of church people that never really talked about it.
00:10:20 ►
My first trip to the Star Club was a real world changer for me.
00:10:25 ►
It was about a week after my first experience with Ecstasy.
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I was really out of place.
00:10:30 ►
I felt out of place because everybody was dressed up wild and they were dancing
00:10:34 ►
and they had this chill space that was real cold down this pit.
00:10:38 ►
And the restrooms were men and women, co-ed.
00:10:42 ►
And, you know, my little Republican conservative mind was totally blown.
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But it was the first time in my life that I thought, this stuff is for real.
00:10:51 ►
It’s not just in the movies.
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And there are some people in this world having a great time.
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And I’m not one of them.
00:10:56 ►
I need to become one of them.
00:10:59 ►
You know, I never consciously sat down and thought, I’m going to be a drug dealer.
00:11:04 ►
I’m going to sell drugs.
00:11:06 ►
I wound up being a distributor sort of by accident because I was so evangelical about it.
00:11:11 ►
I was telling all my friends.
00:11:13 ►
And at first, you know, I’d get some from my friend and sell it to my friends for the same price I was paying for.
00:11:18 ►
In fact, my friend in Mississippi, I sent him some, and his first response was, send me 50 more.
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I had some other friends that wanted some, so I said, well, I need 100 this time. And that’s when she said, you know, I need to connect you
00:11:29 ►
with somebody that can give you a discount for quantities. I said, oh, that’s a good deal. And
00:11:34 ►
I was a businessman, so I got 100 and I got a nice discount. But I decided to keep selling them at
00:11:41 ►
the price they were going for. I think it was $20 a hit at the time.
00:11:45 ►
So a little money started coming in.
00:11:47 ►
And then my friends wanted more and more.
00:11:49 ►
And pretty soon I was ordering several hundreds and multiple hundreds.
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And the discounts got deeper.
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And so…
00:11:56 ►
Well, the first time I met Thomas Crown, I was taken over to his apartment,
00:12:03 ►
I guess more or less to have him check me out,
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and we had a nice conversation. I picked up a few vials of a hundred, a few bottles of a hundred, and
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went back a couple times, but I was coming back and forth pretty rapidly, and
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I remember when I first realized the scope of what was going on was the day he trusted me enough,
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and we went down to the apparel
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mart and carried a big sample case like a carpet salesman sample case only it was loaded with MDMA
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and we’d walk in and go through all these places in the apparel mart and go into their back
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fitting rooms and all and get a bottle of pills and get some cash and walked out with a suitcase
00:12:43 ►
full of money and went home and dumped it on his bed. And so that’s when I realized that, you know, I might be able to save
00:12:49 ►
my computer company. I can get enough cash here to take up the slack of the cash flow I needed.
00:12:53 ►
And there were always rumors he was making a trip to California or he was going south of the border.
00:12:59 ►
He’s leaving town where it wouldn’t be any for a little while. But I never really knew the source of his supply or how much he was moving,
00:13:09 ►
other than I know it was a serious amount of ecstasy because I saw it.
00:13:16 ►
Even though we knew it was legal, we had an inkling that this wouldn’t always be the case.
00:13:20 ►
So right from the very beginning in our distribution network, treated it as if it was
00:13:25 ►
illegal. And personally, I had a safe deposit box where I’d keep the cash and the inventory. So I
00:13:33 ►
never kept anything at home. And that’s what most of my distributors did as well, because we just
00:13:38 ►
had a feeling things wouldn’t last as long as they did, actually. We actually had a handout, and we had a map of local pay
00:13:46 ►
phones. And so I might call this number I was given and say, I’m going to be at 17 at two o’clock.
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And what that meant was at two o’clock, somebody would call that pay phone on that corner, and I
00:13:58 ►
would be there, and I would place my order. And the orders were all in code as well. And so if I wanted to order 9,000 units,
00:14:06 ►
I would mention or discuss movies, actresses, or studios. And so I would say, hey, have you seen
00:14:12 ►
such and such a movie? That meant I needed to have 9,000. And the conversation would go on about
00:14:19 ►
nothing. And then he would say, by the way, I’m not going to be in town next week. I’m going to be in Waxahachie.
00:14:26 ►
And Waxahachie meant the Anatole Hotel.
00:14:29 ►
And he would say a time, and we added two hours to every time.
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He said, I’m going to Waxahachie.
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I’m going to meet with my mother at 2 o’clock next Friday.
00:14:37 ►
And so that meant go to the Anatole Hotel at 4 o’clock on Friday,
00:14:41 ►
and there you would be able to pick up your 9,000 units.
00:14:44 ►
We had codes for every
00:14:45 ►
thousand units, like 5,000 mention a city in the United States, 3,000 mention domestic animals,
00:14:53 ►
10,000 mention a newspaper. Now if you wanted 22,000, for 20,000 you mention transportation
00:14:59 ►
like airlines and 2,000 you mention automobiles. So you would combine public
00:15:05 ►
transportation and private transportation, you needed 22,000 hits. So it was kind of hokey,
00:15:11 ►
but it worked. I don’t know anybody that got arrested. The Anatole, the Melrose, Wyndham,
00:15:17 ►
Marriott, Stemmons, DFW Hilton, the Adolphus Hotel, you know, we went to classy places and you would always ask for a party
00:15:25 ►
who was registered as John
00:15:27 ►
Thomas Jr.
00:15:29 ►
and we would go up to John Thomas Jr.’s
00:15:31 ►
room and hopefully if we had
00:15:33 ►
enough cash we would be able to pick up the material
00:15:35 ►
we wanted but it was all cash
00:15:37 ►
I didn’t really consciously
00:15:41 ►
quit being a Republican
00:15:43 ►
it just sort of faded away I didn’t consciously quit Republican. It just sort of faded away.
00:15:45 ►
I didn’t consciously quit being religious.
00:15:48 ►
It just sort of faded away.
00:15:50 ►
And it most likely had to do with a lot of the ecstasy I was taking,
00:15:54 ►
a lot of the conversations I was having with people,
00:15:57 ►
where we were looking behind what was going on.
00:16:00 ►
We were no longer just taking the word of the ministers and the priests we were starting to
00:16:07 ►
look at what they were saying and a lot of it wasn’t making sense when we were seeing things
00:16:11 ►
on a more spiritual level where we were actually trying to behave honorably toward one another we
00:16:18 ►
were actually treating each other better than we had when we were highly religious. I can remember one young couple.
00:16:26 ►
They were not quite 30 years old. They had just lost a baby. The baby was born and died like two
00:16:34 ►
weeks later. And they were in really terrible shape. And I knew them. They were friends through
00:16:40 ►
a friend at work. And so I went over and talked to them and took them on their
00:16:45 ►
first ecstasy trip. And I saw such, and I’m not a therapist, I was just sitting there to give them
00:16:51 ►
confidence that nothing would go wrong and I’d answer the door if somebody came. I didn’t do,
00:16:56 ►
I didn’t enter into their discussions at all. I just kind of stayed back and I didn’t take it
00:17:00 ►
myself then. But I saw the two of them go through such a healing experience
00:17:06 ►
over the loss of their little baby that I from then on I became even more fervent about seeing
00:17:13 ►
that everybody could have access to this because it seemed to really on its own with the two of
00:17:19 ►
them solve a lot of problems. So one day I decided to really see what this stuff would do. The
00:17:26 ►
kids were at school, my wife was at work, I was home alone, I took 1500 milligrams
00:17:30 ►
which is a stupid amount to take and it was really physically challenging,
00:17:36 ►
mentally, I remember having a bad headache. After that ecstasy didn’t work
00:17:42 ►
for me again. It was, it just, I burned out all the synapses.
00:17:48 ►
You know, during all the time that I was really actively selling and moving a lot of product,
00:17:54 ►
I never once felt like I was a criminal or an outlaw.
00:17:58 ►
I felt more like Robin Hood.
00:18:00 ►
I felt like I was doing something really good for people.
00:18:03 ►
You know, there’s a lot of laws I just don’t agree with,
00:18:05 ►
and so I don’t follow laws in Iran.
00:18:08 ►
I don’t follow a lot of laws in the United States.
00:18:10 ►
You know, I know a lot of people speed.
00:18:11 ►
A lot of people cheat on their taxes.
00:18:13 ►
This was just something like that that didn’t feel like a criminal enterprise to me at all
00:18:17 ►
because it just was such a good thing we were doing.
00:18:20 ►
And then when they made ecstasy illegal, I just kind of went over the top, I guess.
00:18:26 ►
I quit dealing it. I quit doing anything like that.
00:18:29 ►
But I felt like an outsider from then on.
00:18:31 ►
I felt like I’d been ostracized from the country that I grew up in
00:18:35 ►
because they didn’t accept me for who I then was.
00:18:39 ►
Well, the first illegal drug I took was still MDMA because they made it illegal.
00:18:45 ►
And I got thinking, well, I’m already doing illegal drugs.
00:18:48 ►
And a friend of mine said, you’ve got to try pot.
00:18:51 ►
And so we drove to some park and she got a joint out and we smoked it and nothing.
00:18:57 ►
I didn’t feel a thing.
00:18:58 ►
So she gave me a couple more joints that I took home.
00:19:00 ►
And it was two or three days later, I thought, well, I’ll try it.
00:19:03 ►
The kids are at school, the wife’s at work. And so I went out in the backyard and I smoked one and nothing
00:19:08 ►
happened. I kept saying, I’m not inhaling right. You know, I thought you don’t have to learn how,
00:19:13 ►
but I had to learn how, even though I used to be a smoker. And I finally got it and I got really
00:19:18 ►
stoned and I couldn’t wait to get in the house and call her and say, hey, it works. I learned
00:19:22 ►
how to do it. And ever
00:19:25 ►
since then, it’s been a very key feature of my life. In 1986, I decided I had to get out of
00:19:33 ►
Dallas. There were a lot of factors. The main factor was in the back of my mind, I was afraid
00:19:39 ►
that I was maybe going to be tagged by some of the people who were being called in by the DEA.
00:19:45 ►
And I knew I was a very minor cog in the wheel, and that’s the way they work.
00:19:50 ►
They take the low-level people, the low-hanging fruit, take us first.
00:19:54 ►
And I didn’t know that much except about my own organization.
00:19:57 ►
I didn’t know much going up other than Thomas Crown, and I’m sure they already knew about him.
00:20:02 ►
But I was a little worried that things would get dicey
00:20:05 ►
and I’d at least get hauled in for questioning.
00:20:07 ►
I didn’t want to have anything to do with that.
00:20:09 ►
My wife was getting a little nervous about it.
00:20:11 ►
She didn’t know how much I was doing or what I was really doing,
00:20:14 ►
but she knew it was kind of edgy.
00:20:17 ►
So along with the business failing at the time,
00:20:20 ►
I just decided it was time to get out of Dallas, and I moved to Florida.
00:20:23 ►
Well, once we got to Florida, finances were really tight. I didn’t have a regular job, had a house that was too big,
00:20:31 ►
and the pressure built up to eventually my wife and I got divorced. And, you know, in Dallas,
00:20:37 ►
I’d been doing pretty good for myself. I had made over a million dollars by my 40th birthday and I
00:20:42 ►
was feeling good about myself. I spent my 45th birthday
00:20:45 ►
sleeping in my car under a freeway overpass and I had been kicked out of the place I was living
00:20:51 ►
with my girlfriend at the time and things had gotten pretty bad. I couldn’t find a job. I finally
00:20:56 ►
wound up working as a legal secretary for a woman who, she was eight years old when I passed the bar
00:21:02 ►
in Texas and her hot button was to have me go out
00:21:06 ►
and get coffee for her and her clients so I had to really learn how to control my ego.
00:21:13 ►
Even when I’d hit rock bottom and everything had gone wrong for me never once did it occur to me
00:21:20 ►
that ecstasy or drugs had anything to do with it. It was all about me. I
00:21:25 ►
never, I still don’t think it had anything to do with it. In fact, if I hadn’t known about ecstasy
00:21:31 ►
or MDMA and pot and all these other things, I’d be a basket case today. They’re the ones,
00:21:36 ►
they’re the things that really pulled me back up. And I think I would have had that crash,
00:21:40 ►
whether or not I’d ever found ecstasy, but I was able to pull myself out of that hole because I did have some of these substances to help me.
00:21:49 ►
You know, it’s funny, when ecstasy got illegal,
00:21:52 ►
they called it ADAM a lot of times, MDMA or ADAM.
00:21:55 ►
And then they said, but don’t worry about it being illegal.
00:21:58 ►
We’ve got another one that’s legal.
00:22:00 ►
It’s called EVE.
00:22:01 ►
And I took a lot of E, probably for a year or two before
00:22:05 ►
I found out it was 2C-B. And of course, now I know how to take 2C-B, but we were again,
00:22:11 ►
we were taking 2C-B like we’d been taking ecstasy and the dosage is all different. Everything is
00:22:16 ►
all different. And so I had a real bad experience with E that I brought on myself. It was when I was driving a friend’s van with
00:22:26 ►
his hot air balloon to Florida, and I had a bunch of E with me. And I don’t know why, I was stupid,
00:22:33 ►
and I gobbled some of it. And by the time I got to the last 10 miles to my mother’s house,
00:22:39 ►
I was seeing quadruple, and I actually had no business being on the road. It was the last time I ever took anything and drove because I’d really stretched it.
00:22:48 ►
And so I totally abused it.
00:22:50 ►
I didn’t know what was going on, which is really why I’ve come to where I am today
00:22:54 ►
in doing my podcasts and things is to help teach the kids how to use these things,
00:22:59 ►
that we need some better drug education.
00:23:02 ►
Well, after I’d been out here a few years and gotten to know Sasha Shulgin, who invented Eve,
00:23:09 ►
I remember sitting around one time and people asking him about it because it’s one of his favorites, his wife Ann.
00:23:18 ►
And he said the reason he invented Eve is because he couldn’t have an orgasm on X, MDMA.
00:23:27 ►
invented Eve is because he couldn’t have an orgasm on X, MDMA. And Eve, which is 2CB,
00:23:33 ►
definitely does have a lot more sexual activity associated with it. But the way that Ann Shulgin suggested, she puts all the provisos out, it’s illegal, don’t do it. But if you are going to do
00:23:39 ►
it, take 120 milligrams of MDMA, and an hour and 15 minutes later, take 10 milligrams of 2C-B,
00:23:47 ►
and you will have a four-hour plateau on MDMA. And that’s really the best way to use it, I think.
00:23:56 ►
This is long after I left Dallas and got access to some MDMA years later.
00:24:02 ►
And I got together with some veteran friends in Florida.
00:24:06 ►
And none of us had really serious post-traumatic stress disorder or anything like that. But we
00:24:12 ►
were all still uneasy about being Vietnam vets we felt we’d been taken advantage of. And
00:24:18 ►
three of us got together one night and took MDMA. And I have to admit that it made me feel much better about the
00:24:26 ►
things that took place when I was off the coast of Vietnam. And the two of them who had been in
00:24:31 ►
country with the Marines, I saw both of them all of a sudden hugging each other and hugging me.
00:24:38 ►
And these were people who were pretty cold and had the defenses up. So if it’s ever properly
00:24:44 ►
investigated, such as Michael and Annie
00:24:46 ►
Mittenhofer are doing in South Carolina, they’re having amazing results with PTSD patients,
00:24:52 ►
especially Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraqi vets. About two years after I moved to Florida,
00:25:00 ►
a friend of mine gave me some windowpane. It was the first acid I’d ever had in my hands. And I held it for about four or five months before I got up the courage.
00:25:09 ►
And one day, kids were at school, and my then-wife was going to sit for me.
00:25:16 ►
And I didn’t know what was going to happen.
00:25:17 ►
I seriously thought I might never come back.
00:25:20 ►
You know, I thought I’d go insane.
00:25:22 ►
And I took the LSD.
00:25:24 ►
It was really good, good acid too.
00:25:27 ►
And I had just a marvelous experience. And from then on, there was no turning back. You know,
00:25:32 ►
I’ve used, I’ve never used heroin. I’ve never used crack, but most everything else. And a lot
00:25:39 ►
of things you haven’t heard of, I’ve used, I’ve gone through a lot of things in Sasha’s book.
00:25:43 ►
Before 9-11, I was involved in a
00:25:45 ►
study group where we were working our way through his appendix and trying them all out. So I’ve
00:25:49 ►
experimented with an awful lot of things. And I feel now that all of this experimentation with
00:25:56 ►
consciousness expanding drugs has expanded my consciousness to where at least I’ve convinced
00:26:01 ►
myself I’m much more aware of what’s going on, and I have a great deal more empathy for people who haven’t had the advantages I’ve had in my life.
00:26:10 ►
I went through a period in Tampa where I was trying to be an atheist
00:26:14 ►
because I wanted to so reject everything.
00:26:17 ►
And yet a friend of mine lived on the edge of town on a farm
00:26:19 ►
where the cows kept leaving cow patties where mushrooms would grow up,
00:26:24 ►
and he’d keep giving me these magic mushrooms.
00:26:26 ►
So during the week, I’d be an atheist.
00:26:28 ►
And on weekends, I’d eat a bag of mushrooms.
00:26:31 ►
And they say you can’t be an atheist in a foxhole.
00:26:34 ►
You can’t be an atheist with five grams
00:26:36 ►
of dried mushrooms in your body either.
00:26:39 ►
I used to get a magazine called Mondo 2000.
00:26:43 ►
And in it, I read an article
00:26:44 ►
about a guy named Terence McKenna,
00:26:46 ►
and he was talking about a drug called DMT.
00:26:49 ►
I’d not heard of DMT, I’d not heard of Terence McKenna.
00:26:51 ►
I mean, I was out at the end of the line.
00:26:53 ►
I didn’t know but one other person my age who was still using psychedelics.
00:26:57 ►
Well, four or five years passed, and I was sitting home one night.
00:27:02 ►
At the time, we were starting to work from home
00:27:05 ►
so I was downloading a huge file
00:27:06 ►
over a 300 baud dial-up modem
00:27:08 ►
and I didn’t have much to do
00:27:10 ►
and the junk mail was there.
00:27:11 ►
I started looking through it
00:27:12 ►
and there was a flyer from this New Age watering hole
00:27:15 ►
up in Rhinebeck, New York called Omega Institute.
00:27:19 ►
And lo and behold, this guy McKenna
00:27:21 ►
was giving a workshop there.
00:27:22 ►
So I had a lot of vacation.
00:27:24 ►
I was making a lot of money. I was single, no girlfriend. I went up to his workshop. And like one of the very first things
00:27:30 ►
he told me when I was talking, he says, you ought to go to Palenque. And I said, what’s Palenque?
00:27:35 ►
He said, well, it’s the Entheobotany Conference. Go on down there and check it out. I’ll be there.
00:27:39 ►
So I signed up for it. Went down to Palenque in January of 99, and I met the woman there
00:27:46 ►
who is now my wife.
00:27:48 ►
Six months after Palenque, I took a leave of absence from my work and left Florida,
00:27:53 ►
moved to California.
00:27:54 ►
I never made it back.
00:27:56 ►
I just kind of accidentally retired in the summer of 99.
00:28:00 ►
And from there, from Palenque, I met so many people who are now all my closest friends.
00:28:07 ►
One afternoon, they were having a lecture down by the pool, and I did some acid that afternoon.
00:28:14 ►
So I was sitting up by the conference center up at the top and looking down in the pool and watching them there.
00:28:20 ►
But a hummingbird came and got right in my face.
00:28:23 ►
It was feeding off of the banana trees there,
00:28:25 ►
and all of a sudden, Sasha came up and said, boy, that bird really likes you. What are you on?
00:28:31 ►
And he and I sat there, and we talked about being in the Navy, because Sasha was in the Navy.
00:28:36 ►
We had the longest, most delightful conversation. Shortly after that, the conference session ended.
00:28:44 ►
Everybody comes up, and they all gather around Sasha.
00:28:46 ►
And then for the next two hours, he was talking chemistry with the chemists,
00:28:50 ►
and I didn’t understand a word he said.
00:28:52 ►
But he could shift like that.
00:28:53 ►
He could talk to anybody about anything
00:28:55 ►
and make you feel like you’d known him all your life.
00:28:58 ►
Well, you know, I came across MDMA again after I got out here
00:29:02 ►
when I got involved in the rave community.
00:29:04 ►
And there was a lot of raves, a lot of dances.
00:29:08 ►
There were very few people using it as a therapeutic drug or in small groups.
00:29:14 ►
And so I’ve kind of made it a point in my podcasts and in going around to some of these festivals
00:29:20 ►
to spend time talking with the kids and encouraging them to get together in groups of two, three, or four and using it. Because it’s great to dance on. I’m not saying that there’s
00:29:28 ►
anything bad about that. But if that’s all you do and you’re not getting anything else out of it,
00:29:33 ►
these kids come and say, hey, I want to take this feeling with me back to work when I go back to my
00:29:37 ►
cubicle. And I say, well, you know, get together with some people in a small group and do it and
00:29:41 ►
talk about it. Don’t just dance on it. And you’ll be able to take some of this special feeling back with you. I’ve seen, just in the short time I’ve been involved, I’ve
00:29:50 ►
seen the rave culture really go through a lot of transformations. From the great big moon parties
00:29:57 ►
where there’s 20,000 people in the desert, to smaller raves and buildings, the inside rave.
00:30:03 ►
I’ve seen the highest form, the most spiritual forms of it,
00:30:07 ►
evolve into what is now known as the festival circuit, and it’s worldwide.
00:30:12 ►
On the West Coast, there’s some amazing ones like Symbiosis,
00:30:15 ►
the Beloved Festival, the Oracle Gatherings, things like that,
00:30:19 ►
to where they’re all weekend dance parties, but they’re outside,
00:30:23 ►
and they have workshops and massage and families there.
00:30:27 ►
And it’s evolved to where at midnight they’ll have a ritual and a spiritual ritual.
00:30:33 ►
It’s not just getting together and dancing.
00:30:35 ►
It’s getting together and trying to create a better world.
00:30:38 ►
And I personally believe that the worldwide dance community
00:30:42 ►
is the single greatest hope for our species. George Watto. Stark Project Producers Dennis Bishop, Michael Caine,
00:31:06 ►
Wade Hampton,
00:31:07 ►
Miles Hargrove, and
00:31:09 ►
Milena McKinnon.
00:31:11 ►
Stark Project Executive Producers
00:31:13 ►
Arthur E. Benjamin,
00:31:14 ►
Ruth Mulch, and
00:31:16 ►
Don Stokes.
00:31:18 ►
Original Music, Todd McLeod.
00:31:21 ►
Additional Camera,
00:31:23 ►
Joe Kerr.
00:31:24 ►
Production Manager, Gabriel Horn.
00:31:31 ►
In closing, I’d like to thank Michael Caine and his entire production crew for the opportunity to tell this story.
00:31:38 ►
And in particular, I’d like to thank Tom Huckabee, who directed the project and asked the questions that you didn’t get to hear.
00:31:43 ►
Huckabee, who directed the project and asked the questions that you didn’t get to hear.
00:31:52 ►
And a big thanks to George Wada, who did a lot of the post-production work and wound up making my rambling seem to make some kind of sense.
00:32:01 ►
And if you happen to be in the market for a boutique film of your own, I’ll post the contact information for Tom and George in the program notes for this podcast.
00:32:06 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:32:07 ►
Be well, my friends.