You might remember Ken Kesey from of his 1963 novel ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and its famous film adaptation. By the time the movie was screened in 1971, Kesey was already causing a stir among conservative Americans. 

Kesey was quite a piece of work. He was the kind of guy to whom if something was weird, he would probably try it. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for the testing of a psychotropic drug that was later to be known all over as LSD or just acid. And he just loved the stuff, happy that he got paid to do a fun thing like getting high.

For the tests, Kesey had to be kept under observation in a hospital ward. One night he crept out of his bed, broke the lock of the infirmary and stole as many vials of LSD as he could lay his hands on.

Fortunately there was no inventory list and Kesey’s raid went unnoticed. For the rest of his hospital stay he was perpetually zonked out of his mind and even on days he was not administered the drug, leading the researchers to draw entirely erroneous conclusions.

And Kesey? Yikes, he was hooked. Some say that he put some of his experiences inside that hospital in ‘cuckoo’s nest’.

Ken Kesey became one of the symbols of the counterculture hippie movement which began in the 1960s. By the time I became a part of the counterculture scene, it was no longer that ‘counter’. Hey, I had pot-smoking professors in engineering school. Everyone, including me, was stoned. While I drew the line at an occasional Saturday night pre-movie joint of Trichy weed, the other guys were doing pills like Mandies (Mandrax), Lippies (Lippitone) and Dexies (Dexedrin).

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In 1970s Chennai in southern India, where my engineering school was situated, you could get powerful ‘downers’ and ‘uppers’ over the counter fairly easily. All you had to do was find a bent pharmacist and mumble a phony doctor’s name to him which he made a note of and then charged a rupee a pill. An Indian Rupee, now a little more than a US cent, was huge in those days.

The go-to guy for pills in those days was a pharmacist next to Moore Market, a cavernous building right next to the central rail station, that housed hundreds of tiny stores crammed together, selling second-hand books, household stuff and even stolen goods. The pharmacist himself was a heavy user, stoned out of his mind on Mandies most of the time.

Moore Market doesn’t exist anymore, killed by greed. In 1985, a suspicious fire destroyed it. A tasteless high-rise building occupies the prime spot now.

Mandies and Lippies were very strong sleeping pills and the kick came when you resisted the drowsiness. If you took two of them, they could put you in such a tailspin that when you finally stopped resisting the snooze and let go, you ended up sleeping the next 48 hours, dead to the world. 

I tried a Mandy once but found that when I spoke, the words came out funny. If I wanted to say,’ lets go for a movie, man’, it sounded like, ‘leh wo foah yayy mooo, meeeyain’. After that one time, I decided that those kicks were not for me. Talking like a retard was not my scene.

Dexies on the other hand, kept you awake. I tried Dexies too but just once. Boy, did they keep me awake. I was stark, raving awake. The downhill after the drug wore off, was really downhill. I slept for a whole day and I awoke I walked around like a zombie for another fucking day.

Pills were very much in the scene at college, oh yeah. Guys took Dexies going into class and Mandies and Lippies coming out of class. At any given time of the day, around half the population at engineering school were staggering around, zonked out of their minds.

I didn’t mind getting high on weed occasionally those days, but I had to be in complete control, sitting down in my own dorm room, listening to music. Bands like Jethro Tull, Jefferson Starship, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd were great music to listen to stoned. I definitely would not venture out in public where I might end up being a jerk.

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Here’s the thing about marijuana, for those who have never tried it – even the crappiest music sounds fantastic. Every tinkle, every note and every beat is embedded into the consciousness through some sort of osmosis. Lyrics sound intelligent and deep. If you are lying down, the bed will seem to float up and tip over after a while. Even the lousiest Sovexport-like movie will seem like an edge of the seat masterpiece.

But here’s the other thing. If you are tired or depressed or you are preoccupied with too many worries when someone is passing around a chillum of Kodaikanal weed, don’t go for it. Just as it enhances the good, weed will amplify the bad too and your trip is quite likely to turn into a nightmare.

Marijuana also makes you hungry as hell. It’s a special kinda hunger, not for a regular meal, but for stuff like potato chips, chocolates and such like. But if those are not available, you’ll want to eat just about anything you can lay your hands on.

And boy oh boy, if someone fishes out a Hustler and you leaf through it, marijuana will make you really horny. If you are with someone and she is stoned too, sex after a joint is just beautiful. You will turn into the world’s greatest lover. Yucky stuff that you wouldn’t dream of doing to her, will seem natural for you to do without even a single cringe. Even cross-eyed, skinny and bad breath will seem sexy to you.

Well, maybe not bad breath but you know what I mean.

The aftermath of a marijuana high isn’t so terrible either. In the end, after the effect of the marijuana wears off, you will fall into a deep restful sleep and if you haven’t had one too many joints, you will wake up quite fresh, without any hangover at all.

But here’s another thing – the long-term effects of marijuana use. There are many who consider marijuana a harmless drug. I do not think so. Besides medical issues such as BP, lung cancer and pulmonary problems like bronchitis, prolonged use also makes you lethargic and unconcerned about your future and at the same time, impractical and unrealistic. It makes you edgy, impulsive and easily excitable. It also plays havoc with your long-term memory. Marijuana is likely to make you a loser in the long run.

These days, I see that how marijuana is becoming more and more socially acceptable and easily available and legislation is being tabled all over North America, to legalize it’s use. Frankly, I do not think that legalizing marijuana is a responsible thing for governments to do.

Take for example, cigarettes. It might sound crazy now, but back in the 1930s, doctors actually recommended smoking ‘to remain fresh and alert’. Even ads seemed to suggest it. It remained this way till the late-80s when cigarette ads were finally banned. The ubiquitous Peter Stuyvesant ad on the back cover of every Time Magazine issue ceased appearing. So did other ads, some very interesting, like the Camel ad showing a doctor recommending Camels and the Virginia Slims ad campaign.

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Then there was hooch.

Back in the 1970s, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu where my engineering school is situated, was dry. Regular liquor brands were available on the black market but penniless college kids like us couldn’t afford it. Like 1920s America showed us, soon as the prohibition began in 1972, we had our own Al Capones and Dutch Schulzes and a bootleg liquor called Arak began to flow freely.

Just outside the Velacherry gates of my college was a sprawling village that had a hooch den. It was a ten by ten wooden platform in the center of a clearing in the palm trees. On it in one corner sat a massive lady with huge jugs and she had a look that said ‘you get outa line by even a micro-inch and you’ll get your butt kicked out of this joint’. She had a massive drum on the ground by her side, from which she ladled out glassfuls of the stuff to her customers.

Everybody called the woman Amma (mother, in Tamil). She operated the den under a single light bulb that was connected by a long wire that snaked overhead supported by branches and palm fronds to a nearby hut that had electricity. The lamp threw long scary shadows. 

Scrawny, inebriated villagers staggered up to the woman with their hands clasped together in supplication, imploring her for one last slug for the road, signaling that they had run out of cash. For her financial well-being, Amma was mandated to keeping them hooked but she decided who could have one more and who could not.

Students like us were given the red carpet treatment by Amma. To Amma, we were the elite and she felt legitimized and honored by our presence. Rickety steel chairs were hurriedly arranged for us and we were served the Arak in glasses that had been equally hastily washed in a nearby stream, whose water didn’t exactly originate in a Swiss mountain spring.

Twenty pairs of drunken eyes then watched us spellbound and clapped loudly as we downed the stuff. If one of us made a face like a grimace, there was raucous laughter all around.

The liquor was colorless and if you looked closely, you could see stuff floating and some of the stuff even swimming on their own propulsion. If you were desperate to get high as we sometimes were, then you closed your eyes, took a deep breath and downed it in one shot.

I am lucky to be alive and disease-free, honest.

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But in all this mad scramble to get high, there never was any of the real hard stuff like LSD, crack or heroin going around in our college dorms. At least not in my time there. Thank the Lord or I would have tried that too and who knows, I might have gotten hooked.

Eventually after five short years of bliss, merriment and the occasional stoned groping of girls from Stella Maris in darkened cinema halls (whose narration shall have to wait for another post), I graduated with a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with honors. I recognized that I had to earn a living and I left all the stuff we got high with, behind. Thereafter I touched only beer occasionally. No, make that every weekend, in generous amounts, untill June 2014, at which point I stopped even the beer. I am now a teetoatlah. Yay.

What made me pull back from the brink of addiction while so many of my classmates succumbed, one even plunging to his death when he climbed out on a 3rd floor window ledge of our dorm completely stoned, lost his footing and fell out head-first? I had had a tumultuous childhood that at times, looked like a train wreck. I had very little time for an ‘upbringing’ like most other kids had. By 12, I was in a harsh boarding school environment, tortured, bullied, victimized and forgotten. If anyone had to rebel and implode, it should have been me.

But I came through. I think that it had a lot to do with my keeping my wits together and the company I kept in college, the circle of friends I had who matured with me through engineering school. Like me, they all experimented, got high but knew when was enough, caught themselves before going overboard and we all made it through.

Like the Virginia Slims girl – I’ve come a long way, baby.

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The title is from “I got stoned and I missed it” , a Dr Hook number and in case youre interested, here’s the YouTube link…