Mushrooms very often give users the feeling of being connected with the past and the future. Whether the 'shroomers know about morphogenetic fields, they do feel connected with the spirit of the woods, and everyone who has traveled before in the same space. Going up is the voyage to that space, peaking is the un-self-conscious experience of the new world, and coming down is the reintegration during which the essence of the peak experience is translated into a language or set of images a person can refer to later, at baseline reality.
Chapter 6
Making Connections
Distribution and Manufacture
For some cyberians, making sense of things and feeling the connections with other trippers is not enough. They use psychedelics to forge new connections between cultures, people, or even individual atoms. It is important to them that the real world, and not just the psychedelic space, consciously reflect the interconnectivity that underlies reality. Just as a fractal exhibits self-similarity, the psychedelic subculture should reflect the quality of a single trip.
LSD distributors, in particular, believe that acid functions as a twentieth-century psychic grease, allowing modern people to move their mental machinery through the ever-increasing demands of an information-based society. (Acid, unlike mushrooms, can be mass-produced, too.) Leo is an LSD dealer from the Bay Area who believes that his distribution of psychedelics is a social service. One of his favorite distribution points is the parking lot at Grateful Dead shows, where thousands of people mill about, looking for ''doses.''
Tonight's concert has already begun, but most of the crowd of young merchants who follow the Dead don't have tickets for the show. Instead, they wander about the lot, smoke pot with one another, and prepare for the concertgoers who will exit the arena in two or three hours.
Leo is well into his own acid trip of the evening (he says he's been tripping every day for several months) and sits in a makeshift tent, explaining his philosophy to a young couple who make falafel and beaded bracelets. While his rationale is the result of a few years in the military and a few others with skinheads, he does express the psychedelic concept of interconnectivity and networking from a modern cyberian standpoint. The Deadheads (who many cyberians feel are still caught in the sixties) are deep into a conversation about how they can feel their ''third eye'' while tripping, and how it makes them feel connected to everything in the world. Leo shakes his head scornfully.
''The sixth sense of society as a whole also lies in its connectivity and its ability to intercommunicate. When society becomes enlightened, its third eye happens to be that connectivity. That's the evolutionary factor.''
Leo tries in vain to get them to understand the concepts of feedback and iteration, and how they relate to human society connecting through telephones and the media. The bong gets passed around again, and Leo tries a different tack.
''I'm attempting to work this on a subversive level by distributing a large amount of LSD throughout the U.S. and trying to reach other countries, too.'' One of the Deadheads laughs, just liking the sound of breaking the law. Leo rolls his eyes and stresses the global significance of his subversion.
''LSD's definitely an interconnectivity catalyst for the countercultures and subcultures that we're tuned in to. We're able now, with our information-age technologies, to know about groups and countercultures who are communicating together and sharing common resources and information – like all you Deadheads living in this parking lot. As these groups develop their own identities, they gain a certain amount of awareness about themselves as a collective conscious. That offers a channel for catalytic tools like LSD to be exchanged, putting all these groups on the same wavelength.''
The falafel merchant shrugs, too stoned or too straight to understand Leo's point. ''I don't get it. Is LSD making this happen, or is it happening so people can get more LSD?''
''LSD is part of and a result of this interconnectedness. It's mind expansive and group-mind expansive. And what it does is act as a catalyst for culture and individuals. Now that we've left the industrial age and come into the information age, the rate information exchanges is increasing exponentially. It's very fast; you can look at it in binary terms. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two – that's how fast the information multiplies. What's going on is, the way people learn, is they cause an imprint in their subconscious, and then they're able to build a type of structure on their imprint which represents their knowledge. And how they see their own knowledge is their own wisdom ... it's their knowledge of their knowledge.''
Both Deadheads are lost now. The girl has started mindlessly unbeading a bracelet and the boy is reloading the bong. But Leo doesn't care that he can't make an impact on these people. He just continues to reel out his run-on sentences into the datapool in the hope that they get picked up morphogenetically.
''LSD primes the mind for subconscious imprintation – makes it more susceptible to it. We're able to learn more information at a faster rate because we're able to imprint ourselves at the same rate as the information is being developed, because in the LSD state you're able to conceive such a vast quantity of anything. When I'm on LSD sometimes I can think in broad terms and sometimes I even gain vocabulary that I've never used before and I'm able to retain that in the future.''
''If you gave us another hit of your LSD, Leo,'' the bead girl smiles, "maybe we'd know what you're talking about, too.''
This is where traditional, sixties-style tripsters differ from their cyberian offspring. The sixth sense, or ''group mind oversoul,'' to which Leo has dedicated himself (but which these old-fashioned-type Deadheads can't understand) is the locus of awareness that most cyberian psychedelic explorers seek. Whether it be Mariah in Elf Land or Leo in the LSD distribution net, the cyberian difference is that psychedelic activity now becomes part of an overall fractal pattern, experienced, in one way or another, by everyone.
While Leo draws the lines of interconnectivity between users and groups of users, other reality designers at sublevels of the psychedelic fractal network are more concerned with the lines of interconnectivity between the very atoms of the substances they take. Becker, Leo's LSD source, is a twenty-eight-year-old chemistry grad student with a strong background in illicit psychopharmacology. His experience of psychedelics is on a different fractal order from that of classical personal tripsters or even Leo and other cultural catalysts. Becker knows about drugs from the inside out, so his answer to any drug's problems lies in its chemistry. If a drug is illegal, alter its chemistry to make it legal again. If a drug is too short-acting, figure out a way to stunt the user's ability to metabolize it.
Leo arrives at Becker's attic laboratory discouraged from the Deadheads the night before. He's wondering if Becker can whip something up with better transformational properties than those of LSD.
Becker has just the answer. He spent all of last night creating his first batch of 2CB (in chemist's lingo, 4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine). ''It's called Venus, and it's a synthetic version of mescaline, with a few designer improvements.''
Becker's problem with mescaline, another organic psychedelic, is that it is metabolized by the body very quickly. By the time the user begins to trip heavily, he's already on the way down. To figure out how to modify the substance, Becker took a large dose, then went on an internal visionquest into the chemical structure of the active mescaline molecule.
''The native mescaline molecule is a ring. I saw how the methoxy group which hangs on that ring could be pried off easily by the metabolism, rendering the molecule impotent in an hour or so. By replacing that methoxy group with bromine, which can hang on much tighter, the drug becomes ten times stronger. The body can't break it down, and it goes much much further because it can stay planted in the brain's receptor site that much longer.''