From: tnf@well.sf.ca.us (David Gans)
Subject: Re: Interview with Owsley
Summary:  (part 2)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 22:45:12 GMT

(part 2)

The following is an excerpt from _Conversations with the Dead_ by David Gans,
published September '91 by Citadel Press.

As far as I know it is the only interview Owsley has ever granted and allowed
to be published.


BEAR (Owsley Stanley) - Oakland, California, January 13, 1991


Bear:  Kesey was the kind of guy that reached out, took your knobs, and
tweaked them all the way to 10.  All of them.  And the whole scene was running
at 10 all the time.  It was almost as sudden, and as different, as discovering
psychedelics themselves for the first time, at another level.

Q:  I would venture to say, then, that the social aspect of it - the
collective acid experience - probably was part of the eye-opener there, right?
I mean, everybody was tripping together, and in on the joke together, or in on
the multiple jokes?

Bear:  I think it was more than that.  They did specific things.  They made
specific sounds.  They did specific stuff.  They'd loop tape machines together
and do delays and get reverberation, the sound reinforcing itself.  There's a
certain persistence - like when you're really high and move your hand, you get
a smear.  Well, there's also other kinds of persistence, and they reinforced
all these things. 
   It seemed as though they had rediscovered something from ancient ways and
ancient times.  A lot of the music that's used in shamanic rituals does the
same thing, which we discovered later, but this totally came up in isolation.
None of these people in Kesey's scene had any roots in the shamanistic rituals
at all.  That was the other group of people that I'd run into every so often,
that were more into those things.  The Millbrook guys, [Oscar] Janiger [now
head of the Albert Hofmann Foundation], all those guys.  They were more into
that. [I don't know] whether they actually got into the rituals or not,
because I just had some contacts with them - you know, take a few trips with
them, and that sort of thing - but I didn't follow that line, didn't go down,
never went to an Indian peyote meeting, although I've always had the desire to
do so.  And I never went to a curandero in Mexico with the mushrooms or any of
those things. So I've never actually seen it. But from the best that I can
figure out, all those rituals contained a lot of the elements which the
Pranksters discovered, or rediscovered, or invented, or something.

[...]

Bear:  For a long time, it was like no matter whatever else we were doing, we
had to be at the Acid Test every week. That was it. No matter what other shows
we did, or anything else, Saturday night we were there.  Other than that, I
don't know how many of those I would have gone to. I didn't actually think of
myself as a Prankster per se.  I found it all kind of scary, and every time,
it provided days and days and days of sorting it out and putting it together,
trying to get it together.  It was sort of like a crash course in how to
become a jet pilot when you had never seen a jet before.  The way they did it
was they dropped you in there, took you up, and said, "The controls are
yours!" [maniacal laugh]  Whoa!  Barrel rolls!  Immelmans!  Tailspins!  Right
into the ground, some times.  But psychically you recover from all this, I
guess, if you're tough.  I guess most of us were.  Occasionally some people
weren't; it's unfortunate.  But because of the way in which it was undertaken
in those days, and the fact that we used to take huge amounts of acid - we
used to take 250, 300 mikes or more; Kesey preferred 400 or more.  Albert
Hofmann told me that was a substantial overdose, and I said, "Yes, in
retrospect, I realize it was, but..."

Q:  What do you consider an optimum dose?

Bear:  Oh, I don't know. People nowadays seem to take around 100, 150,
something like that. They call 'em disco hits, I think.... All I know is that
the result is that people - it's like first you have training wheels on your
bike before you get the 1000-cc Yamaha.  It's a little different effect, and
the result is that people don't get so crazy, I guess.  But in those days
everybody got kind of crazy, and some people crash landed and other people
managed to make it further down the road, but the whole scene became very,
very, very loud and very weird, and it attracted a lot of attention.  It
attracted a lot of social concern, because a lot of people were experimenting
with radically different social matrices which were frightening to our
cultural leaders and societal leaders.  The police and the legislatures and
the business community - basically the people who were concerned with
maintaining a stable society - saw this as a very threatening and frightening
phenomenon.  A lot of people acting very weird and doing things that just
didn't fit.  They passed a lot of laws against it and tried to suppress it in
various ways.
   Whether or not the psychedelics would have been included in the basic
matrix of anti-drug laws or not without the heavy influence of some people
like Art Linkletter, I doubt.

Q:  That story about his daughter's suicide -

Bear:  I heard that she was not on [LSD], but just the fact that she had been
taking it was enough. Somewhere in the past, she had taken it.

Q:  There were a lot of bogus stories like that. "People went blind staring at
the sun!"  

Bear:  Chromosome damage!

Q:  There were scientists ready to cough up all this crap to suit the
political agenda. We still see that.

Bear:  Sure, we were taking large doses, because that's what we thought was
the right amount.  Some people were psychically crashing into walls.  Nobody
knew about it.  We didn't come with a shaman, with a thousand years or ten
thousand years or a hundred thousand years of traditions and a ring of people
holding your hand to show you the right way to go.  It's not something that
you started at puberty with.  It's something, all of a sudden, bang! you're
shot from a cannon.  And some people had a little problem with it, and so some
people did themselves in when they weren't on it, some people accidentally
died when they were on it - hey, I can't justify that stuff.  I didn't know
any more than anyone else, right?  All I knew was that it was better to take a
known substance in a known quantity than an unknown mixture of who-knows-what
at God-knows-what quantity.  That was the only difference.
   I didn't advocate it; I never told anybody to go out and take it, or 
anything else, but I knew I wanted to.  I knew it was important to me.
And I didn't want to poison myself, I didn't like Russian roulette with
chemicals.  I didn't think it was appropriate.

Q:  I would say, then, that what you were doing was essentially taking
responsibility for it, for yourself and for your partners.

Bear:  You might say.  It's one way of looking at it.  It was all a matter of
consent at that point.  But the fact is that out in the culture as a whole,
all kinds of bizarre things were happening.
   In fact, it bothered me.  I didn't know for a long time whether it was a
good thing or a bad thing.  Eventually I realized that the psychedelic itself
was neither good nor bad, any more than a very sharp knife is good or bad.
You can use a knife to whittle a sculpture, you can use it to trim your nails,
you can use it to cut up your food, or you can use it to stab somebody.  The
knife itself is not the operative thing there, but it took me a long time,
because of the fact that it's so powerful and it changes consciousness so
much.
-- 

	David Gans	tnf@well.sf.ca.us
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