by Carol Brightman
Hard drugs had chased out the soft, as they had begun to do inside the Grateful Dead organization. "In 1969 and 1970, it became apparent that something was going on with the drug supply," Mountain Girl recalls. "Acid was getting harder to get. And there was all this other stuff around, especially cocaine, which was being touted by doctors like Dr. Hippocrates, Gene Schoenfeld, in the Berkeley Free Press. It's great stuff, they'd say. It's pure, and it helps you get through your work day, and there's no hangover." And Mountain Girl wants to know, "Where does this cocaine come from? Could we ask this question?"
With Paul Krassner, she believed that cocaine, like heroin, which moved in on the Dead some year later, was not necessarily coming by donkey back over the mountains of Mexico from campesinos far away. It was coming on 747s from Southeast Asia and South America, with the CIA. "They were flying it into this country, she says. and dropping it off to their informants in the inner cities. And it made its way to our scene right away, because so much of it went to San Francisco and Berkeley. And it destroyed our scene," she exclaims. "And it destroyed the scene in Berkeley, too. It did its job, boy, and it was like a bullet right at the heart of the whole thing. And it scared the shit out of me. I was sure we were being targeted."
"You probably were," I suggest. "You were a market. Druggies with a public who wanted to do everything you did."
"I never thought about the wider thing," Mountain Girl says. "I only thought about us; I only thought that we were being targeted. The bullet had struck at the heart of the band's extended family, which in a couple of years would be surrounded by "rich fringies" connected to invisible dealers who "started showing up on our doorsteps with big old sacks of this stuff."
"Hey, look what's happening here," Mountain Girl would say. Everybody's running off into the bathroom. They're jumping into their car or disappearing. They're not coming home. Dinner doesn't matter. Forget doing anything together. You come home, and you're in a terrible shitty mood, coming down from this stuff."
Mountain Girl has her own take on CIA drug-running at the time. She's inclined to think it was for the money, that it was this little branch that had run amok, she says. "They were down tinkering with these little wars in South America, and their agents got into the blow. And they realized they could sell this stuff and make money and fuel their secret wars, in Guatemala and Colombia, especially.
"Who were the dealers who were showing up on your doorstep?" I asked. "Not dealers," she says. "We never saw the dealers." Or at least she didn't. "You'd hear, 'Hey, man, wow, this is the new thing.' I tried it and hated it immediately," she declares. "It made me dislike music. It made me dislike my clothes. It made me dislike people. I didn't want anybody to touch me. It turned me into a horrible, whining Nazi bitch, and I decided it was not my drug, immediately."
"It must have been terrible for the band's music," I say, "because they weren't listening to each other."
"But it wasn't, no. They played faster and louder, but it didn't seem to affect the music itself that much. Besides," she says, "there were still enough psychedelics around that there was some balance."
For Jerry and Mountain Girl, the arrival of these drugs was the beginning of the end."It was disconcerting," Mountain Girl tells me, "to be the only one holding back in a room full of friends with whom you always used to do things together." All of a sudden, she was the odd guy out, she and Sue Swanson, who didn't like cocaine either.
Sometimes Mountain Girl would stay up all night with Jerry and the others and rap and talk. Then the next morning, she would say, "Jeez, did anybody say anything worth anything? No, nobody said anything worth shit. All this extra-powerful conversation lead to nothing, led to insight, led to no improvement in the consciousness of the people involved in it. It was just a bunch of surface crud."
So her half a dozen cocaine experiences ended. She lost many friends, but fortunately, she and Jerry were living with Bob Hunter and his girlfriend Christie Bourne in a nice house in Larkspur. Annabelle was a little girl, and she and Sunshine had a decent home life. Watching the kids play, though, Mountain Girl remembers her spirit sinking. In fact, she hadn't known what was going on at first, just that something awful had happened, and she was powerless to stop it.
"Cocaine is a crystal that wants you to want more of it," Kesey explains. You can have a hundred dollars of acid in the refrigerator, and a hundred dollars in coke, and you'll use the coke before midnight. You won't use the acid all year. You don't know anybody who's going back and taking these monster trips," he adds, answering a question I've had. Are these old acidheads still dropping 500 micrograms of LSD? The answer is no, though both Mountain Girl and Kesey still dabble with psychedelics.
And Kesey regards the right to use such drugs as equivalent to a woman's reproductive rights. "What's going on inside you is your own business," he says. Every Easter, he and his Prankster friends and families drive to the top of a little mountain in front of the Kesey ranch in Pleasant Valley and drop some acid. Kesey, who believes that the federal government made LSD illegal in 1966 after recognizing how it might threaten the status quo, also believes that the government sent in the "counter-revolutionary drugs," booze and heroin and coke, "to break up the community."
"Everybody who has been through the coke scene knows that all you ever care about is yourself," he asserts. "You're suspicious of everyone because they're out to get the stash," and he tells me a story about how Hitler and five buddies were into cocaine. When the war was about to start, Hitler was afraid the supply would be cut off. So he ordered some chemists to come up with a substitute, and the substitute they came up with was methedrine.
"That's where meth came from" Kesey states. It came from the Nazis. It's a Nazi drug. Everybody has used speed to try to get stuff done," he says, "but if you use it for too long, pretty soon you begin to become violent."
By 1971, meanwhile, meth and cocaine had turned the Haight into a drug ghetto. It had become a teenage slum with a soaring crime rate, something new on the American map, in that its inhabitants were largely white and middle class. Hard times had eaten into the salad days of the mid-'60s, when $50 and a little help from your friends could carry you across the country, Vietnam spending was exacting its toll on the domestic economy.
For while the troops had begun to trickle home, the bombing had escalated and the war had widened. In Berkeley and San Francisco, the curbside free boxes, where almost anything could be found, were emptying. The boomtime surpluses of the 1950s and '60s were drying up.
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