Recently, I got very stoned. I haven’t been that stoned since I was at Woodstock. Or was it the first Glastonbury festival? Or maybe Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight? I can’t remember, but that’s dope for you. The curious thing is, I don’t take drugs any more. I hate getting high. It’s like your brain is seasick. But there I was at a party and the hostess offered me an apple-flavored, cannabis-infused gummie. Without thinking, I swallowed it — just as if I’d been offered a canapé.
As soon as I did so, however, I started to panic. What had I done? Why had I done it? Any minute I was going to start hallucinating and then take off all my clothes and do frenzied nude hippie dancing before falling to my knees and weeping and crying out: “Mother, where are you?” (Something like this once actually happened to me.) People at the party would be frightened. They would call an ambulance or maybe the police. Then the men in white coats would come and take me away — ha-haaa! I was freaking out even before the drugs took effect.
Then the voice of my young bohemian self said: “For heaven’s sake, relax! Can’t you just let your hair down and have a little fun for once, you old square? You’ve become so uptight and boring. Go wild! You’re such a puritanical wuss. Do you think Keith Richards goes, ‘Oh dear me I’ve done a gummie! Mick, help me please!’ Cosmo, what harm can one little gummie do?”
I found out about forty minutes later when a friend who had also eaten one passed out and fell to the floor, head first. She was unconscious for a few minutes. I discovered another gummie guy sitting on his own in a dark room staring intensely at his feet, quivering with paranoia. By now the stoned hostess had gone to bed, unable to string a coherent sentence together. And me? I felt as if I was about to pass out too. Someone later told me I ran out of the party yelling: “Help! I’m going to die!”
I had a very bohemian druggy adolescence. My parents were old bohemians. For Christmas they regularly gave my brother and me a lump of hashish, cigarette papers and a packet of cigarettes. As a family we’d get stoned and watch the Christmas edition of Top of the Pops.
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Cosmo Landesman
