Hannah Lamb-Vines
DREAMS DRUGS + CIRCLES

I smiled on a roof in the early morning darkness. I was high on acid and coke trying to explain to my friend that you can’t blame any one thing on any one other thing.

“Everything is a part of everything, you know, so if it’s the acid’s fault it’s also the roof’s fault, and it’s the stars’ fault, and it’s our fault, so it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it is.”

There was silence.

“Denton is so boring, man,” I told my friend. “I look forward to sleep more than anything else, because my dreams are more entertaining than real life.”

He raised his eyebrows. Or maybe he rolled his eyes. I mainly remember what he said: “Pretty sure that’s called clinical depression.”

Before I moved to New York, I lived in a boring little town in North Texas. I didn’t have a job, and my classes were easy. The social scene in the town made me uncomfortable, so I just watched a lot of TV and slept. I was feeling a bit suicidal. I didn’t see the point in my existence. What’s the point of existing if everything is everything and you’re not doing anything?

In a concerted effort, my therapist and psychiatrist tried to place me on antidepressants. I was compelled to resist. Living like I wanted to die wasn’t exactly fun, but that didn’t mean it was anyone else’s business. I was tired of living my life so that other people wouldn’t feel bad. I mean, sure, I had sought help from a therapist, and I had jumped at the chance to see a psychiatrist about getting a prescription. Really, they were doing all of this because I asked them to, not because they felt bad. But a prescription for antidepressants? How boring.

I asked for Adderall.

“But you clearly don’t have a deficit of attention.”

I asked for Valium.

“That’s for acute attacks of anxiety. You need something with more regularity.”

I asked for a new job. It was a joke. The psych ignored it.

“Old people want to take medicine. Young people want to take drugs.”

My therapist asked why I didn’t want antidepressants. She knew I was okay with taking the limited store of Valium a friend had given me, and with snorting coke, and smoking weed.

“I guess because people don’t use it recreationally. I mean, nobody pops a Prozac to have fun.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said, and she didn’t say anything else about it.

Eventually I ran out of Valium. My chin developed a quiver. I was neurotic. I was depressed. I was labeled. I was at that point where I knew I had to do something or give up entirely. The one thing I hadn’t tried was antidepressants. So I took them. Instead of giving up, I got drugged up. And now I do things.

After the Prozac started working, my therapist told me that it was designed to make me feel normal, and those other drugs like cocaine were designed to make me feel nothing. I resisted that. Normal is not a word with which I’m comfortable.

“Okay,” she conceded. “But Prozac is supposed to make you feel like yourself again.”

Is there a difference between my “real” self and my “depressed” self? Which one is actually myself? And why does thinking or feeling under the influence of cocaine constitute “nothing” when thinking or feeling under the influence of Prozac is “normal”? If the only real options are “normal” and “nothing,” and you want to live but you can’t without a drug, who cares which drug you choose? 

I turned to one of my original artistic guides, David Lynch. One of “The Greats,” he is a part of a fluctuating list of creative role models who has provided both questions and answers to my life for the last five years. As far as drugs go, this is Lynch’s opinion:

A survey of his fictional characters suggests that he feels this way about depressants, opiates, and psychedelics, but categorizes stimulants—especially the legal ones, like coffee—as having fewer side effects, so few he disregards them as a damaging drug. I hold two images of the great Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle Maclachlan in Lynch’s Twin Peaks) in my mind: In one, he sits at a bar drinking a cup of black coffee; in the other, he explores a cave, flashlight in hand. It’s not difficult to transpose these images in my mind, to picture Cooper at a bar studying patrons with a flashlight or peering into the depths of a cave with a mug of coffee at his lips.

So there is one option, to equate stimulants such as caffeine with flashlights, lighting the dim recesses of our labyrinthine mind caves. Most of us would discourage anyone from entering a mysterious cave without a flashlight, or from attempting an all-nighter without caffeine. There’s no denying that the bright light might awaken something dark within the cave, but venturing into a mysterious cave is a risk to begin with. So is pulling an all-nighter. Like the flashlight, the coffee is hardly life altering and will probably make the adventure more productive. At what point, though, does a dependence on the flashlight result in losing oneself within the cave? Next time I watch Fire Walk With Me, I’ll pay special attention to the coffee habits of the characters. Surely there is at least one example of coffee abuse.

Not long after I had tried weed for the first time, and a few years before my first experiment with psychedelics, I spent most days on the floor between the cultural studies and Spanish-speaking shelves at my local Barnes and Noble. There I consumed Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent. The text is essentially a proposal, based on shamanic knowledge, that the DNA that constitutes all earthly life is a spiritual species that communicates with itself among various earthly life forms on a molecular level. This communication is imperceptible by the “sober” mind, but organic hallucinogens can reveal the messages of DNA. Narby describes the jergón plant used to treat poisonous snake bites; his guides explained that the plant’s pair of white hooks resembling snake fangs was a sign from nature of its virtues. In this way, the plant is able to communicate directly with a human, revealing information about the natural world to the drug user. Trippy shit, huh?

My friend Jessica knows about plants, and drugs. She has a garden on her roof and drinks five cups of herbal tea a day, which she blends herself. I never see her without smoking a bowl or taking a shot or doing something harder. She also cites a deep connection with Latin American medicinal culture. Her expertise is informed through both practicum and intellectual scientific study, and comes with an inherited respect for doctor-prescribed drugs; her parents are pharmacists.

So of course when we met up to smoke a custom-made blend of mullein, red raspberry leaf, skullcap, rose, chamomile, and peppermint, I turned on my voice recorder and asked her a few questions about plants.

“It’s not that western medicine is evil,” she said over shots of whiskey. “It’s just not necessarily accessible or familiar to some people. In Latin American cultures, everybody has their own curandera grandmother, so they’re like, ‘what do you mean I need [health] insurance?’”

La curandera, as defined by Rudolfo Anaya in his introduction to the coming-of-age-meets-magical-realism novel Bless Me, Ultima, “is a healer in the tradition of our native New Mexican healers. She is a repository of Spanish, Mexican, and Native American teachings.” I would trade my barely adequate health insurance for a curandera grandmother any day.

“Did you know that Panama treated a flu epidemic with elderberry juice? And this was in ‘96.” she said. I pictured those illustrations I had seen on macabre-themed websites of pointy-faced masks for hooded epidemic doctors and steaming mugs of red potion.

“You mean 1996? Like, when I was five?”

The masks in my mind flattened into the familiar doctor masks of modernity, and the mugs transformed into orange Rx bottles. For details, we pulled out our smartphones. Sure enough: in 1993, Sambucal (SAM), a standardized elderberry extract, was used in a “placebo-controlled, double blind study… carried out on a group of individuals living in an agricultural community (kibbutz) during an outbreak of influenza B… A complete cure was achieved within 2 to 3 days in nearly 90% of the SAM-treated group and within at least 6 days in the placebo group (p < 0.001).” 

Pretty much everyone got to feeling better again eventually. The “drug” just made it happen faster.

The next day, I rolled myself a short cigarette of the blend and smoked it on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment building. I’d had a cappuccino, a greasy burrito, and a donut, but I felt sober enough to document the “true” effect of the smoke.

It was harsh, but in a bright way—I assumed that was the raspberry leaves. The smoke tasted nice and distracted me from the laziness induced by my burrito. I strained to note some subtle difference in my state of mind.

The wind whipped at my hair, picked it up, and ran it across my cheek and against my ear. I imagined I was on a cliff situated above a river. The sun shone just as brightly in my fantasy as it did on the roof, and the wind whipped just as intentionally, if with a bit more warmth. I breathed deeply and smiled. The mullein was at least giving me the perception of easier breath.

“There’s esoteric values to plants that took me a long time to come around to,” Jessica had told me. “The same way people are like, ‘Ah, this crystal unlocked my consciousness!’ That seemed like mumbo jumbo to me, and unsubstantiated by science, but I’ve come to this point where I know that if you have any sort of talisman or artifact or something that you consume with intention, whatever the actual value is is not really important. It’s what you get from that experience.”

But while I might feel that the conclusions I come to while tripping balls are legitimate, and while David Lynch, Jeremy Narby, and Jessica might agree with me, if I stick to those beliefs I know I am likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill.

“I mean, I get it, I guess,” my psychiatrist had shrugged. “Look, young people don’t want to take medicine. Old people want to take medicine. Young people want to take drugs.”

Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1999.

Twin Peaks. Directed by David Lynch. Performed by Kyle Maclachlan. 1990.

Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

Narby, Jeremy. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998.

Sappho, and Mary Barnard. Sappho. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.

Zakay-Rones, Zichria, Noemi Varsano, Moshe Zlotnik, Orly Manor, Liora Regev, Miriam Schlesinger, and Madeleine Mumcuoglu. “Inhibition of Several Strains of Influenza Virus in Vitro and Reduction of Symptoms by an Elderberry Extract ( Sambucus Nigra L.) during an Outbreak of Influenza B Panama.” The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1, no. 4 (1995): 361-69.