They call him Bruce
Mark Ameba discusses drugs, the counterculture, and the new
Millenium with author and psychedelic visionary Bruce Eisner.
Bruce Eisner’s expertise in the world of psychedelics needs little introduction. Author of ‘ECSTASY: The M.D.M.A. Story’ and founder of the Island Group, a free association of individuals dedicated to the creation of a psychedelic culture, Bruce has been a key figure in the psychedelic underground since the 60s, and has long been associated with luminaries like Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, Laura Huxley, and Alexander Shulgin. Island Group publishes a magazine format newsletter called Psychedelic Island Views and hosts occasional salons in Santa Cruz devoted to discussion of new and innovative ideas. Mark Ameba chats with Bruce in his Santa Cruz home which also doubles as the Island headquarters.
Let’s start with a little history or background about yourself and the M.D.M.A. phenomenon?
My history with these countercultural or underground scenes goes all the way back to the 60s. I joined the hippie movement at age 19, and unlike some of my peers, I’ve maintained a constant interest in the idea of a counterculture. I think it is kind of interesting that recently Newt Gingrich labeled the counterculture as the biggest threat to the Republican party he knew that existed. I don’t pretend to get into politics, but that seemed kind of humorous to me.
In any event, I got involved with the L.S.D. scene after it had already been criminalized. Back then, people would tell me that previous to being criminalized, the L.S.D. scene was almost completely different, because, well, different people were involved at the beginning. There was kind of a taboo against spreading the stuff around indiscriminately.
Secondly, the stuff was all pure and so forth, and so then when I got involved some acid was good and some was speedy. You know they called it speedy or whatever, and I was actually the first person to write about L.S.D. purity. I wrote a series for High Times back in 1977 to 1979 when I was a contributing editor. During that time, I wrote an article called “L.S.D. Purity” so I was one of the first people to talk about that. It’s interesting to see that recently on the World Wide Web someone wrote “A Heresy and Gospel of L.S.D. Purity” and the gospel is that all L.S.D. is pure and the heresy says that not all of it is pure.
Getting back to countercultural scenes and how the drugs change.
Drugs change as we evolve. There are actually in the brain hundreds of receptor sites for different kinds of drugs. It’s kind of interesting to how they got there. It’s kind of like a CD player evolving a hole for CDs without knowing what CDs are. So, I think they serve an evolutionary purpose.
> In the 60s, it was L.S.D. and M.D.A. and so forth that were criminalized, and it made things much harder. As the psychedelic movement became much more of a mass marketed scene, a lot of people thought it lost a lot of its original ideals and innocence.
> I had all of these ideas about how we were going to change the world and make it a better place almost instantly. Like we would have a huge revolution and just overtake everything. So, when the 70s came, a lot of the L.S.D. became not so good, and there was a big repression against the 60s counterculture and so forth.
Tell us about your first encounters with ecstasy.
I had been writing about psychedelics for publications like the L.A. Free Press and Omni since 1971, and in 1978 I was returning to school so I could work on my doctorate and research psychedelics. It was during that time that I was given M.D.M.A. The M.D.M.A. I had in the beginning was absolutely pure, and my exposure to it was amazing. So when I first tried M.D.M.A. it was actually legal, and it was mostly old hippies that were true to the psychedelic quest or psychotherapists or people like that were the only ones who had it and then somebody in Texas started making lots of it and selling it at parties and at bars and things. So then, the government got upset and made a big fuss about a research paper that had been written about giving M.D.A. to rats in huge doses so it was made illegal. You have to remember that the rave movement didn’t exist then, and after M.D.M.A. was criminalized, its use was actually starting to ebb. People weren’t using it as much then the rave scene started in England and Ibiza and actually moved here around ’89 or ’90.
How did you get involved in raving?
> About seven years ago, I left my doctorate program just short of a degree to start my software company, Mind Media and also to found Island Group. So, in the midst of all this a woman named Dianna Jacobson invited me to a party called Toon Town in a warehouse that was in conjunction with the Whole Life Expo that I was lecturing at, so I went to it and began to realize that the rave scene did have something to do with M.D.M.A. and that is a genuine new countercultural movement which has different values and different ideals than the 60s movement had. I try to distinguish those by saying the main focus is what they call techno shamanism which means to link technology and ancient techniques, but they don’t reject the ancient techniques, they combine them together. So, for instance, in your essay “Tribal Future” you say that the past, the tribal thing could be our future because the tribal thing had wisdom about it.
How is the new dance culture different?
Techno shamanism is one of the essential ideals and of course the whole dance itself. The rave dance is a spiritual ritual that has evolved. It’s not like the disco scene of the early 70s. It’s a spiritual ritual.
Why do you think this ritual is so important?
I was curious to find a reference by Aldous Huxley where he mentioned an interesting culture in the past. He finds that biologically everyone has quite a bit of stuff pent up in them, call it male aggression, adolescence, whatever. Youth in their teens and twenties have an awful lot of this energy, and our culture doesn’t really have a place to channel that energy so it gets channeled into
violence or other harmful things. He found that this culture had hardly any instances of violence, and the main reason was because they had these very rapid pulsing dances and really get it out all night until they were exhausted to the point of dropping on the ground in the morning. I realized that this was a new youth scene, and I’ve always realized that the youth scenes are always the leading edge of the counterculture because young people are so much more open to new ideas than older people, unfortunate but true.
How did things change when M.D.M.A. was outlawed?
Until 1985 when it (M.D.M.A.) was made illegal, I always got my M.D.M.A. from one source, and it was always pure, but they stopped making it as soon as it was made illegal.
For me it was like being thrust into the wilderness of people representing things as M.D.M.A. that weren’t. I was appalled, but I predicted it in my book. I said that if you criminalize a drug, all of a sudden people are not going to know what they are getting anymore. This is really a dangerous thing, and this alone should be an argument for keeping them legal. You talk about harm reduction, that’s definitely going to reduce harm if people know they are getting pure substances.
What about combining psychedelics?
I’m actually the one who invented candy-flipping. I invented it in 1980. I got the idea from a paper that was written in the 50s by Rick Fisher for the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs about how he would give Ritalin to people before he gave them acid, and the Ritalin would make them so euphoric that they would almost automatically have a good trip. This is sort of the same idea as set and setting as I assumed the same would be true of M.D.M.A. and L.S.D. Now, I don’t recommend that everybody should take L.S.D. because there are some people who should never take it (L.S.D.). Some people should stay away from it and those are people with a predisposition to mental illness or people who have a heavy need to control themselves.
‘Control freak’ is the new term we use in the vernacular. Control freaks should stay away from acid because the main thing is letting go of controls. Of course, ecstasy (M.D.M.A.) kind of helps that. Pushes it along in some ways so the two in combination are very interesting.
How is the government involved in the underground?
The government has managed to cut off the supply of good ecstasy to a large extent by making all the precursors to it illegal. That’s what they do with drugs, and instead there’s this huge flow of
amphetamines and heroin and all kinds of stuff that they have no way of controlling because it is so easy to make that anyone can get the chemicals. It seems almost to be a covert action by the
government against the rave scene, because they are cutting off the good psychedelics of the drugs that are beneficial, almost like medicines, and allowing the bad ones to proliferate, and thereby
destroying the vibe that was created in the early days. So what I would recommend for people who are interested in amphetamines is to read some of the books about them because they are very, very
frightening drugs.
What about the laws against drugs and psychedelics?
I believe that all drug use should be legal. I don’t think that it should be the interest of the legal system at all. I think that we should develop a new culture and a new class of individuals who work with these things the way that shamans did. I think there are an awful lot of things that need to be changed about our culture, and it’s really in need of major revision. Psychedelics just happen to be a tool for some people to expand their consciousness, get out of their old ways and so forth.
There was a guy named Hakim Bey who wrote a book called Temporary Autonomous Zone and that’s what raves are. What we need to do is create a permanent autonomous zone where the vibe can be put out like a beacon all the time.
What were some of the early forerunners to the rave scene?
In the early 80s when M.D.M.A. was legal as table salt, we would have these parties of 100 or so people, and everyone got pure M.D.M.A. for free. These were like precursors to raves in a lot of ways. Everyone would be all loving and hugging each other until they returned to their communities to start gossiping and creating bad vibes and other things that wouldn’t happen in their heightened condition. And that’s because the culture doesn’t reinforce the visions that people have on M.D.M.A., L.S.D., or other mind expanding compounds so really the culture is in need of revision. I mean, if you are being bombarded with all of this negative imagery all the time, it is hard to reinforce the positive behaviors.
Why is getting high so important?
I wrote an essay for Island Views called “Why We Get High.” A lot of times people want to get high but they don’t ask why. In the essay I go through all these reasons why people use drugs. In the case of M.D.M.A., I listed four. One is therapy as a healing tool for therapists to use with couples, repressives, schizophrenics, and so forth. The second reason was for people to enhance their creativity so they could write or paint better. A third reason people would take it was for
I like to think of our brain as a synthesizer so that each of these different compounds are like a key on the keyboard and we’re learning to play them in synergy. for spiritual purposes. For instance, a monk in Big Sur said M.D.M.A. was as close to pure meditation as any experience he ever had. The fourth reason is recreational. Now, recreational use has a bad name. Therapy, creativity and spirituality are all lofty ideals, but when you get to recreational, people automatically say, “uh-oh drug abuse.” They never separate drug use from drug abuse. There’s intelligent use and then there’s abuse.
In the essay, I examine the term recreational. Recreational means to re-create ourselves and that’s what these so-called meta-programming compounds are all about. But, how do they really work? It turns out that one of the things that beneficial psychoactive compounds do is to allow adults to play like children again. To start doing creative new behaviors. And these new behaviors, if applied
correctly, can lead to a new culture and a new way of dealing with each other.
They call ecstasy an empathogen making that empathetic connection where there’s no barriers between people anymore.Communication opens up, and people have a sense of well being. Unfortunately, like I said, contrasting it before and after it was made illegal, we are seeing a decline in good quality ecstasy.
How do youth movements shape society?
So we think of every rave as a T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) where people are trying on all these new behaviors and people tend to get involved for a while and then leave and do their own thing in society, but they carry with them these changed behaviors and a changed vision.
> Peers of mine from the hippie scene still hold within them all those experiences that they had which were so different than their parents. It helps people become more open and idealistic and evolves culture so it is an evolutionary movement.
How are computers and the internet changing the psychedelic movement?
The Internet is probably one of the most revolutionary forces shaping society right now because it’s international in scope, it’s free to communicate anywhere, and you can put up tremendous amounts of information and link them together almost instantaneously.
Any important issues we should be aware of?
Frequency of use is an important issue. There was a guy that came over here that had to take L.S.D. everyday. He was fully out of it, completely spaced out with no idea of what he was doing. He said that in order to get off he had to double his dosage everyday. So he started with one dose one day, and two the next, then four, then eight, sixteen, and so on. So, at this point, he was eating whole sheets everyday and just getting the same effect. So I said, “You don’t have to take it everyday. L.S.D. is for special occasions. It’s not supposed to be in your diet.” So he said, “Oh, I’ll save some money that way.”
What’s wrong with society’s views on drugs?
Our society fails to differentiate between drugs. They say that all drugs are bad. Just say no. Now we know that there are some drugs that are much more beneficial than others. M.D.M.A., L.S.D.,
psilocybin, mescaline – these are spiritual medicines. Then you have drugs like amphetamines, heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, and so forth, which are not good for you.
What do you think about Herbal E?
These guys wanted me to write a plug for it so they gave me a whole bunch of it, like five packages. I took a whole one. It gave me a really bad stomach ache and made my hands shake like I was on too much caffeine. I said to myself, if this is Herbal E, I want the real stuff. Later on some research showed that they were actually putting three times as much ephedrine in than was safe.
I suppose that there’s more interesting compounds out there.
Alexander Shulgin wrote a book called Phenythalamines that I have Known and Loved or PIHKAL and is writing another one called Tryptamines I have Known and Loved or TIHKAL. He names
hundreds of compounds in each of these categories that are beneficial. I like to think of our brain as a synthesizer so that each of these different compounds are like a key on the keyboard and we’re learning to play them in synergy.
Any thoughts about the approaching millennium?
We’re on the edge of a new millennium and Timothy Leary calls the last one the Christian Millennium because Judeo-Christian ideals were the dominant theme, and he calls the next one the
Millennium of the New Paganism. Now Terence McKenna doesn’t really postulate history past 2012 so we can’t get much into it, but whenever he does it’s definitely pagan, not the uptight Christian morality thing which has basically been a split between two poles – the scientist and the mystic. In other words, there has always been this kind of gap between magic and science. That has been the main tension throughout this whole millennium and that’s about to be resolved. In fact, the term Techno-Shamanism does it good because it says there is going to be a combination of technology and shamanism.
I think we have an awful lot of problems right now ,and we could sit around for hours and days enumerating them, but rather than dwell in all that stuff we need to create a positive vision and work towards that vision and put out a message of hope.
Any closing words of advice for the trippers of today who will be the tribal leaders of tomorrow?
I would say that they try to learn as much stuff as they can, get into finding out what people did before them and then taking all that and try to develop some new creative solutions to some of the problems that still haven’t been solved. They should realize that what they are doing in the rave scene has more importance than just rebelling against their parents. They have to create a positive vision of the future where people can be loving and sharing and hugging each other and living together in harmony and peace. So they need to take that vision and bring it into the world.
Aldous Huxley once said that what’s important is love and work in the world. Don’t get stuck in your vision, go out and take that vision and apply it out in the world to real things, to your work situation, how you relate with one another in everyday life. It’s like the Zen saying before enlightenment, a man chops wood and carries water. Afterwards he goes out, works in the world, and makes his vision into a reality by the work that he does and the creations that he makes.
“… there has always been this kind of gap between magic and science. That has been the main tension throughout this whole millennium and that’s about to be resolved.”
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