You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Drugs ‘R’ Us.” I have. By 1960s standards, I was a modest druggie. I never went over the edge. But I knew that I was drugs and drugs were me. Case in point: I met Dr. Timothy Leary a handful of times during the last few decades of the twentieth century and dropped acid with him in LA and then in Algeria, where he was a fugitive from the law. Still, I was never by any stretch of the imagination an acidhead; I had friends who went on hundreds of acid trips, while I rejected the gospel of acid and disliked Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He was a salesman and LSD was his product. I was an academic and didn’t want to damage my precious brain. But after a long dry spell, I did catch up with “the drug culture” — or perhaps, more accurately, it caught up with me. 

In the late 1960s, I got stoned with a Columbia Law School student and an SDS member named Gustin “Gus” …