I have only one more dose of Lewis Carroll’s LSD. The thirty days will be up, the bottle will be empty. So is this it? Am I finished? Is the experiment over? The answer, at least initially, was obvious. I didn’t want to go back to feeling the way I did a month ago. This perspective? This equanimity? I wanted it to continue. But that meant I needed more drugs.
Resupplying should have been easy. I live in the Bay Area, a community replete with people who spend every Labor Day cavorting naked on the playa at Black Rock City. I must have been bolder in my search than when I first embarked on this experiment, because this time it was not that hard, as it turns out, to track down a Burner with access to LSD. I was given a telephone number. I sent the Burner’s friend’s friend (whose name I was careful not to learn) an oddly formal text, describing my microdosing experiment, using the word “Lucy” instead of LSD. After I hit “send,” I started to fret. How old was this person I was trying to do a drug deal with? Do young people even listen to the Beatles anymore? My kids certainly don’t. Would the person on the other end of that number have the faintest idea what I was talking about?
Within an hour, I received a reply. Either kids do listen to the Beatles or, even better, the source was someone who’s been doing this a good long time. Since a single regular dose of LSD lasts for one month, I decided that I would request a few doses. It was more than I was comfortable having in my possession, but if I continued the protocol it would allow me to avoid having to engage in the stressful business of buying drugs every month. It’s hard enough to buy tampons or lube. Who needs the agita?
The source, whom I decided to name Lucy after the product she sells, replied that she could supply the number of doses I requested. She said she would deliver the drugs to me at my home. That was unacceptable to me: I won’t even let someone from Craigslist show up here when I’m selling a sofa; I’d never expose my kids to a drug dealer. I suggested we meet up in the hills where I like to hike. Lucy rejected this and insisted on coming to my house. Against my better judgment, I offered a time when I knew I would be home alone and prayed that she’d turn out to be one of those honest, unarmed drug dealers.
A couple of hours before Lucy was due to arrive, it occurred to me that she wasn’t likely to accept credit cards. And even if she did, I’d rather not give her mine. I ran down to the corner to the ATM.
I had just pulled a few twenties out of the machine (it’s amazing how cheap LSD is—fifteen dollars a regular-size dose! That’s a buck-fifty per microdose!) when my phone buzzed. Lucy wanted to know if I’d consider buying sixty doses from her. I stopped in the middle of the street and glanced around, suddenly fearful I was being followed. I’ve seen Goodfellas.
“Why?” I texted back. “That’s far more than I could ever use. One dose lasts a month. Why would I want enough for five years?”
She replied. “I wouldn’t know how to divide it. It’s liquid.”
I tapped out a reply. “Just put a few drops into a dark container. Or bring your bottle when you come and drop them into my little blue bot”—
I stopped typing.
When I was a federal defender, I had a client, a Mexican woman in her forties, a mother of five, who’d been abandoned by her husband. On a rare night out, she met a man in a bar. He was from Puerto Rico, and she found his accent beguiling. They exchanged phone numbers, and he began calling her, telling her how beautiful she was, how he couldn’t get her out of his mind. My client was a frumpy little woman, with feet swollen from a lifetime of menial labor and thinning strawlike hair dyed the color of raw beef. She said the last time a man had called her beautiful was on her wedding day, when she was sixteen years old.
The couple didn’t meet in person again; all their conversations happened over the phone. For days he flirted with her, describing the life they’d have together, how he’d be the father her children needed. Then he asked her if she could help him. He wasn’t a drug dealer, he assured her. But he had an opportunity to make a single score, one that would set them up for their life together. Did she know anyone who had access to methamphetamine?
My client laughed. She was a domestic worker, a mother. She didn’t know anyone who dealt drugs. But surely she knew some who used drugs, he persisted. She lived in East L.A., a center of drug activity. Wasn’t there someone from the neighborhood who could point her in the right direction?
Day after day the couple would speak on the phone, and he’d beg her to help him find the methamphetamine. He was curiously specific about the quantity of drugs he desired. At least fifty grams, he said. She told him she had no access to drugs, she wouldn’t know whom to ask. Ask your son! he suggested. Tell him to ask around his high school. Surely, he’d be willing to do this small thing for the sake of his mother and his soon-to-be stepfather’s happiness, for the sake of his own future. Tell him to think of the house the family would move into with the money his new stepfather made from the score.
My client was torn. Not about whether she’d ask her child to search for drugs—that was out of the question. She was a fond and worried mother who hovered over her children, pushing them to complete homework she couldn’t understand so they would get good grades, go to college, and have the kind of life she could not have imagined for herself when she was their age. But she had fallen hard for the lover from Puerto Rico. She wanted him to love her, and she worried that if she didn’t help him he’d stop calling. She would find some, she told him. She would find methamphetamine.
Weeks passed, and they spoke every day. The calls were always the same. They began with talks of her beauty and his passion, and moved quickly to the drug deal, with the quantity of methamphetamine the man sought always carefully specified. No fewer than fifty grams, my client’s telephone lover would remind her. She would reassure him that she was looking for the methamphetamine. Someday soon she would find a source.
Meanwhile, she begged her boyfriend to take their relationship to the next level, to meet her in person. He would promise to meet, but not until she had the drugs. Finally, he agreed to take her to dinner, even though she’d as yet been unsuccessful in finding the methamphetamine. The truth, which he didn’t know, was that she had not even bothered to look. She knew no one who had access to drugs, nor did she want to know anyone who did.
On the evening of their first real date, she opened her door not to her lover, but to a phalanx of DEA agents. The man from Puerto Rico was not her boyfriend; he was an informant. Over the course of many weeks and long conversations about how beautiful she was and how he planned to spend the rest of his life with her, he’d set her up.