Low life | 17 May 2018

An 87-year-old friend, a former doctor, has been urging me for some while to have a look at the latest smart drug fad among affluent Americans, which is to go to work every day on a tiny dose of LSD. He’s an avid reader of the Scientific American and I think he must have read about it in there. He hoved into view at the Spectator Life party the other week and I turned aside from my conversation with the Hungarian ambassador to ask him whether he had managed to get hold of any yet. ‘I bought a ton of it,’ he said. (He is an enthusiast and always buys ‘a ton’ of everything, whether the latest smart drug or something off the street.) ‘And?’ I said. ‘It comes on tiny squares of blotting paper,’ he said. ‘The first time I was a little timid and ate a quarter of a square. Nothing happened. The next time I ate half a square. That was OK. I felt happy and alert and creative and so forth. The next time, I ate a whole one and immediately fell asleep. And I’d only been awake for an hour.’ We laughed at the hubristic image of him peacefully sleeping the day away in his vast apartment, then I introduced him to the Hungarian ambassador and went to look for a drink.

Then there was Sam Leith’s recent Spectator review of Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us. My mind has become as Matthew Parris says his has become: obsessed with the Brexit debate in a stupidly Manichean way and to the point of insanity. It badly wants changing. Or if not changing, at least switching to another channel for a week or two, or until that future bright day dawns when we take up arms and start shooting at each other.