your exploded body

"I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body." Sheen described himself as superhuman, citing a "different constitution," "different brain" and "different heart" than normal people have, allowing him to survive his drug binges. "I got tiger blood, man," he said. "My brain . . . fires in a way that is - I don't know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm."

A Drug Called Charlie Sheen

“Charlie is missing a room, its called the OD room, where girls, you know, they’re all living in this house, if they OD they press a little button on the wall and have an in-house doctor you know, and so that no-one has to get rushed to the emergency room."
--Kacey Jordan

"Newsflash, I’m special. The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning. My success rate is 100%. I was shackled and oppressed by the cult of AA for 22 years. I finally extracted myself from their troll hole and started living my life the way I want to live it. I have a disease? Bullshit. I cured it right now with my mind."
--Charlie Sheen

Acid War

"Bin Laden ... this is the enemy who is manipulating people," Gaddafi said, adding: "Do not be swayed by bin Laden. You people of Zawiyah, stop your children, take their weapons, bring them away from Bin Laden, the pills will kill them. They give them pills at night, they put hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe."

Burned Out

"The audiences who go to the movies, must be assassinated, killed, destroyed, and they must leave the theater as new people. I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." –Alejandro Jodorowsky

Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe

the lobsters

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters — which he sometimes referred to as crabs — Gerassi’s account offers startling new details of the philosopher’s descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.

“Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he says in Gerassi’s new book, Talking With Sartre. “They followed me in the streets, into class ... I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’ I would say, ‘Okay guys, we’re going into class now . . . ’ and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.”

Sartre was intrigued by the mind-expanding properties of the peyote cactus. His mescaline experiments started in 1935 and affected his thinking for more than a year. They proved a big influence in the writing of his 1938 novel, Nausea — now regarded as a manifesto of existentialism. Shellfish visions also featured in his 1959 play, The Condemned of Altona, in which a race of crabs sits in judgment on humanity.

In between, Sartre told Gerassi, “I began to think I was going crazy.”

He consulted a young psychiatrist named Jacques Lacan — who later became another of France’s foremost intellectuals — and they attributed Sartre’s crab-infested depression to his fear that he was being pigeon-holed as a teacher.

“That was the worst part, to have to be serious about life,” said Sartre. “The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and I wouldn’t pay attention to them.” By then it was the 1940s, France was occupied and Sartre had other things to worry about.

- "Mescaline left Jean-Paul Sartre in the grip of lobster madness" [The Sunday Times]

a tumult of visions

[Sigmund Freud's mentor] Jean-Martin Charcot was known for his sober and dispassionate nature, but his close associates also commented on his particular penchant for the bizarre, the supernatural, and grotesque. Meige recounted an anecdote from Charcot’s student days that highlights this latter characteristic and foreshadows Charcot’s interest in contorted deformities and exotic behaviors. Predating Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal by seven years, Charcot experimented in 1853 with smoking hashish: As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmagoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic conceptions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

- "Charcot - Constructing Neurology" / Christopher Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, Toby Gelfand

Junky Relations

Kick That Man Habit

“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on. "When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”

NY Times

What is Your Opium

"This week Yves Saint Laurent unveils an addictive new fragrance."

Cocaine Kate

"Opium, for women who give themselves to Yves Saint Laurent"

"Opium was the only name it wanted. It's a fragrance which evokes all the things I love—the refined Orient, Imperial China, exoticism. Nineteenth-century aesthetes, poets, and writers knew and understood the very release of imagination, dreams and mystery it evokes. Byron, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, they all understood the exotic beauty of the orient without having traveled there. If you don't have the power of imagination, you don't have anything."
— Yves Saint Laurent, 1978

"LSD plunged them into an orgy of violence, invaded by the man they called Lovemaster."