Another segment from Use Your Hallucinations: MONDO 2000 in the Late 20th Century Cyberculture

One fine Sunday, we had a party — it may have been for the release of one of our newsletters — and it was possibly the biggest we’d ever had.  The backyard at Quail House looked almost like a small rock festival as attendees found their spots and, no doubt, dosed themselves with favorite hallucinogens.

I had just received a fairly large bundle of 5-meo-DMT, a substance similar to DMT (and the stuff that Queen Mu had discovered was in a certain type of toad venom) — but unlike DMT, a full dose was 5 instead of 35 milligrams.  The experience was perhaps even more intense, but rather than entering a colorful infinitely-dimensional funhouse filled with elves and clowns, some of whom may try to convey a message, 5-meo put you into something very much like that tunnel heading towards the white light reported by so many who had been pulled back from death.

I must have been bored, because as the sun was starting to set — and after smoking a double dose — I decided to turn on every person there.

Feeling like a cosmic assassin on a mission to blow away everyone’s last shred of attachment to any and all social constructs, I set out with my pipe and my bundle.

Most of the attendees — veteran trekkers all — accepted my kind invitation and took their journey beyond the veil with aplomb.  Every once in awhile, I would do unto myself as I was doing unto others.  A few partiers rolled around on the ground in fear or clutched my arm tightly while I reassured them that they weren’t actually dead. But only Ariana — usually a psychedelic trooper — complained that it was too much… and not something I should be passing around willy-nilly.

Finally, I entered the final room of the house, where some boys —  I’d estimate they were in their late teens — were hanging.  Boy One took his dose and settled back calmly into the void.  Boy Two, same thing.  I came to Boy Three, the night’s final target.  A big dude with a punkish shock of spikey blonde hair. He took his big hit and, unlike most, he didn’t close his eyes.  He stared out at me in terror. His head jerked back and forth.  I was ready for him to go totally Linda Blair on me.  Well, his head didn’t spin around in a complete circle, but he did projectile vomit (it wasn’t green). And then he laughed. He blinked a few times.  And then he looked at me.  “Dude, that was fucking awesome!”

A few weeks later, I heard that this party was rather the last straw for some responsible members of the psychedelic community.  I specifically heard strongly worded objections from a fellow  psuedonymned D.M. Turner,  who would later be instrumental in popularizing Salvia Divinorum amongst the psychedelic cognoscente. In fact, when he came up with a formula for orally active salvia, he refused to share it with me, largely on the basis of the infamous 5-meo DMT party.  (D.M.  later drowned in his bathtub after injecting ketamine, a fact that I don’t share with some sort of perverse sense of triumph.  He was a truly sweet guy and he was probably right in objecting to my day as a cosmic assassination.)