“We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country . . . country . . . country! . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . . cockroach . . . cockroach . . .”
“What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”
I shrugged. It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehistoric gathering. The voice of a “drug expert” named Bloomquist crackled out of the nearby speakers: “. . . about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months . . . and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.”
Gosh darn that fiendish LSD! Dr. E. R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference. He is the author of a paperback book titled Marijuana, which—according to the cover—“tells it like it is.” (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach theory . . .)
According to the book jacket, he is an “Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern California School of Medicine” . . . and also “a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.” Dr. Bloomquist “has appeared on national network television panels, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.” His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher. He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a hit for lecturing to cop-crowds.
Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of stale bullshit. On page 49 he explains the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomquist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening.’ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip.’ And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy.’ And after that, with much luck and perseverence, he can rise to the rank of ‘cool.’ ”
Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks. And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him with a straight face that sunglasses are known in the drug culture as “tea shades.”
This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Dept. locker rooms.
Indeed:
Know Your Dope Fiend. Your Life May Depend On It! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command—including yours. Beware. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.
“The Chief.”
“If you don’t know, come to learn . . . if you know, come to teach.”
—motto on invitations to National DAs convention in Vegas,
April 25–29, 1971
The first session—the opening remarks—lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, although it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to learn anything, and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any teaching. It was easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish . . . There was certainly no risk involved. These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.
I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid . . . except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline—which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it—but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the “dangers of marijuana” would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: the medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes . . . and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.