One morning a couple of years back, when things weren’t looking so good in terms of making it through alive to the end of the next week, I downed the best part of a bottle of vodka and took myself along to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The meeting started at 10am, and by the time I lurched through the door, I was of course, already steaming drunk. For emotional reasons that I probably shouldn’t dwell on openly here, it had been a tough morning and I’d responded like the good alcoholic I was by immediately pouring serious liquor down my throat. Now then, rolling in drunk to a room full of recovering alcoholics might not seem like the done thing, and I suppose it isn’t really ideal, but AA being as it is, there are worse breaches of etiquette you can make. The people there understand, and have probably all done something similar themselves at various points in their recoveries.
Anyway, I sat through some of the meeting, God knows for how long, head basically hanging between my legs, eyes squinting and clenching in an attempt to focus, before giving up the ghost and heading outside, there to semi-collapse against an outside wall. Soon enough, a concerned fellow emerged from within to enquire after my well-being. I can’t remember what was said exactly, but I do recall that he asked if I needed to go to hospital, so I couldn’t have been looking too good. At some point however, a friend of mine – let’s call him Ronnie, because he does genuinely remind me of Ronnie Wood – also emerged from the meeting to check on me. Giving me sideways glances of concern, these two older, sober members swapped some murmured conversation, before Ronnie said something like, ‘Here old mate, I don’t think you should be on your own, why not come and crash round my place and sober up a bit.’ This seemed like a good idea at the time and so, with options limited anyway, I climbed into the passenger seat of Ronnie’s ancient ute, and we took off to his little house buried deep in the back of the Australian bush.
And it was there that the trouble began.
Ronnie’s house, a nice place by all means, but really an extended shack of sorts, is genuinely located in the middle of pretty much nowhere. A bush dwelling if ever there was one, surrounded by rainforest and kangaroos, it nonetheless provided a homely and certainly very private retreat from the mill of everyday life. Safely ensconced here with Ronnie and what was left of my bottle of vodka (he didn’t mind me drinking, and didn’t imbibe himself) , conversation turned to what was to be the business of the day. It turned out that Ronnie had ‘a good idea’, which might help me in my doldrums. He’d mentioned it to me before, when we’d been discussing – as AA members are wont to do – the teachings and sayings of the Fellowship’s founder and guru, Bill Wilson. You see, back in the day, Wilson – one of the 20th Century’s great alcoholics – had quietly but determinedly advocated for the use of hallucinogens, in particular LSD, in the treatment of the condition from which he, and many like him, suffered.
Wilson’s understanding of this approach made, in the twisted kind of way you might expect from an alcoholic, perfect sense. The central tenet of the AA faith, is the belief that alcoholics can be cured of their obsession to drink by the deliberate and self-conscious act of placing their faith in the hands of a Higher Power:
‘Step 2: We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’
For members of Alcoholic Anonymous, particularly those who have fully swallowed the Kool-Aid (an unfortunate analogy here, but still), Step 2 is kind of the Big One. From this, even more than the relatively easy Step 1, all things flow. AA is, to a large extent, informed by the Jungian notion that addicts are ‘lacking’ something in their emotional and spiritual make-up, that can only truly be filled by a meta-physical experience of some kind. ‘A spiritual problem that requires a spiritual solution’, as my first – and to date only – AA sponsor once told me. And, if you’re down with the 12 Steps, or at least want to be, then he is absolutely right. But here’s the problem: not everyone is down with that, or can be, even if they desperately want to.
To put it bluntly, the ‘God’ word drives a lot of people away before their bottoms have even had a chance to warm the seat of the first, and quite possibly the last, AA meeting they will ever dare to enter. After all, beaming down from the walls on prayer banners that would not look out of place at a 1920s Christian Temperance rally, are words such, ‘GOD’, ‘PRAYER’ and ‘HIGHER POWER’. For a lot of people, one glimpse of this kind of thing is enough to make them turn swiftly on their heels, never to return. Which, for all my mixed feelings about AA, is a shame, because for some Salvation – another big religious word, but hey – is to be found in the rooms of the Fellowship, for when you truly have nowhere left to turn and your life has been essentially destroyed by alcohol, then being saved by God (or anyone) is a powerful hook indeed.
But Wilson, a shrewd, pragmatic and compassionate man, knew full well that the God of AA’s banners was going to be a problem for some, and for a man on a mission, that simply wouldn’t do. If people were unwilling or simply unable to let a Higher Power into their lives, then let’s gift it to them with a kind of shortcut to the spiritual experience, by getting them to ingest a powerful dose of lysergic acid diethylamide. A ‘God Pill’, as it were.
Wilson, who took his first trip in Los Angeles in 1956, had enthused about the drug:
‘I am certain that the LSD experiment has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened colour perception and an appreciation of beauty almost destroyed by my years of depressions.’
He wasn’t alone amongst his contemporaries at the time, in thinking that LSD was maybe some kind of therapeutic wonder drug. At around the same time that the CIA was secretly slipping large doses of the stuff into the morning coffee of its agents and then watching what happened to them from a safe distance, Wilson and his cronies – including the author and hallucinogen evangelist and connoisseur, Aldous Huxley – believed that LSD had an enormous latent power to do good. Wilson believed that the drug could play a part in emulating the spiritual experience necessary to bring dubious alcoholics closer to a sense, at least, of a Higher Power. In Wilson’s biography it said that LSD had:
‘…helped him eliminate many barriers erected by the self, or ego, that stand in the way of one’s direct experiences of the cosmos and of god. He thought he might have found something that could make a big difference to the lives of many who still suffered’.
Now this was, and remains, all very controversial in Alcoholics Anonymous itself, where the thought of its great, and supposedly sober, founder merrily dosing himself up on yet more chemicals is anathema to many. Understandable. AA make a big deal out of sobriety, not just from alcohol, but from all things, preferably including anti-depressants, if possible. Marijuana, something else that Wilson was said to enjoy, is definitely frowned on, sedatives one step away from the bottle itself, and gambling a mere gateway to substance intoxication. Nonetheless, the fact of it remains: Wilson tried LSD on any number of occasions, and recommended its use in some cases, going so far as to remove himself from the governing board of Alcoholics Anonymous, in order to continue his association with the drug whilst not bringing scandal down on the organisation itself.
But meanwhile, back at the shack, we see two alcoholics, one drunk the other not, plotting their own – you guessed it – Bill Wilson Magic Acid Trip, in the form of something I won’t specify here. Suffice to say that, with Bill Wilson’s example forefront in his mind, Ronnie was hellbent of showing me that The Path to Sobriety could sometimes be a spangly and multicoloured one. Whilst I won’t be drawn exactly on, What Happened at Ronnie’s that day, I have heard tales from the bush, of locals indulging in such things as ‘Ayahuasca Ceremonies’, where an increasingly potent hallucinogenic tea is fed to participants, who then go flying off the psychedelic saucepan handle and into hitherto unexplored regions of the subconscious, there to dwell, gibber and scream under the eye of a merciless Acid God.
So, you get the picture.
Needless to say, this wasn’t how I’d expected my day to shape out, when I’d set out that morning, distraught, emotionally drained and morbidly drunk. That things turned out better, and certainly more interesting, is down to both my friend Ronnie’s kindness and generosity – he was definitely only trying to help – but also to one of the founding, crypto-myths of Alcoholics Anonymous itself, namely that we can find God in all sorts of places, if only we’re prepared to look for Him. For me, that day, I didn’t ‘find God’ as such, although I certainly have as a result of my travels in recovery, but more notably, I shared some fellow feeling with a good bloke, and caught, at the edge of whatever void it was I find myself staring into, a glimpse of another possible way to bring ourselves into the great and warming light of recovery.
Nick Jordan
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
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