agin’?

Thanks to R. Crumb, who first published these strips in 1971, when I could have posed

A funny thing happened on the way to my stoned retirement.  Come end of this month, it will have started 4 years ago.  In the idle months leading up to that fateful date, I had time to figure what I might do with myself.  Diving back into mind-altering substances (besides alcohol) had some appeal.  While I was never a “head”, I did smoke a lot of weed back in college and enjoyed every minute, especially when music was involved.  Maybe I would have had a higher GPA had I not done it, but I still did o.k.  But I rarely smoked after leaving Ann Arbor, a situation that changed when I had my bike accident December ’14.  I had to take enough Neurontin to make me look like a Parkinson’s patient to keep the brachial plexus injury pain down, so against the advice of my UofM docs, I sought and received certification for “Medical Marijuana”.  Michigan Medical Marihuana Act 2008 Law 1 (1) had passed and with a doctor’s certification, you could walk into any number of pot shops dotting Ann Arbor, hand over a wad of cash, and walk out with an array of cannabis vehicles.  With passage of Marihuana Act in 2018 (2) anyone can now do the same, and the pot shops are now on every corner.  The stuff, in whatever form, never really killed the pain, but made me care less that I had it while the buzz was pleasant, familiar, and welcome.  Edibles became my choice, trading a cough for a slower onset of action.  I guess I became enamored with buying the stuff, as I laid up a stock way more than I could consume once my symptoms settled down toward the end of 2015.  I confess I did eat some for fun now and then, but not often.  I took all the “leaf” I’d bought and made my own magic caramels with the Magical Butter machine (3) we’d bought to make garlic oil on the advice of my nephew’s wife, who used hers to make other potions in addition.  That stock still sits on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, next to a few (tobacco) cigars.

So that stock seemed to be something I’d be dipping into once it didn’t matter to anyone how stoned I got.  As I thought more about it, why stop at pot?  Except for a magic mushroom or two, and some speed from my girlfriend to get a couple term papers done, I didn’t do any other drugs in college.  But what about those other “soft” drugs from my hippie wannabe days, like LSD, psilocybin, PCP’s, ‘shrooms and even ecstasy, molly, and ketamine, not on the scene in the 70s but popular now? While all these drugs emerged in the 60s or before with claimed legitimate medical benefits, hippie recreational use dashed further development by making them all illegal.

I picked up a lovely looking book by Dr. Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD (4).  Legitimate research into use of acid as a psychotherapeutic agent was exploding (5).  Likewise for psilocybin (6), ecstasy (doing a bang -up job on PTSD (7).’shrooms good for lots (8), and now legal in Colorado.  Curiously, all these drugs seem to help with other addictions.  And Timothy Leary’s real favorite – ketamine – is exploding as a treatment of depression so effective people pay cash on the barrelhead for it (9).

So, this was the brave new (for me) world into which I would be venturing.   I wouldn’t be going naively, as besides my reading to guide me, I’d be counting on my little brother-in-law Mertz and high school friend Hooch to guide me personally.  Each had accumulated extensive personal experience in the area, was still fully functional, and had agree to help.

But none of this ever happened.  What did?  I guess you could say life happened.  With my brain power no longer shackled to the job and my time now my own, the two took me to many different places.  Some quite mundane, like looking around my home with eyes to spot things I’d want to change and make better.  That’s why there are over 120 objects hanging on my upstairs walls with leftover hooks going up everywhere to hang what used to flop.  I’ve always enjoyed my time in the kitchen, but now – especially with COVID taking other options away – I could do so much more, and experiment with a willing subject.  Recipe cards got generated that got not only into boxes but into blogs and books.  It took an invite from a “predatory” journal to kick off my scientific writing, but I can now count 19 new peer-reviewed papers published since retiring, as many as I’d put out in the last 19 years of my “active career”.  Just as my first full calendar year of retirement dawned, my good friend Sam died.  I wanted to write something about him, so I looked into blogging.  Getting a site on WordPress was easy-peasey and cheap (10).  I never looked back, and this will be my 359^th blog post.   When I realized my posts coalesced into certain topics, I decided to organize them into books and have self-published 5 related to my blogs plus another about a tragic event from my youth (11).  Two more are close to ready – one possibly going to a “real” publisher – with ideas for several more.  My wife says I pound my laptop keys too hard and my steady “type, type, typing” drives her nuts, but it’s a sound you hear a lot around this place.  Then, there’s the plain old stuff of life: friends, travel, concerts, sports.  Realizing that getting high makes me miss out on this, I just no longer have any desire to go there.  Kathy hopes I may someday come to the same realization about alcohol.

I think the key has been “flow”, a concept first described in 1975 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a University of Chicago psychologist who would have been on campus same time I was there.  In studying people intensely engaged in their tasks, like surgeons, rock climbers, and fighter jet pilots, he found they felt extreme happiness while engaged in their tasks.  He proposed that this seeking of a “flow” experience was what drew these people back to their tasks.  The phenomenon is now widely accepted and continues to be studied (12).  Here’s a concise definition from the abstract of that paper “Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it.”  Csikszentmihalyi (a Croat raised in Hungary, whose unpronounceable name goes “Chuck-sent-me-he”) died in ’21, but he made a TED talk about his baby in 2014 (13).

Neuroscientists say my flow state is just bathing my brain’s locus coeruleus with norepinephrine (14).  So, it’s just about altered brain chemistry after all, and wasn’t that what I was seeking?  So, I had the power all along, just like Dorothy’s ruby slippers.  “There’s no place like home”.

References

1. Michigan Legislature – Section 333.26424.  MICHIGAN MEDICAL MARIHUANA ACT (EXCERPT)
Initiated Law 1 of 2008.  http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(vmprn114t4teyyi5ltkmta3l))/mileg.aspx?page=GetObject&objectname=mcl-333-26424

2. Michigan Legislature – Section 333.27955. 
MICHIGAN REGULATION AND TAXATION OF MARIHUANA ACT (EXCERPT)
Initiated Law 1 of 2018.  http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(kq0r0claosbcl0fgi4azlxmi))/mileg.aspx?page=getObject&objectName=mcl-333-27955

3. Magical.  https://magicalbutter.com/

4. Hofmann A.  LSD.   My Problem Child.  Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science.  Santa Cruz: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2009.  https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/lsdmyproblemchild.pdf

5. Fuentes JJ, Fonseca F, Elices M, Farré M, Torrens M. Therapeutic Use of LSD in Psychiatry: A Systematic Review of Randomized-Controlled Clinical Trials. Front Psychiatry. 2020 Jan 21;10:943. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00943.  https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-08270-001

6. Ziff S, Stern B, Lewis G, Majeed M, Gorantla VR. Analysis of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy in Medicine: A Narrative Review. Cureus. 2022 Feb 5;14(2):e21944. doi: 10.7759/cureus.21944.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8901083/

7. Mitchell, J.M., Bogenschutz, M., Lilienstein, A. et al. MDMA-assisted therapy for severe PTSD: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 study. Nat Med 27, 1025–1033 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01336-3

8. Newberry L.  The ‘gnarly and painful’ therapeutic potential of ‘magic mushrooms’.  LA Times 2/14/23.  https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2023-02-14/the-gnarly-and-painful-therapeutic-potential-of-magic-mushrooms-group-therapy

9. Caron C.   Ketamine Shows Promise for Hard-to-Treat Depression in New Study.  New York Times 5/23/23.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/well/mind/ketamine-ect-treatment-depression.html

10. Bob Ike’s Blog. Welcome to Harbal https://theviewfromharbal.com/

11. Robert Ike.  Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Robert-Ike/author/B095CPDZGP?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

12. Peifer C, Wolters G, Harmat L, Heutte J, Tan J, Freire T, Tavares D, Fonte C, Andersen FO, van den Hout J, Šimleša M, Pola L, Ceja L, Triberti S. A Scoping Review of Flow Research. Front Psychol. 2022 Apr 7;13:815665. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.815665. https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.lib.umich.edu/35465560/

13. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • TED2004.   Flow: the secret to happiness.  https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?language=

14. van der Linden D, Tops M, Bakker AB. The Neuroscience of the Flow State: Involvement of the Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine System. Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 14;12:645498. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645498.   https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.lib.umich.edu/33935902/