Shy Exhibitionist 8
The debate kicked off this celebration. It was formal -- women were restricted to viewing from above. The opponent was Sidney Katz, the chief feature writer for The Toronto Star, and to Peter's astonishment the vote was heavily that Peter had won. Here is how Peter reworked his opening remarks for his Psychedelic Baby Reaches Puberty:
My personal feeling, after having watched the effects of these substances for over ten years, is that the psychedelic invasion is something fundamentally new in our culture and that it will be important in the way that the discovery of numbers and religion were. What we are seeing is a giant transforming wave now washing over society, comparable in a sense to what happened in the thirteenth century when notions of romantic love were introduced into Western society.
My own attitude, which may be evident from having written about these possibilities at such length, is that I favor the psychedelics and I'm here to defend them and make the case for them. In my own life I have found them to be important -- feeling that a year with ten or twelve trips is better than one without them -- and important in the lives of others. I have been impressed with the fact that when used under reasonably proper circumstances, and often improper ones, they can do things that nothing else can do. I have elsewhere given quite a number of examples -- alcoholics in Canada and all the rest of it.
My feeling is that it's inevitable that the psychedelics will continue to spread into various walks of life -- but this is irrelevant, for if it weren't inevitable I would still like to see that happen. I think it very important that we begin a serious exploration of the inner self in this society, whose best writers point out is sick at its core, which has alienated almost all of its most educated and enlightened members, which has little sense of what murder means, which doesn't know much about what reality is and how this relates to other people. That means having some understanding of what it's like to be in a black skin and what it's like to die with napalm, and I think LSD is helpful in this because it is a substance that breaks down those barriers that have made it possible for words to hide truths from us, so that we can use the word "pacify" instead of "murder," etc., etc.
By this I don't mean that I think these drugs have any special help for the left or the Christians or the intellectuals or whomever, but that they offer help for all of us. I think that what they are doing is creating people who are not even too reliable in any traditional sense from the standpoint of an ideology, but who may be very necessary in terms of our survival.
These are molecules that are dangerous to systematized, single-value thinking: they are what might be called "soul drugs." The words frighten us, but I say these drugs put people in touch with their own soul and collective reality, and I think this is more important, finally, than any organized system of thought . . .
