I had been looking for datura for years, when I found it at last, in the place I least expected it. I mean, I had been rummaging the countryside, in Corfu and Penteli, looking for the damned plant, and I had tried half a dozen herbs that looked like it, but of course they weren't. And then, one day, as I was walking in the streets of the city of Corfu, whaddayaknow. I see a short bushy plant with a lot of thorny pods filled with seeds that smelled of putrescence, smiling at me with its' little bell-shaped white flowers.

I was with a friend, who had had some datura before, his name was George. Just before I saw the bush, we were actually talking about the plant, how I was so frustrated I couldn't find any while it was supposed to grow all over the place. George was talking about his own experiences with the seeds, and then, he hears me yelling "Christ Fuck me! That's it! Datura! Look!". And he looked, and he couldn't believe it. At first. I couldn't believe it either. There were we, talking about it, and there was the plant, sitting in front of us, in a patch of land by the garden of a taverna. We cut a few pods, not without piercing our fingers in the pods' thorns, and we went home happy.

I can't say I remember how the first time with datura felt like. I remember several times, but I can't remember which one was the first one. Anyway, all of them had some things in common.

I do remember that I started with half of the seeds in a pod. I had been told the effect was very strong, and that I would go mad, and lose my mind and that it was dangerous, and blah blah blah, which I thought was bullshit, the rantings of people who had had a bad trip, but prudence never hurts, so I didn't take the whole podful for the first couple of times. The truth is I had done way more terrible things to my mind and body before. For example, as I knew atropine was one of the active substances in datura, I had tried the eye-drops Atropine Sulfate, which contains atropine, and that really was the scariest trip I ever had in my life (still not scary enough to deter me from "trying" it out a dozen times or so). After the first couple half- podfuls, and since I saw that a friend, another George, was completely normal (for our standards, and, most important, his own ones) after taking two podfuls a time, I started taking the whole podful myself.

The bad part of the experience, were the somatic side effects. Datura was supposedly used as a treatment for urinary tract conditions. Fine. I had no urinary tract conditions at all, when I started taking the seeds. Once the drug took on, though, I couldn't pee to save my life. And it's not that I didn't want to. I could feel my bladder ready to blow. But I would stand over the toilet bowl, holding my pee wee in my hand, waiting to pee, and nothing would come out. I 'd stand there for hours on end, but only the faintest trickle would come out. That was one really annoying thing. The xerostomia, and general drying out of the skin, was also annoying, but not all that horrible, compared to the taste I always had in my mouth during the trip. It tasted like I had been sucking on the socks of rotting plant-men for a month. I tried to eat, several times before giving it up, but food tasted like recycled paper spread over with mashed avocados in decay. Water tasted rotten too, and since I couldn't pee, it made my bladder swell, so I didn't know what was worse: the dried mouth, or the danger of urinaimia? Of course, my pupils were always so dilated, I couldn't read- and that lasted for days after the trip had been completed. Otherwise, I didn't have any adverse symptoms that I didn't wish for in the first place. In the end, because I was so frustrated by being unable to comfort myself, I tried drinking coffee. It's supposed to be a diuretic, after all. And it worked. Oh boy, you couldn't believe how much. The first time, I started drinking a huge plastic cup filled with Nescafe frappe, and lots of ice cubes, a quarter of an hour after I took the seeds. Half an hour later, I was having the first effects, and also I was peeing. Every two minutes. Not kidding. I couldn't stop. A veritable flood, I tell you. Peeing felt good, though, and so the next time I had two cups instead of one.

I know there's several preparations for the seeds, the leaves and the flower, supposedly some enhance the experience too, but since I was only doing it for fun, the raw seeds were enough for me. So they were for my friends. I couldn't keep the secret, you understand. Soon, a dozen kids from Corfu were all over the bush. It was a real disaster. One night, my friend Spyros came at our usual haunt with a bag full of seeds. I had told him how it was best to cut the pod by twisting it around, instead of just trying to pull it off the plant, to avoid getting your fingers pierced by the pods' thorns, but he had forgotten (of course) and he pulled so hard, that the whole plant came loose. Lots of others were at it of course, and in less than two months, the bushes were completely bare of pods. A week later, we realised the owner of the tavern next to the bushes had noticed our little foraging expeditions: he had mawned everything away. Well, so much for environmental consciousness.

To tell you the truth, I do feel guilty about it. I shouldn't have told so many people about the bushes. It was all my fault, for thinking they 'd go about it in a controlled, civilised manner. As if.

The good parts of the experience, were, of course, the hallucinations. I have never tried anything so intensely halucinogenic before, and I have tried my share of hard stuff in my days. LSD was nothing like it. Codein was nowhere near it neither any other opiate. It really felt like I was switching realities. The halucinations I had, they seemed so real, and were so fully detailed, that while I had them, there was no way to tell them apart from real life. I saw people coming in my room, for example, and talk to me, and do things, going around and all, and only when I snapped out of it I realised there was noone there except me. I remember this time, when I was lying in my bed, trying to make my mind up to go and find the others, when the door opened, and a couple of girls in their underwear came in the room, and started looking themselves in the mirror, chit chatting, painting their faces and laughing. They turned around, sent me kisses and got out again. Then I was back in reality, sprawled all alone on my bed, lights turned off, and telling my self "shit, whatta flash!". This happened a lot, especially when I was on my own, in my room at the students' hotel. When I was outdoors, with others, nothing that detailed happened, but still I had visuals of any weird kind you can imagine. I took care not to walk around and interact with people I didn't know, or that didn't know I did drugs, when I was like this, except where it was absolutely necessary, because during the trip, I was really incapable of normal everyday (night) social interaction. Besides, I couldn't really tell when the people I talked to or saw were actually there, and not just halucinations themselves.

The most intense part of the experience, lasted several hours. I always started late in the afternoon, so that I wouldn't spoil it by having to go up and about during the day. I doubt anyone could have failed to notice I was talking to animals, that sometimes weren't even there, in broad daylight. Three or four hours after the trip started, depending on the dose I had had, I was able to walk in a street without being hit by a car, and that was the point when usually me and the others got up and started for one of the night clubs we hang out to. We spent most of the night there, listening to music, and watching aliens drinking sizzling chemicals from hourglasses, and things like that. You get the picture. One of my friends, George, the one I mentioned took the seeds by the double and triple podfulls, usually slept too. He drank a lot of alcohol anyway, and he seemed to feel great about taking the seeds with a bit of booze. Well, no, not a bit. He drank a couple of bottles of cheap Retsina (greek wine) each time, and he looked really happy about it. One day, he came and told us that he had gotten up, that morning, prepared for work, took all his stuff, ladders, buckets, brushes, because he was a house-painter, and went to his bosses' home, woke him up and waited outside for him to get ready, like he did every working day. Then his boss came out and told him, sort of embarassed: "George, my wife told me. It's Sunday, today, we don't work". Ha ha. Yeah. Hilarious, if you weren't George, or his boss.

A couple of my friends had some bad trips with datura, and they hated it, to the point that they swore they 'd never put the damn thing in their mouth again. They kept it too. It has happened to me with other stuff, so I won't laugh at them, but nothing I saw or did with the seeds scared me enough to make me want to stay off them. Once, I had this freakish moment, when I looked at the moon and it was surrounded by a hallo of red and blue luminescence, and I didn't know if it was my idea or some effect caused by the humidity, although it was too intense to be the latter. But I asked a couple of friends, who were also stoned but not on datura: "hey, guys, is the moon red tonight?" and they told me "noooo dude!", and that was it. I also watched Arizona Dream while high on the seeds one night, and I was reaaaally weirded out, but that was just how you felt during the trip anyway. And Arizona Dream, although I remember so few of it, is not exactly a mainstream feel-good film, is it? I think I remember something about that fish, and the girl that got hit by a lightning, when she was playing her accordion, but I couldn' realise what exactly was happening, and I think I have an image of her face all charred, looking like a fucking zombie, from that night, but I don't know for sure. What really stuck in my memory from that time, was the part where I tried to eat a souvlaki with pitta, and a fried potato stuck in the middle of my throat, I almost choked on the stupid thing. Otherwise, it was vague, but good.

I 've also heard about people burning themselves out on datura, and I must say that this is indeed a very possible possiblity. I 've been told about a girl whose time-concepts were all fucked up after a year or so of abuse of the herb. Reportedly, you 'd talk to her, and she would answer a couple of minutes later, like when joe Dalton kicks Ran-Tan-Plan, or something. And I know one guy that really burned out, one of the kids that had a bad trip with our first daturas and swore he would never take any more ever again. Apparently, he was admitted to the university somewhere in an Aegean island, and he discovered fields of datura he could practically swim in. A while later, a common friend met him, and he told me later the other one had become echolalic: he repeated everything several times, like "hello hello hello hello hello hello. How are you how are you how are you how are you how are you?". I only met him months after that, and he was still echoing, but a lot less. He only repeated every word two or three times. Big deal. Anyway, it's a well observed fact. Too much of a real good stuff will fry your brain. There's no objecting that. Nor am I saying that bathing your synapses in atropine and scopolamine, which are named "toxines" for a reason, and a good one at that, isn't going to hurt eventually. Maybe it won't even have to be long term hurt. Two other of my friends on datura, had a narrow escape, when they were walking under the influence, on Patision Avenue, thinking they were walking several feet above the ground. And the speeding cars too. I 've no idea how they weren't hit, but if you think they were actually walking on air, and so little trips like that are not dangerous to your flesh and bones, you 're a morron. Or burned out already.

But anyway, all these are dangers you 're supposed to be aware of and prepared for when you take halucinogens. I mean, you know that when you ride a motorcycle, you might fall down at 300 Kmh, and brake every bone in your body, still you do it, because it's fun and you try to be careful (as careful as you can be at 300 Kmh). Same goes with drugs, any kind. You know shit happens, and are prepared to eat it plain in the face. Otherwise, as I said, you 're a morron. Being aware of the danger, turns the danger to a voluntary risk. Risks, are OK. Being unaware of the risk, makes you even more of a morron. And anyway, it takes away all the fun.

The kind of datura we used, must have been Datura Stramonium. I met some brittish guy one night in Corfu, who told me it was called Jimson Weed, but he hadn't actually seen the plant, only me under the infulence, and trying to explain what the plant looked like. From what I remember, the leaves were almond-shaped, with tiny thorns on the edges, but that must have been my impression, or a bug in my memory, because in the pictures I 've found on the internet since, the leaves don't have thorns. The pods look a bit different too. They seem to be flatter at the base than the ones we had. Maybe it's just a southern Mediterranean variation different from the western-european ones. I 'm not sure. If we were wrong and it wasn't Datura Stramonium, then I guess it must have been Datura Inoxia.

The funny thing is, I started looking for the weed in the first place, because I had read about it in Carlos' Castanedas' books. But when I finally found it and took the seeds, it didn't even cross my mind for a second to use it in any "magical" way. The experience was so intense, that I couldn't think of anything but sitting there and enjoying it. As I said, I never had any hallucinations so vivid as that before, and that, kids, was a mystical experience all by itself. Besides, the effects lasted for days after the actual trip had ended. For the best part of a week after it, I still saw everything throught fuzzy eyes, and I had a hard time reading. Remember the red- and -blue hallo around the moon? I started seeing that a lot around any kind of strong white light I happened to look directly at. Car lights, for example. They had an iodine tracing all around them, like I was seeing them in ultra-violet, or something. I noticed it was certain cars' lights only that did this, though, namely the most recent models, which have the strongest lights. Looking at the sun never produced the hallo image. I guess the suns' light isn't white enough for that. For days and months after the trips, my dreams were also exceptionally vivid, and very frequently lucid, more than the usual even for that period, when lucid-dreaming happened at least once a week anyway. Some of those dreams looked a lot like datura hallucinations, and the actual waking-time hallucinations also had the texture of dreams themselves.

It's a really weird experience. I understand how it can be disturbing to some people, especially if it's one of the first hallucinogens they try. And, to be sincere, the feeling of something happening that was "wrong" in an intensely metaphysical way, was very strong, when I was under the influence. For instance, there was this thing I experienced every time, which I called The Wind. I 'd look, absent minded, at the fountain in front of me, or at the parks' lawn, or the stairs at the parks' entrance, and I 'd see sudden jolts of jittery motion, like insects jumping around merrily, or bits of dried leaves blown by a sudden gale, but there was no wind, and nothing was blown away, and I didn't actually see anything, or hallucinate of anything moving. There was just this strange feeling of visible motion, but nothing particular moving. And then, there were the noodles, of course. If I focused my eyes on a patch of floor or ground for a while, I started seeing shapes forming, always the same thing: transparent, colorless filaments, like desaturated noodles, gnarled and tangled, and waving slowly upwards, as if they were sprouting from the soil. And I had this feeling everything I saw around me was just a layer of superficial pigmentation, that was about to peel away like old paint, and reveal whatever was lying underneath it. I was inclined to believe this "underneath" whatever, would be a vision of reality as viewed without those concepts of it that we normally employ, a new or maybe an ancient reality concept, or maybe a reality without a concept, only perception, a reality possibly similar, or identical to the one described by Carlitos, in his books. A reality where everything would be made of filaments of conscious luminescence. But I wasn't really eager to see that. For one thing, I could never come back from it certain that it was a spontaneous vision, and not something induced to me by my own beliefs for a non-conceptual experience of the universe (I was reading a lot of Carlitos' stuff those days, and it tended to stick in my mind- I 'm impressionable as a person, and reading his books while smoking weed helped too). It is notable though, that I had the same feeling of the thin layer about to peel off, with those atropine eye-drops I mentioned. It was a much more ominous and foreboding feeling then, though. I was always terrified at the thought that the "paint" might actually fall away and I hated the idea of seeing whatever was under it. I suppose the scopolamine, and hyoscyamine in datura played a part in making the herb better tolerated and more enjoyable than the sulfuric atropine on its' own (eye drops are not for internal consumption anyway). But it is really interesting how the Wind, and the noodles were always there, when I took either the seeds or the eye-drops. It looked as if the same thing happened every time, but I don't think I am or was in a position to speculate wether this was a by-product of the pupil dilation caused by atropine or a genuine visionary state. And I was really reluctant to believe in one more reality I had created on my own (albeit with a little help from my friends, Carlitos and Juanito) as an objective, non-conceptual one.

After the plants were razed by our friendly neighbourhood taverna-keeper, I never found the chance to have any more of the seeds. I looked for them in a park at Maroussi, and in Penteli where I lived at the time, but I couldn't find any more plants. I still have this feeling, that the plant wanted me to find it after I had spent some time displaying my eagerness to find it, and then got pissed off by mine and others' indiscreet behaviour towards it, and left.

But that is just the 'emic explanation, isn't it?

 

BACK