Why I shall not be getting stoned

I only ever had one acid trip.

I think I was about 22, and someone had spiked a delicious strawberry flan with LSD at a party in Oxford. I had two slices.

It wasn’t long before I felt the need to go home. Five of us had driven in a Mini, from London. We got back into the car and set off down the M40.

Almost immediately I seemed to be being assaulted by the white lines, flashing into my head. Then as I approached the first bridge over the road I became convinced that the car was too big to pass through it. I pulled over to the hard shoulder.

The one person, who proved not to have eaten of the flan, took over the driving. By the time we reached my flat above the drug dependents’ day centre where I worked, I was all over the place. We had deliberated on the journey and concluded that we were on a trip in which our tyres did not connect with any road surface.

Read more: Q & A on MDMA

I poured out glasses of orange juice and put Jaques Loussier on the turntable. The awfulness began to subside into something more pleasurable. When the music stopped the tireless trudge began again .. so the music resumed. The next morning as I descended to work I concluded that I had finally joined the vulnerable young people I was supposed to be counselling.

Tonight at 10.00pm in ‘Drugs Live’ I shall not be tripping. Instead I shall be anchoring a genuinely exciting Home Office approved trial of the drug MDMA – Ecstasy.

I have never tried E, but today 25 volunteers have agreed to take 83mg of the drug in hospital conditions and subject themselves to three hours of MRI scans. They are range of people from a Church of England woman vicar, to a former SAS man who now fights piracy in the Indian Ocean. The results are fascinating.

Professor David Nutt of Imperial College, the former Drugs Czar, says the trial has already yielded three dramatic scientific breakthroughs in the way Ecstasy works in the brain.

We explore the dangers and beneficial therapeutic potential. It’s eye opening stuff and feel honoured to be part of it.

Part one tonight at 10.00pm – Part two tomorrow night.

Oh, and yes, unfortunately I am not part of the trial – I shall not be on Ecstasy when you next hear me. But I shall be talking to someone who is.

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