Drugs weren’t just for fun. For her, MDMA was “an insight drug”. As a therapist, she offered it to her patients: it offered insight without self-hatred
, mescaline. Though she never liked the stoning drugs. And if you couldn’t make love on a drug, as she later said, stretching out her wrinkled hands, then “there’s something not quite right.”
Though he didn’t respond that well when things actually went wrong. A few months later there was a pregnancy. It was the 1950s, and he was married, and ambivalent. So when, at two months, she felt the contractions begin, she coped with the miscarriage alone. She squatted on the toilet, alone. She went to lie on the bed, alone. She woke, alone, in a pool of her own blood. Later, in hospital, she would be told that she had lost six pints of blood.
Their trips, like Huxley’s, were recorded. When, on a bright May morning in 1953 Huxley had swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, he had been watched by a researcher who had recorded his responses to the drug. He had seen books glow like rubies; a slow dance of golden lights; flowers shine with eternal life. When the researcher asked Huxley how he felt about time, he had replied with clarity: “There seems to be plenty of it.