This is my personal blog where anything I want to write about goes. I’m drafting another “chemtrails” debunk article but I feel like posting something more personal and humorous first.

This is a memory from my troubled but extremely interesting teenage years which popped into my head recently after almost 50 years and put me in stitches of laughter. So after all these years, I’m fessing up to one my adolescent misadventures.

It was 1976 or 1977 when I was 14 or 15, I can’t exactly remember when. I was a teenager living with my mom in San Francisco and like any good 1970s teenage stoner, I was interested in drugs. Unlike a lot of my fellow stoners, I was studious and systematic in my pursuit of them and read up on any substance of interest before I put it into my body. I read a lot of books on drugs and one of them was a small green pamphlet that I believe was called “Legal Highs”. It was a list of legal herbs that had some kind of effect on human consciousness along with recipes for preparing them. This dealt quite nicely with another problem I had as a teenage stoner, money. Drugs cost money and as an unemployed teenager living with a single mom, I didn’t have very much. And what little I had was generally spent on my other addiction, books and comics. Comic books were 30 cents and used paperbacks were half the cover price in most book stores which made older ones from the 1950s and 1960s dirt cheap, a far more affordable addiction than even the $10 “lids” of Mexican ganja that were sold at the time. I went through the legal highs book, made a list of the herbs that interested me and found an herb shop on 9th street that had almost all of them. It only cost a few dollars to buy them. I tried them one by one. Most of them didn’t work or were an unpleasant experience. There was one that did, kava kava, a traditional psychedelic from the south seas. I had an intense psychedelic experience where I saw colors, mostly red, dancing in the darkness that lasted about half an hour. There was a reason, however, that kava kava was legal. It required a complicated preparation that resulted in a liquid that tasted like dish soap. You had to drink about a pint of it to get high for about a half hour. As much as I enjoyed it, once was enough. I was mainly interested in psychedelics but the book had a section dedicated to “lettuce opium” which was a mild sedative that could be made from the roots of wild lettuce. The book said that even supermarket lettuce would have some effect but the wild lettuce was stronger. So I started saving the lettuce hearts from our salad lettuce, pureeing them in a blender, straining the juice out through a stocking and drying it in a shallow dish with a sun lamp. That gave me a substance that bore an incredible resemblance to opium and had a mild sedative effect when smoked like opium. I tried it and did feel the effect. I had a hippy aunt who encouraged my research and I gave her some. She tried it and commented on the sedative effect but sedatives really weren’t her thing and she gave it to a friend of hers who was under a lot of stress. This woman had a high energy 5 year old and a partner who was an unstable drug dealer/hustler. She loved it and I suddenly found a customer for my product. It also impressed her old man who was familiar with real opium. He was struck by how much it resembled the real thing and put in an order for a small ball of it with which he intended to deceive customers on a trip back home to somewhere in the Midwest. This was straight out of Paper Moon. Of course, I never got paid. As I remember it, it wasn’t a money deal, I was promised a gram or two of Lebanese hash for the fake opium. And so, I learned a sharp lesson in life, that a con man will con you even if you’re his friend. After that, I moved on and my mom got a housemate from the UK who gave me odd jobs helping him in his unlicensed construction work which alleviated some of my money issues and took my mind away from making homemade drugs. The memory of this rocks me with laughter and I still find it amazing that a mild sedative that looks like opium can be made from lettuce hearts.