Amsterdam: The Longest Way Round

It has become a by-word for the bulk of society’s carnal excesses and eccentricities, but Amsterdam remains, for me, one of the most beautiful cities to walk around and simply be in across the whole of Europe. Its hard-earned reputation as a mecca for the sexually and narcotically underprivileged stands in contextually stark relation to the hard facts of Netherlands life. A mere 6% of Dutch people use recreational drugs such as mushrooms or cannabis on a regular basis, despite widespread decriminalisation. The figures for brothel attendance were not, last time I checked, widely published.

It is primarily we Brits who make the pilgrimage to its narrow streets and mesh of canals, with 20% of its annual tourist contingent (second only to domestic visitors) emanating from our fair, repressed Isle. Braying packs of football supporters and swaying herds of various stag parties sniff out the coffeeshops and nightclubs, before the wind picks up and the prevailing scent steers them, inevitably, to the city’s red-light district.

The primary ingredient of Amsterdam’s Brit-magnet is of course the ubiquity of soft drugs. There are nearly a hundred coffeeshops (to be distinguished from cafes) in the city. A brief scan of the menu of types of cannabis on offer is a potentially dispiriting experience. Various types of ‘high’ are itemised, before one happens upon one strain’s claim to offer ‘no paranoia’, which certainly undercuts the appeal of the remainder of the menu.

On perhaps my second visit to the city, my travelling companion raised the prospect of trying some mushrooms during our visit. It was apparently something that he’d always wanted to do. When it comes to recreational drugs, I’ve always been of the opinion that one’s inclination towards certain types bears some relation to one’s taste in music. The dance and hardcore crowd gravitate towards the endless energy and euphoria of speed and pills. The manic art-schoolers who won’t leave the house unless promised synthesisers favour cocaine’s manic buzz. I was very much an old-fashioned lover of the relatively fashionable wave of sixties sounds – appropriating actual sixties music with the soundalike indie groups of my youth. The odd toke would provide an excellent backdrop to much of our listening, though the hippy-ish and idealistic curiosity as to the limits of our minds led one, perhaps inevitably, to the psychotropic end of the scale.

LSD and mushrooms are, of course, not the same thing. Through prudent selection, though, one can experience a fascimile of the former’s effects and symptoms. Mushrooms are legal in Amsterdam, their stockists a range of ‘head shops’ that nestle in back alleys, the better to ensnare the errant tourist whose stoned wanderlust has led them off the beaten track.

Perfectly sober, we entered one such establishment, and started to scan the various display cases. The layout put me in mind of a jeweller's shop transplanted to an interrogation facility, with the goods on offer being an oddly enchanting (even when ‘straight’) array of funghi. We explained our ‘predicament’ to the proprietor and made our selection, and were assured that, should we begin to feel ‘unwell’ at any stage, we should simply drink some water and eat a banana. Perfect – the exhilaration of the jump and the safety net all for under twenty Euros.

Now, I had little sense of exactly what psychoactive drugs such as LSD do to the mind, or how their effects presented themselves. In music, poetry and literature there is a trove of abstract jargon relating to doors being opened, to altered perspectives, to some synaesthetic elements such as ‘seeing’ sounds. But like one’s balance, it is a hard thing to describe to the unbalanced – one can’t imagine it into being. As such, I probably anticipated a slightly refined version of being high, or drunk. Dear reader, I could not have been more wrong.

Back at our rented apartment, we began by dropping a couple of mushrooms into our mugs of tea and stirring them around. This merely gave the tea an earthy tinge, and we chewed and grimaced our way through mouthfuls. We opened a bottle of wine – the better to dispel the arid taste in our mouths – and resumed our game of chess. And we waited. For what, we weren’t sure, though were convinced we’d know it when we approached it.

Baffled at the lack of effects, and cursing the charlatan who had sold us some fancily shaped, psychotropically dormant mushrooms, we finished off the remainder of the box. But still the chess pieces simply failed to come alive and address us as to the best course of their movement. The wine we were drinking had a screw-top, one of us noticed. This was becoming rather common, we agreed. God only knows what’s likely to become of the world’s cork manufacturers, we pondered. And then laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed some more, our mirth comfortably scaling the heights of hilarity.

And we were suddenly ushered onto and buckled into the kind of trip that we had been promised, and had read about. The initial laughter subsided, and we scrabbled around for some music to listen to – the better to experience it through such an auditory filter. I remember that my friend opted for something classical, though it could scarcely have mattered less who the composer was. The sounds of the cello seemed to bounce around inside my head, at numerous points seeming to flit across my field of vision.

The conversation was shelved as we simply lay, or sat, and gazed into the middle distance or into the streets below. The music wasn’t simply bouncing around the room, it was IN me – with each climb up the musical scale, my brain reacted with a gushing of euphoria. Eager to experience new realms of touch sensation, I roused myself from the rug that I was lolling around on and took a shower.

Quite how I managed to undress and eventually re-dress myself given my state of mind remains off-limits to my memory or understanding. Suddenly, we were ‘normal’ again; we agreed to take a walk. The sanity that had been tantalisingly glimpsed moments earlier once more eluded us as we weaved along the street – not intoxicated or unbalanced, just drawn to the merest light or architectural nuance.

Now, I maintain to this day that, alongside the attendant madness, and discombobulation of ordinary mental processes, the sheer longevity of psychoactive drugs remains their most potent feature. After about half an hour of taking our place in a coffeeshop, and smoking a little local ganja, we once more began to feel weird. The perceptions were the same, but our overall ‘sense’ of ourselves and our environment suddenly altered. Or, more correctly: dived. This wasn’t a happy place, but one of unexplained and unattributable worry and concern. We hurriedly packed up and scurried off home. Sleep it off, and leave tomorrow for the reflecting, we thought.

Sleep does not come easily to the user of such drugs. Its overall palette of sensations is too abstract to adequately describe, but none of them are physical. There is no reduction in alertness, co-ordination or vigour. The mind, on the other hand, responds as if it has been injected with enough energy and insight to sustain a thousand waking moments; a million hopes, dreams, paranoias and anxieties. I lay awake, wishing that the enhanced scrutiny that my psyche was now imposing would dissipate, but such wishing served only to make it worse.

I eventually slept, though not for long. I was suitably physically fragile the following day, while my mind felt as if I had been ridden hard and put away wet. We groped our way through what can only be described as a psychological hangover, before eventually recovering sufficiently to sit down in a local boozer and recount and connect some of the features of the last twenty-four hours. There are still songs and sights that remind me of the frame of mind that I was in, though there is no corresponding emotional state or realm of perception that one can equate with such trips.

The apperception of the fragility of mere rational consciousness was immediate and vivid. It was an education of sorts – perhaps that the longest way round is often the shortest way home...