I don’t really recall how I started using opiates and heroin again in 1965. I had kicked the habit early in 1964 and went back to college to redo my A levels so that I could go to university.[1] At the City of Westminster College I met Lynn Ellis and we started going out. I had already met her at the Witches Cauldron in Belsize Park, but it was through college that we got together. She was weaning herself from opiates and had a regular methadone prescription. Sometimes she’d give me half a vial and I’d shoot that up. So that must have been the start. Summer 1965 after travelling overland to Afghanistan with friends I found I could buy ampoules of morphine for 10 Afghanis each (about a shilling old money, 5p today) to shoot up. I also brought 4 oz of opium home from that trip and sometimes would dissolve that and shoot it up, after boiling and filtering it through a tiny ball of cotton wool.
Summer 1966 I went back Afghanistan with just one friend Peter and persuaded a doctor to write me prescription for 4 ampoules of morphine. It was a rather shameful incident. There was a queue of about 100 sick people and I jumped the queue and went straight up to the doctor and asked for medicine for painful piles, as Bill Burroughs used to do. He started to write a prescription for paracetamol when I stopped him and said that was not strong enough. He asked “The pain is very?” I responded “The pain is very!” and he wrote me the prescription for morphine. Shamefully, I have never suffered from piles.
My companion Peter took a picture of my booty laid out on a pillow in Kabul. There’s a syringe along the top, over the revolver. Two folding knives on the left, and various discs of black hashish on the right. There are three bullets for the gun top left and various pills, drugs, etc including two ampoules of morphine and 4 larger ones of distilled water. There is a small lump of opium top right near the larger discs of hash. All of it was used up, disposed of, like the gun that was pinched from me in Kandahar, or brought home with me. This rather poor contact print is the only image left.
Afghan booty Summer 1966
I bought the gun from a French hippie in Herat for $10 with 3 used but repacked bullets. I never dared fire it just in case it went wrong and blew my hand off. In Kabul I walked around with the revolver butt protruding from the right hand hip pocket of my Levis. An English speaking police officer approached me and politely informed me that, technically, carrying a gun is illegal, so would I kindly disguise it better? In response I wrapped a red hanky round the butt so it wasn’t quite so obvious. I kept the gun unloaded with the 3 bullets in a matchbox in my left pocket.
I did wave it around in anger once, to threaten a hotel keeper who tried to extort 3 days rent after a stay of just 2 nights, and who was impeding our departure by hanging on to a suitcase. Luckily he didn’t see the chambers were empty when I pulled out the gun and shouted “Let go of the suitcases or I’ll blow your fucking head off!” He backed away with raised hands and we escaped with our luggage. Unfortunately our waiting taxi driver saw the incident with the gun and drove off in a panic. So we had to run a couple of hundred meters down the road carrying a packed suitcase in each hand, until we were out of sight! Our suitcases were full of used American clothing from the market that were quite the rage back home in London. These were USAid donations which ended up on sale in the market. Button-down cotton shirts, Ivy League cut jackets, and so on. Plus some traditional Afghan outfits. Just for ourselves and maybe for a couple of friends.
Returning to England I found I had got good grades in my A level resit exams and won a place at the fashionable but excellent Sussex University near Brighton. It was called by ‘Hampstead by the Sea’ by some wags. I soon made friends with the local heads at the university and in town, especially as my old Hampstead mates Alan Green and his brother Brian Green lived nearby. They were both ex-users but stuck to booze and smoke these days.
Maggi Gearson in 1966
That Autumn I met and fell in love with a wonderful and beautiful girl called Maggi Gearson. She was studying to become a teacher at the Brighton College of Education, across the road from the University. We hit it off so well and were inseparable for the next 20 months, except when she visited her mother in Paris. I did sometimes go with her, and her mother put us up in a modest hotel in the Pigalle district near to her flat. We took a lot of drugs together like hash, acid and less often uppers and downers. I recall spending one whole acid trip in Brighton in bed doing nothing but making love with Maggi. We came again and again and I couldn’t tell which was her body and which was mine. It was a wonderful experience of bodily and mind fusion and togetherness. Ah, the passion and lust of young love.
In Autumn 1967 after a Summer together in Ibiza I started my second year and we were more heavily into drugs. Maggi dropped out of college and was living with me in a dingy basement flat in Ventnor Villas, Hove. I shared this flat with my dear friend Dave Fry. One of my new friends was Niall Good whose father was a GP in nearby Rottingdean. He would pinch some morphine solution from the surgery and he and I used to get high on that. He substituted water for it and I do hope some poor tragic accident victim wasn’t given a shot of morphine solution diluted to nothing, when in real need.
I tried to keep my opiate use hidden from Maggi, but she knew what was going on and asked me for some. I refused because I thought it would ruin her. I did some serious thinking because I knew it was getting inevitable that she would start shooting up. I faced two choices – to give up all opiates and intravenous drug use myself, or to break up with her. I just couldn’t and wasn’t prepared to do the former and I loved her too dearly for the latter. I was paralysed with indecision and in the end I made the coward’s choice of no choice and the inevitable happened.
One day when I came back from University she showed me she had some heroin she had bought and some nasty punctures on her arm where she had tried and failed to inject herself. I didn’t want to do it but couldn’t bear to see her wounding herself, so I gave in and, regretfully, gave her her first intravenous shot. She loved it and after it wore off in the midnight hour she wanted more, more, more.
Over the course of that academic year we were multidrug users smoking dope most of the time, taking speed, acid now and then, downers, opiates, and when we could get it, coke to shoot up with the H. We were getting by without getting too degraded and even travelled to Turkey together overland during the Easter vacation 1968 to score a couple of Kilos of hash for sale and personal use. We went to so many psychedelic events that year – the Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally, in April and Christmas on Earth at Olympia in December; UFO in Tottenham Court Road, Middle Earth in Covent Garden. We saw Jimi Hendrix and the Pink Floyd about five times each, Arthur Brown once and loads of others including Captain Beefheart.
One time we were at the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden that my friend Neil Winterbottom had set up with others (so he claimed). John Peel was the DJ and he said over the PA system what bliss it would be if he had a copy of the Velvet Underground’s record to play. This was their first album with the Andy Warhol banana cover and my friend Patrick Lane had brought a copy back from San Francisco and later swapped it with me for a box of ampoules of meth. So we went to John Peel and said we had it outside in the car, and brought it in and lent it to him. However after 2 hours he still hadn’t played it so we asked for it back and left. In those days you could park in Covent Garden and Maggi had a tiny car called a Goggomobil.
Alex, Maggi and Paul in Paris Easter 1968 on return from Gaziantep, Turkey
However from Easter 1968 we started to go downhill, becoming full-on heroin addicts. I stopped attending University and we spent more time in London, although there were a few registered addicts we scored from in Brighton, as well. We hung around with some heavy users like John Boylan, Danny Halliday and Frank in Shadwell, as well as anyone else we could score from. Too often we would be hanging around the chemists Bliss in Kilburn, and Boots and John Bell & Croyden by Piccadilly circus at midnight, looking to score. However, of the episodes I recall about half involve Maggi and half do not. She also went to Paris several times on her own.
I remember walking around the underground station at Piccadilly circus, trying to score from junkies at the Gents, shooting up in the stalls, and thinking it was like one of Dante’s circles of Hell. It really was. Undercover cops chasing rent boys and pick pockets. Junkies chasing dealers – who themselves were just junkies with a little ‘spare’ on the script. Then there was the squalor and stink of the underground station and the gents toilets! Drunks and junkies vomiting. Rent boys and johns ejaculating. We were condemned by our desires and sins to forever chase each other around this hellish circle.
Too many half remembered episodes come back from the Spring and early Summer of 1968. Such as meeting Gina Strauss who had been such a lovely and joyful girl in Hampstead, Tony’s first real girlfriend and later Andrew Loog Oldham’s squeeze. Now only 5 years later she was an ill-kempt and desperate junkie hanging around the ‘Dilly’. She offered to come home and sleep with me just for a bed for the night. I declined, my sole desire was for the white mistress of the night, heroin. Heroin kills libido in males and reduces capacity too. For women it is different, quashing inhibitions without necessarily squashing desire.
One time I was so desperate all I could score was methadone linctus and I shot that up in a giant 20ml syringe in the Dilly gents. My blood floated on top of the linctus and when I shot it into my arm it was as if my liver groaned and my low grade high was tinged with nausea.
One time I found a jack of H on the floor at Bliss where some junkie had fumbled their little prescription bottle and dropped it. In those days H still came in little jacks in a tiny cork stoppered glass bottle, the pills counted out by the dispensing chemist. Charlie came in similar bottles but was tiny little snow-flake crystals, smaller than in sea salt. Methedrine came in little glass vials holding 2 ml of water into which 30 mg was dissolved. The vials came in cardboard packs of 5 for which the standard price was £1 or 5/- each vial. H and C was £1 a grain (60mg in the form of six10mg jacks) and was 100% pure NHS issue. I have never used any H that was other than 100% pure NHS issue.
In all my time as a junkie I never once had a junkie try to jack the price up on me (excuse the pun). The prices were just standard and accepted by everyone. I hate to think what would happen today, if someone had the stuff you desperately needed and you only had money to buy it with. Would the price double, treble, go up fivefold? I think the reason everything was fair (and cheap) was because it was junkies selling part of their script both to help out a fellow user and to gain a little spending change. They weren’t in the game to get rich, just to get by!
As soon as the Chinese Heroin came in via the Hong Kong Triads, after the NHS more or less stopped prescribing it around 1969, the price jumped sixfold to 1 pound a fix (instead of 6 jacks for a pound). Grey elephant they called it. I never tried it.
Only once did I get a prescription for H and that was from the infamous Dr Petro. I met him by arrangement in St John’s Wood tube station, where he wrote me a prescription for 3 grains of H, for a fee of £2. He was a doctor who had served the upper classes but now as an alcoholic he was down on his uppers. He was struck off not too long later.
Rab cashed my script (prescription) for me in an East End chemist and as we were walking away he opened the bottle clandestinely in his raincoat pocket to steal some, but fumbled it. When I asked for my H it was all loose in his grubby pocket, mixed in with fluff and god knows what else. I told him off and said “I was going to give you some, you know” which I did.
I was reluctant to get registered on H because I was technically a foreigner and I was applying for British citizenship at the time. I just didn’t want ‘heroin addict’ written all over my official records, and get refused as an undesirable alien. In the end the police decided I was involved with drugs and recommended I be refused citizenship anyway, which I was, in 1968. My friends Tony and Alan were registered addicts by then, but either we didn’t meet up that often, or when we did they didn’t have any junk to spare.
Maggi was starting to sleep with other guys when were not together, which I didn’t really know at the time, although I sometimes had vague glimmerings and uneasy suspicions. She was quite insecure and attention seeking, and if I, her boyfriend, was not there to give her my love and full attention, she would use her charms to get that attention from another guy on the scene. One time she gave me crab lice, and even then I did not suspect how she had been infected. We both had to cut off our pubic hair and apply a pink cream to kill the little parasites and their eggs. When we did, because of all the little wounds and scratches we had made on our pubic regions with nail scissors, it stung really badly. As we jumped about in pain I recall joking that we had the perfect antidote to that pain as we both shot up heroin. It worked.
One time in the Brighton flat, we had 3 jacks each. I shot mine up but she only used one of hers. A few hours later I wanted some of hers, like a child squabbling over his sister’s sweets when he’d gobbled up his own share. She didn’t want to share and I begged and pleaded for ages. When I looked round she was cutting scratches into her forearm with a knife. She was so torn between her need for her own heroin and my desperate pleas that she turned away from the pain of the insoluble dilemma and hurt herself. I was deeply shocked to see that, upset because of the pain I was giving the woman I loved. But I still wanted some of her heroin. I think she gave me half a jack.
There was a couple we knew, Diane and John, from the London drug scene. They were a stylish, attractive but skinny pair. They might be labelled Goths these days. They were speed freaks, which kept them very thin. She said they lived by ‘bric-a-bracing’ which was a euphemism for burglary. Diane lent us her mini a couple of times and we’d drive down to Brighton for a day or two.
One time we took the old time junkie Danny Halliday and his girlfriend Pauline on a late night visit to my flat in Ventnor Villas, Hove, in the borrowed mini. We arrived at 6:30 am and waited by the beach until Niall Good turned up at 7am for the start of his deck chair job. We piled into the tiny hut and within 10 minutes Niall had passed out from an overgenerous shot of heroin.
We then drove on to Ventnor Villas. Pauline couldn’t wait and was shooting up in the car and passed out with a needle bloody in her arm. She flopped out of the mini and was lying on the pavement, legs in the car, bloodied needle in arm, skirt up ’round her waist, which didn’t look too good to the neighbours, as she had a ravaged streetwalker look anyway! A bit much at 8 am as a spectacle for neighbours to pass by on their way to work! We picked her up and hauled her downstairs to the seedy basement flat.
Danny was on a huge script of 30 grains of H, 30 grains of C and I think 10 boxes of methedrine per day, on a prescription from Dr. Lady Frankau. So although a very heavy user he had plenty to spare. I don’t know what prescription Pauline had. We piled into the flat and Danny generously allowed me and Maggi to use as much as we wanted. Being greedy I had a big shot of H and C (an exquisite speedball) and passed out on the floor. My friend Patrick was there to witness this. This is his account.
I visited my close friend Paul one day at his basement flat in Ventnor Villas in Hove. I found him on the floor, dead, with a syringe still protruding from his arm. Instead of giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or calling an ambulance, I rifled through his pockets to find his stash of drugs, which I immediately took possession of. I also stole his LP of Bach’s Musical Offering and his copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. That such wondrous examples of human creativity should be coveted by a lost degenerate provides yet another example of life’s rich contradictions.
‘Well, he doesn’t bloody need them any more,’ I would have said if asked.
I’m pleased to report that Paul was not dead, just unconscious, and these days he holds a chair at a prestigious English university. I eventually replaced the drugs and returned the book and LP – though we argued for a long time about how much heroin was in his pocket when I emptied it. But Paul was very forgiving of my behaviour and completely understood. “Of course, man. I would have done exactly the same.”
Danny said to me when I came to “Don’t trust that guy Patrick, he helped himself to your stash”. In fact, he didn’t steal it all, just enough to get him off, and for us not to notice. And he did replace the book and the LP although I’m not sure he ever replaced the drugs!
Another incident with Danny and the mini happened not long after. Maggi and I scored some boxes of meth and were pretty high on it for days. We drove to Frank’s to see if we could get some H. He didn’t have much to spare but swapped a grain of C for a box of meth. Next, after midnight, we drove to Danny’s in West Hampstead to score. In my stoned and devious way I thought maybe I could get 2 grains of H from Danny. We went in after the usual palaver of quietly tapping on the window of his rented room at about 1 am. One of his young acolytes let us in and we had an audience with him in his large bedsit room. There were a few young addicts sitting around listening to his longwinded stories for a cheap, or if really lucky, free fix.
We went in and greeted the occupants paying special homage to Danny. After the usual long delays he finally asked me what I wanted. I said I had a couple of grains of coke to swap for two grains of H please. He opened the folded paper and looked at the coke. He said
“This is one grain of coke. You have come here trying to cheat me. I don’t like it, I’m no fool you can take advantage of just because I’m high. As a punishment I will give you just half a grain of H for it. But I’m not forcing it on you. I will only give it to you if you tell me that this is fair and you are happy with the deal.”
I was hurt, publicly humiliated, but so desperate for the H I told him I was happy with the deal, took the three jacks and left. I was really upset. Outside in the hallway Maggi said to me “How could you let him put you down like that. And in public, have you no spine?”. I burst into angry tears and asked how she could kick me like this when I was so down and humiliated.
We got into the mini and headed off to Brighton from West Hampstead. The cogs in my meth raddled mind were turning, and in my amphetamine psychosis the picture became clear. She was my enemy and was planning to kill me. I sat there silently scheming. I wondered how I could escape from the speeding car and her evil intentions, and then a bright idea came to me. I pushed my foot hard against the gear stick so she could not change gear and would be forced to stop. She exclaimed “What are you doing?” and pulled the car diagonally in to the curb in Finchley Road near St John’s Wood tube station. I threw open the door and ran out and hid behind a low wall. She followed me asking ““What’s happening, are you okay?”. I was sobbing by now and ran down a side street and huddled in the doorway to a garden set in a long brick wall. Maggi came and sat next to me with her arm around me trying to comfort me as I shook with tears.
Just then a bobby on the beat walked up and asked me. “Excuse me sir, is that your car on the high street?” I replied, “No, no, no, … it’s not my car, it belongs to a friend who lent it to us, you see.” He said “Well if you don’t mind, would you be kind enough to park it properly, sir?” and then he walked off. I guess he thought we were having a lover’s tiff rather than me having a breakdown.
We got back in the car and drove to Brighton down the usual route including the wonderful and aptly named “PurleIy Way”. It has a line of sodium lights suspended above the centre of the road for a kilometre, like a string of pearls. I gradually recovered my equanimity, but it was one more step towards the end of our relationship.
There were many further sad, degenerate and desperate episodes of drug abuse throughout the academic year 1967-68, especially in the early summer, culminating in Maggi dumping me.
In the summer of 1968, after Maggi was gone, I recall going to Diane’s basement room in Westbourne Grove one evening. She was the girl who used to lend us her mini. There were about half a dozen of us including Diane sitting around on the carpet. Someone had some speed so we all coughed up some money and shared it out in little paper packets. These were made the usual way. You get a rectangle of paper, maybe 6” by 4” and put your powder in the middle. Then you fold it longways so the two lengths overlap a couple of times. Then you fold up the bottom and top thirds, making sure you keep the powder in the middle, and tuck one inside the other. People also sold grass and other drugs wrapped in a similar way. There were no plastic bags nor clingfilm in those days.
So we each had our stashes in little paper folds and were starting to shoot up the speed. After twenty minutes one of the guys, a youngster I hadn’t seen before said “Hey, I can’t find my stuff!”. We all got up and patted down our trousers and looked around. Nothing doing. The young guy got more and more agitated, saying “One of you guys must have nicked it!”. Everyone denied it and he went off in near tears. We carried on shooting up, then one of the guys said “Well of course I had it. You can’t go leaving your stuff around on the floor and not expect it to get nicked. It was his own fault, he’ll learn.”
I was deeply shocked by this casual thievery from a compatriot in the brotherhood of drugs. The absolute lack of empathy and ethics towards someone you were treating as a friend a moment before. What was shocking was not just the theft, but the casual admission, as if nobody could possibly regard it as wrong. Drug desire knows no ethics, no bounds, and you’d steal a dying relative’s morphine if you needed it.
I remember two incompatible endings to that night, so probably it was two evenings. In one ending everybody left except Diane, and a female friend of hers and her sleeping five year old child. Diane took her blouse off revealing a very skinny torso with ribs deeply etched, and two perfect breasts. She smiled at me and despite my head spinning with speed at 3 am, I felt really sexy and aroused. I wanted to make a move on her. I felt it was an invitation. But I was just too inhibited, embarrassed to make love to her in the presence of another woman and a child in her one room flat. The hours passed and as dawn came I left. I always regretted my timidity.
In the other ending, one of the guys said, wouldn’t it be great to score some H. I said I knew where, at Frank’s in Shadwell. We went there by tube. I think it must have been really late by then and we got the first tube at 5 or 6 am. I told him to wait on the platform and I would go and score. I couldn’t bring him as Frank didn’t like strangers coming around. I went to Frank’s and it took ages to score and I shot up myself as well, before I left. I did bring some stuff back to Shadwell Tube Station, but it had taken me 1 hour and 15 minutes, and my friend for the night had gone. I felt sad he had given up waiting before I got back. But it left me some extra!
We must have met Frank at the Dilly or somewhere. He lived in a flat in the East End, nearest tube Shadwell, and his flat was absolutely crammed with his stuff. Floor to ceiling. Stuffed eagles, harmoniums, oak pulpits, complete encyclopedia sets, large collections of crockery, fishing tackle, brass instruments, records including 78s, towers of books, cases of butterflies, electric drills, and so on. A real emporium of antiques and bric-a-brac. Except none of it was for sale. He was a hoarder. There were passages through it so you could get to the toilet, kitchen and bedroom. The living room and hall were pretty fully stuffed. Even the bedroom was mostly piled high with books on half on the bed and two or three easy chairs clear, if you were lucky, with a cramped space for your feet, and the rest of the room filled up. Some of the time he lived with a mixed race girl and her child. I think they all slept sitting up in the chairs. Frank was a bright guy, I don’t know what path had led him into heavy drug addiction. He was a self taught expert on everything, and with his ginger hair looked a bit like Vincent van Gogh. And just as rough as Vincent on one of his bad days.
He was a decade or two older than us. He could usually spare a bit of H and C and would swap them for Meth, if you had some. He’d often make you accompany him to the chemists to pick up his prescription. He liked the company because there were East End roughs around who would rob him of his drugs if they got a chance. I recall them shouting insults at us, like “He’s a dirty junkie!” as we re-entered his flat having collected his prescription. They had broken in once, when he was out, and robbed him. He had a boarded up window in the hallway where they had broken in.
One time I was there, it must have been Autumn 1968, when there were noises and the boarded up window was pushed in. Piles of crockery and books were pushed perilously close to collapse as two guys clambered in the window, breaking a few plates. They were plain clothes police. They said “What are you up to Frank, keeping honest?” I don’t know what his relationship with them was, and whether they were on the make. He certainly did not welcome the intrusion. I was sitting down trying to stop nodding off while I read “The Trial of Galileo” by Berthold Brecht. I was studying Thomas Kuhn’s Copernican Revolution and the history of science at the time, at Sussex University. One policeman said to me “What’s a nice middle-class boy like you doing around here, you shouldn’t let Frank get you on the drugs.” I protested I was only a friend, although my pinned pupils would certainly have given me away as a user. They left after a while. Frank was a nice and interesting guy, and I did regard him as a friend, not just someone to score off.
Tony told me later that Frank got busted and the Council moved in, cleaned up his flat, and stored his stuff in a garage lock up. When Frank came out of nick his flat was gone and he claims they nicked the best stuff in his collection. I never knew what happened to Frank in the end, let alone the girl and child.
I had a pretty miserable academic year 1968-69 after coming back from Sweden in the Summer, where my parents sent me to rehabilitate. I restarted year 2 of my course at Sussex again but had to leave after a month as I was back on drugs. I was a multi-drug addict, taking anything to get high. I had a lot of acid trips for kicks, not as the semi-religious voyages of self discovery that they had been at first, starting 1965. I used everything I could get, smoking dope daily, alcohol, uppers and downers, speed, opiates, anything at all. It was really a year of depression and breakdown. Sitting at home reading H.P. Lovecraft, Tibetan Buddhism, Sci-Fi and all sorts of weird stuff that confirmed my rabbit hole of ‘world-strangeness’ or alienation.
I learned later that during this time my two ex-girlfriends Lynn and Maggi moved into Paul de Mille’s flat in Chalcott Square, which they shared with Crispin Kitto, while Paul was away for a couple of months. They were both on junk, but our paths did not cross. I had seen Lynn once in early Summer 1968 when she came over to my mother’s house and stayed the night after getting out of Holloway Prison on release for some petty drug-related offence. By the time I woke up she was gone again, back into the endless nightmare of her life, wearing some of my clothes.
But as winter 1968 approached I was isolated and very depressed. My mother referred me to a psychiatrist Dr. Peter Dally who she worked with at Westminster Hospital. Because I was intermittently on junk he gave me a methadone prescription for 4 months. He described my state as psychotic, my mother told me later. He was cutting me down from 4 ampoules to 2 ampoules a day. I would jump on a bus from West Hampstead to Golders Green everyday to cash my prescription. I even saw Maggi a bit. I recall hiding behind the door of her bedroom in Hendon with a methadone loaded syringe in my hand when her father looked in to speak to her. I had been banned from the house and she snuck me in. But the magic, the love was gone and we were now both sad and desperate characters.
When my grandmother died around Easter 1969 I asked Dr. Dally for two days worth of methadone syrup to take with me to the funeral in Gothenburg. I went there by ship, which was the cheapest route in those days. Each day I drank half the syrup and then refilled it with water. I was at Danny and Lena’s in Gothenburg when the withdrawal kicked in. But it was only aching legs for one night and sleepers took care of it.
I think Lena made love to me once that visit, as I was lying drowsily on the roof in the sunshine with just my pants on, still a bit numb from the sleepers. She climbed on top of me and was finished before Danny came to look for us. If he had caught us, or confronted her she would have said “You don’t own me or my body, I’ll sleep with anyone I want to!”. It would have been more difficult for me though, as I was betraying a friend’s trust.
It was good to see old Swedish friends again but I was in a dark place. I felt nothing at my grandmother’s funeral although I had spent lots of time with her as a kid and loved her dearly. Returning to London I was still a depressed multi-drug addict taking whatever I could to get high. In the Summer I went to the Stones free concert in Hyde Park.
Paul at the Stones concert in Hyde Park Summer 1969
My last period of drug abuse was Summer 1969. I arranged to meet Lena, my Swedish sometime lover, in Ceuta, Spanish Morocco. She was in an all inclusive holiday resort just outside of Tetuan which she had booked cheaply as a travel agent. I flew in to Gibraltar and took the ferry across the straits and a bus to her resort. The doorman wouldn’t let me in and denied that she was there. I found out later she was sleeping with him, and he obviously didn’t want to lose his pretty blonde squeeze for the weekend. So I travelled on to Tetuan and hit the chemist for over the counter drugs. I scored lots of preludin, a form of speed, and spent the weekend shooting it up in my hotel room, and smoking kif. I think I suffered from amphetamine psychosis. I was hugely paranoid and saw some terrible things. These included eyeballs on stalks coming through splitting walls. There were whispering voices and an overall aura of threat and doom.
By Monday morning I was in a terrible state. I went back to the holiday camp and met Lena, but I was so locked up inside myself I kept saying “terrible things are happening”. We took the bus to Tangier, but instead of shacking up together in a hotel as I had hoped, she abandoned me and hoofed it as soon as we arrived. I was all hippied up in a white flowing shirt with turquoise embroidery and matching turquoise velvet loon pants from my friend Duncan who ran Forbidden Fruit in Portobello Road. But it wasn’t the hippie clothes and long hair that drove her off. After all, the previous summer she had sewed me a couple of pairs of flared trousers herself. No, it was my abject head state. Her plan was to score a couple of keys in Tangier and then take them home to Gothenburg, which she did. I can’t blame her for dumping me! I never saw her again, although my sister bought her flat in the very steep Nedre Fogelbergsgatan (Lower bird mountain street) from her and Danny in Gothenburg, or rather paid her key money to take it on.
Actually it was me that inspired her to smuggle the dope. I’d met up with Danny de Souza in Gothenburg on my second cure Summer 1968, when my parents sent me to Sweden after my awful summer in the dumps and after the split from Maggi. I stayed in the countryside with my cousins and near my granny (mormor – mother’s mother) and took up the habit of bussing into Gothenburg to visit the main library. They had loads of English language books. One day walking out I bumped into Danny de Souza who I knew from City of Westminster College where I had redone my ‘A’ Level studies 1964-66. He took me home to meet his girlfriend Lena. They invited me to stay and I moved in there.
Danny had to go back to England for a week to clear up some business and Lena immediately invited me into her bed. It was such an intense romance for me. I suppose I had a vacuum in my heart after Maggi and the terrible damage heroin does to you emotionally. Lena filled it, and it was young love all over again. I was head over heels infatuated. I’d meet her after work at her travel agent’s office and we’d spend all our time together, much of it in bed. I bought her the new Bob Dylan LP with Johnny Cash and Buffalo Springfield’s second album and those songs were listened to by us with such intensity, that the feeling lingers on to this very day.
Paul and Lena during our brief fling, Gothenburg Summer 1968
But then Danny came back and I had to covertly move out of her bed and their normal life resumed. But I regaled them with stories of how I had travelled to Morocco twice and brought back grass. How I’d been twice to Afghanistan and brought back hash. And how I had even travelled to Turkey earlier that year with Maggi and brought back 2.1 kg of best hash. So they wanted some. In fact, in the 1970s Danny did one run and got caught in Iran and spent a year or two in jail in Meshed. When he got back he told me he had become chess champion of Greece on the return overland journey because the colonels had locked up all the best players. He refused to play me though, I was at the peak of my skill at chess and Go, and fancied a game. He didn’t learn however, and got caught again bringing quite a few kilos of hash into Turkey from Iran and ended up with a sentence of 20 years. He served many years and his story is like that in the film Midnight Express with John Hurt. He wrote his story in a book “Under the Crescent Moon” which I picked up in a charity shop.
Back to Summer 1969. Lena was gone and I got a hotel room in Tangier, but was still out of my head. I smoked one pipe of kif after another and I could hear people whispering about me incessantly, and I just knew that they were peering into my hotel room through every crack, door and window. I ‘sensed’ that there were watchers all around, even hanging in the air outside my window, just out of sight. At one point I threw open my doors shouting “I have nothing to hide!” Luckily the hotel manager was either deaf or very tolerant of stoned tourists. Later on that week, wandering around Tangier and looking seawards, I could see big fish jumping out of the water. They were the same size all the way to the horizon, so I worked out that I must be hallucinating, from the speed.
Of all the drugs I ever took the most dangerous was speed, in its many forms from amphetamine, Dexedrine, Preludin, methedrine, Ritalin, etc. Large doses of speed stop you sleeping and you get paranoid and develop threatening hallucinations and suspect that all around you are scheming against you, even those you love. Amphetamine psychosis makes you cunning, wily, paranoid, scheming, distrustful, obsessive and full of distorted illusions about people, space and time. It made me fearful, angry and liable to lose my temper. Luckily I never became violent but some speed freaks do. A small dose makes you warm and loving and you can’t stop rabbiting on. Large repeated doses brings out compulsive behaviour, sleeplessness and paranoia and is very dangerous.
Alan Shoobridge and Paul in 1963
Fortunately I stopped shooting up speed and calmed down a bit and my amphetamine psychosis subsided. Actually, what happened was I went to a chemist stoned and asked for preludin. The chemist asked me what for. I was flustered and caught off guard so I said “Slimming”. But I was skinny as a rake, twitching and done up in hippy gear, so it was a highly implausible story. The chemist refused me, which was actually doing me a favour.
Walking around the Casbah who did I bump into in but my old friend Alan Shoobridge? I was so happy to see a dear friendly face and we spent the next 2 or 3 weeks together before I flew home to the UK. I kept my cheap room in a hotel in the Casbah, but spent all of my time with Alan. He was shacked up with his French girlfriend in another cheap hotel, taking all the drugs he could afford. Our staple was paregoric, an over the counter tincture of opium with camphor dissolved in the alcohol base, so it could not be injected.
William Burroughs describes chilling it until the camphor has separated out and forms a crust on top, and then extracting and injecting the remaining liquid. I have done that in the UK. Alan had a simpler technique. You heat it in a metal ladle or large spoon until boiling and then set fire to it. Both the camphor and alcohol burn off and you are left with a black opium deposit. This dissolves easy enough in water, suck it up through a ball of cotton wool and hey presto, you are ready to go!
I had money enough to pay for my share and to pay for his Alan would send his girlfriend importuning in the European quarter of Tangier. She would ask gentlemen for money for her favours and then run off back to Alan with the cash. We didn’t discuss it but I gathered that some johns caught her and demanded their pound of flesh!
I had a bottle with 120 trips of LSD in liquid form with me in Tangier. Quentin Theobald had synthesised in his Hythe lab. He was of course caught later and ended up in the clink doing a seven stretch. In the 1970s when I was back into studying mathematical logic I sent him logic and philosophy books in jail. He passed his Logic ‘A’ level inside. After that we sort of lost touch, but I heard he was killed in Ibiza. A brilliant chemist and a lovely guy!
But that summer I didn’t feel in the right state to take it myself, so I sold it among the hippies of Tangier. In fact I never took acid again. The drug binge with Alan Shoobridge in Tangier for three weeks was my last mad fling. While there I made a deal with a shop to buy 20 pairs of leather slippers with about 2 oz of hash sewn into each sole. But although I had given them half the money, I had a premonition that it would end badly, so I cancelled the deal. For my money I took some dope, instead, to smoke. Probably one of the best decisions I have ever made. People were getting caught bringing dope back. Paul de Mille had tried to bring a bunch of stuffed leather camel toys with kif in them back from Morocco, or posted them, I forget, and got busted, a year or two before. It was not a smart time to take risks, even though many people were getting through, especially as I was dressed like a hippie, drawing attention to myself. Indeed I was a hippie!
In the years that followed a whole bunch of friends were caught out east smuggling hash back, including Danny de Souza in Iran and Turkey, and Bernie Osgood, Viv Schutzman and Mic Parsons, who did time in Iran. (Mic also did time in USSR, having got off a plane in Tashkent to shoot up. He was later released as small change in a celebrated spy swap deal). That was before the really big-time smuggling took off, which ended with my friends Patrick Lane and Howard Marks splashed all over the papers and then in jail in the USA. I guess I was lucky to get away with it, but I did give it all up before it got really hairy, and my last smuggling was Turkish hash at Easter 1968 with Maggi. Oh no, there was one more occasion. When I went back to stay with Lena in Gothenburg in April 1969 I posted a bundle of comics and magazines with 2 oz of hash stapled between some pages, addressed to myself. The magazines were all rolled into a tube and bound up with string, so you could see right down the middle. It got through undetected.
It was just as well I posted it because when the boat docked in Gothenburg I was strip searched by the customs authorities, who confiscated most of the Rizla cigarette papers I was bringing. These were highly taxed in Sweden at the time. You were allowed 3 packs but I had a box of 50 as requested by Danny and Lena. There was no penalty, just confiscation and a mild telling off. Astutely they noticed the tracks on my arms and I explained that I was a recovering addict who had just given up methadone except for the linctus, which they let me take through. They were a thoroughly decent bunch of people.
Alan and I had a great time in Tangier but it was also uncomfortable. The reusable stainless steel needles we used were getting more and blunt, and even rubbing them on the striking side of a safety match box to sharpen them left them hurting my arm. Also the shots, the dissolved opium deposits, were making me feel sick to my stomach (my liver more likely) and it was all starting to be a pain. Not Alan though, I loved his company.
On reading a draft of this memoir my old friend Tony told me that paregoric includes benzoic acid as well as camphor and opium extract. No wonder shooting it up, even after burning off the inflammables, made me feel sick to my stomach!
I flew home to London via Gibraltar, but when I arrived I was diagnosed as multiply infected. I had hair lice, crab lice, pink eye (conjunctivitis), hepatitis A or B, and was a suspected typhus carrier. After and a few days in a public ward in Middlesex Hospital, I was diagnosed as a risk and sent to Coppetts Wood isolation hospital in Muswell Hill. Before I got there, I made a pact with the doctor to stop all drugs, and I did. This was forever, apart from one telling slip in the Autumn of 1969.
I spent 3 or 4 weeks in Coppetts Wood Isolation hospital completely on my own, off drugs. Visitors had to be gowned and masked up, before they were admitted into my private room, as source of some mirth to me. They were the freaks, not me. My parents brought me a radio and later a portable TV, as well as fruit and other treats on their visits. Bowie’s ‘Major Tom’ (Space Oddity) was the hit of the moment on the radio and I rolled those delicious chords around my mind. I was just sitting and thinking, determined to go clean, forever. The drugs no longer brought me joy and my life was a mess. Just watching the sky at dawn was a huge turn on. Of course, now I know that if you are a heavy user of cannabis the THC saturates your body fats so you remain pretty high for a month after giving it up. But no matter, I was filled with joy and love and ready to start to live again. I wrote poems and other short pieces including dramatic descriptions of sunrises and sunsets. I sent cards and letters to friends to keep in touch, letting them know I was back in the land of the living, adding drawings and writings in coloured pens and pencils. I was sharing the new found joy of being straight, of rediscovering myself, and of finding a self I could love and enjoy, instead of having run away and hide from myself all the time. One of the letters I wrote to was Philip Howe, and a parcel arrived from him in Cornwall. He was yachting with old man Hubbard and sent me a tin of clotted cream. I recall feasting on dark chocolate digestives with the cream in my isolation room, a private ecstasy. I tested negative for typhus in the end and was released.
The last time I had brought any dope to the UK back was Easter 1968. My then girlfriend Maggi and I travelled to Gaziantep, where we bought 2.1 Kg of the best grade hash. Back in England things had gone from bad from worse and we sunk into addiction and had to part Summer 1968, when she dumped me, to my great sorrow. Before then Maggi had a tin with 20 oz of our Turkish hash stolen by a guy called Max, after she spent the night with him. But in Autumn 1969, after I had given up all drugs, Max came back from Afghanistan with 100 kg of hash. Pete Rasini kindly said to Max “Why don’t you replace the dope you took from Paul and Maggi? That would be a nice thing to do.” Max gave Maggi one pound in weight of black Afghan hash, and although married to Tony by now, and 15 months on from our split, most honourably she contacted me to give me my half.
Selling that was the last dealing I ever did. Although straight, I took it to Brighton to sell to Geoff Conrad and other friends from the University of Sussex. Geoff happily bought it off me, and then offered me some coke. I had one shot, then, two, three, four, until it ran out. By morning I was pretty stoned and wretched as I took the train back to London. I thought to myself I was at a crossroads. I could choose to go back on drugs. Or I could take this slip as a serious lesson, and learn that I could not trust myself around any of my old drug friends, if they were still using. Viewed this way it could be seen as a positive, not the beginning of the end.
I walked back to West Hampstead from Victoria Station through St James’ Park, Hyde Park, Regents Park, Primrose Hill, on a glorious and sunny Autumn day. I smelled the flowers in those wonderful rose gardens in Regent’s park. My long walk was partly a penance but also partly just time to think, to clear my head. I decided I really did want to stay clean, I didn’t want throw away my hard won sobriety. I had just turned 25 and it was time to grow up, get serious, and fully face the wonders and challenges that life has to offer.
And so I did, keeping myself sequestered and applying for work and pursuing new interests in yoga, meditation, mysticism, magic and all the technologies of soul cleansing. I started a new diary recording all of these practices on 1 January 1970, just as I had started a diary about my growing into adolescence on 1 January 1960. Clearing out my mental garbage led to me getting a good job in computer programming at the start of 1970, and meeting Jill, the love of my life three months later. And reader, I’m still married to her, 56 years on.
By the summer of 1970 I was confident enough to meet my old friends on neutral grounds, away from temptation. Many were clean anyway like Peter, Philip, Steve and John. Maggi married my best friend Tony and although still users, they were mostly on methadone treatment programmes. Maggi and I were good friends until her premature death in 1971 from an accidental overdose caused by a pharmacist accidently making up methadone linctus for her that was eightfold too strong. The inquest was a whitewash and they claimed that she has added methadone powder to her syrup to enrich it. And they even talked down the 5 gm discrepancy in his methadone stocks listings as trivial, even though it is enough to kill more than a score of people. Their lovely son Julius is 55 years old now. Tony and the others, those that survived anyway, are still my best friends, to this very day, with heroin a very distant memory in the past.
To continue the story of my life, Sussex University readmitted me in 1971 after passing academic tests and with a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was clean. Jill worked and supported me by commuting from Brighton to her work at the World Films Service office in Brook Street, WC1. She rode down to Cannes in a Rolls Royce carrying the print of Losey’s ‘The Go Between’ to be screened, and it won the Palme D’Or. We were married in 1972.
I graduated in 1973 and obtained a masters degree in mathematical logic in 1974 with distinction. And on to my academic career. I published my first academic paper in 1975 in The British Journal of Philosophy of Science and sent a copy to Dr. Peter Dally, at my mother’s urging, to show how the fallen had risen mightily!
Paul and Jill in Summer 1970
There is quite a contrast between this picture and that of the dark and doomed-looking Paul of the Summer 1969, just one year earlier, at the Stones’ Concert in Hyde Park.
I guess I was lucky to get away with it, but I did give it all up, especially the smuggling, before it got really hairy. I did get turned down for British Citizenship in 1968. I mentioned Paul de Mill getting busted for smuggling dope. Because my name was in Paul’s address book I was listed as ‘suspicious’ in the Home Office files. One ‘strike’ against me. I was also interviewed by customs and excise agents Mr Cutting and Mr Cooney, when my friend Steve was done for posting some Afghan stuff in from Paris in 1965, on our way home from Afghanistan. Lynn Ellis’s parents had also falsely reported me to the Home Office in 1965 for turning their daughter onto drugs. In fact when we hooked up (sic) she was on a methadone treatment and it was her giving me a bit now and then that helped opened the door to my eventual readdiction. These three things were used against me by the police when they recommended turning down my citizenship application to the Home Office, in 1968.
They were very decent about it and suggested I withdraw my application. But I refused to do, stupidly thinking it was an admission of guilt! Of course they were right, I was deeply involved in drugs, even if none of the circumstantial evidence proved it. But as the policeman said at the time: “just one of these reports could have been a mistake. But three reports – too much to be a coincidence!” As John Buchan wrote “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” (Goldfinger quotes this!). But in 1990 my next application went through smooth as silk, thank god! Have you seen what they do to immigrants applying for citizenship these days? Monstrous. But I was clean and respectable by then!
When Mr Cutting and Mr Cooney interviewed me in my home, in the 1965 build up to my friend Steve’s smuggling case, one of them took a disc of hash out of his case and addressed me. “It’s not the money in this that gets me, it’s all the misery in a piece like this!” he said, waving the disc. I really had to battle to keep a straight face. I thought of all the laughter and joy in it!
Alan came back to the UK and I recall seeing him late 1969 or early 1970 when he visited me in West Hampstead. I was straight but he was not. He had few personal possessions left but owned a stamp collection in storage and asked me to hold it for him, when he went off on his travels again.
Later that year I got the news that he had had a dirty shot somewhere in Northern France that developed into septicaemia. He was taken to hospital too late by his girlfriend and died there from blood poisoning. He was 25 years old. He would now be in his early 80s.
Portrait of Alan Shoobridge by Paul Ernest, 1963.
All his friends mourn and miss Alan. He was a very bright, stylish, sardonically witty, loyal and sincere friend, but one with an unquiet heart, a death wish. Afterwards Maggie came to me and told me that Alan had said that he would leave his stamp collection to her, so I passed it on. Sadly she too was dead within the year and I think Tony still has Alan’s stamp collection. The only surviving, tangible memento. Well, at least Alan found some peace.
And finally there is the sad tale of Lynn Ellis with whom this story started. I was working as a computer programmer in Berkeley Square in 1970 and strolling down Bond Street one lunch hour. Who should I see but Lynn in a doorway. We chatted and I asked if she was off the stuff. She said yes but I could see from her pinned blue eyes that she was on opiates. Later I heard from her friend Nessie that she was living in a squat and died from a dirty fix the year after I saw her. Not many of the cursed gang left, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.
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Paul Ernest
January 2026
[1] An account of my first bout of heroin addiction and some speculation about the lure of the drug is in Paul Ernest, Heroin, International Times, May 2020. https://internationaltimes.it/heroin/
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