I’ve never used illegal drugs, but my experience with people who have is that, members of the Grateful Dead excepted, heavy LSD users are the biggest assholes, even worse than cokeheads. Maybe because they’ve briefly glimpsed the world through cleansed doors of perception and are disappointed by the reality they face when they come down? But most likely it’s just because they’re assholes. From Jon Wiener’s  Los Angeles Review of Books interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s neither an asshole nor a heavy user of drugs, a conversation about the doctor’s long-ago experimentation with acid:

“Jon Weiner:

When and how did you first come to take LSD?

Oliver Sacks:

I think it was a few months after I smoked that joint. There was a lot of LSD around. In one of the early experiences I had with LSD, recklessly, I had mixed it with some other drugs and topped it off with some cannabis. I’d been reading about the color indigo, and was puzzled by the fact that no two people seemed to agree on what indigo was. Newton added indigo to the spectrum because he thought the spectrum ought to have seven colors, as the musical scale has seven notes.

Anyhow I got stoned on acid. And when I was really high, I said, ‘I want to see indigo, now!’ And, as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling, pear-shaped drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall in front of me. It seemed wonderfully luminous, and sort of numinous at the same time. So much so that I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven. This must be the color which Giotto tried to get into his paintings but could never get. And maybe he couldn’t get it because it doesn’t exist.’

I lent toward this in a sort of rapture, and it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an immense sense of loss. I had had a sense of bliss or rapture, almost orgasm, seeing the indigo.

For months after, I kept looking for indigo. I went to a mineralogical museum and looked at azurite, which is often described as indigo. But it was nothing like what I had seen when stoned.

I did see indigo again, curiously. I was at a concert, listening to some Monteverdi. And I was enraptured by the music, thrown into a sort of ecstasy. The concert was in the Egyptology gallery of a museum in New York, and in the interval I went out and saw some of the lapis lazuli things. And they were indigo. And I thought, ‘It really exists.’ But then, after the concert, I went again, and it wasn’t indigo. I’ve never seen it since.'”