Skip to main contentYou have to marvel at America. Where else would you find high-school auditoria thick with parents wearing red and black D.A.R.E. arm-bands, like Nuremberg rally extras, watching their Ritalin-addled and Prozac-packed progeny march lock-step in a diploma line? In prohibitionist America, bad drugs are defined as anything that might open or expand the mind, good drugs are those that shut the mind down (or, of course, erect unwilling flesh).
Most people in this country D.A.R.E.'nt think about these rather grand contradictions in America's drug policy. But whether the great horde wants to ponder drugs seriously or not, the subject is being discussed in the culture at large, and American publishing houses have been working overtime supplying inquiring minds with books on the Mind and its encounters with drugs. And the meeting between the two (sorry, Nancy) has actually been quite positive if not liberating.
Brad Willard has long been a student of cognitive science and of literature supporting cognitive liberty (the radical idea that we, as individuals, should have sole control over the way we think). A few months ago, Willard, part owner of the successful Belmont Street cafe The Pied Cow, decided to open a cafe-cum-bookshop devoted to the subject. His new venture is an attractive specialist bookshop of the type one thought Barnes & Noble had murdered.
Nestled within an early 1900s house, the Psychonautical Supply is a place, Willard hopes, where individuals may embark on myriad new voyages in the mind. "If there's any message that I'm promoting at the Psychonautical," says Willard, "it's that each person has the right to seek their own path."
The rich, dark colors of the shop's walls are rivaled by a brightly polished wood floor, while overstuffed period chairs front a cozy brick fireplace. In the back is a small kitchen where Willard dispenses lattes and tea to the internal travelers who happen in. Serried on the shelves are books by J.G. Ballard, Noam Chomsky, William Gibson and Douglas Rushkoff, as well as Huston Smith and Terence McKenna. Willard also stocks magazines and periodicals, such as The Journal of Cognitive Liberties and work published by the Alchemind Society, which necessarily focus on the role of drugs in expanding consciousness. There's also the Entheogen Review, a publication that takes its name from a word coined in the '70s by a group of ethnobotanical scholars to denote psychoactive plant or chemical substances that are taken to achieve spiritual or mystical experiences ("entheogen" is now preferred to "hallucinogen" or "psychedelic," which come supplied with negative connotations).
Willard also hopes Psychonaut-ical will become a salon of sorts where people can come and freely discuss matters. My own visit coincided with an interesting conversation on drugs between a visitor from Arizona, Willard and a gentleman named William who is a friend of the poet Gary Snyder (and who ran the D.A.R.E. gauntlet at his son's graduation). The three agreed that Timothy Leary's dictum to "drop out" was reckless, and that McKenna's insistence that drugs should only be taken by thoughtful and mature people was correct. All were equally interested in New Mexico Gov. Gary E. Johnson's visit to Portland (see Q&A, page 20).
Psychonautical is a stimulating stop and a potent reminder that a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Do you dare?
2511 SE Belmont St., 234-6661. Noon-9 pm Tuesdays- Sundays.
Fresh off the press:
, edited by Allan Hunt Badiner and Alex Grey (Chronicle Books, 238 pages, $24.95); Henri Michaux's mescaline journal,
(New York Review of Books, 190 pages, $13.95).
WWeek 2015