I have tried... tried at least once practically everything, but I've never permitted and I've never, never will permit to put anything into my blood. I only take what you can eat, sniff, chew or, I don't know, drink or... but nothing that... I cannot stand injections, even when they take my blood and I go to a doctor, I cringe. So... but in general it's like this.
I spent one weekend at Timothy Leary's place, the LSD, with some people, Barbara Daas, who was not Barbara Daas yet, so on the third day he comes to me and says, 'Let us go for a walk'. So we walk and then stops on a bridge by a little brook and he turns to me and says, 'I don't... why... everybody here, friends, you know, and they're here, and some are with their children, but they're all, you know, trying something because this is chance or occasion and they're under my... supervision and they're in no danger, some be it LSD or something, and you seem to be just filming, reading...' Because I was sitting a lot of reading, I found there a book on... actually, on Meher Baba, who's not very... nobody knows maybe that name any more, whom everybody admired like some guru and I discovered... I started reading and I could not stop because from that biography came out that Meher Baba was really not some mystic who just knew meditate but he was running... he was a psychiatrist and doctor running the several hospitals for mentally, mentally disturbed people with great success and that's what he was known in India for. He was an amazing doctor that saved thousands of lives. He was not some, you know, drug person. So, that's, reading... So I said, 'Yes. I have tried practically everything that my friends have tried but nobody... I always like... The highest intoxication that I have ever have had in my life was when I was reading Rimbaud'.
So he turns around and we walked back and he said nothing, nothing more. In any case that's my position, that I get much more excited when I read good poetry or when I saw... nothing can match this screening when I saw Brakhage's Desistfilm and this Night... and this film with this guy walking down with scratched eyes. Those were electrical, they changed your body, it goes down to your cells, molecules and cells and atoms and so I always found a very lasting influence. So, when I, you know, got some peyote some, I even took LSD once and nothing was that... that lasting on something that I would have to have or want to try again.
Or, you see, another thing is I like wine with friends. Friendship is one of my drugs, when I can eat and drink and sing and be with friends. That's exciting, there is something in the air, there is something... and that's what keeps me going, not... there, I get excited. And that's my drug. I tried with smoking, sometimes... I tried because I want to impress one girl that I knew. It didn't work. No, actually, I mean, narcotics, drugs or whatever the name. But when I was a child, when I was ten or 12 in our... the farmers where I grew up in our village, the villagers, always in their gardens had also... they used to call it canarpes, canarpes, cannabis, cannabis and they grew them because they protected other vegetables and plants from something, I don't know, so they always had them in different places of the garden and when they reached the bloom, and the ripe stage there are little, we used to chew them, we used to as children. I don't know what that did to us, but we liked them very much. So, we grew up with... on pot but not pot but actually it's... yeah, yeah.