DOSE:			Mushrooms
			MDMA
			Cannabis

I have two sons, Zack and Clint, now ages 25 and 28, whom I raised as a single mother, with a lot of help from friends. Most of their lives we have lived in the San Francisco Bay area, with the exception of a three-year hiatus in Connecticut. My younger son was born at home on Clayton St. in the Haight-Ashbury. During the course of their lives my sons were exposed to various modalities of the California alternative lifestyle. This did not include heavy usage of psychoactives. I was mostly indulgent of marijuana on a regular basis, until my sons were in their teens.

However, I had had extensive experience with psilocybin mushrooms, while living with my Colombian husband in his country in the early 70s. We were residing in a town called Florencia, situated near the jungle, when native son Luis Eduardo Luna wandered through on his Christmas vacation, met all the local gringos and introduced us to each other. Shortly we were in the company of Terence McKenna, fresh from his second journey to La Chorrera, and we were in for a ride. This meeting and the ensuing 30-year friendship had enormous influence on the direction of my spiritual quest, which included the use of magical plants.

Subsequently I moved to San Francisco with my older son in the mid-Seventies. My interest in native cultures, growing out of four years exposure in Latin America, led me to embrace the emerging goddess movement, a feminist earth-loving spirituality. One of the movement’s prominent teachers was our neighbor. My ten-year involvement with her in a collective exposed my sons to many community rituals, with folks of all kinds of progressive persuasions, whether sexual, political or spiritual.

Regarding attitudes with which my sons were raised around entheogens, I would have to say that I erred on the side of permissiveness. I trusted my sons to make their own choices and to handle the consequences of that. They were aware that I used marijuana and that therefore I did not subscribe to the Just Say No that was constantly in their faces. As they grew older and I became freer of their demands, I found time to explore the use of Ecstasy and to return to flying with the mushrooms. My use increased when I found a life partner with interest in entheogens and we became active in the larger psychedelic community in our area. By then my sons were in their twenties and were conducting experiments of their own.
We first lit up together on Christmas of 1996, when they were ages 18 and 21. Over the next few years we gradually became freer in talking with each other about our explorations.

In early 2000, Zack asked me what I thought about Ecstasy. His older brother had warned him away from powders. I told him that I thought he would enjoy trying it, as I knew and liked several of his friends who used it. He did try it and had a positive experience. A few months later, we took E with both of my sons and other friends at a concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. It was the first time for my husband and I to take E in public, and for all of us it was an extraordinary day. At that time, the band playing was my son’s favorite group and he loved turning us onto them. It was special to share in this intergenerational psychedelic scene with both of my sons. We have attended several concerts together since then, two including my husband’s son (age 27) as well.

In the spring of 2001 my husband Bill & I planned a trip with Zack up to our cabin in Mendocino to take LSD. Zack had had an unpleasant experience the first time he tripped around the age of 16. He was with a friend who left him alone in the house and it became a frightening experience. He decided that there could be no safer way to try again than tripping with his mom and step dad. We spent a lovely day together and developed some private stories that we continue to share. All of these experiences have brought us closer together as adult friends.

The friendship has expanded to include roommates and close friends of both of my sons. For the past three summers we have spent a long weekend with Zack and several friends at my wooded property in the Sierras. We hauled a generator, amp and big speakers, keyboard, trap set and turntables, guitars, etc. to create a party of several days, ingesting both Ecstasy and mushrooms, and creating our own tribal groove. Last year (2002) we camped with some of the same kids at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

In conclusion, I feel that the selected use of entheogens has enhanced our closeness as a family and enabled loving communication between all of us. We share more common ground due to these experiences. Both of my sons have been living on their own for the last seven years. Clint works as a network engineer and Zack as an audio technician.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 24650
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 20, 2003	Views: 32,684
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Cannabis (1), MDMA (3), Mushrooms (39) : Various (28), Families (41), Retrospective / Summary (11)