Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I was 15 years old in 1967. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles played constantly and the hippie lifestyle was in full swing. Drugs, especially pot and hashish were omnipresent. As an enquiring teenager, I was very keen to see what all the fuss was about, and decided to try smoking a few joints with friends as part of the club scene. It seemed harmless enough and produced a very pleasant buzz that was enjoyable and fun. I couldn't understand why our parents reacted so negatively to the idea of drugs to “raise your consciousness”. It tended to relieve inhibitions and allowed me to conquer my shyness, especially around girls. It also seemed to enhance my musical creativity (I was a guitarist and singer back then).

Flash forward to age 19 and I’d been smoking pot and hash for 4 years. I’d become increasingly introverted and incessantly worried about even the simplest of things. The initial pleasant buzz had disappeared and was replaced with a mild state of paranoia whenever I’d get high. The boost of spontaneous creativity of 4 years past had become a wall of doubt about my creative abilities, and a questioning of the apparent pointlessness of life. I’d moved to a new city 1,500 miles from my hometown and had essentially become a reclusive hermit. I was so introverted and worried about how people reacted to me that I felt tied up in knots worrying about what I should say, do or even think. I was a mess. My drive had driven off and I was starting to wonder how I was going to make it through the rest of my life with such a pessimistic attitude. Remember that I was only 19, but I felt like my life was more or less over. This was the negative result of smoking pot, hash and taking the occasional bit of peyote mushrooms and a rare dose of LSD. For most of that time, I wasn’t aware of any connection between my introversion and the drugs and thought I was just going through a bad patch of life.

For some reason, I finally decided to take a more scientific approach to my problems and observed my thoughts and behavior when straight, and then compared them to when I was stoned. My observations became obvious that the more drugs I took, the worse I felt and the more introverted I became—and it wasn’t just when I was high. My life had been going downhill for years. I was working only odd jobs and didn’t have a steady income. I even went on welfare for 3 months to be able to eat and pay rent. It was definitely the lowest point I’d ever experienced in my young life—and I decided to give up drugs.

The thing about drugs is that they’re FUN in the initial stages. They DID seem to expand my mind and offered euphoric and pleasant diversions from the dull day, but I discovered that as the toxic effects of drugs built up in my body, all of those pleasant experiences quickly disappeared.

I never became addicted to pot or hash, but the joy had gone out of them, only to be replaced by introversion and self-doubt. About 2 weeks after my decision to stop taking drugs, my brother-in-law came over and told me about a new thing he’d found from L. Ron Hubbard. I started reading about it and I soon discovered that my own observations had been correct. By age 20 I was completely off all drugs, and gradually I became less and less introverted and more like my old self. It took several years for most of the effects of the drugs I’d taken to entirely go away, and this was primarily due to getting onto the L. Ron Hubbard detox program, now called the New Life Detoxification (a program of vitamins, exercise and sauna to sweat out the toxins) and now part of the Narconon program.

My music career took off shortly afterward and I became a working professional guitarist and singer around the city and province of British Columbia for many years. My artistic career also took off at roughly the same time, and I began to build a graphic design career that I still work at today. I’m currently 65 years old, and I have never regretted my decision to stop taking drugs. The “high” never lasts, and it is quickly replaced by introversion, lack of motivation and diminished enthusiasm for life. Simply put, drugs are poisons.

I’m now a satisfied artist and have been drug-free for 45 years.

Len Williams