With psychedelics, I was sure—sure I’d found a Way, and even more that I’d only begun to unlock the richness of its secrets, had only placed my foot on the first gilded stair leading—where? Heavenward? Onward, at least. Beyond.” In her memoir The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, Ashley Lande details how, as a wayward young woman from Kansas City, she became addicted to LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline. By the time of high school, Lande drank, smoked, slept around, and declared to her Protestant parents that she was an atheist. It’s a grim and agonizing self-portrait that leaves you wondering how such an observant soul could become so deluded. Lande tries to justify the drugs to herself as a natural enlightenment, a hippie pathway to reality, but only finds herself sinking into squalid addiction and paranoia. She marries and has children, but keeps using—“LSD was my friend, yes.”
Not until the end of the chronicle does the actual Word reach her. Her husband brings her to various churches; tears flow, and her religion of psychedelics starts to crack. It is frightening to surrender to the Lord, she recalls. It feels like danger. She hates Christianity, she’s a pantheist, she wants to run. To give up psychedelics would be to “[cede] half of myself . . . their death would mean my death.” One pastor in Topanga Canyon says that people “who are into all this New Age stuff” are really “just tormented”; she walks off, but she cannot forget it. I won’t tell you how the Christian story overcomes her servitude to the drugs. I will only say that on a cold March day in Kansas, she was baptized in a freezing lake, “which accomplished something holy, something monumental, something unseen but no less real for it.”
