High society – Frank McNally on taking drugs at the opera

In San Francisco last autumn, to help me through a difficult experience – an afternoon at the opera – I took drugs. Legal drugs, of course, although in Ireland they wouldn’t be.

Since 2016, marijuana can be bought in California by those over 21. “Pot Shops” are now commonplace. Typical products sold there, popular with people who don’t smoke, include the cannabis-infused “edible”.

In the spirit of journalistic curiosity, I had to try these at least once.

So a friend and I bought a jar of “gummies”, which look and taste just like jelly sweets. And while watching a film one evening, with some trepidation, I swallowed the recommended dosage.

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According to the jar, this was “half a gummy” (US imperial measurement). The label also warned it might be an hour before you felt any effect. So I waited an hour, and then two hours. But the effect never came.

Still, the recommended dosages were only a guide, clearly, and people’s resistance varies. So the next time I tried, it was a full gummy. And this too was a non-event – almost.

The one hint of an altered state of consciousness was when there was an unexpected noise somewhere and I looked around suddenly.

This brought the odd sensation that my head had turned first while my brain arrived a split second later.

That was it. As long as I kept watching the TV screen, the effect was negligible. Even when I tried the head-turning again, my brain had already adjusted and was up to speed.

It so happened, however, that soon afterwards, there was an event called “Opera in the Park”, apparently a highlight of the San Francisco social season, featuring a selection of the genre’s greatest hits.

On the way there, I again ingested a full gummy, while my friend stuck to the standard half. And just because there was a half left over in this equation, I thought: “What the hell – I’ll take that too.”

This turned out to be a mistake. Not quite as bad a mistake, maybe, as Maureen Dowd – New York Times columnist and associate of this parish – made one night in Colorado, a few years ago, soon after that state had legalised the drug.

In her case, the edible was a bar of chocolate and the package didn’t mention dosage. She should have limited herself to a square or two, it later emerged. But when nothing happened quickly, she ate the whole bar.

Soon afterwards, as she wrote: “I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours . . .”

I was never that far gone, by any means. Even so, after a while, I did start to feel very strange. A rare exposure to opera, with its outlandish plots of murder, incest, demonic possession, and so on, may not have helped.

In any case, suddenly, even sitting on the grass I felt off balance. I was afraid to lie down flat, meanwhile, for fear I wouldn’t get up again. As for standing, that was soon too much of a challenge to contemplate.

Instead, I spent the rest of the concert semi-prostrate, propped on tense elbows, feeling simultaneously spaced out and paranoid.

From there, every now and again, I looked slowly around. And each time I did, my brain was held up in traffic. In general, there was a feeling of weird dislocation.

Whenever I spoke, half-way through, I found myself listening to the words and wondering how the sentence would end. It was always a relief when it turned out well.

None of this was exactly pleasant, in part because of a fear that worse loss of control was to come.

But when the opera ended and I got back on my feet, surprised to find I could walk normally, it felt a bit better.

As for Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, the nearest I got to drug-fuelled insight was the musical Doors. Or at least a group of hippy musicians who were playing elsewhere in the park.

Apparently, I watched them, entranced, for a long time. In my defence, I would have said they were laying down a pretty funky groove, man.

My wise and sympathetic friend walked me around long enough afterwards to be sure I came down safely. In the meantime, once, I caught myself saying something that by the end of the sentence, I knew was gibberish.

So I stopped talking until I was sure of regaining control of the editorial process. And in fairness to marijuana, a single nonsensical sentence per conversation is well below average for me, even when sober.

Maybe we will have pot shops in Ireland, eventually. Either way, I don’t think I’d be in any rush to try edibles again. As for a related question – whether opera should still be legal – I might come back to that another day.