to join this “legion of angels” whose mission was to save the world. Walking the streets of Bogotá, holding hands with this “heavenly missionary”, I felt like I was on a cloud of happiness. I did not realize that not a soul around us could guess what we had in our hearts and even less understand the hallucination so much marijuana was causing in our brains. We would walk the streets with a group of six or seven boys and girls. I was the only Colombian in the group. They would pay for all my expenses as I could not afford their life style. Marijuana made us very hungry, necessitating many meals. We rented cars and went camping to different sites in Colombia, especially to “magical” places like pre-Columbian archaeological parks.
Although this first group of “missionary angels” was in Colombia for all of three months, it seemed but a day because of the permanent hallucinatory effects the marijuana had on us and all the ‘trips’ we made while high.
Free love was also talked about in those days. I had never had sexual relations with any girl before. My American girlfriend not only taught me everything about sex but also introduced me to an activity that never stopped until I found the Lord at the age of 47. The day they were about to leave, I felt as if something terrible was about to happen. What would I do without them? And so I told them, “I’ll go with you”. This made them all happy, particularly Donna, my girlfriend. I had my passport issued very quickly and then went to the American Embassy to get my visa. I had never been to a Consulate before and had no idea of what the process would be like. Besides, I had nothing to worry about since I was with the “saviors of the world”. I was completely surprised when I discovered that “my saviors” were considered the worst criminals by their own people. A formally-dressed woman who looked like the ladies I had met at the YMCA took me to a separate room and asked me whether any of the young men had offered me drugs like marijuana, LSD and many others I had never heard of before. I looked at her and realized how serious the situation was. “No, I have never heard of that,” I retorted. She replied, “Those you are with are losers and you should not go with them anywhere; I would suggest that you go back home and carry on with your life as if you had never met them”. When I left the room and looked at them, it became apparent that we had fallen off our cloud onto a hard surface called reality. I walked out holding Donna’s hand, and neither she nor I spoke for quite a while. Two days later, I was completely alone after seeing them off at the airport. They gifted me the monies for my plane ticket to Miami, Donna’s stereo and Beatles’ music and enough marijuana to enable me to lock myself in a room for a couple of days.
My loneliness did not last long. Two days later, some knocks at the door woke me up. A new “missionary of love” named Cindy appeared in my life, and her blue eyes were even more beautiful than Donna’s. Cindy had met Donna and my other friends at the airport in Miami. Cindy was on her way to Peru to visit a friend she had met in California but changed her ticket and decided to spend some time with me in Bogotá after talking to Donna and the rest of my friends. Donna had asked Cindy to be considerately loving towards me since I was very lonely. I immediately established a relationship with her as close as the one I had enjoyed with Donna; it had been Donna’s idea and everything seemed to be perfect. All this was like living in a different world. How could I possibly explain the situation to the people who knew me? It was impossible.
Like Donna, Cindy also introduced me to drugs but this time to something even more extraordinary. She first asked me, “Have you ever had a trip?” A little surprised, I looked at her and said, “Only here in Colombia”. She roared with laughter for quite a long time but I could not understand why. After a while she took out a big book about the ruins of the Incas. From the inside of it, she took two full pages full of round, colored circles, one page being orange dots and the other purple. She said, “Each little dot that you see here contains 400 micrograms of LSD; if you take it, you will have the most incredible mind trip, without having to go anywhere. I took about 10 trips with my friends in California, and on the last one it came to me that I had to come to South America because the magic is here in the energy of the Amazon and the secrets of the Incas.” She continued to give me an esoteric lesson on South America. Then she said, “In two days, I will turn 17 and I want to celebrate my birthday with a special trip by the sea using the round, purple circle trip.” I replied, “The sea is very far away from here and the ticket is very expensive”. She said, “Don’t worry. I’ll treat you”.
I lived in a never-ending fantasy that I liked more and more each day. The very next day, we were on our way to a city in Colombia’s Caribbean region called Santa Marta. It was there that I experienced with Cindy the LSD trips she had talked about; they took me to a completely new dimension that I would simply describe as an opening to the doors of perception. Suffice to say, I did not manage too well (nor do I think anyone can). Most of my friends from that time went through those doors and did not come back.
Without realizing it, just over three months had passed since my initiation into the drug scene of these psychedelic messengers. The physical changes in my appearance could be readily seen. I had forgotten to shave my not-fully-developed beard and I had not had my hair cut. I wore Cindy’s clothes and some of Donna’s shirts and jeans. No wonder waiters thought I was a foreigner. Cindy rented a small apartment in the north of Bogotá; for me, the rent seemed astronomical but Cindy did not seem to care. Her father was a famous cardiologist in San Francisco who was providing for everything.
Cindy’s apartment became the central meeting place where activities never stopped. She left me in charge of that treasure that kept everyone revolving around us: the two famous pages bearing orange and purple dots. In a few weeks, more and more Americans started to show up; they were running away from the army or came because they had heard the rumor that the best marijuana grew in Colombia. The strange thing was that we never found it. Donna and her friends had brought the first marijuana I tried from the States. Little by little, the first manuals on how to cultivate the drug, printed in San Francisco by a company called High Times, began to arrive. Soon after, the first shrubs of Colombian marijuana began to grow.
The course of my life with Cindy changed. Too many people would come to our apartment to take a “trip” for several days, and as a result, we ended up having intense love affairs with other “psychedelic angels”. We became like brother and sister; this adventure in her apartment lasted two years, after which we moved to a small farm in the countryside outside of Bogotá. Then things took on a mystical dimension due to the discovery of hallucinogenic mushrooms in a place called La Miel. Located near a crystal-clear river that bore the same name, La Miel was a renowned paradise for fishermen. We turned the place into a center of psychedelic activities. It was there a few years later that a great tragedy occurred. I went there for the first time with my friends from Bogotá. Some of us stayed in that region for three months. We would eat mushrooms and talk to the trees, all the while carrying a copy of the Bible with us. When we returned to Bogotá, we found out that many of our friends were admitted to rehabilitation centers. These and many others never recovered their sanity. Psychiatrists completely ignored the effects of hallucinatory drugs and made many mistakes diagnosing some of our friends, who, in turn, were practically destroyed by erroneous treatments. Those of us who withdrew from treatment for a while did not have much trouble regaining reality after a certain time.
In two years, my hair had grown much past my shoulders and my beard was at chest-length. It was 1970 and rock-and-roll fever invaded Colombia. Hundreds of young people had run away from their homes to join different communities around the city where they lived together. In Bogotá, the “Calle Sesenta” (meaning 60th Street) became a famous psychedelic center run by eager young dealers and traders who dressed like hippies, as all of us at the time were called. Drugs like marijuana and LSD were already in the hands of dealers who were only interested in money, and who did not share the spirit of love and peace that had initially motivated the movement.
That same year, Cindy left Colombia and went back to San Francisco. She was addicted to heroin and died of an overdose. Her death broke my heart and I began to concern myself with what was going on around me. Many of our rock-and-roll heroes had died the same way, but nobody seemed to care. This new movement
