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The matter of time

February 01 2025
Tag, by unnamed artist, 2024 © Koestler Arts Tag, by unnamed artist, 2024 © Koestler Arts

A trip (no pun intended) down memory lane leads our writer to some considered conclusions about time and Class A drugs.
By Mat Amp

Star Trek, the must watch sci-fi drama of the ‘70s and ‘80s for any young kid, started with this booming voice: “Space, the final frontier,” and sure, yep, space is a big one. But, of course, if you’ve dropped acid or done DMT or tripped yer balls off on any other psychedelics out there, you might be aware that the final frontier is essentially time.

As a homeless junkie, the dole office every other Tuesday at 11am became my furthest frontier. Then there was the daily pilgrimage to the Morrisons on Seven Sisters Road, where three of us used to rob a rucksack of meat and sell it to the old geezers spunking their pensions in the pub opposite.

Their frontier was that lunchtime drink, which was extended on days when we would bounce in with our bag of freshly purloined loins, shoplifted chops and other fresh cut ‘n’ run cuts. For the old boys in the pub, money saved on meat meant more money for merrymaking.  
Something I learned when I was homeless was that your frontiers shrink rapidly. Poverty does that to us. The poorer we are the less we travel, our boundaries shrinking as we grind to survive. Being poor can squash the limitless horizons of our childhood dreams that are challenged by the brutal consequences of poverty and the inevitable stress that ensues. Unless, of course, you come from a truly abusive home and then I’m guessing that you may never have had the luxury of letting your imagination off the hook to begin with.

I wouldn’t know. I was born into a loving and very functional family. My issues began when they started dropping dead. My way of dealing with the sorrow that followed was to throw myself into drug use, not just to numb the feelings of sorrow and sadness but to escape by over-stimulating the pleasure zone in my cerebral cortex.

But whilst I was ripping the arse out of life by getting carelessly wasted on everything I could get my hands on, I stumbled across genuinely mind expanding drugs like LSD, mushrooms and the king of them all: DMT.

Drugs like cocaine and heroin work by flooding the reward pathways in the brain with endorphins. Over time, a brain subjected to repeated abuse in this way becomes less sensitive to dopamine, meaning we need more and more of the active substance to stimulate reward centres.  Physical reliance and the formation of habits fuelled by a single-minded compulsion can mean we end up abusing these types of drugs, even when we want nothing more than to stop because of the damage they are doing to our lives.

Sadly, most drugs are lumped into crude categories of illegality that elicit varying degrees of disapproving scowls from the knowing moral majority. You know, the type of uptight prick you see on the 8am train from Ascot to London HARRUMPHING as they read the front page article of the Daily Maelstrom: ‘2,000 ravers left alone for fear of riot.’ It’s an attitude that demonstrates that while many of us have had our boundaries limited by poverty, there are others who use their money to build cages for themselves. They find themselves more trapped and isolated than any of us, their boundaries limited to somewhere in the region around the end of their snooty beaks.

While poverty can limit our freedom to travel about the place, psychedelics, a class of psychoactive substances that produce changes in perception, mood and cognitive processes, offer us the opportunity to expand our horizons within. How the fuck psychedelics are often framed in the same light as drugs such as cocaine and heroin is beyond me. Unlike narcotics, psychedelics aren’t addictive. In fact, they often act as a powerful remedy for addiction and the compulsive behaviour it fuels, and have been successfully used in treating mental health problems.

Psychedelics work on serotonin receptors in the brain, reducing the energy needed for the brain to switch between different activity states. The benefits are manifold.

For example, it has been proven recently that psychedelics interrupt the brain network involved in the creation of our self and challenging it in the process. In short, they make us less of an arsehole.

At this point you might be wondering what the fuck all this verbal meandering has to do with time. Without getting into the many theories about time, let’s limit our wondering to the way different experiences alter our perception of time. You know, how time flies when you’re having fun, or how it drags on when you’re waiting for the bus from the Tesco on the Old Kent Road on a wet Wednesday afternoon in February.

Nowhere is this disparity more apparent than when it comes to taking drugs. LSD trips can seem like a lifetime as your mind tries to deal with the tidal wave of revelations. The ‘time expansion’ caused by an LSD trip is often rich with memories, rewarding us with realisations that are satisfying and soulful. This is in stark contrast to the seeming eternity of waiting to score heroin whilst you are sick. There, time seems to slow down. Rather than expand, it seems to grind its gears as we repeatedly look at our watch, clutching £20 in a sweaty palm and looking up and down the street for the dealer to arrive. The sweet relief of scoring is soon followed by a high largely characterised by a distinct lack of events and memories. It’s not that time flies by or drags on, it’s as if it doesn’t really happen at all.

I guess drugs just exaggerate everything – the highs, lows, inside outs and the shake it all abouts – which is why psychedelics can be so positive, both in helping us to get to know ourselves and in treating the type of modern mental health problems that are fuelled by the anxieties of this peel off, stick on, throwaway brave new world. It’s a world in which time has become a taskmaster. We seem to be in a hurry to go nowhere special, often failing to enjoy the moment. We’re too busy collecting and cataloguing our lives on our iPhones to actually live those moments with meaning.  
I can’t help thinking that it’s all there in a thing my mum used to say to me when I was a kid. “Whatever you do, remember to stop and smell the roses.”

  • Problems with drug use? There is support available to you. In England, you can talk to FRANK for drug advice and help. Visit the website: talktofrank.com
  • In Scotland, the Scottish Drug Services Directory can help you find useful services in your area. Access the easy-to-use interactive map of local services here: www.scottishdrugservices.com
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