As a fellow phanner (sorry, sorry) I always notice your handle. Would be hilarious if you were on the Phantasy Tour message boards? I’m in self-exile, as it has become a woke lib hellhole from hell, but there’s a few of “us” in there doing daily battle.

Oh yes - Umphrey’s ... I’m betting we would have been at some of the festivals together it I was a little bit older and you were a little bit younger.

Glad to have met a fellow festivaler (is that a word?)

🥳🎏

Man I'd love to just sit and listen to someone like you talk about all the stories you must've accumulated.

But yeah hippie at heart here myself. I used to think it only made sense to be a liberal. I was the go-to-guy in college for psychedelics and designer drugs (I was very careful in how I dosed people with Molly. Even had two chicks furious with me for not giving them more. Only for them to come find me 4 hours later crying and thanking me for not giving in to their pressure because their comeup was so intense).

Festival culture was a completely different type of euphoria. But I was almost ALWAYS the person responsible for making sure everyone who took drugs survived.

One of the few times I wasn't, one of my best friends and fraternity brothers (who had ever a stronger tolerance than I did) made it about 30 minutes into first set of a 3 day festival about 20 of us went to in two groups in South Padre Island.

He mistaking took 3 tabs of lsd not knowing they were double doses. And combined it with an ecstasy roll, and ended up blacking out and falling into a seizure in the middle of the crowd.

Ended up getting cared for by the paramedics as they monitored his heart rate and administered fluids as he slowly came back to homeostasis.

The craziest part of that event (besides one of us hardened ravers being shown we're not immortal), is that earlier that afternoon our two groups came together for a daytime kegger at one of the townhouses one of us luckily had access to by their negligent rich parents lol.

A handful of us decided to dose on the blotter of acid my friend procured for festival.

Maybe like 6 or 7 of us bought a tab from my friend just to sample it out together. I was the one who agreed to trade him two ecstasy rolls for two tabs, since he wasn't able to find any in time for the festival later that night.

After about 3 to 4 hours of me watching everyone else clearly begin to trip and thus verify the tabs were as potent as described, I annoyingly felt compelled to approach my friend and express my disappointment that despite taking both tabs and waiting patiently, I wasn't feeling a thing and so he reasonably agreed to return one of the ecstasy rolls I traded him.

And so later that night when he ended up falling into a seizure from overdosing and had to receive attention from the paramedics there, you can just imagine how emotionally charged I was from hearing the news while I myself was plateauing on the tab of ecstasy I took and already had my emotions amplified to the max.

All I kept thinking about was how it must've been divine intervention that the TWO tabs of DOUBLE DOSED lsd (that just sent my friend into a seizure) that I took earlier that afternoon somehow had zero effect on me, which ended up being the only reason my friend took 1 less ecstasy tab than he had planned that night.

I was bewildered, emotional sad yet astounded at how statistically unlikely the entire day's chain of events had occur so perfectly so to have avoided what would've been a devastating fatal disaster.

I remember how unnaturally certain I was that my friend was going to be okay when i initislly was told he was being treated at the medical tent.

Ironically i was the only one not thinking the worst before we actually knew he was recovering wonderfully. A part of me immediately knew that this was a divine intervention and the reason the 2 tabs (4 doses) of potent lsd I took earlier that day didn't end up working, was because my friend was not meant to die that night.

That event even further solidified my belief system that I had to always do my best to make sure my friends didn't get caught up in the fun of partying and accidentally kill themselves with drugs, especially if I was in a position to mediate what they took and how much.

I went on kind of a tangent there but something about the topic of how festivals were in the earlier decades always makes me reflect on how many accidental deaths must have occurred from simple naive hippies just looking to have fun.

Experiences like the one I described are why mushrooms are the only drug ill ever push onto people since their physical safety is pretty much guaranteed.

Oh Phish fans for sure come from all ages. I was 16 when I was first introduced to it. At the time I didn't understand how this obnoxious noise was so revered. But when I took mushrooms for the first time and I finally understood.