Low life | 17 May 2018

An 87-year-old friend, a former doctor, has been urging me for some while to have a look at the latest smart drug fad among affluent Americans, which is to go to work every day on a tiny dose of LSD. He’s an avid reader of the Scientific American and I think he must have read about it in there. He hoved into view at the Spectator Life party the other week and I turned aside from my conversation with the Hungarian ambassador to ask him whether he had managed to get hold of any yet. ‘I bought a ton of it,’ he said. (He is an enthusiast and always buys ‘a ton’ of everything, whether the latest smart drug or something off the street.) ‘And?’ I said. ‘It comes on tiny squares of blotting paper,’ he said. ‘The first time I was a little timid and ate a quarter of a square.