Pubdate: Sun, 01 Mar 2009
Source: Vancouver Magazine (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 Vancouver Magazine
Contact:  http://www.vanmag.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3171
Author: Frances Bula
Cited: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrPiRHxGnHQ
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm (Ecstasy)

THE ECSTASY OF PAUL HADEN

His death, in a West Side apartment with a pot of chemicals boiled 
dry on the stove, mystified not just his friends and family but his 
initiates and customers as well

One sunny Sunday last June, the small park at the centre of 
Strathcona, usually filled with Frisbee players and Chinese seniors 
and hipster kids recovering from the previous night's partying, was 
transformed.

A festival-style tent went up. Folding chairs for 200 were put out 
for the large crowd of guests. These guests-some in suits, some in 
batik-print shirts or gauzy flowing skirts-covered a wide range: a 
doctor, a banker, a filmmaker, a writer, a lab technician, a 
stripper, an architect. There were so many people that a few dozen 
ended up having to stand.

As people took their places and a guitarist played quietly, a parks 
employee asked one of the guests, "Who's the famous person having the 
funeral?" The man he asked, Joe Brites, repeated his answer during 
his eulogy for his long-time friend: "He wasn't famous. But he was 
much loved. You would have liked him."

Paul Haden's body had been discovered the previous week in his 
Kitsilano apartment. The body was near the door, as though he'd been 
trying to get out. There was a 22-litre container of ecstasy 
chemicals boiled dry on his stove. Various surfaces of his Balsam 
Street suite were covered in a varnish from the residue. Haden was 44 
and worked as a lab technician. Police said he had no criminal record 
and was unknown to them.

His mysterious death attracted a flurry of media coverage because it 
was on the West Side, because it was the first death anyone knew of 
caused by a drug lab, and because the 23-suite building had to be 
vacated while hazardous-materials crews disposed of everything in the 
suite and then dismantled the apartment itself. Bloggers and Internet 
commentators were briefly scathing about the jerk who'd caused so 
much trouble. And then the story disappeared.

A few speakers at the memorial service expressed sorrow and regret at 
the way Haden had died. Far more talked about a man who had been a 
unique force in their lives, rambunctious and funny and never 
interested in living by the rules. The kind of perpetual boy who adds 
glitter and charming outrageousness to the lives of the more 
conventional. "In some ways, time stood still for Paul," said his 
former UBC roommate, David Downie, a banker who works in Ontario but 
visited his old friend regularly.

Haden kept tarantulas as pets, and on at least one occasion lost them 
in an apartment he was sharing. He'd phone up to embroil friends in 
his latest escapade with the words "Dude, I've got a situation." The 
last of the die-hard carnivores, he'd arrive at relatives' houses 
with pounds of meat he'd insist on cooking up for a feast. Then he'd 
announce he was going on a diet of beer, coffee, and chicken wings.

But there was another side. He was someone people turned to for 
comfort and help. He would sit at a sick friend's bedside for hours. 
He was a hugger, and he had an exceptional ability to connect with 
people from wildly different walks of life. (A stripper at his 
memorial said she came because he'd been a regular at the bar where 
she worked and she liked him.) At least half a dozen people at the 
service called him their best friend.

But one woman hinted at something about Haden's life that others 
hadn't. "Paul was a philanthropist. Even the manner of his death was 
philanthropic," said Kelly Attridge, a biologist who had lived with 
Haden until a breakup two years previously. "Paul believed in what he 
was doing with such passion that he put his life on the line for it."

Some in the audience had no idea what she was talking about. Others 
knew all too well. They knew that Haden was not just another sad 
Vancouver story, a guy from a good family caught up in the city's 
battle with drugs. Instead, he was a central figure in a submerged 
subculture that has received little notice as the city agonizes over 
the ravages of street drugs in the Downtown Eastside. That subculture 
is made up of middle-class professionals and arts types who have 
turned to hallucinogens in recent years, drugs they use on special 
occasions, sometimes to enhance a group celebration, sometimes to 
enhance a voyage to their inner selves.

Using language evoking the optimism and spirituality-seeking of the 
1960s, they're part of a North American renaissance that promotes the 
psychotherapeutic or spiritual or just plain consciousness-expanding 
uses of plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin, peyote, and 
ayahuasca, and chemical variations of the same: LSD and MDMA, also 
known as ecstasy. In the growing academic literature, those drugs are 
called entheogens instead of psychedelics to emphasize their use as 
psychoactive substances that facilitate spiritual experiences. Their 
users and advocates see them as fundamentally different from the 
legal and illegal drugs wreaking havoc everywhere, which tend to 
promote detachment and isolation. Entheogens, they say, foster a 
sense of goodwill, bonding, and community, as well as inducing a 
positive state of self-exploration.

Haden was the underground chemist to the local chapter of that 
tenuously connected group, which includes simple users as well as 
those with an evangelical faith in the power of drugs. Some got to 
know him through the usual friends-of-friends channels. Others 
gravitated to him through an informal secret-handshake kind of 
network. In the last few years, many got to know Haden through shared 
pilgrimages to Burning Man, the legendary annual Nevada festival that 
creates an instant experimental city, an explosion of art and 
hyperkinetic celebrations of everything creatively unorthodox. This 
past August, his friends at Burning Man memorialized his death by 
taking his plastic-bagged ashes up in a plane; one emptied them into 
the air during a parachute jump-an act entirely befitting the spirit 
of both Haden and Burning Man. (It's now captured for perpetuity on YouTube.)

In Vancouver, Haden supplied free LSD to people who used it in 
controlled sessions under the guidance of one of the few therapists 
who are exploring it as a treatment method. He would take small 
groups to a friend's Mayne Island cottage and spend a leisurely day 
with them; they would take one thing or another that would send them 
into a quiet, contemplative orbit for several hours. And he sold or 
gave away those drugs to many more. At least once, he supplied a 
party of about 200 people from the arts world.

There were no signs that he had a massive operation or made much 
money from it. There were reports of cash rolled up in cans and 
stashed in books, but police have not confirmed them. He owned 
nothing more valuable than a beat-up 15-year-old car and dressed like 
the fashion-disabled science geek he'd always been. He was also more 
than just a supplier. "Paul made an extraordinary contribution to the 
community," said a friend I'll call Alan. "Most of the underground 
chemists have no moral or spiritual orientation. It's purely 
materialistic. But Paul was a mixture between a priest and a scientist."

Another man, whom I'll call Michael, a well-known writer, said much 
the same. "He had this scientific side and this deeply spiritual side 
as well. He really thought he was making the world a better place."

Alan and Michael were two of several people who called me 
spontaneously as word spread that I was doing a story about Haden's 
death. None of them felt able to speak publicly, because of their 
fear of repercussions. It's not local criticism they're worried 
about, although they know that they'd be labelled as people who 
glorify or enable drug use. It's the far-reaching consequences.

"Most of us are professionals, and most of us need to go into the 
U.S. I personally wouldn't have a problem going public in Canada, but 
I have business in the States," said Alan. Even Haden's family, who 
had little or no idea about his other life, won't speak publicly. The 
case of local psychiatrist Andrew Feldmar weighs heavily on all of 
them. Feldmar was on his way into the States for a regular trip to 
see his son two years ago when a border guard Googled his name and 
found a reference to Feldmar having taken LSD in the 1960s. Although 
it was not illegal at the time, Feldmar was banned from entering the States.

In spite of their anxieties about being associated with Haden, they 
also seem compelled to help create a record of who he was and the 
impact he had. "All of us are, 'Oh my God, we've lost an incredibly 
precious person.' He was known as the expert. He was known as the 
guide. It's a huge loss," said Alan. "We don't know another chemist 
who has stepped up to the plate. I don't know what we're going to 
do." Another man, an academic, wrote:

"I hope you can do Paul justice. He was not a criminal." It's an 
acknowledgment that Haden himself would have welcomed, they say, 
because he felt so strongly that he was bringing peace and love to the world.

Haden's interest IN that role began a long time ago. He was the baby 
brother in a lively family of five kids-four boys, one girl-who grew 
up in Kingston, Ontario. Their father, Philip, was a psychiatrist 
who'd fled the English class system for more egalitarian Canada in 
1955. Their mother, Jessica, was the other pillar in a smart, 
academic, unpretentious family. They were 1960s parents, and their 
children were encouraged to discover their passions, not compete for 
conventional success. The Hadens spent their summers on an island in 
Northern Ontario, where the kids explored, canoed, and collected 
snakes-one of Paul's several lifelong interests.

Philip, especially, encouraged his children to experiment-with 
boundaries. Paul was most like his father: scientific, curious, a 
little rebellious, and inclined to think that rules were for lesser 
beings. When Paul and a brother tried "bomb-making" in their preteens 
(Paul, the chemist who detached the small detonator from a fireworks 
rocket; his brother, the miniature casings maker) and blew a crater 
in their back yard, Philip came out, surveyed the scene, and said 
calmly, "Okay, kids, no more bombs."

And when a teenaged Paul expressed an interest in trying mushrooms, 
his father was alongside him. Philip, a Freudian by training and 
belief who was involved with LSD research in the 1950s, supervised 
Paul's first experiment.

Haden's life in his 20s and 30s was marked by the same curiosity, 
restlessness, and lack of interest in the conventional. He moved to 
Vancouver in the late 1980s and did a degree in biochemistry at UBC 
and then a lab-tech course at BCIT. But instead of settling into 
steady research or lab work and a climb up the professional ladder, 
he moved around from job to job, occasionally out of work. At one 
point, he was a researcher for a drug that worked as a bowel 
anti-inflammatory. At another, he dove for sea cucumbers and scraped 
out their intestines to look for concentrations of useful enzymes. He 
was co-author of an academic paper titled "Loloatins A to D, Cyclic 
Decapeptide Antibiotics Produced in Culture by a Tropical Marine 
Bacterium." When he died, as a lab technician at Burnaby General 
Hospital, he was testing vials of body fluids. Toward the end of his 
life, he seemed more happy and settled, and closer to his family. He 
was thought to be planning to propose to his girlfriend.

No one seems to know when he started producing drugs, although it had 
probably been going on for well over a decade. He'd always smoked 
pot, as an after-work thing. And he was curious about drugs, as his 
father had been, interested in their effects on the brain-less a 
druggy guy than a science geek. He produced drugs with a partner at 
one point, but after the partner went to jail in 1994, he restricted 
his efforts to a relatively close circle. It's hard to pinpoint his 
activities exactly, though, because-as those at his memorial 
discovered-he had many groups of friends and kept them compartmentalized.

Alan said Haden didn't believe in using drugs in party situations, 
that their experiences were like retreats. But Michael said that 
Haden also supplied and participated in parties. He told one friend 
that it was a bad idea to do ecstasy more than a couple of times a 
year. Another friend said Paul was a responsible drug user, but also 
an enthusiast: "Hallucinogens, yes; stimulants, yes; downers, yes; 
you name it, yes."

And still others knew nothing about any of it and were simply baffled 
by the way he died. "I stand here with a broken heart because there 
is no farewell this visit, only goodbye," said David Downie, the 
college roommate. Haden's boss at Burnaby General, Nancy Cunningham, 
said his death shocked everyone there; they had had no suspicions 
about his other life. "He was the greatest guy to work with. He was 
never late and he was really accurate," said Cunningham. "He'd only 
been here a year, but everybody liked him."

Despite Haden's spiri-tual goals, he created chaos in his last act. 
The Friday night he died, four people in his building reported 
smelling something strange, feeling nauseous, and vomiting. The whole 
place had to be evacuated. The owner had to spend $140,000 stripping 
his apartment to the studs to reduce-down to 0.1 microgram per 100 
square centimetres, as per the city's environmental health bylaws-the 
chemicals found in his apartment: palladium chloride, palladium 
bromide, phosphoryl chloride, acetone, hydrochloric acid, and the 
ecstasy precursor chemical MDP2P.

For police and fire services, the incident was a frightening example 
of the dark side of drug labs: they're easy to set up and they're 
portable, meaning that in a condo city like Vancouver they can be 
anywhere, potentially putting hundreds of lives at risk. Paul Haden's 
family ended up with none of his belongings, not even the hard drive 
of his computer, which held 20 years' worth of photos.

And he left behind a community of people who couldn't fathom why he 
was cooking chemicals in his apartment in such an unsafe way. Some of 
them mourned that he paid for the consequences of prohibition with 
his life but are not uncritical of what he did in the end-and they 
say he would have been the one most horrified by what he unleashed. 
"There was something grossly weird about what he was doing," said 
Alan. "There was an out-of-character shoddiness, and it harmed a lot 
of people." His friends are blaming not just him, says Michael; they 
also blame themselves. "There's some part of us that feels complicit 
in his death. We were the demand for that product. We were part of 
the machine that consumed."

What exactly took Haden's life? Ironically, not the noxious fumes of 
the drug he was purifying. There weren't enough toxins in the 
apartment to have killed him. The coroner has told the family that he 
died of a heart arrhythmia, and had been dead for at least a day 
before he was found.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom