“This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high,” Joe Mellen’s book Bore Hole opens.
The psychedelic adventurer, who was a pioneer of experiments with LSD in the UK, has told how he learned about the ancient procedure from a Dutch academic named Bart Huges in the 1960s.
“He was the sanest person I’d ever met,” Mellen recalled. “I became his disciple”
READ MORE: Lake District hikers high on magic mushrooms had to be saved by mountain rescuers
It took three attempts for Mellen to break through his skull and achieve nirvana, starting off with a grisly procedure with a hand-held drill in 1969.
"At that time," he said, "I was broke, and I certainly couldn't afford an electric drill, so I bought a hand trepan from a surgical instrument shop," he recalled.
Trepanning is one of the earliest-known surgical procedures, and only fell out of favour in the 1930s. As a result there are a great many antique drills that were purpose-made for the operation.
Mellen described the one he found as “a bit like a corkscrew but with a ring of teeth at the bottom”. It was designed to remove a cone-shaped core of the skull.
Desperate bloke has been getting drunk and 'pulling his own teeth out' for 15 years
The operation was “difficult,” Mellen recalled: “It was like trying to uncork a bottle of wine from the inside”.
He told Vice: “I was tripping on acid. I thought that it was the only way I could get through doing it, but it didn't work…”
A second attempt followed a year later: "There was kind of a 'schlurping' sound as I took the trepan out and what sounded like bubbles."
Ex-model left paralysed by tennis ball-sized tumour after being sent home from A&E
Another year went by and he decided to try again. This time he wasn’t high, and instead of the “blunt” antique device used an electric drill with a 6mm bit.
“Quite a lot of blood comes out,” he said, and “It took half an hour all in all, including clearing up afterwards”.
"I was feeling great because I'd done it,” he said, “but then I noticed after about an hour I started to feel a lightness, like a weight had been lifted off me.
"I did it in the evening and went to bed at 11pm feeling good, and I could still feel it when I woke up the next morning. And then I realised, 'This is it. It's done'."
Despite Mellen’s insistence that there is a long history of successful trepanations, The Daily Star does not encourage its readers to undertake any unlicensed surgical procedures on themselves or others.
For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletter by clicking here.
READ NEXT:
- Drugs gang turns ex-Premier League star's abandoned £3m mansion into cannabis farm
- UK drug gangs armed with terrifying military-grade weapons including submachine gun
- Notorious 5'8 football hooligan KO'd five people in a nightclub with one punch each
Source: Read Full Article
