Is There a High That’s Worth a Hole in Your Head?
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Is There a High That’s Worth a Hole in Your Head?

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Is Any High Worth a Hole in Your Head?Entire bookshelves are dedicated to the depths alcoholics and addicts have gone to get high and feed their addictions: harrowing, pitch-black memoirs like Jerry Stahl’s heroin epic Permanent Midnight, Bill Clegg’s fall-from-grace crack odyssey Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and the elegant desperation of Sarah Hepola’s booze-soaked Blackout. Even James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces has enough identifiable truth to eclipse an otherwise fiction-rotted narrative. And yet, for all their beautifully drawn horrors, none of these memoirs are as jaw-dropping as Joe Mellen’s not-for-the-squeamish Bore Hole. Self-published in 1970, Mellen’s long-out-of-print memoir opens on the sentence: “This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high.” The book has now been reissued and expanded, igniting centuries-old controversies about the skull-drilling technique of trepanation. In a recent feature for Vice, Mellen (now 76 years old) was interviewed about the book, using a 6-mm bit on his head and his unbelievable quest to remain high forever.

Wait—What?

According to the Vice piece, Bore Hole isn’t so much an endurance test for readers as it is “a persuasive attempt to answer a very fundamental question about human nature: Why do we love getting high so much?” Mellen’s chronicle of self-trepanation, as reissued by the publisher Strange Attractor, is about permanently altering his consciousness—a concept that he still hasn’t abandoned in his 70s. In fact, he insists that getting high is fundamental to getting “an objective view” of the world: “We want to get back to that youthful state of being where we have more spontaneity and more creativity and more life. This is what we miss. It’s paradise lost.”

Mellen’s counter-culture attitude began in 1965 as a reaction to his parents, or by “throwing off the square life that his establishment parents had planned out for him.” Things took a turn when he met Bart Huges, a Dutch chemist who introduced him to the one-two punch of LSD and self-trepanation—which isn’t exactly everyone’s first gateway to drugs. Even Mellen wasn’t initially sold on the concept: “When I first heard about [self-trepanation] I thought, This is ridiculous! And the idea that someone would do it to himself or herself was absurd.” And yet, he was compelled enough to follow Huges down an insane rabbit hole of altered states.

Does Trepanation Actually Work?

Trepanation is a process by which a hole is drilled into the skull in order to achieve a high that’s “more subtle than drugs, more gratifying and less dangerous,” according to a Washington Post feature. By most every account, though, the evidence that it works is mixed at best. (Then again, any medical process that requires an electric power drill is automatically suspect.) Still, the Post notes that it’s not only considered one of the “oldest surgical practice[s]” but “still performed medically worldwide and ceremonially by some African tribes today.” The first attempts at trepanning weren’t as adventurous as they’ve become now, as they “simply involved taking the skin off the head and scraping the bone away with stone tools.” The sizes of the holes varied, too, ranging just from a few centimeters to half the skull.

The procedure isn’t a one-and-done sort of thing, either. It requires (you guessed it) re-drilling. Both the bone and skin grow back, which closes the hole. Mellen’s former partner Amanda Feilding, the director of the UK’s consciousness-investigation think tank Beckley Foundation, trepanned herself a number of times since 1970 after no doctor would perform the procedure on her. (Her first attempt was filmed, and is the subject of a documentary I can’t bring myself to watch.) In an interview with Feilding, she recounted the subsequent effect “like the tide coming in: there was a feeling of rising, slowly and gently, to levels that felt good, very subtle.” She recalled her dreams becoming “less anxious,” though she even cops to wondering if it all isn’t the result of a placebo effect. But one would hope that drilling a hole into your head would achieve some effect.

Is This Still a Thing?

Even with the reissue of Bore Hole and renewed interest in trepanation, Mellen doesn’t suggest that anyone follow his or Feilding’s leads in taking an electric drill to their craniums. “I don’t advise people to do it themselves. I really don’t. I had lessons from Bart, and I’m not going to tell other people to do it to themselves,” he told Vice. “Really, there needs to be some sort of legal and social change in this country for it to happen. I just wish that someone would do some research into drugs that get you high and their properties as vasoconstrictors.” And it’s this research into improved blood circulation and expanded consciousness that Mellen argues rests at the heart of why trepanation “works.” Feilding agreed in a Scientific American story, claiming that marijuana and psychedelics accomplish the same effect, among other techniques “like yogic breathing or cranial osteopathy,” she said. Trepanation is more subtle, she claims—aside from the obvious hole in the head, of course.

While neither of them advocate for self-trepanation, they believe research and medically-assisted trepanation are the answer. “Although it’s not illegal to trepan, it’s not exactly legal, either. It’s a catch-22,” Feilding observed. “You can’t get the research authorized because there’s not enough evidence to support it, but you can’t get the evidence without research.” Currently, that evidence amounts to anecdotal claims and a single research paper from an advocacy group stating “that trepanation significantly increases arterial blood flow in the brain.” Regardless, it’s difficult to tell whether it’s the high or improved blood flow that people like Mellen are championing. One thing is for certain, though: it’s probably not worth drilling inside your head to get outside of it.

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About Author

Paul Fuhr is an addiction recovery writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Live Oak Review, The Sobriety Collective and InRecovery Magazine, among others. He is the author of the alcoholism memoir “Bottleneck.” He's also the creator and co-host of "Drop the Needle," a podcast about music and recovery. Fuhr lives in Columbus, Ohio with his family and their cats, Dr. No and Goldeneye.