Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?'

It's a joke. Greed and the desire to take drugs are two separate things. If you want to separate the two, the thing you do is make drugs legal. Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness, and make an effort to make safer, healthier drugs.

The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst.

... Grateful Dead - that's it !! ... nobody in the band liked it, (the name) I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it.

Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

Things come up from the outside, the outside world says, okay, you have do this, you have to go here and here and here, and these are your options. You can be here or you can be here. You can do this, or you can do this. You can go here, or you can go there. So each one of those things becomes a place of decision, and the way we make decisions is that we all get together and if somebody doesn't feel right about it or it doesn't seem to sit right, usually we'll go with the no vote. If somebody's not comfortable with it, we'll figure it's not going to be worth doing.