Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)

Despite what happened with Marge in the kitchen, Shelbyville cannot lace Springfield’s (or anyone else’s) water supply with LSD: the drug is too unstable and complicated, and gets broken down immediately by the chlorine and other chemicals in the water treatment plants.  This is the same reason the water supplies are essentially immune to potential biological terrorist attack, as these chemicals attack bacteria as well.  In any case, the effects would take an hour or two to really get going, not instantaneous as happened to Marge.  

 In the Beginning, there was Sandoz.  Working on ergot alkaloids for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, Albert Hofmann (one f, two n’s) invented lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938.  They marketed it as Delysid.  Can you imagine the ads today?  “Delysid is not for everyone…consult your doctor about Delysid.  Side effects may include…”.   Having successfully developed several other (non-hallucinogenic) ergot compounds which became commercially successful for Sandoz, he put LSD aside for the time being.  In 1943, he dusted off the LSD and began working on it again, and accidentally ingested it through his skin, becoming the first person to trip on it.  Soon after he took another trip, resulting in a horrifying bicycle ride (wartime restrictions limiting gasoline engine vehicles).  The rest is history.  His book, LSD: My Problem Child is remarkable, although only half of it is really about LSD itself.  The drug definitely changed him, although he remained the efficient, normal-looking Swiss chemist with the analytical mind we expect from Germans/Swiss.   

 Eventually Sandoz was embarrassed by the publicity surrounding LSD and stopped making it.  The premier LSD source of the 60’s, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, better known as "Bear", claimed to be able to make purer LSD than Sandoz itself; his variety “Blue Cheer” became the name of a SF metal band, and his poetry graces the inside covers of their albums, but he is usually associated with the Grateful Dead and claims he was never very impressed by Blue Cheer.

 Effects. LSD is the most powerful drug known to man, as noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.   Doses are measured in micrograms, not milligrams.  Although it’s been produced in tablet and liquid form, blotter paper (as shown second left) is probably the most popular and well known, and certainly uniquely open to artistic interpretation, something that can't be said about a drug which is injected, snorted or smoked….LSD doesn’t have to be injected, snorted, or smoked.

Low doses.  The spaced out feeling like a mild fever, or Darvocet/Percocet.  Something isn’t quite right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Still able to have something close to a normal conversation.

            Medium doses.  The visuals show up – trails, colors are brighter, glow, and begin to melt into each other.  Patterns, like wallpaper and oriental carpets, begin to shift, swerve, or scroll; lines on a flannel shirt will dance, woodgrain breathes.  Grass grows before your very eyes.  Album covers breathe and begin to act up, like the living portraits in Harry Potter.  Speech becomes more difficult as the brainwaves no longer directly connect thoughts to spoken words – someone inside (who?) has to translate from the brain to the mouth. 

            Higher doses.  Totally out to lunch, on another planet.  More intense visuals, and the mindf**k goes into overdrive.  The self dissolves into the universe at the molecular level, the ego disappears and nothing has any true meaning anymore.   You’ve shifted into a completely different dimension.  Welcome to “where the hell am I now???”

There is no “cure” for a trip, but thorazine will calm down a bad trip somewhat. Theoretically, a bad trip can happen to even the most experienced tripper, but it's most likely when LSD is taken carelessly  in the wrong set or setting - or if it's given to someone without their knowledge ("Somebody Put Something In My Drink", as the Ramones might  say); the Dead were notorious for doing so, so much so that it was common knowledge to avoid eating or drinking anything in their presence.  Syd Barrett's friends would constantly dose him, thinking they were doing him a favor by keeping him tripping 24/7, ultimately not helping him. 

 The CIA.  It experimented with the drug in the 1950s in the MK-Ultra program, as fully described in Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain.  It turned out to be a lousy truth drug: the subject was as likely to spout complete nonsense as the “truth” (however that could possibly be defined under the influence of the drug), with the interrogator scarcely able to tell one from the other.  It was also useless as a mind control drug, because its effects were so unpredictable and (as noted above) it breaks down in the water supply.  The CIA finally gave up on it altogether, about the same time certain anti-establishment elements discovered it.  This is the twisted part about LSD: it started out within the darkest depths of the establishment, the CIA, and then went to the counterculture.  Before Leary (mentioned below) there was Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, one of the CIA’s biggest fans of LSD.

 Merry Pranksters.  Yes, these are the anti-establishment elements, led by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) – they ran out of the Beatles’ 1964 tour screaming as they couldn’t handle “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on acid.  Kesey & crew, with a plentiful supply of still-legal LSD, painted a school bus (“Furthur”) dayglow colors and toured the country in summer 1964, freaking out unsuspecting locals who had yet to experience LSD or hippies.  Eventually the Acid Tests evolved, group parties in California where a warehouse would be rented, a vat of electric Kool-Aid (laced with LSD) was there for communal drinking, and a house band, the Grateful Dead, would play – all in safe, nonthreatening environment where you were surrounded by like-minded (?) people and not thrust out into a hostile outside world of squares and pigs.  In London the same experience was imitated, the house band being Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  Kesey’s antics are best described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

 Timothy Leary. The all-time ultimate LSD guru.  After a mushroom trip in 1960, he discovered LSD and proceeded to lose his job at Harvard.  From then he preached the LSD gospel to everyone, convinced that LSD could solve all the world’s problems.  Hofmann met him a few times in Switzerland but felt that Leary was responsible for attracting too much unwelcome attention to LSD and encouraging its use among people who really should NOT be tripping.  Eventually Leary got off his acid trip (after a vacation in exile in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally picked up by the FBI in Afghanistan) and turned his attention to space travel and the ultimate final trip, death itself.  Before he died he engaged in a series of public debates with G. Gordon Liddy, his erstwhile nemesis as a NY prosecutor in the late 60s.

 Change the world?  The hippies, including Leary, felt that if LBJ or Nixon could just be dosed, they would wise up and stop the war in Vietnam.  Highly unlilkely. The effects are unpredictable even for the same person tripping more than once – each trip is completely different, like a snowflake – much less predicting how it would affect the President.  For all we know, Nixon might have decided to nuke North Vietnam.  Not good. 

 Acid Casualties.  Charles Manson & Syd Barrett, who I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, are the most notorious.  Hofmann, though, notes that no one has ever died of an LSD overdose, which can’t be said for heroin.  Much of the anecdotes about people flying off rooftops because of an LSD trip gone wrong usually turn out to be urban legends (remember Pop Rocks?).  The rumors that LSD damaged chromosomes turned out to be complete nonsense, as Generation X has ably demonstrated (these kids are normal, right?).  And the top ranks of corporate America are full of baby boomers who consumed vast quantities of acid in the 60s and eventually rejoined the mainstream rat race like everyone else, none the worse for the whole “experience.”

 It’s the music, man.  Of course, far beyond Timothy Leary or Charles Manson, the ultimate legacy of LSD is in the music we listen to today.  Although much of the LSD-influenced music was psychedelic with little appeal to those not already disposed to take LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, etc. – notably Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Hawkwind – a substantial amount was, and is, accessible to those of us who would never dream of tasting the temporary madness of LSD, but who can nonetheless enjoy the music made by those who did dare to “turn off their minds, relax and float downstream”, the biggest example being the Beatles and their masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Very little of Sgt Pepper is psychedelic in the sense of “Interstellar Overdrive” (Pink Floyd), “Dark Star” (Grateful Dead) or anything by Hawkwind or King Crimson.  The LSD effect is more subtle than that: it’s the whole concept of the album and how it all fits together; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is just the ambassador of LSD within the album itself, to those not in tune enough to recognize it in the whole, the big picture.

            But that’s not all.  To the extent a second wave, an “equal and opposite reaction” in the Newtonian sense, of 70s rock developed, mainly Black Sabbath and punk rock (remember that “Pink Floyd Sucks!” t-shirt?), in defiance of the hippies and California sound, we have a secondary ripple from LSD.  From there, you get the bands Black Sabbath influenced, i.e. Metallica and the whole dark heavy metal genre, and its offshoots such as grunge, meaning that LSD’s impact on music is far beyond the Beatles, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.  Again, even if some metalheads wouldn’t dream of doing LSD, they still listen to, bang their heads to, and enjoy, music which was indirectly caused by the very drug they shun.  There's also a whole newer genre of heavy metal, which developed in the mid 1990s and continues today, called stoner rock, a genre which deserves its own blog entry in its own right.

             Finally, that brings us to Blue Cheer – not only named after LSD, not only having Owsley’s poetry on their albums, but merging both the San Francisco sound with the darker noise of Black Sabbath and proto-metal...arguably the first stoner rock band.