Happy 420

Yeah, more weed jokes.  But not from me.   I’ll just offer up more observations on the topic.

4:20 & 4/20.   It’s not just Hitler’s birthday, it’s the alleged time and/or date to toke up.  Really, you can toke up at 4:19, 4:21, or any other time of day, and any other day of the year.  By now it’s so well known it’s not even special or unique. 

Stoners have a bad habit of assuming because they’re stoned and find literally everything funny, that everyone else will too – and find their nonstop laughter and amusement endearing.  Nope.  Please, laugh at everything responsibly.

New Jersey.   Despite the promises now-Governor Phil Murphy made during his election campaign last fall, weed is still not legal in the Magic Garden State.  Remember, he’s the governor, not the NJ state legislature, so he doesn’t pass laws, he simply refrains from vetoing laws which Governor Fatso would have nixed.   As for when the legislature will pass anything, we’ll have to wait and see.

Decriminalization vs. Legalization.   Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has indicated he’ll try decriminalizing MJ at the Federal level.  In Virginia, decriminalization is what Ralph Northam promised.  A step short of legalizing, it means possession of modest amounts, typically under a half ounce, becomes merely a civil offense.  In Virginia, possession of a half ounce – a large amount for personal use but too small to be Costco quantity (try more like a pound) – is still a Class 1 misdemeanor, i.e. the worst misdemeanor short of a felony.   Doing so at a Federal level would get the FBI and DEA off everyone’s ass, nationwide. 

The following states have decriminalized marijuana: Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island

By the way, we associate Federal drug enforcement with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also actively investigating and prosecuting drug offenses.  It seems the two agencies had a brief turf war but eventually reached an agreement: the FBI hassles us at home, and the DEA goes outside the US. 

Anyhow.  Decriminalization is NOT legalization.  The latter exists in several states right now, the pioneer being Colorado.  In that state, officially sanctioned dispensaries sell recreational marijuana.  An adult – and you don’t even have to be a Colorado resident – can go in and purchase modest amounts of high quality, THC-laden marijuana with colorful names like Ghost Trainwreck, Green Crack, Soul Diesel, OG Kush, Girl Scout Cookies, AK-47, and so on.  [Maybe the Trump crowd would be more tolerant if someone named a strain AR15.]

The following states have LEGALIZED recreational marijuana:  Alaska, California, Colorado (the first), Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State.   Leave it to the District of Columbia (Washington, DC) to screw things up:  possession and growing is legal, but buying and selling is not.  Either you live there and figure out how to grow it yourself, or you play games bartering with people.  The MA law is in effect but their dispensary system is not yet operational – they hope to have it going by fall 2018.  They will sell to non-residents but all weed has to be smoked in MA.   How about a reboot of Cheers?  Woody would be the perfect budtender. 

Outside the US, Uruguay was the first country to legalize recreational MJ.   Canada did so recently, but their system isn’t online yet.  FYI, weed is NOT legal in North Korea.  What is are some hemp cigarettes with no THC, and which the locals will not sell you.   

Medical vs. Recreational.  Marijuana has two major ingredients:  THC and CBD.  THC is the active ingredient which gives it psychoactive effect and makes Pink Floyd albums so awesome.  CBD is what cures cancer.  Recreational strains emphasize THC and ignore CBD, whereas medical strains have almost no THC and instead maximize CBD. 

The medical laws vary.   The more liberal laws simply allow a doctor to issue a prescription for MJ if he/she believes you have some condition for which it would help.   California’s law, passed back in 1996, was this type, which acted in some ways as de facto legalization.   Other states were stricter, specifically narrowing this to certain unpleasant conditions like cancer, epilepsy, and other nasty diseases which most people don’t have.  Moreover, they often limited the patient to CBD oil which has no THC – i.e. you can’t get high off it.

Flower vs. Edibles vs. Hash.  Generally we think of MJ as the leafy herb people smoke in joints (horrendously inefficient), pipes, bongs, or more recently, vaporizers. 

Edibles are weed-infused cookies, brownies, gummies, etc.  The MJ has to be specially treated into butter or oil and then cooked normally into food you can eat.  The effects come on in two hours – instead of relatively instantaneously for smoked herb – but are 4 times what you could expect for the smoked version.  This has screwed up people who had never smoked and suddenly munched down on cookies and wondered what happened.  Even experienced smokers are warned to start slowly and take into account the two hour delay.  A major benefit of edibles, however, is not having smoke and smell everywhere.   With more places banning indoor smoking these days – e.g. literally everywhere in DC – that makes edibles more convenient.

At the top end is hash, wax, shatter, etc., essentially highly concentrated marijuana.  This can be consumed in a bong or special pipe.   See The Hasheesh Eater, by Fitzhugh Ludlow (1850s account by a verbose New Yorker).  It’s available wherever legal marijuana is available and probably best for those who have “been there, done that” and ready to maximize their MJ experience. 

Vape Shops.  These have sprung up like wildfire.  It seems every time I drive down the street I notice a new vape shop open.  Ostensibly these are for tobacco smokers who use vape pens and vaporizers to smoke their traditional herb, but they sell bongs and other items which are almost exclusively associated with marijuana.  Do NOT refer to marijuana, even if you’re buying a bong. 

Other drugs.  California is now debating legalizing – or at least decriminalizing – psychedelic mushrooms.  These are usually psilocybe cubensis – though there are lots of different psychoactive varieties – and considerably stronger than marijuana.  Mushrooms are a good approximation of LSD, though not exactly the same;  mushrooms sometimes induce nausea and other unpleasant physical effects which are absent with LSD.  Both cause intense hallucinations when consumed in sufficient quantity.   Even if these were fully legalized for recreational use – an outcome I’d consider optimistic even for California – the sheer intensity of these drugs makes them much less appealing and desirable relative to marijuana.

Heroin.   Rather than go on about meth, ecstasy (MDMA), cocaine, etc. I’ll simply head to the top.  Heroin is by its nature physically addictive.  Bayer invented it in 1895 as a safe, non-addictive alternative to morphine, only to find it was neither.  It was criminalized in the US in 1924.   As too many people have found out the hard way, you can die of a heroin overdose – which is not true of marijuana.

Despite that, I would argue that heroin should be legal.  While legalizing it would not make it non-addictive, it would be safer, though not completely safe.  The #1 thing making heroin dangerous, though, is its illegality.  Available cheap, in known doses and quality, the risk would be brought down to manageable levels.  As a practical matter, I would argue that demand for cheap, legal, top quality heroin would still be a fraction of demand for any other drug, especially marijuana. 

Moreover, if heroin can be legalized, all those drugs between marijuana and heroin could also be legalized.  The biggest concern for doing so is the consensus – an unproven assumption but taken as irrebuttable fact – that if you legalize something, literally EVERYONE will do it.  Legalize gay marriage, and overnight all these happily married heterosexual couples will abandon their opposite-sex spouses and hook up with same-sex partners.  Legalize cocaine and everyone will snort it.  Legalize heroin and we’re all stabbing our arms with needles.  Legalize LSD and we’re all flying jumbo jets into rainbows.  You get the idea. 

I know several people who live in Colorado.  How many of them smoke marijuana? NONE.   I don’t know anyone who left their opposite sex spouse to go get married to a same-sex partner simply because their state suddenly legalized gay marriage.  I know nobody – myself included – who would even try heroin if it were legalized tomorrow.  And if you really think about it, very few people actually would.  

   

For those of you who do toke, enjoy today while it lasts.  And tomorrow, and the next day….

Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley III

Recently I picked up a book, Practical LSD Manufacture, by someone named “Uncle Fester”, clearly an alias.  My impression going into the book is that of all the clandestine substances  you might attempt to make yourself, LSD is among the hardest and least amenable to those of us (e.g. me) who struggled through high school chemistry and stayed light years away from it from graduation onward.  I lack (A) the lab or space to make it, (B) the precursor chemicals (most of which are closely watched by The Man), (C) the equipment (unlike Walter White, I don’t have chemistry lab to raid for my own use), and most importantly, (D) the skill set necessary to do any of the necessary procedures.  In the unlikely event that I could cook it up, what would I do with it?  I’d have several lifetimes of LSD at my disposal, and the examples of excessive personal consumption aren’t good: (1) Charles Manson – still in prison, (2) Syd Barrett, baked out of Pink Floyd and retired, now dead, and (3) Roky Ericksson, who went insane.  No thanks.  

Although 90% of the material went over my head, many of the comments were fairly amusing.  A “cook” (clandestine LSD chemist) in the UK was nabbed in “Operation Julie”, so named after the female operative who took down the operation, much of which involved orally stimulating the chemists’ genitals.  This particular cook had come up with yet another way of making LSD, which itself was of major interest to the author.  And yet another method – there appear to be several – involves phosgene, evoking images of WWI chemical warfare. 

But reviewing this gave me more understanding and appreciation of this famous counterculture personality, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, often known as either “Bear” or “Owsley”.  Of course, reading a biography on him also helped.

Bear: the Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, by Robert Greenfield.  “Bear”, as in the Dead album “Bear’s Choice”, is mainly known for two things:  developing the Grateful Dead’s on-stage sound system (and recording countless shows) and making killer LSD he claimed was more pure than Sandoz’.  [Note, Hofmann’s book, LSD – My Problem Child, does not mention him, nor does it mention Ken Kesey, but Timothy Leary does come up.]

Owsley was a remarkable character.  AOS I – his grandfather – was governor of Kentucky during WWI.  His father (AOS II) was a drunken Navy guy who survived the sinking of the Lexington at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WWII.  AOS3/Bear lived in the DC area for awhile, went to Washington & Lee High School (down the street from GMUSL, and I even took a car class there), and briefly went to UVa in Charlottesville (long before my Cousin Eddie went there).  

Much of the story involves the other of Owsley’s major roles with the Dead: taping their shows and developing their sound.  He was more effective at the former, much of which was intended as feedback for the band to improve their live performances.  Garcia himself once confessed that he had been unhappy with Phil Lesh’ bass playing during one early show, so much so that he threw Lesh down a flight of stairs.  After listening to the tapes (most likely recorded by Bear) he was so impressed that parts of that show wound up on Anthem of the Sun, their second album.  Naturally, Garcia was remorseful about his.  [Ah, so this is why Lesh doesn’t tour with the Dead any more.]

Owsley’s later “Wall of Sound”, a massive and unwieldy PA system which overtaxed the band’s logistics, proved too much and had to be abandoned in favor of more mundane and conventional concert amplification.  As of 2017, a more tangible and lasting legacy of Owsley’s work with the Dead are several live albums and bootlegs, the most notable being The History of the Grateful Dead, Part 1: Bear’s Choice.  Naturally, Greenfield’s book has a fairly extensive list of all those recordings.  They also include non-Dead recordings, e.g. Janis Joplin & Big Brother & the Holding Company.  Owsley also recorded supporting acts and other bands playing with the Dead.  His tangential relationship with Blue Cheer (and the LSD they named themselves after) is briefly mentioned.  While not nearly as famous as the Dead, Janis, Quicksilver, etc. they were still part of the San Francisco, Haight Ashbury scene – the hairy edge of that scene and its connection to the Hell’s Angels (e.g. “Gut”, ‘Cheer’s famous manager). 

Of all the “cooks”, Owsley is probably the most famous.  He supplied Ken Kesey with his doses.  What I found funny was that Kesey’s preferred dose was 400 micrograms, which even veteran tripper Bear thought was excessive (100-200 is the ideal, 250 being Hofmann’s famous bicycle ride dosage).  Owsley also supplied the Beatles with their LSD.   Remarkably, Owsley often gave about half his output away free not only to various celebrity musicians, but also anonymous festival patrons.  Of the half he sold, he did so practically at cost.  His goal was to distribute as much top quality LSD as he could to as many different people.  Unlike Walter White – who so far as we know, never sampled his own meth (and in any case was a fictional character anyway) – Owsley could and did trip on his own supply.  For one thing, he enjoyed it, but also it was a sincere question of quality control.  Owsley would not expect anyone to trip on a batch he wasn’t sure was up to his standards, and he took immense pride in the quality and purity of his LSD.   

Acid Tests.  These were public gatherings at which people could trip on LSD amidst friendly comrades with a house band playing the appropriate music, occurring in the San Francisco, CA area.  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, is the most famous description of these.  They occurred from 1965 to 1968.  The house band was the Grateful Dead; the LSD was supplied by Owsley.  Note: over in London, similar gatherings were done, mimicking the California version.  The house band at these was Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  The SF version was organized by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

Owsley himself estimated his lifetime production to have been somewhere close to 5 million doses.  Since LSD doses are measured in micrograms, as opposed to milligrams, a relatively modest amount of LSD can produce an unusually high amount of effective doses.   In fact, for some time the Guinness Book of World Records listed LSD as the world’s most powerful drug. 

What’s also remarkable about Owsley’s LSD operation is that technically he had no background in chemistry and “taught himself” how to make it.   Again, the prior book explains how difficult this is.

However, there are two major caveats to this assessment of his achievement.  First, his GF at the time was a chemist, so undoubtedly she taught him the procedures necessary to do so.  This goes a long way to explaining how he was able to “teach himself”, very likely taught by her, as she was also closely involved with him and his lifestyle and also helping him consume and distribute the top quality acid he was making.  Second, he was doing so before it became illegal and shortly after it was banned, at a time at which the feds were far less sophisticated at tracking down cooks by precursor chemicals and such.  He would have had a much easier time than a contemporary cook at acquiring what he needed.    

Owsley was busted eventually and went to prison for two years (Terminal Island).   Oddly, although he taped many Dead shows – and the opening acts too, which supposedly included Blue Cheer – it seems only a fraction of these recordings have been released to the public.  He moved to Australia and made a compound out in the outback.  He long since stopped doing interesting like doing the Dead’s sound or making killer LSD – but his cause of death was actually a car accident in the outback.    

While I’m on the topic of cooks.

Nick Sand & Tim Scully.  I recently watched “The Sunshine Makers”, a 2015 documentary on this pair of cooks, essentially Owsley’s successors.  Scully trained under Owsley himself.  With Owsley’s arrest and incarceration, this pair became the biggest and most important producers of LSD – until they themselves were caught.  Sand died in April of this year in exile; Scully served his time and permanently retired from the LSD business. 

William Pickard.   If you believe the Feds, this man was the biggest cook, as the supply of LSD dropped dramatically after he was caught – though Pickard himself insists (quite plausibly) that LSD production has always been decentralized since its banning in 1966, and the end of the Grateful Dead’s regular touring schedule (Jerry Garcia died in September 1995) essentially shut down the most important distribution network the drug had.  [If you don’t know anyone personally who sells LSD, a jam band concert is probably the best place to score acid.]  What’s interesting is that Pickard had been particularly careful about his operations.   He was arrested in 1999 and is serving a life sentence.   

One thing you notice: every major “cook” – and while “Uncle Fester” falls short of identifying himself as one, his extensive knowledge of the intimate details of LSD production would infer that he was one, or maybe still is – has eventually been caught, sooner or later.  None of them were stupid or careless, they were all aware their activities were illegal, and all took the matter of evading notice or capture seriously.  But it wasn’t good enough.    

Reefer Madness, Alice in Acidland, and Smoke & Flesh

I’ve already blogged on Thanksgiving, so I’ll go for something “completely different”: In other words, a horrendous trio of anti-drug films.  

“Reefer Madness”.  This is the original, from 1936, when marijuana was still called “reefer” and not yet (1937) illegal.  The characters look like typical characters from a contemporary film but generally tend to smoke pot and then everything goes downhill from there.   Apparently they all get addicted, go insane, and commit all sorts of crimes.  At the most benign, they laugh hysterically, play piano fast, and jump in bed with each other.  It’s so sensational as to be unbelievable.   Stoners seem to enjoy it precisely for that reason.  I find it more annoying than entertaining, but it has some inherent charm due to its age and unique implausibility.

Incidentally, they remade the film more recently (2005), with the remake being a full parody.  I watched it once and immediately erased it from my memory.  It’s in full color with fairly mainstream actors, follows the original plot loosely, but isn’t all that entertaining. 

“Alice in Acidland” and “Smoke & Flesh”.   Fast forward to the late 60s and LSD makes its debut.   If the first movie is any indication, it’s a powerful aphrodisiac which will make everyone have sex with everyone else – male and female.  More likely they would vegetate and watch the wallpaper scroll, or venture out in public to see what happens with the visuals.  Some might freak out – paranoid and overstimulated - and stay at home.  But chilling at home with lava lamps and music doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s LSD agenda in this film. 

            The second movie features marijuana but remains just as implausible.  Bikers and orgies.  Both have lots of skin – but if I wanted that, I’d watch something else.

The sad part about this is that as of 2015, very few people take these seriously, and the only people who watch them are looking to be entertained rather than warned.   As “warnings” they are too ridiculous to be credible.  As entertainment?  Scarcely even that, as the novelty wears thin almost immediately and they lose whatever entertainment value they might have.  They wind up as simply annoying.  Of them all, I’d say “Reefer Madness” is strange enough to be somewhat entertaining, while the other two have some nudity which may arouse some people.  None need to be permanent additions to your movie collection.  

Listening to idiots like Chris Christie – dude, NO ONE wants Fat Jerk from New Jersey as President – champion the drug war even now, it’s clear that some people are still stuck in the backwards mindset which produced these films.   

Fear

It’s Halloween again and the topic for today is FEAR.   That seems to be the holiday’s #1 emotion.

By the way, they’re now celebrating Halloween in Europe, which they weren’t when I lived here.  I see pics of Asterix costumes in France.  If anyone can tell me what other costumes are out there these days, I’d love to see them.  Putin?  Stalin?  Hitler?  Who knows.

Legitimate Fears.   Life is scary enough – plus, it ends sometime for everyone and, religious beliefs notwithstanding, we still have no clue what happens after that.  So here is a list of items I don’t blame people for being worried about:  death, cancer, the afterlife, losing loved one, losing job, losing children, being poor, not having money, children in jail, spouse runs away with someone else, etc. 

Stupid Fears.   We have enough things to worry about without coming up with stupid fears.  Here are two I’ve seen the most on Facebook.

Halloween Ecstasy.   Every year the parents and cops play this game of idiotic paranoia that somehow DRUGS will be widely and freely (!) distributed to children.   An ecstasy pill costs $10.  Someone is going to give a $10 pill to a random child instead of raving themselves?  

            Back before I went to high school I worried someone would dose my food with LSD.   Since the Grateful Dead were nowhere near the ASP cafeteria, that was a particularly stupid fear.   LSD is hard to come by these days, so whoever scored a sheet or a vial of the stuff would be either selling it for $$$ or using it themselves.   Wasting expensive drugs on random children is not likely.  And sure enough, there are no documented cases of it happening anywhere. 

ISIS in Mexico.   Then the Yahoos in Texas post pictures of ISIS tanks (actually in Iraq or Syria) claiming that this ISIS army is in fact in… MEXICO?  Somehow neither the Mexican government nor armies of drug dealers noticed an Islamic army in their midst.   Please recall: Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country.  ISIS can expect no sympathy, support, or recruitment in Mexico.  If there is one thing that would temporarily ally the Mexican government and the drug dealers, it would be some incursion of ISIS in Mexico.

As a bonus, here's one we're probably not afraid of....we're too busy eating it to care:

Bacon.  I’m waiting to see someone dress up as bacon to scare people for Halloween.   Better yet, dress as Keith Moon and bacon.  Because the WHO are so damn competent, right?  Townshend and Daltrey must be shaking their heads.

By the way, if you have any suspicions, by all means check out SNOPES.  They do a good job at debunking all the bullshit out there.  In fact, it’s all those morons spreading idiotic rumors that keep Snopes in business.

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.