Drugs and Popular Culture

Notes on Acid DreamsAnd other sources

Compiled by Dr. Nerio

The Media on Drugs

• The media create the “reality” of drugs

• Are the media “biased”?

• Who decides what is “biased”?

Two Types of Bias

• Factual bias

• Selection bias

No story can present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

• Selection bias is more or less inevitable…

• There is no such thing as “the whole truth”

Stories about drugs ebb and flow

• 1930s – hundreds of sensationalistic articles about marijuana

Special Role of Harry Anslinger

First head of Bureau of Narcotics, friend and ally of William Randolph Hearst

• LSD in the 1960s

• Before 1967, press described LSD as a “nightmare” drug, whose effects produced insanity (perhaps permanent)

• NJ Narcotic Drug Study Commission: “greatest threat facing the country”

• Almost no media subsequently corrected the story = LSD is an extremely safe drug

• Media could neither understand nor communicate the nuance of set and setting

• Manufacture of LSD was outlawed in 1965… by 1968, sale of LSD was a felony and possession a misdemeanor

Battling the Media over Drugs

Example: PBS’s Tales of the City, 1993

• 1967 and after: panic over LSD and chromosome breakage

Sensationalism

• The intent to thrill, amaze, excite... By focusing on exaggerated, superficial, or lurid details

Sensationalism and Media Theory

• Ruling elite theory – sensationalism distracts from structural problems in society

• Money machine – sensationalism sells papers

• Grassroots theory – public loves excitement

• Professional subculture – journalists seek “human interests stories”

Jay Stevens: Storming Heaven: LSD and the

American DreamJanuary 1965: Time declared that the sixties

generation = conformity

• Seymour Martin Lipset had declared the “Triumph of the West”

• Jay Stevens claims: “To put matters bluntly: the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration…they were a laboratory experiment that had either gone awry or succeeded brilliantly—a difference of opinion” that still persists (xiii)

• The story begins…

Albert Hoffman’s Bicycle Ride (1943):Not unlike a Salvador Dali painting

Ergot Fungus

Earlier: Peyote Cacti

Weir Mitchell’s 1896 peyoteExperience was “somewhatreminiscent of… MaxfieldParish…” (6)

• Mitchell told the BMJ how “thousands of galactic suns had streamed across his vision, how a gothic tower gleaming with jewels had shot up to an immense height” (6)

Havelock Ellis’ Experience withPeyote was more reminiscent of Monet

William Butler Yeats saw“delightful dragons, puffing out their breath straight in front of them like rigid lines of steam, and balancing white balls on the end of their breath.” (7)

• Ellis called peyote “a new artificial paradise”

• He wrote that “most educated gentlemen” should try it once or twice

THE BMJ Called it a New Inferno

The West’s Reservations about Sensations

Protestantism,Calvinism,Puritanism

Avoiding the Question

• “By opting for the moralizing tone, the BMJ editors skirted a more interesting area of argument: what were legitimate drugs of use and what were dangerous drugs of abuse?” (8)

• “Was a substance used to promote nonpathological symptoms such as ecstasy, visions, even terror, a danger to the public if it wasn’t a danger, physically or psychologically speaking, to the individual?” (8)

Acid Dreams

• 1977: “LSD: A Generation Later”

• LSD: • A boon to psychotherapy• An enhancer of creativity• A religious sacrament• A liberator of the human spirit

Two Views

RICHARD ASHLEY

• Acid is a “chemical messiah”

• A way to short-circuit the mental straight jacket imposed by society

• Acid helps people resist “thought control”

STANLEY KRIPPNER

• The culture is not ready yet

• The culture does not have the framework/the closeness to God

CIA

• “As it turns out, nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s—marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrate, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed, and many others—had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists” (xxvi)

Ch 2: Psychedelic Pioneers

• Captain Al Hubbard – the first to emphasize LSD visionary/transcendental possibilities

• The “Johnny Appleseed” of LSD

During his first trip, in 1951, he claimed to have witnessed his own conception. “It was the mostmystical thing I’ve ever seen” (45)

Aldous Huxley

• 1953: Mescaline

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbI4f1WvN9w

• The Doors of Perception

• Mind and brain are not the source of the cognitive process, but a screening mechanism or “reducing valve”

• Huxley tried LSD for the first time in 1954:

• “What came through the closed door,” he stated, “was the realization…the direct, total awareness, from the inside…of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact” (48)

• “Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still” (50)

• A Catholic priest recommended the experience to members of his parish

Hollywood

• “LSD was the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the late 1950s…”

• “All my life,” [Cary] Grant stated, “I’ve been searching for peace of mind. I’d explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment” (57)

• “That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non-drug factors play an important role in determining the subject’s response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature” (58)

Science, Objectivity and LSD

• “According to Osmond, the most important features of the LSD experience—the overwhelming beauty, the awe and wonder, the existential challenge, the creative and therapeutic insights—would inevitably elude the scientist…” (63)

• http://www.cosm.org/art/sacredmirrors.html

• “The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet” (65)

Alex Grey: LSD as Religious Sacrament

Ch 3: Under the Mushroom, Over the Rainbow

• “LSD was fine by Mrs. Luce as long as it remained strictly a drug for the doctors and their friends in the ruling class” (71)

• “Oh sure, we all took acid” (she said). “It was a creative group—my husband and I and Huxley and Isherwood” (71)

The Magic Mushroom

• Life had run a story on the “magic mushroom” by Gordon Wasson

Leary Conducts the Psilocybin Experiment

• 32 inmates at Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord

• Found lower rate of recidivism (25% vs. 80%)

• Leary, Walter Pahnke, and the Good Friday Experiment

Spring Grove Experiment, 1966

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIOysM1briU

Not Everyone Agreed

• Arthur Koestler to Leary after mushrooms:

• “This is wonderful, no doubt… but it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism… There’s no wisdom here. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was” (81)

• William Burroughs also had some “ominous premonitions”

1963: Leary and Alpert Are Fired

• The first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the 20th century

• “Some day it will be quite humorous,” (Alpert) told a reporter, “that a professor was fired for supplying a student with ‘the most profound education experience in my life’” (88)

Ch 4: Preaching LSD

• Leary and Alpert relocate to Mexico – International Federation for Internal Freedom

(IFIF)

• 5,000 applicants

• Relocate to Millbrook (gift of Billy and Peggy Hitchcock)

Millbrook

Leary and the Bardol Thodol

G. Gordon Liddy “Crouches Behind the Bushes”

“When the Supreme Court ruled that suspects must be informed of theirlegal rights at the time of arrest, the bust was thrown out of court” (117)

• Millbrook was forced to disband in 1967

Chapter 5: “The All-American Trip”

• The Great Freak Forward

Ken Kesey

• Volunteers were paid $75 a day to serve as guinea pigs for psychotomimetic drugs

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

• Venison Chili laced with liberal helpings of LSD:

• Dining electric: Jerry Garcia, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Acid and the New Left

• Berkeley Free Speech Movement

• Maria Savio “delivered a stirring address in which he denounced the university as a factory for processing students—its raw material—into standardized personnel” (127)

• The “first big surge of street acid hit the college scene in 1965, just when the political situation in the United States was heating up”

• “If any single theme dominated young people in the 1960s, it was the search for a new way of seeing. LSD was a means of exciting consciousness and provoking visions, a kind of hurried magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the resonance of life that society had denied” (131)