[THS] !!! A Mind-Altering Drug Altered a Culture as Well

[Peter Webster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/arts/05conn.html?_r=1&oref=
slogin&pagewanted=all

New York Times [notable article!! It links to The Psychedelic Library!! scroll down about 2/3 to +++++++++]

Connections
A Mind-Altering Drug Altered a Culture as Well

   
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: May 5, 2008

When it comes to LSD, I have to confess: I inhaled. But I inhaled like so
many other denizens of the 1960s and early ’70s, whether they actually took
the drug or not. I inhaled because you couldn’t fail to inhale. LSD — its
aura if not its substance — was a component of the air we breathed. This
hallucinogen infused the exhalations of musicians, philosophers, advertisers
and activists.

[photo]
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, in 2006, at age 100.

There seemed nothing “counter” about this culture; it was prevalent. At the
time there seemed to be as many head shops in New York as there are
Starbucks now; acid rock played in those darkened spaces to acid heads, as
beams of black light caused DayGlo Op-Art images to shimmer dizzyingly.
Typefaces ballooned and swooped, melting across posters and album
jackets in drug-induced swoons. Lucy was in the sky with diamonds, the
Byrds were eight miles high, the Magical Mystery Tour was overbooked;
Carlos Castaneda played out his fantasies.

The era’s hallmark drug was championed with as much messianic fervor as
the era’s countercultural politics. And I, and seemingly everyone else I
knew, ingested that culture even if not the drug itself, not even realizing
how strange that culture was.

It seems even stranger with the passing of time. So while the death at 102
last week of Albert Hofmann may have tempted some to resurrect tales of
spiritual adventures under the influence, or to invoke the now familiar quip
that if you can remember the ’60s you weren’t there, there are other
flashbacks — LSD-induced or not — to consider.

Dr. Hofmann, you recall, was the discoverer of LSD when he was a brilliant
young Swiss chemist working for Sandoz Laboratories; he was identifying
and refining the medicinal properties of various plants. In 1943, after
synthesizing a chemical derived from the ergot fungus found on rye
kernels, he noticed some unusual sensations. He entered a dreamlike state,
as he described it; when he closed his eyes he saw an “uninterrupted
stream of fantastic pictures.”

His real eureka moment came a few days later when he deliberately
ingested a minute quantity (0.25 milligrams) of that synthesized chemical —
lysergic acid diethylamide — and had the world’s first bad acid trip. Its
components included a horrifying bicycle ride, the frenzied drinking of two
liters of milk, a neighbor who appeared as “a malevolent insidious witch,”
and an emergency call to the family doctor who could see nothing wrong,
even though in his autobiography Dr. Hofmann said he felt like “a demon
had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul.” But the
next day everything glistened in a fresh light: “The world was as if newly
created.”

For the LSD era there was something mythic about this initiation. Epic
heroes have always descended into the underworld to emerge, however
scarred, bearing new forms of wisdom. That was also the LSD archetype:
descend into madness and emerge enlightened, seeing the world anew.

Like others, I found the demonic threat too fearsome to engage and saw
many an injured traveler drop by the wayside. As for the promised
enlightenment, it too raised concerns. I was wary of the trappings — the
surface style and attitude that had developed around a substance whose
promise was that it would help you see the essence of things.

I doubt if I would have been comfortable ingesting anything more than a
Fresca if Timothy Leary had been at my side reciting the spiritual patter he
and Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert — the shamanistic professors of the
age — had put together for the 1964 book “The Psychedelic Experience: A
Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.” Their manual tried to
establish an almost sacramental order for an experience that was much
more anarchic.

“O (name of voyager),” its opening recitation begins (prompting for
personalization of the impersonal message), “the time has come for you to
seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the (name) game are about to
cease. You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light.”

That Clear Light sounded nice. So did “the All Good” and “the All Peaceful.”
But these chants also warned on the subject of the “Source Energy,” “Do
not try to intellectualize it.” And that still seems wrong: ideas of trying to
“merge with the world” and “enjoy the dance of the puppets” seem
relatively banal compared with really seeing the interconnectedness of
things. How did Eastern mysticism, 20th-century pharmacology, messianic
politics and 19th-century Romanticism become so intertwined?

This really was a remarkable form of cultural intoxication. And there were
important precedents. It was no accident that when Aldous Huxley wrote
about his experience taking mescaline in “The Doors of Perception” in 1954,
his title was drawn from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were
cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Blake was a Romantic visionary, suspicious of the scientific mechanisms of
modernity that were transforming 18th-century Britain. His younger
compatriot William Wordsworth, once intoxicated by revolutionary fervor,
strolled through the English Lake District, beautifully invoking the nurturing
powers of Nature and evoking an incorporeal “presence” that moved him
deeply “with the joy of elevated thoughts.”

The Romantics were championing an alternative culture that might displace
the encroaching industrial age. Cold reason would be tempered by visionary
warmth, objective science by internal experience. Coleridge and De Quincey
penned their drug dreams, and Coleridge said that nitrous oxide —
laughing gas — provided “the most unmingled pleasure” he ever knew.

+++++++++++++++++
In Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 autobiography, “LSD: My Problem Child”
(reproduced, along with other fascinating texts, at psychedelic-library.org),
he sounds at times like the Romantics’ nemesis. He is a frustrated scientist,
astonished at the popular interest in the drug and dismayed by how it was
swept out of the research laboratory by a “huge wave of inebriant mania
that began to spread over the Western world.” During his first meeting with
Leary at a Swiss train station in 1971 Dr. Hofmann barely restrained his
criticism of that populist showman.

As Dr. Hofmann points out in his memoir, Sandoz Laboratories, seeing no
obvious medical purpose for the drug, provided it without cost to
researchers at first. About 100 scientific papers appeared annually. But in
1965, when patents had expired, and accounts of bad trips and widespread
use had made LSD a “serious threat to public health” (as Sandoz put it),
the company announced it was stopping production — which did not, of
course, stop proliferation. In Dr. Hofmann’s view abuse of the drug led to
its illegality.

But he was torn; the scientist also sounded like a Romantic. He seemed to
echo Wordsworth: during one of his childhood walks in a forest path above
Baden, Switzerland, Dr. Hoffmann had a euphoric vision of nature,
experiencing what he called a “beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart.”
He said he believed LSD could recapture that experience, disclosing a
“miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday
sight.”

Like the British Romantics and like the ’60s counterculturalists, Dr. Hofmann
also saw a “spiritual crisis” in “Western industrial society,” one that
demanded that we “shift from the materialistic” and discover new modes of
understanding. That view gave a political edge to LSD: it was literally
counter-cultural, offering a dissent and the promise of a reformation.

The same impulse attracted Huxley. In 1932, in “Brave New World,” he saw
drugs as instruments of social control and as short cuts to mood
manipulation. But in “The Doors of Perception,” his conversion is complete:
the drug plays the opposite role. It provides a way to step outside of the
restrictive bounds of one’s culture, revealing alternatives, breaking down
boundaries.

There is no need to rehearse again how wildly such countercultural
fantasies ultimately failed, how drugs of illumination became drugs of
disturbance. Huxley was more prophetic about the influence of mood-
altering drugs than about mind-altering drugs. And with all the great
promise of LSD, what did it leave behind? What liberatory principles were
established or revelations disclosed?

Not many, except in one surprising direction. The LSD counterculture may
once have attained its cultural power by dissenting from the scientific world
view, encouraging a return to the natural world and stripping away the
trappings of materialism. But many alumni of that era have had different
ideas.

It is through technology, not despite it, that LSD visions were realized. Leary
called the personal computer “the LSD of the 1990s.” And in a 2006 report
in Wired magazine, many early computer pioneers are said to have been
users of LSD. Steve Jobs, Apple’s presiding genius, described his own LSD
experience as “one of the two or three most important things” he has done
in his life. So here it is — a world in which we all do more than just inhale.
It is through the iPod that, in Leary’s once contentious words, we turn on,
tune in and drop out.

Connections is a critic’s perspective on arts and ideas.
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