Albion Dreaming
Page 2
17. John Michell and DJ Jeff Dexter
18. A late Sixties LSD poster
19. Hampshire Drug Squad, Isle of Wight festival, 1970
20. Bill Dwyer
21. Stonehenge Free Festival sign
22. Jeremy Dunn with newspaper reporting on Operation Julie
23. Christine Bott
24. Operation Julie graffiti, Edinburgh
25. Operation Julie graffiti, London
26. Operation Julie police chiefs, 1978
27 and 28. Casey Hardison’s LSD laboratory, 2004
29. Blotter LSD seized at Hardison’s laboratory
30. Sheet of LSD blotter art, signed by Albert Hofmann
GLOSSARY
Acid
LSD
Acidhead
One whose preferred drug is LSD
Blotter art
Non-LSD-containing sheets of blotter
Blotter
Dose of LSD on blotting paper
Bust
Police search, raid or arrest
Cap
LSD in capsule form
Coming down
The tailing off of an LSD experience, returning to “normal” consciousness
Counter culture
The culture, especially of young people who use drugs, with values or lifestyles in opposition to those of the established culture
Dig
Understand
Drop
To take LSD orally, i.e. to drop acid
Establishment
The matrix of political, legal, economic, religious, and social forces committed to maintaining the status quo
Freak
Early name for a hippie, member of the counter culture
Freak out
Adverse reaction to LSD, often in public
Happening
Spontaneous eruption of artistic display, often by amateurs
High
Under the influence of a drug
Hippie
Member of the counter culture
Mind blowing
Ecstasy producing experience or drug
Psychedelic
Mind expanding or mind manifesting
Scene
Any aspect of the counter culture, also used to describe a small part of it
Score
To buy drugs, i.e. “I went to score some acid”
Set
The mind set of the LSD user – their fundamental beliefs and values
Setting
The physical surroundings for an LSD experience
Stoned
Under the influence of a drug, usually cannabis
Straight
Someone who has not used LSD, a member of the Establishment
Tab
LSD in tablet form
Trip
LSD experience
Tripping
Under the influence of LSD
Turn on
To use LSD, to give someone else LSD
μg
Scientific symbol for microgram (one-millionth of a gram)
Underground
Another name for the counter culture
FOREWORD
I am so glad I took LSD. Albion Dreaming reminds me why, as well as telling me many things I never knew about the ultimate psychedelic and how its story played out here in Britain. This turns out to be quite a different story from the better-known tale of LSD in the USA. Acid was, after all, a European invention and there were many Englishmen involved in its early use, including Aldous Huxley who famously asked for it as he lay dying of cancer.
No wonder its discoverer, Albert Hoffman, called LSD ‘My Problem Child’. More than any other drug I know, LSD has the capacity for the extremes of insight and joy as well as the bleakest and most fearful of depths. This may be why it can be such a great teacher and I guess this is the main reason I am glad. I was also very lucky to have good guides for my earliest trips and the opportunity to choose wonderful settings. For me the ideal has always been to take it early in the morning and spend a day on the cliff tops or the beach or the woods or even my own garden. I may have overindulged a bit in those early days in the 1970s – after all, it was all so exciting! But most of my life I have wanted it only once every few years when the time or the need seemed right.
In January 2006 I went to Basel in Switzerland for the symposium to celebrate Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday, and what an event that was and what an amazing man. I glimpsed him the first morning there as I was going up an escalator and looked round to see him halfway up. Crowds were hovering around him as though in awe or even worship. Part of me rebelled as I so dislike heroes turned into semi-religious figures but then I too was captivated as he stepped off at the top and I was looking into his bright, warm, intelligent eyes. He radiated a kind of presence that I have never seen before, and then moved steadily off amid an enormous crowd of admirers.
How can someone live to a hundred and be so fit and well? Did it have anything to do with the drugs he synthesised, tested and used? Perhaps it had more to do with his earlier spiritual or mystical experiences as a child, experiences that arguably led him to the ‘mishap that was not a mishap’ as he put it, to the intuition that the apparently innocuous 25th compound in the LSD series was worth a second look. Or was it, as he suggested, his daily breakfast of raw egg? We cannot know. Yet this hundred-year-old man participated fully in the three days of the conference. As he walked up onto the stage for the first time, he wobbled a little and steadied himself with his stick. Then he turned and apologised ‘I’m sorry for being a little unsteady but I must remind myself that I’m no longer in my nineties’.
I was lucky enough to meet him briefly face to face. As well as just enjoying the event I was recording interviews with many of the people there, hoping to make a BBC radio programme and write articles on LSD. Like lots of other journalists and researchers I had asked for, and been politely refused, an interview with the great man himself. Then one afternoon, to avoid the melee, I had snuck away into a relatively quiet corner to interview Martin Lee, author of Acid Dreams. What I hadn’t realised was that the innocuous looking door behind us was a secret way through from the conference centre to the hotel next door, and right in the middle of the interview I saw a small group coming towards us – the organisers escorting the birthday boy to this door. I was introduced right then and there to the centenarian who put aside his stick and warmly shook my hand. I went completely pathetic and mumbled what I tried to say in the most appalling German. Yet of course he understood for I was only saying what everyone else there wanted to say. Thank you Albert.
This deep gratitude is just one of many hints that LSD invokes something akin to mystical or spiritual experiences – leading to the vexed question of whether these experiences are really the same or ultimately different – whether a simple drug that affects the brain can really create true spirituality. Is laughing at the ‘Cosmic joke’ and delighting in sheer acid joy the same as mystical joy? Is the sudden understanding of the power of love the same as that met in prayer or contemplation? Is the involuntary review of who we are and all we have done, with its descent into fear or disgust at our own shortcomings, the same as the ultimately freeing acceptance reported in near-death experiences? Is the terror of letting go of self, or the joyful realisation that ‘I’ am not other than the universe, the same as the oneness reached in mystical experiences. Is this loss of self the nonduality that can take years of meditation practice to find? Or are these just tricks of the ultimate trickster drug? I cannot answer this deepest question about LSD any more than anyone else can, although my own intuition is that the answer is ‘yes’.
The tragedy of LSD, as this and other books explore, is how it became abused, made illegal, and ultimately denied both to those who wanted to explore its spiritual dimensions and those could have benefited from its therapeutic potential. I get upset to think how differently things might have turned out. In my dream world I live in a society in which all recreatio
nal drugs are legally available, regulated and controlled; a society in which a culture of serious drug use rather than drug abuse grows up and matures. Just imagine being able to seek out experienced guides to take you, or your children, or your best friends, into that first trip. Just imagine a world in which professionals know how to guide people through bad trips and terrifying ordeals, and how to avoid the psychological damage that LSD can undoubtedly sometimes inflict. But I ask myself whether it could ever have been this way. Was the abuse and misunderstanding inevitable? Might we ever reach this dream world, and in my lifetime?
I do not know but I keep hoping. And in a country where more and more people want to see the end of the war on drugs, perhaps we can do it. I’ve read many histories of psychedelic drugs and met many of the characters involved, but Albion Dreaming gives us something new by showing how the history of LSD played out differently here in Britain from the way it did in the USA. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much, and it may perhaps give us hope for LSD’s future here in Britain.
Dr Susan Blackmore
Psychologist and author of The Meme Machine (1999), Zen and the Art of Consciouness (2011) and other books on consciousness, memes and anomalous experiences
Devon, February 2012
www.susanblackmore.co.uk
www.memetics.com
Albion
Dreaming
TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT
LSD: an abbreviation of the German term Lysergsäure-Diäthylamid for lysergic acid diethylamide: a semi synthetic illicit organic compound C20H25N3O derived from ergot that induces extreme sensory distortions, altered perceptions of reality, and intense emotional states, that may also produce delusions or paranoia, and that may sometimes cause panic reactions in response to the effects experienced.1
The American psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary once said LSD was the drug with the most unusual emotional and psychological effects when compared to any other. Why? Because just the idea of the drug has the power to cause terror among people who have never taken it. With this, Leary was referring to the worldwide moral panic that has attended LSD since the drug first became popular among the hippie counter culture in the Sixties.2
For politicians, the police, the media and the public, LSD represents and remains a powerful folk devil. The idea of LSD is freighted with fears that it is capable of causing insanity after a single dose. It is believed to contribute to the moral and social degradation of the individual and the development of a counter culture antithetical to the values of western materialism. In other words, the drug is perceived to be a serious threat to the individual and to society.
Yet there are fundamental differences in how different groups of people view LSD. Millions of individuals have taken LSD since its discovery in 1938 and its use has spawned a huge subculture. Devout supporters of the drug claim LSD is a beneficial tool for studying consciousness, with the potential of bestowing fundamental spiritual and personal insights on those who take it. Others simply laud the drug as being a powerful agent for altering consciousness and enhancing awareness, revealing the sensory world in all its glory. At the most mundane level, those who are not interested in LSD’s spiritual or consciousness expanding possibilities speak of the sheer, boundless, multi-dimensional cosmic fun to be had using the drug recreationally: a Disneyland of the mind. There are innumerable reports from people who have taken LSD who testify to its beneficial effects on their lives, yet society has deemed it so dangerous that its manufacture, distribution or possession is punishable by lengthy prison sentences.
Of course, to those who have not taken LSD such claims might appear pretentious or deluded. They will refer to the handful of people who have died whilst under the influence of LSD. Alternatively, they will recount how some have been compelled to seek psychiatric help because the effects of the drug have been so overpowering. Everyone, whether they have taken LSD or not, has their own opinions, fuelled by a combination of experience and prejudice.
There is no way of adequately explaining the result of taking LSD other than through the accounts of those who have, and observation of how they have tried to integrate the experience into their lives. All of us are familiar with the effects of at least some drugs, from the lift that can be obtained from strong tea, coffee, cola, alcohol or tobacco, to currently illegal substances such as amphetamines, cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine or heroin. But the reactions to LSD are in a class of their own. To compound matters further, LSD, unlike other drugs, does not have a consistently predictable set of physiological or psychological reactions.
The effects of LSD on the body are minimal. On the mind, however, they are dramatic, complex, and inter-dependent on a variety of factors including purity, expectation, environment and dosage. The drug’s potency is such that doses as small as 50-millionths of a gram (50 μg) can produce powerful effects, and even a significant dose is only 250 μg. How the interplay of dosage, expectation and environment creates different theories and reactions is a theme that runs throughout this book.3
Author, Tim Lott whose reaction to his first LSD trip can be found in Chapter 11, has written one of the most cogent and articulate explanations of what LSD means to him. It is a view shared, to varying degrees, by the majority of those who have taken LSD:
“I have many times tried to describe how simply taking a drug can change your whole perception of life, but it is rather like trying to explain colour to the blind. There are no terms of reference in ordinary life to help you to understand. And actually, I am torn between evangelising for the drug and warning everyone not to go within a million miles of it. I suppose the most simple and incredible fact about LSD is also the one that is hardest to believe: that what it reveals to you is not, as is popularly supposed, a hallucination, but an awe-inspiring glimpse of reality. Other drugs distort, but LSD gives you a reality far beyond words, or visual representation, or language. It is quite the reverse of seeing something that isn’t there. LSD disables some chemical filter in the brain that, in order to keep the world manageable, limits the amount of reality you can experience with your senses. An LSD trip allows ‘reality’ – and if you have never questioned what that is, you would after taking LSD – to flood in untrammelled. The result may be terrifying and it may be wonderful, but it will be more ‘real’ than anything you experience in everyday life. LSD shows you that ordinary life is the hallucination. Or to put it another way, ordinary life is like listening to a record with fluff on the needle, and LSD removes the fluff. Psychotherapeutically speaking, it releases your subconscious into the conscious mind (or vice versa).”
Anyone who has not taken LSD might dismiss Lott’s views as hyperbole to explain and justify the effects of a drug that actually mimic a form of temporary madness. But Lott has experienced mental illness, and is clear about the distinction between that and LSD, “... I’ve been mad – or at least severely mentally ill. And taking LSD is as different an experience as you can imagine.”4
When LSD was discovered, the drug seemed loaded with potential. The problem was no one knew exactly what to do with it. LSD seemed to be the answer to a question that had not yet been formulated. And, like Tolkien’s ring, LSD exerted a powerful force on individuals and institutions, leading several to assert it was the answer to their particular question. Firstly, the intelligence services and military laid claim to it, believing it could be the solution to the problems of interrogation, investigating its potential as, among other options, a “truth drug”. The medical establishment also saw its possibilities for their profession, as a drug capable of unlocking and unblocking the unconscious mind. It was employed in experimental psychotherapy to cure obsessions and addictions, heal damaged psyches and to develop human potential. Both of these approaches yielded contradictory results, the experiments being curtailed long before any firm conclusions could be drawn or the way forward charted.
Inevitably, the secret leaked out and LSD became available to the public, slowly at first, building to a torrent after the mid-Sixti
es. LSD was legal in the early Sixties, those early psychedelic pioneers were awed, and astonished by the experience it provided. Travellers returned from LSD trips with tales of other dimensions, other ways of seeing, other ways of thinking and, most importantly, other ways of being. Small groups of psychonauts, often maverick professionals such as Timothy Leary, believed that LSD, if taken in the correct circumstances and with an experienced guide, could elevate consciousness to the spiritual heights tantalizingly offered by the world’s major religions and spiritual disciplines. But unlike traditional spiritual practice, which offered no guarantees and demanded years, a lifetime even, of study and devotion, LSD, it was rumoured, could deliver enlightenment in just one dose. Use of LSD required no reliance on deity or scripture and the user was not required to be part of a spiritual hierarchy. The widespread belief was that by taking it an individual could be plugged into the hub of the Universe, to become one with everything, and could experience God directly. LSD soon became known as “the sacrament” and unsurprisingly, one popular badge in the Sixties bore the adage “God is alive in a sugar cube” – LSD soaked sugar cubes being a popular method of ingesting the drug in that decade.
Ultimately, the Establishment, that web of conservative social, political and religious ideologies, fought back. The idea of young people having access to a drug rumoured to confer instant enlightenment and spiritual freedom was abhorrent. The media, always looking for a new folk devil to exorcise, seized on LSD as the destroyer of youth, focusing only on the small number of personal disasters. Journalists, rather than exploring the success stories emanating from psychotherapists or the genuine and meaningful personality changes brought about by LSD, chose to amplify the possible dangers of a drug they knew little about.