by Andy Roberts
Hollingshead, like Huxley, was amazed with the drug. He now understood why people might believe the LSD experience was the “Real Thing”, the “ultimate illumination, Nirvana!” but was cautious not to ascribe this potential to it. In fact he speculated that LSD could be the exact opposite of spiritual illumination, the ultimate distraction. Nevertheless, after just one session Hollingshead concluded the drug, “... does allow one to live at least for a moment of time in a window into eternity, that the absolute is manifest in every appearance and relationship, and that Love is Wisdom in daily practice ... It is the development of another state of consciousness within one’s own self. One that leads to a vision of existence in which only the sense of wonder remains and all fear is gone. It is also the impetus that makes a few travellers in each generation set off in search of the grail, the genii in the bottle, the magic ring ...”27
Dr. John Beresford was with Hollingshead and had also taken some of the pure LSD. When he returned to some semblance of normality he was just as impressed as his partner. Beresford would continue to champion psychedelics for the rest of his life, believing LSD to be a portent of evolutionary change and relating it to the first self sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the development of the nuclear bomb. “The reckless act of science in Chicago in December, 1942, was remedied in Basel four months later, with Albert Hofmann chosen as the instrument to perform the cure.”28
The LSD experience both baffled and excited Hollingshead. It was, he thought, “... a bundle of solutions looking for a problem”. He phoned Huxley to discuss his findings, now speaking with the authority and perspective of one of the inner circle of LSD initiates. It seemed to Hollingshead that modern man had lost his way and was caught in a world of external illusion, a stranger to himself. Perhaps, he suggested to Huxley, LSD was the antidote to this existential malaise. Moreover the drug could even be “... a therapy for the widespread sickness of insensitiveness and ignorance which psychologists call ‘normality’ or ‘mental health.’”
Huxley was sympathetic to Hollingshead’s predicament but advised him that little was known about LSD. They spoke again a couple of days later, Huxley suggesting Hollingshead should meet a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. Timothy Leary. “If there is any one single investigator in America worth seeing,” Huxley assured Hollingshead. “It is Dr. Leary.”
There are numerous histories of Leary’s life that cover in minute detail his journey from trainee priest to LSD evangelist. In 1957, when he was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University, he tried psilocybin mushrooms on a field trip to Mexico. The psychedelic experience, as it had done with so many others, profoundly changed Leary and he commented that he had “learned more about ... (his) brain and its possibilities ... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than ... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing [sic] research in psychology.”29
On his return from Mexico, Leary set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project with colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, using a synthesised version of the drug. Leary’s interest in behaviour change, in which he was an expert, led him to believe that psychedelics, in the correct dosage and set and setting, could radically alter behaviour. It was at this stage in Leary’s exploration of psychedelic drugs that he came into contact with Hollingshead. Leary had been warned off Hollingshead by someone he knew, a millionaire by the name of Winston London. A “no-good, two-bit English con-man” was London’s bodyguard’s view of Hollingshead and he advised Leary to have nothing to do with him. But Leary was intrigued by the persuasive, roguish Englishman and within weeks Hollinsghead had moved in with the Leary family as their lodger.30
At first Leary was wary of LSD. He was a veteran of many psilocybin and peyote trips but believed these drugs were acceptable because they were organic and had long traditions of structured use among the world’s indigenous peoples. LSD, in contrast, was only partly organic, had been created in a sterile laboratory and was primarily used by the military and the secular psychiatric establishment. Psilocybin and peyote, Leary rationalised, were familiar to him. He knew their moods and how to navigate their twists and turns. This rationalization only partly concealed Leary’s underlying fear that, “... the more powerful LSD swept you far beyond the tender wisdom of psilocybin.”31
Leary initially evaded Hollingshead’s invitations to take LSD. Then, in December 1961, the jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo stayed with the Learys after a performance in Boston. The Fergusons were considered to be an urbane, hip couple who liked to smoke marijuana and so naturally, over dinner, LSD came up as a topic of conversation and Hollingshead soon realised that the couple had never taken the drug. When they found Hollingshead had more than enough LSD they suggested he ran a session for them and Leary. Leary excused himself, claiming he had work to do, while the Fergusons and Hollingshead each took a spoonful from the mayonnaise jar and settled down in front of the roaring log fire.
Hollingshead described their reaction: “After about thirty minutes, Flo, who until that moment had been lying fully reclined on the sofa, sat up, suddenly her face one huge smile, and started waving her arms at Tim. ‘You gotta try this Tim, baby. It’s f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c.’ Her husband was equally enthusiastic, ‘Yeah, really Tim’, confirmed Maynard, his face glowing like an electric toaster. ‘It really gets you there – wow – it’s really happening, man ...’”
Leary was curious, noticing that when Flo laughed, “It was not a nervous or a funny laugh. It was the chuckle of someone who was dead and gone and sitting on some heavenly mountain top and looking down at the two billion years of evolution the way you’d look at a transient episode in a children’s playground.” And with that, Leary’s curiosity finally got the better of him. He swallowed a spoonful of the sweet LSD mixture from Hollingshead’s jar and with it the cultural landscape of the developed world changed forever.
As his mind spun outside of time and space, no longer linked to mundane reality, Leary literally saw the light. “But not just light. It was the centre of life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything – sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the ‘hard eye of God’. Merged with this pulsating flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama. Past and future. All forms, all structures, all organisms, all events were illusory, television productions pulsing out from the central eye.”32
Perhaps because he was already an experienced psilocybin user Leary was able to tap into the religious aspect of LSD. Or he could have just been very lucky that his first trip was a journey into the heart of light rather than the torments of hell. But Leary’s trip consisted of more than just the fantastical visual hallucinations. The drug allowed him to see through all social roles and games, realizing they were just masks to wear for a time. LSD had “... flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations, and each illusory form was simply a different frequency.”33
Leary returned from his trip a convert to the power of LSD. The drug had shown him that “... everything is a message from the impersonal, relentless, infinite, divine intelligence, weaving a new web of life each second, bombarding us with a message. Don’t you see! You’re nothing! Wake up! Glorify me! Join me!” Leary became an immediate acid evangelist.34
Leary’s overnight conversion presented problems for Alpert, Metzner and the others who were already involved in a programme of psilocybin experimentation. In his penetrating study of LSD in America, Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens comments how this cosy world of psilocybin exploration was shattered by the advent of LSD. Psilocybin had become just about manageable but LSD threw the user back into mental chaos and Alpert in particular feared they would never understand how to use the drug. Leary had different ideas and exhorted his colleagues to persevere with LSD.
Hollingshead quickly became a central
figure in Leary’s circle of serious scientific psychedelic explorers. But Hollingshead was not bound by any scientific ethics, or by any ethics at all. He was disruptive on group LSD trips, often trying to manipulate or dominate the proceedings. Yet when confronted he denied everything and turned on the charm. Despite his obvious shortcomings Leary fully supported him; everyone had a sneaking respect for him and the path he had now set them on.
Leary’s books and magazine interviews were widely read in Britain. His translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead – The Psychedelic Experience – was highly regarded as a tool for guiding LSD users through their early trips. His other later writings, however, such as The Politics of Ecstasy, though they sold well, were less influential on the counter culture in Britain. London DJ and psychedelic adventurer Jeff Dexter, for instance found “Leary hard going ... too falsified in some ways, whereas reading Huxley there was a certain clarity to it.”35 Leary was effective at being a self-promoting figurehead for the worldwide psychedelic movement and he had a huge impact on the public’s perception of LSD. Hollingshead might have known how to manipulate individuals, but Leary was equally adept at manipulating the media. His perma-grinning visage and portentous announcements about a new religion based on LSD use, or how a woman could have thousands of orgasms during an LSD session, were guaranteed headline grabbers.
The relationship between Leary and Hollingshead ran hot and cold for a number of years in the early Sixties. It culminated in their abortive plans for the American psychedelic vision to be transposed to Britain. Leary’s activities in America after he had been turned on to LSD by Hollingshead have little direct relevance to the social history of LSD in Britain. For the time being we must leave Leary on the cusp of his adventures in consciousness and his love/hate relationship with mainstream America.
The last key individual who influenced the mind set of the British psychedelic generation was American writer David Solomon. Solomon is another advocate of LSD with his roots in military intelligence, in which he served during World War II after being reassigned from a combat unit when his two brothers were killed in action. It is not known when Solomon first took LSD but in the early Sixties he was literary editor for Playboy magazine and published Timothy Leary, Ram Das (Richard Alpert), Alan Watts and Humphrey Osmond.
LSD: the consciousness expanding drug edited by Solomon, with an introduction by Leary, featured essays by Huxley, Watts and Osmond, among other luminaries of the psychedelic scene. The book’s dedication was, “For Aldous Huxley, guru extraordinaire, whose words first beckoned me through the doors of perception.”36
In the preface, Solomon clearly states his views on the purpose of LSD. He believed psychedelic drugs “... frequently enable one to see through the myriad pretensions and deceits that make up the mythology of the Social Lie. Thus, to the extent that power structures rely on the controlled popular acceptance of the Lie to shore up and stabilise their hegemonies, psychedelic substances do indeed represent a kind of political threat.” Solomon saw the spiritual uses for psychedelic drugs but tempered this view with his belief they could be used to change socio-economic patterns to bring about a new society based on their insights. For him the psychedelic experience was “no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality”. It was Solomon’s fundamental tenet that the human brain was man’s most inalienable possession and individuals should have complete autonomy over their own consciousness. “No person or institution has the moral right to muffle or inhibit its development. No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the rights to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men may aspire, whether these states are induced pharmacologically or otherwise. Die Gedanken sind frei.”37
Though Solomon provided only the preface for his book, his selection of essayists was carefully chosen to give the most positive view of LSD, providing the reader with some of the history, rationale, subjective accounts, and mystique that launched the drug movement. Of all the early psychedelic pioneers and philosophers, only Solomon would go on to be an active, physical presence in Britain’s LSD culture.
The philosophies and writings of Heard, Huxley, Watts, Solomon and Leary spread rapidly through the burgeoning psychedelic movement in Britain. Between them a template had been forged for the expectations and parameters of the LSD experience. Anyone who used LSD need pay no heed to the dire warnings issued by the media because they had their own textbooks written by the forerunners and philosophers of the counter culture. These books were important because they were written by those who had been there and had experience of the transcendent through the agency of LSD, a religious experience unmediated by priest or parson.
Huxley and Leary’s books in particular became sacred texts for the LSD counter culture just as much as the Bible and Koran were to Christians and Muslims. They were treasured by British LSD users, discussed intensely and pored over for clues as how best to interpret an LSD trip, or how to successfully navigate one. All the influential authors described here were optimistic for the future of LSD use. That optimism would soon be taken up by the tens of thousands of young people in Britain who were soon to be offered their own key to the doors of perception.
THE FOGGY RUINS OF TIME
There is some possibility that my friends and I have illuminated more people than anyone else in history.
Michael Hollingshead1
It’s impossible to be certain who took the first recreational dose of LSD in Britain. Though some who took LSD as part of the military and medical experiments carried out in the 1950s and 1960s may have enjoyed their experience, this could hardly be classed as recreational use. By the mid-Fifties, word of the drug’s powerful, often enjoyable, effects had reached Britain through American magazine articles, books and traveller’s tales and there was a ready market for chemical thrills. Poet Dave Cunliffe cogently sums up the scene at the turn of the decade:
“Late 1950s’ British urban Bohemia included a varied mixture of dedicated individualists and loosely affiliated sub-cultural group devotees. Traditional European middle-class artistic life-styles were gradually being swamped by a younger, less identifiable manifestation. Forties hipsters, newly emergent beats, extrovert beaus, traditional jazz ravers, modern jazz cool, opiate junkies, speed freaks, pot-smokers, out of the closet sexual trail-blazers, creative innovators, anarchists, eccentrics, deviants, dissidents, outlaw bikers, student dropouts, religious cultists, dedicated Utopians, born-again Luddite and all kind of known and unknown orientations and tendencies. A rich counter-cultural soil in which the unifying hippie flower was about to explode.”2
At the tail end of the 1950s, the teenage Cunliffe was a courier for a firm of London drug dealers. He delivered packages, no questions asked, in response to orders placed by phone. Cunliffe had no idea what was in the packages unless they were unwrapped in his presence. When they were, it was invariably marijuana, amphetamine or heroin. These substances had been staples of the jazz scene and those within its orbit since the 1920s, jazz musicians traditionally being the first social group to seek out and make recreational use of any new drug. Now, in the “you’ve never had it so good” decade they were reaching a wiser audience.
Far from 1950s Britain being a psychedelic wasteland, a variety of mind-expanding drugs was available if you knew the right people.
Cunliffe had been aware of LSD use in London for some years but was under the impression that the drug was fake or exceptionally weak. Rather than LSD, mescaline with its longer pedigree and body of literature was the holy grail of mind-expanding drugs at the time. Nevertheless, LSD was accessible, science fantasy author Michael Moorcock recalling that it was available as early as 1956, with a doctor’s script, from London pharmacists John Bell & Croyden. Liberty cap mushroom, Psilocybe semilanceata, was also widely used, ingested as a tea or in the form of a chewy sweet. Unlike LSD and mescaline, psilocybin was freely available in the countryside during early autumn. Cunliffe writes, “After a time, those in the know went on weekend natur
e walks and parts of idyllic pastoral Fifties Britain often resembled Seventies hippie festival sites.” This, anecdotally at least, locates the genesis of recreational use of LSD and other psychedelics in Britain in the period 1956–59.3
There was little media or public sensationalism surrounding illegal drug use in this era. What interest there was from the fourth estate revolved around the barely concealed racist notion that West Indians and other non-whites were corrupting Britain’s youth with cannabis or heroin. The possibility that young white people were, of their own volition, seeking the intense, psychedelic, experience offered by mushrooms, mescaline or LSD had not yet been dreamed of in Fleet Street’s tobacco and alcohol suffused editorial meetings.
On a winter’s day in late 1959, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Cunliffe made a delivery to Samuel Thomas, a jazz trumpeter living in London’s Notting Hill district. Thomas opened the package in front of Cunliffe, revealing small squares of blotting paper. “Grade A acid,” he purred, suggesting Cunliffe try one. Wary at first and mindful of Thomas’ reputation as a notorious conman Cunliffe hesitated briefly but, ‘... the mind manifesting lure was too great, and I greedily swallowed the diminutive blotter. It was truly a cosmic eruption ... This was the real thing. Conversion and evangelism would soon follow.”4
Although Cunliffe and others had limited access to LSD at this point in the late 1950s, the drug was of variable quality and its usage was largely confined to the jazz and beatnik scenes. A distinct LSD subculture was yet to form and for this to take shape a central figure was necessary. This catalyst appeared in the form of a drug user who, perversely, preferred the dreamy certainties of opiate-based drugs to the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelics.