by Andy Roberts
With Hollingshead under lock and key and the World Psychedelic Centre closed down, the London LSD scene had lost some of its focus. Now Leary was not coming to Britain to market his brand of drug-induced religion, and in the absence of any other psychedelic gurus in London, the LSD subculture was free to develop in its own way. The purposes people used LSD for were limited only by the number of LSD users but some deserve special mention, if only to illustrate that LSD use was not all motivated by a desire for peace and love.
Terry Taylor had left England in 1963 to live in Morocco, where he pursued the life of an expatriate beatnik. He returned to London in 1966 and introduced a new strand of thought into Britain’s burgeoning psychedelic culture: magic. Taylor is a fascinating character, about whom little is known. He is noteworthy in the history of LSD in Britain because his 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change, featured the first fictional reference to LSD in Britain: “‘Really?’ my junkie friend said, sounding interested, ‘What’s it now? Bennies, L.S.D., or Nems?’”23
Taylor had been encouraged to take up writing by Colin MacInnes, and became the role model for the hero of MacInnes’ tale of emergent youth culture, Absolute Beginners. Through MacInnes’ patronage Taylor was introduced to a world of bohemian creative types such as surrealist painter Ida Kay, who would influence his interests in art and the occult. At the time of writing the novel Taylor had not yet taken LSD but his interest in it would have far reaching consequences for him as the 1960s progressed.
Baron’s Court is a classic novel of London beatnik life, its nameless protagonist rebelling against straight society through fringe religion, drugs, multi-culturalism, jazz and sex. Yet it would be just another genre novel were it not for the fact Terry Taylor was thinly fictionalizing the life he lived.
In the early Sixties Taylor left Britain for Tangier. There, with other Europeans and Berber tribesmen he formed a group practising drug-induced magic. American poet Johnny Dolphin was involved in this group and in his travelogue Journey Round an Extraordinary Planet, describes how Taylor’s magic circle used marijuana to materialise thought forms: “Each one would concentrate, projecting his inner scene. The one with the most power would make the scene that would take over the night in the Magic Room ... Terry, lean, deft and poised, prepared the kif from the dried plants, carefully selected from the Berber women’s stocks. Then he would pass out the majoun cookies ... We sat backs to the wall in silence, focusing on making the scene appear.”24
Dolphin continues: “Terry wanted to turn all London on and later helped start the process with street acid together with his tall, thin-nosed call-girl friend from Chelsea.” This was an aim Taylor would soon achieve.
When Taylor returned to London he vigorously pursued his interest in the occult, now combining his rituals with LSD as well as marijuana. He formed a magic circle in Notting Hill Gate involving, among others, two hippie call girls, Bernadette Whybrow and Julia Callan-Thompson. Magic rituals are incredibly powerful psychological events in their own right. When magical practice is combined with LSD the effects of both are exponentially intensified. Taylor’s group soon discovered the potent mix of magic and psychedelics to be highly effective in the evocation of thought forms to reality. But the aftermath of these sessions was physically and mentally exhausting, and the group began smoking heroin to dampen their over-stimulated imaginations. What began as an occasional calming smoke of heroin led inevitably to intravenous use and years of addiction for several of the group’s members. Taylor’s magic group operated in London for a few years and he and his hippie girl friends would soon become involved in Britain’s first illegal LSD manufacturing and distribution network.25
There was a general perception among the police and public that LSD was already covered under the Poisons Act, but LSD’s exact legal position was unclear. Roy Jenkins, Britain’s Home Secretary, believed LSD was dangerous and wanted the drug brought under the umbrella of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1964, so events were set in motion to achieve this. Jenkins’ decision to deal with LSD had been influenced by a variety of factors. The increasing number of ill-informed scare stories in the media, plus pressure from some sectors of the medical establishment, contributed to a general sense of unease that LSD was a problem which needed dealing with rapidly. If Jenkins allowed LSD to remain legal it would call into question the reason for legislation against other consciousness-altering drugs. This would open a debate the government did not want and so Jenkins found himself in a situation where he had no choice but to support legislation curbing the possession and use of LSD.
In June the British Medical Journal published a leading article calling for LSD to be made illegal. Citing a study of 129 people who had received LSD therapy, the BMJ claimed that two patients committed suicide and four others attempted to take their own life. The study was flawed though as there was no attempt to determine whether or any of the deaths and attempted suicides was as a result of taking LSD or whether there was a predisposition to suicide. For this study to have had any validity, a control group of subjects without identified mental health problems would have been needed, as well as a group who took no LSD at all.26
On 21 July, Roy Jenkins laid before Parliament a draft Order adding LSD to the Misuse of Drugs Act, which would make it illegal to possess, manufacture or deal LSD. This announcement was widely reported in the media, leading to an irate memo to the Home Office from G.P. Clements of H.M. Customs and Excise. Clements was annoyed he had only discovered that the importation of LSD was to be made illegal after it had been discussed on BBC’s 24 Hours news and current affairs programme. In a phone call to R. Bamfield, head of the Home Office’s drugs branch, Clements also learned that the Home Office only planned to tell Customs and Excise about the new legislation after it had been passed! It is uncertain whether this was a measure of the general lack of communication between government departments or an intention to present Customs and Excise with a fait acompli which they had no choice but to accept. 27
During the amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1964, an interesting discussion took place when the law was put before the House of Lords. Lord Stonham introduced the debate by summing up the drug’s medical and social uses, surprisingly failing to mention any of the alleged dangers. An air of nervous jollity attended the brief debate, with the Conservative Lord Sandford noting, “... the government, with all their troubles did not want to contend with hallucinations as well.” This prompted widespread laughter in the House. Lord Saltoun, recalling a snippet from a newspaper article on one of the effects noted by psychiatrists, asked, “Does not LSD enable you to remember what happened when you were born?” Lord Stonham replied, demonstrating his ignorance of the effects and reasons for taking LSD, “The effect of creating hallucinations is not to enable you to remember back, but rather to forget and to imagine you are otherwise and otherwhere than you are. LSD is not the only substance which can create that illusion. I have known people who felt they could fly on four pints of bitter.” By now the House was in an uproar of laughter at Stonham’s childish humour and the motion was agreed without further debate.28
Media reports about the looming illegalization of LSD triggered a furore in the world of LSD therapy, provoking several people to speak out in the drug’s defence. Dr. Bhattacharya, who had treated 581 patients with LSD, wrote to the British Medical Journal vigorously defending the medical use of the drug. “I do not consider LSD to be a ‘miracle’ drug, but certainly consider its assistance immensely valuable in certain forms of psychiatric illness ... There were no cases of suicidal attempts and at no time did any patient produce any bizarre behaviour which was beyond our control.”29
Other commentators applauded the coming change in the law and were scathing about the alleged benefits of LSD. Writing in the Sunday Times, Alan Bestic launched into a tirade against LSD. He compared the drug to heroin and suggested that heroin addicts, “that raggedy army”, and LSD users were one and the same. Bestic argued that LSD was liable to severely damage the min
ds of those who took it and that claims LSD provided insight or illumination were “almost certainly untrue”. Bestic offered no evidence to support his assertions and the article was little more than an attempt to give conservative Sunday Times readers what they expected to hear. His final paragraph was a call to arms against LSD and a rather paranoid warning about the future, “If action is not taken quickly – and by that I mean within the next few months – that raggedy army will have grown so large that it will be unbeatable; and by that time it could well be receiving its arms from the professionals, who know a good market when they see one.”30
Meanwhile, the correspondence between the Home Office and H.M. Customs continued. Customs, now reconciled to the fact they were expected to police importation of LSD into Britain, protested that they had little knowledge of what form LSD came in or how to identify or find it. The Laboratory of the Government Chemist, part of the Ministry of Technology, was called upon to provide Customs with facts about LSD, which they did in a lengthy and detailed letter. But even the Home Office were not above repeating unverified facts about LSD and one internal memo claimed: “As to identification, we hear that LSD is now stored on toast as well as sugar lumps or blotting paper!” The origin of the LSD on toast rumour is unknown, and there is certainly no evidence toast was ever used as a delivery system, but the canard was repeated several times in Home Office memos, thus making it Britain’s first official LSD urban legend!31
LSD became illegal to possess or distribute on 9 September 1966, a month before it was outlawed in the USA. The only exceptions to the law were doctors, who could still prescribe the drug and use it in psychotherapy. To do that they had to go through a licensed importer, soon to be limited to only one company. Shortly before it was outlawed Jonathan Aitken, then a minor figure in the Conservative party, made headline news when he took LSD and reported his experiences for London’s Evening Standard. Unsurprisingly the story was splashed across the front page. Aitken told of seeing “visions of hell. Continents dripping with blood. Black men fighting brown men, fighting yellow men.” These negative quotes have become attached to his LSD experiment, but Aitken also noted that he had considerable positive insight into his problems and into his future. Aitken didn’t record exactly what he saw in his future but it’s unlikely that he could have foreseen the fall from political grace which culminated with him being sentenced to prison for perjury in 1999.32
As part of the LSD criminalization process the Government also took a long look at who was licensed to import LSD into Britain. In April 1966 thirty-one companies were issued with licenses which would allow them to import LSD if they wished. These companies were mainly chemists and drug manufacturing firms. The Home Office changed the law so that licenses to import drugs would no longer include LSD by default, and a specific requirement would be needed to import it. By early 1967 only Brocades GB were licensed to import LSD into Britain. This meant that any LSD used recreationally after 9 September was made illegally and imported from overseas. America and Holland were the main producers of illegal LSD at this time but now a clandestine LSD laboratory had been set up in London, producing large quantities of high quality LSD for distribution in Britain and elsewhere.
John Esam’s conspiracy to sell LSD case finally came to trial at the Old Bailey in October. During the two day trial the jury could not reach an agreement as to Esam’s guilt or innocence and a re-trial was planned for January 1967.
Commercial enterprises connected to the rapidly expanding hippie subculture had been springing up throughout 1966. Barry Miles’ Better Books and Indica gallery had proved there was a place for shops selling reading material and art geared towards the broad spectrum of counter culture interests. The logical next step was a counter culture newspaper, “... a paper for the 6000 at the Albert Hall, a paper for the people living in cheap rooms in Notting Hill Gate, Covent Garden, Ladbroke Grove, Chalk Farm.” These areas were known to the hippies simply as the Gate, the Garden, the Grove and the Farm and were the main constituencies of LSD users in London during the Sixties and Seventies. Miles, Hopkins and others put their heads together, drew on their many contacts and connections and created International Times, or IT as it was often called.33
The paper was launched at 11.00 pm on 14 October at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. The gig, organised by Hoppy, featured Soft Machine and Pink Floyd and drew over 3000 people. In a nod to the zeitgeist, those in the queue were met by a figure offering sugar cubes from a tray. Some said all the cubes were dosed with LSD, others that one in ten were. In fact none were. In any case LSD was in plentiful supply once inside, but the inference was obvious, IT was the paper for LSD users. Rock musician and writer Mick Farren later wrote of the event that it was more than a rock show it was “the germ of a new way of life”.34 The first issue of IT carried a round up of the year’s main LSD-related news, and until the paper’s eventual demise in the mid-Eighties it provided news and opinion about many facets of LSD culture.
Paul McCartney’s curiosity about LSD had been growing steadily throughout 1966. He’d visited the WPC in Chelsea in 1965 and fellow Beatles John and George had told him about their wonderful experiences with LSD. In fact, most people he knew had become “experienced” to put it in the hip jargon of the day, but he’d been putting it off. Eventually, more out of peer pressure than anything else, McCartney took the leap.
At the end of an evening of nightclubbing he found himself at Guinness heir, Tara Browne’s hip mews house, where a small party was underway. “Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet. He invited me to have some ... And that night I thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so I said, ‘Go on then, fine.’ So we all did it.”35
McCartney had a good time that night. He told his biographer Barry Miles it was “quite spacey”. The Beatle went on to have many more LSD experiences but was never as attached to it as John Lennon. McCartney concedes though, that he was never the same after LSD and was later to make a very public statement about his use of the psychedelic.
Not long after his LSD trip with McCartney, socialite Tara Browne tragically died in a car accident. In the early hours of 18 December he rammed his Lotus Elan into the back of a parked car. The twenty-one year old had been a habitué of Swinging London’s nightclubs and was popular with various members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Browne was a frequent LSD user, often tripping the night away with the Stones’ fill-fated guitarist Brian Jones. Keith Richards and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg were also among the circle of rock aristocracy in which he moved, and Pallenberg vividly recalls driving round London with Browne one LSD-drenched night. “He had a Lotus sportscar and suddenly near Sloane Square everything went red. The lights went red, the trees were flaming and we just jumped out of the car and left it there.”36
Hoppy Hopkins’ success with the Spontaneous Underground and events such as the IT launch led him to realise there was a market for larger and more regular psychedelic events. Teaming up with American record producer Joe Boyd, they rented a struggling Irish drinking establishment, The Blarney Club on Tottenham Court Road, and turned it into London’s most successful club for the psychedelic generation. The club later became know as the UFO club, UFO standing for Unlimited Freak Out, or Unidentified Flying Object. But in its early days UFO was only part of the club’s name. The main name on the flyer for the club’s launch on 23 December was Night Tripper, an obvious reference to LSD users, over a gyrating female hippie dancer. UFO would be the home for the LSD subculture’s London adventures until its closure. Boyd summed up the essence of a visit to the club “... at UFO the grinning crocodile of psychedelics wrapped its lips around your ankle, dragged you in and licked you all over.”37
As 1966 drew to a close there was a final blast of authoritarianism when the United Nations commission on narcotic drugs made a public announcement. The UN called on all world governments to put stringent controls in place to prevent manufacture, sale or use of LSD. The days of legal LSD were ending not only in
Britain and America, but across the world.
The year 1966 was pivotal in the history of LSD. Close scrutiny of the LSD subculture by the media and police led to the drug being legislated against and its users demonised. In the space of twelve months the drug had risen from being an obscure chemical, used as a religious sacrament by a few psychonauts, to a household word that filled “straight” society with dread. Though the media and political establishment tried to give the public the impression they had the measure of LSD, its users and their aspirations, in reality they were ignorant. Legislation against LSD had been rushed through Parliament and was not driven by medical evidence or the result of any medical trial or study. There is no evidence in government documents to indicate that the legislation was driven by anything other than fear of the unknown, media hyperbole and international pressure.
If the authorities seriously believed that legislation would curb LSD use they should have looked at their existing drug policy, which had done little to stem the increase in recreational drugs. In treating LSD as just another recreational drug such as the opiates, heroin and marijuana the establishment had overlooked many crucial factors which influenced and informed the growing LSD subculture.
LSD was a new drug, whereas existing recreational drugs had a long history of recreational use across a range of countries and social contexts. None of these drugs had a philosophical underpinning in western society in the way that LSD had, first with Heard and Huxley and later with Hollingshead and Leary. Unlike existing recreational drugs, LSD was advocated as having a purpose other than simply to get high. For LSD users the psychedelic experience was about enhanced and expanded perception, a way to see the world as it really was, the Blakean vision of seeing “a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour”. In short LSD provided a numinous experience unmediated by a religious hierarchy or sacred text.