Albion Dreaming

by Andy Roberts

  The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, gave police a slew of new powers. The right to free speech was eroded and Section five of the Act brought in laws criminalizing previously civil offences including the ability of police to prevent gatherings that featured “repetitive beats”. Clearly aimed at the Acid House rave, squat, road protest and other outdoor counter culture activities, free festivals became even scarcer and even more risky. This Act led to a series of primarily London based club nights springing up to cater for the vestiges of hippie culture. Megatripolis – the name speaks for itself – was begun in 1993 by psychedelic veteran Frasier Clark. Its festival-like ambience together with a series of guest speakers such as Allen Ginsberg, Terence McKenna, Howard Marks and Baba Ram Dass made it a popular venue for users of LSD and other psychedelics. Rave and dance music mixed with tribal drumming and light shows reminiscent of the Sixties. Although many just went for the dancing, others saw Megatripolis and others like it as part of a developing psychedelic movement.23

  The cultural impact of Acid House spurred novelist Irvine Welsh to write a book of the same name, containing an eponymous story that played with ideas of how LSD can affect concepts of identity. Coco Bryce, the story’s protagonist, perhaps unwisely, takes two doses of LSD alone at night in the middle of an electrical storm. Cosmic serendipity steps in; Bryce is struck by lightning as an ambulance containing a pregnant woman passes by and his consciousness switches places with her newborn baby.24 That LSD was now beginning to appear in mainstream fiction in 1994 was testament to the depth to which it was embedded in British culture. And it was still massively popular, for instance in October 1995 over 41,000 LSD tablets were discovered by police under a street in Darwen, Lancashire.

  Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, was now retired and an elderly man. At the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Germany, he reflected on LSD and the steps in his life that led him to discover it. Age appeared to have mellowed his views about LSD and he now seemed to be espousing many ideas about LSD initially held by the counter culture.

  Firstly he expounded the idea that LSD had not been synthesised by accident: “... considering the discovery of LSD in the context of other significant discoveries or our time in the medicinal and technical field, one might arrive at the notion that LSD did not come into the world accidentally, but was rather evoked in the scope of some higher plan.” Hofmann contrasted the discovery, in the 1940s, of the tranquillisers, which covered up psychic problems whereas LSD revealed them. Were these the comments of a scientist whose mental faculties were deserting him or of someone who now had no professional reputation to maintain and who could say exactly what he wanted about the substance he had discovered? Hofmann also referred to the “coincidence” of the effects of LSD being discovered at the same time as the atomic bomb was under development, echoing a belief held by many in the early counter culture.25

  The advent of blotter acid, with its brightly coloured, culturally relevant images, caused misunderstanding among the authorities. The prevalence on blotters of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse generated the unsubstantiated belief that blotter manufacturers were somehow targeting children. They weren’t, but in the early Eighties, the authorities’ ignorance led to an LSD urban legend sweeping America and eventually taking root in Britain.26

  In a typical example, a public institution such as a school, hospital or police station would receive a photocopied flyer warning that LSD “tattoos” are being given to local children. The police referred to blotters as a tattoo because they resembled children’s stick-on tattoos, the New Jersey police issuing the statement, “... children may be susceptible to this type of cartoon stamp believing it a tattoo transfer.” The implication of these tales is that drug pushers are aggressively marketing these LSD laced tattoos to children in an attempt to get them hooked. The flyer often claims the LSD can be absorbed directly into a child’s skin merely by touch alone and that many children have already died from the tattoos.

  Of course, the information on the flyers was rubbish; pushers were not marketing LSD to children and nor could LSD be easily absorbed through the skin from a blotter. LSD is not addictive and there is not one report of a child dying as the result of LSD use. Yet despite this, and despite some police forces refuting the hoax, the “acid tattoo” urban legend spread, promulgated by those who failed to heed official information or chose not to for their own ends. The legend gathered momentum as recipients of the flyers photocopied and distributed them to their friends, creating viral marketing for a product that did not exist. The acid tattoo urban legend joined the ranks of other LSD scare stories such as the students who took LSD and stared at the sun until they went blind.

  “Peril of the LSD Cartoon Stamps” screamed the headline to an article in a November 1985 edition of tabloid newspaper the Daily Star. The legend had come to Britain! Joe Clancy faithfully reported how “stamps laced with LSD are being sold to schoolchildren – and just one lick could kill”. Clancy’s inability to separate fact from fiction was matched only by that of police at New Scotland Yard who warned: “The stamps are potentially lethal. A youngster could throw himself under a bus or off a building after taking this drug.”27

  Just as it had in America, the urban legend took root in Britain and has circulated in one form or other ever since. In 1991 a major wave of the legend was seen with duplicated acid tattoo flyers being distributed in Merseyside, north Wales, Hampshire, Somerset and the West Midlands. One of the flyers was pinned to a notice-board at BICC Cables in Wrexham and claimed: “A young child could happen upon these tattoos and have a fatal trip.” Wrexham drug squad officer John Atkinson told the local paper: “These are just stupid chain letters that cause nothing but alarm.” Other police officials weren’t as enlightened and in September 1991 West Midlands police actually issued a letter of their own, warning parents and schools about the evil tattoos.28

  The acid tattoo urban legend once again demonstrated how little real awareness the police had about LSD culture. The story had been quashed several times but kept re-appearing, uncritically spread by the media and believed purely because it had appeared in print. In the new millennium, the paper flyer has been superseded by a hoax email message, ensuring the legend’s longevity as it mutates to keep up with changing forms of information distribution.

  The acid tattoo scare was just one of a number of urban legends circulating in Britain. In 1997, Nestlé came up with an ingenious marketing strategy, selling the “holes” from the popular confectionary item Polo mints. The “holes” were small, round pieces of mint that vaguely resembled LSD microdots. Nestlé couldn’t possibly have imagined what would happen next. The Daily Express ran an article entitled “Hole Lot of Hassle”. “Teachers all over the country are alarmed by a new-look Polo mint. It’s not the mint with the hole that is worrying to them but the ‘hole from the mint’ produced by Nestlé Rowntree. The classroom menace is a small, white pill-shaped sweet, each marked with a P, L, or O. Teachers are confiscating hundreds of them fearing they might be drugs. One was convinced that the L on one ‘hole’ was short for LSD. So the new sweet has been added to toxicology identity lists.” Fortunately, this particular urban legend did not catch the public’s imagination and disappeared as quickly as it had arisen.29

  LSD had heavily influenced art and design from the Sixties onwards, producing the characteristic multicoloured paisley and swirl patterns that were used in fashion, advertising and publishing. Now, LSD itself had become a vibrant form of folk art and exhibitions of sheets of blotter art began to appear. Individual sheets, free of LSD, obtained from the blotter manufacturers or specially designed purely as art became very popular and auction sites such as eBay offer many examples for sale to the collector.

  The images printed on blotter LSD can be of anything, but often reflect the present culture or some aspect of LSD’s history. Albert Hofmann, Walt Disney characters, film stars, music iconography, politicians and contemporary cultural images such as flying
saucers, all have been used as LSD blotter images. “These are symbols of a secret society,” claims Mark McCloud, an American who has made it his life’s work to collect and chronicle the hundreds of designs produced. McCloud has been arrested, and his collection confiscated, several times by the Drug Enforcement Agency, but he only collects inert sheets of blotter, donated by LSD chemists and dealers.30

  Blotter art collecting is now a rapidly growing market in the UK. One of the leading blotter art dealers is Paul Guest, who runs the BlotterArt.co.uk website. Sheets of blotter art signed by psychedelic luminaries such as Hofmann, Leary and psychedelic chemists Sasha and Ann Shulgin are highly collectable items. A sheet of blotter art signed by Albert Hofmann is currently valued in excess of £3000.31

  As the millennium approached, people began to express serious doubts over the medical use of LSD in the Fifties and Sixties, when a group of former psychiatric patients announced they intended to seek compensation. Their action was driven by Wolverhampton MP, Ken Purchase who had taken an interest in claims that some of those who underwent LSD psychotherapy up to forty years earlier had subsequently suffered psychiatric problems as a result of their treatment.

  “The more I looked into this, the more I was concerned about what happened to people,” said Purchase, who had compiled a dossier containing over seventy cases. The MP approached Alexander Harris solicitors, who took the case on. Any claim would be made against the health authority responsible for the hospital where the therapy took place. The crux of any claim would be for the claimants’ legal team to prove LSD was the cause of their problems and also that doctors were negligent in how they had administered the treatment.32

  Media publicity brought over three hundred other complainants forward and headlines such as “Did LSD Kill My Father?” and “LSD Wrecked My Life” soon began to appear. Some of the stories related in the newspapers were a far cry from the positive impression given by the LSD psychotherapists of the Fifties and Sixties.

  One of the claimants, Valerie Bateson of Radcliffe, in Lancashire recalled how she was given LSD for post natal depression in 1964. “It was like a bad dream. I drank it the first time and I just blacked out and I was paralysed. It took twenty-four hours before I got the feeling back into my body. I was so frightened. I used to take Holy Communion in the hospital chapel before a treatment as I really did not think I would live another day.”33

  Bateson had six treatments of the drug, but claims after being discharged she developed monophobia, the fear of being alone, as well as panic attacks that prevented her taking medication or starting employment. Similar accounts came from patients who were treated at all the major LSD psychotherapy centres in the Fifties and Sixties, including Powick, the hospital in Worcestershire where LSD therapy began in 1953.

  The investigation lasted until 29 February 2000 and Ronnie Sandison, who pioneered the psychotherapeutic use of LSD at Powick Hospital in Worcester, became involved in going through the files of many former patients. In 2006, reflecting on what he called a “sensitive” time for him, Sandison commented: “The really sad thing was revealed when I read the notes on some of the patients, from which it was evident that their doctors subsequent to their LSD treatment had all made every possible effort to help these unfortunate patients, condemned as most of them were, to a lifetime of mental disturbance, often cloaked as physical disorder.”34

  It’s hard to know just how many of the claims represented genuine problems caused by LSD therapy and how many were either just extensions of the initial illness or problems developed independently of the treatment. Both sides were aware of this, Vizard Oldham of the solicitors acting for the NHS stating: “We are defending the action and are gathering expert evidence. The difficulty with the case is that these things are alleged to have happened thirty or forty years ago, and not all the NHS staff involved are still alive.”35 Head of the NHS litigation authority, David Towns, was more bullish: “Investigations and expert evidence led the authority to believe that there were no legal liability and the claims were defended.”36

  The NHS knew it would be difficult for the claimants to conclusively prove LSD therapy had caused their alleged problems. But they also knew they had no defence when it came to less abstract matters including whether patients were told what drug they were taking and what its effects would be. In most cases this either didn’t take place or the patient wasn’t asked to sign a consent form.

  After five years of legal and medical argument, by November 2000, only forty-six claims were still outstanding. Despite their earlier stance the NHS decided to make an out of court settlement of £195,000 to the remaining claimants. David Towns still believed the litigation authority at the NHS could have won the legal argument but said the NHS had decided on a settlement to save the taxpayer a protracted and expensive court battle.

  The legal conclusion to the experimental LSD psychotherapy of the Fifties and Sixties cast a long shadow over the achievements and breakthroughs made by people like Ronnie Sandison; their sincere attempts to free people from mental imprisonment thrown back in their faces. Thus, the new century began with LSD again at the centre of a media furore. Sixty-seven years after Albert Hofmann’s serendipitous discovery his “problem child”, as he referred to the drug, was still causing difficulties, still an answer in search of a question.

  13

  REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD

  It is my wish that a modern Eleusis will emerge, in which seeking humans can learn to have transcendent experiences with sacred substances in a safe setting.

  Albert Hofmann1

  In the years that have passed since Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesised LSD in November 1938, the drug has passed through a number of distinct phases in Britain. The medical and military establishments’ use of LSD was initially sanctioned by the government, with high hopes that this new chemical would be the key to unlocking the secrets of the subconscious. But support for investigating LSD’s potential quickly halted once the young people started to use the drug and it became one of the driving forces responsible for the cultural changes of the Sixties. As a result, LSD was made illegal in October 1966.

  No robust medical or legal argument was offered as to why LSD should be illegal. The government’s decision was not based on controlled medical tests, or evidence from the military or medical experiments with the drug. It appeared that legislators were swayed more by the opinion and influence of the British media, as well as the lurid horror stories about LSD emanating from America, as the scientific facts. Hansard, the official journal of parliamentary record, shows the legislative process was conducted in an atmosphere of flippancy, with parliamentarians displaying ignorance and disinterest in a drug they apparently knew nothing about.

  At the time LSD was outlawed, only a few thousand members of the public in Britain, at most, had used the drug. At a conservative estimate, at least a million British citizens have tried LSD in the fifty-nine years since the first record of its recreational use. Bad practice at Porton Down and the failure of psychotherapists to inform patients about the drug they were taking aside, few seem to have been forced or coerced into using the drug. Indeed, the evidence suggests the reverse is true; people have gone out of their way to obtain, use and to pass on a drug that they believed has consciousness enhancing properties.

  Of those who have taken LSD, a small percentage developed mental health problems. Opinion is divided whether these individuals had a pre-existing or latent illness, which LSD exacerbated, and whether or not the problem would have emerged had they never taken LSD. This has proved an impossible question to answer, but the negative personal effects of LSD cannot be overlooked, as it is this aspect of the psychedelic experience employed most often in media or political debate. But the numbers of those affected are small, and must be balanced against the multitudes of people who suffer serious physical and mental problems from the use of legally sanctioned drugs such as alcohol and tobacco.

  Of those who have taken LSD, some have tried i
t once and found the experience to be so awe-inspiring they did not feel the need to repeat it, but are glad they tried it. This is often the origin of the maxim “everyone should take LSD once in their life”. Others found it to be a drug worth taking repeatedly, if only for the dazzling trip into the synaesthesic wonderland it provided. For them it was a drug to be used to have the most intense mental and physical fun imaginable.

  At the other end of the spectrum, some LSD users have had the course of their lives permanently changed for the better by LSD. These changes are as varied as are the individuals themselves but the insights offered by LSD have stimulated tens of thousands of people into a radical change in lifestyle, broadly involving some form of religious or spiritual practice. In and among these extremes, the majority of those who have taken LSD have found the drug to be a mixture of these primary reactions. For these, the psychedelic foot soldiers, LSD proved to be a signpost to a novel way of perceiving the world, a new way of living and, as they incorporated the drug into their lives, an entrée into the social grouping we broadly refer to as the counter culture. And it is the counter culture’s use of LSD which has been the main focus of this book.