British troops on LSD

[Luther Moore]

This is pretty funny..

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Turn Off Your Mind

A failed CIA “truth drug”, LSD first arrived in ‘Swinging London’ packaged in a mayonnaise jar. Within two years it had inspired The Beatles to cut Sgt Pepper, sent Pink Floyd's songwriter bonkers and led a whole generation towards astral grace or disaster. Harry Shapiro guides us through the extraordinary story of “acid”.

JUNE 18, 1967. The tabloids celebrated Paul McCartney’s 25th birthday by reporting he’d taken the most controversial and feared drug of the era. Declared illegal the previous year, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) had been demonised in the press as a substance that sent users crazy, convinced them they could fly and altered minds forever. McCartney, however, had a different take on the drug. He told Queen, the British socialite magazine, that LSD had “opened my eyes”. “It made me a better, more honest person, a more tolerant member of society.”

Next day, he was interviewed for television news.

“Paul, how often have you taken LSD?”

McCartney: (pause) “About four times.”

“And where did you get it from?”

McCartney: “Well, you know, if I was to say where I got it from, I mean... it’s illegal and everything... So I’d rather not say that.”

“Do you think that you have now encouraged your fans to take drugs?”

McCartney: “I don’t think it'll make any difference. I don't think my fans are going to take drugs just because I did. But that's not the point anyway. I was asked whether I had or not. And from then on, the whole bit about how far it’s gonna go and how many people it’s going to encourage is up to the newspapers, and up to you on television. I mean, you’re spreading this now, at this moment.”

“But as a public figure, surely you’ve got the responsibility to...”

McCartney: “...No, it’s you who’ve got the responsibility... If you’ll shut up about it, I will.”

But nobody was going to shut up about it. McCartney had made a major gaffe. When it came to The Beatles and drugs, the cat was already half out of the bag. A Day In The Life, the closing track on Sgt Pepper, had already been banned by the BBC for alleged drug references, and there were some knowing winks about Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. What the press didn’t know was that, as Paul was speaking, The Beatles had arranged for a large consignment of super-strength acid to be smuggled into Britain. The opportunity came with the Monterey Pop Festival in June, the first international platform for the new wave of acid rock bands. The Beatles knew the film rights had already been sold, but they sent a large film crew anyway knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to work. Instead they filled the airtight film cans with liquid vials of LSD.

BACK HOME, THEIR mortified manager Brian Epstein launched a damage limitation exercise in the wake of McCartney’s revelations by admitting publicly that he too had tried the drug. He was more worried for his other acts than for The Beatles. When she heard about Epstein’s confession, his other client Cilla Black was furious, fearing that she too would be tarred with the same brush. For the British public, back then the idea that pop stars used drugs was novel. The Stones had been famously busted in February, but as hairy, dangerous ne’er-do-wells who pissed up against garage walls, what could you expect? But The Beatles? And Paul McCartney? And wasn’t it LSD that only a few weeks ago The Sunday People had exposed as “the drug that is menacing young lives”? Ever hip to the jive, the paper also revealed that they had “obtained evidence of ‘LSD parties’ in London”.

In truth, LSD had been Swinging London’s best-kept secret since the psychedelic revolution arrived in September 1965, from the States in a mayonnaise jar. The jar belonged to an acid hustler named Michael Hollingshead who with the financial help of two Old Etonians established the World Psychedelic Centre in a Belgravia flat. Through word of mouth London’s cultural cognoscenti soon beat a path to his door.

Hollingshead’s supplies had come from an English psychiatrist, John Beresford. The two had shared a flat in the ’50s, then Beresford moved to the States to be followed later by his erstwhile flatmate who set up a cultural exchange network in New York. Like a number of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, Beresford was fascinated with the properties of hallucinogenic drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD.

SINCE ITS ACCIDENTAL discovery in 1943 by Albert Hofmann working in the lab of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, LSD had been put to use by both the military and the medics. The CIA thought they had found the perfect Cold War drug which could disable the enemy without destroying their weapons — and tested it as a truth drug. Neither proved viable, though not before at least one soldier committed suicide: like many others he had been dosed without his knowledge and thought he had gone mad.

Exploiting the drug’s capacity to dissolve the ego, some doctors were having success with those suffering personality problems and alcoholism. Others like Dr Humphrey Osmond (who coined the term ‘psychedelic’, meaning to ‘reveal the mind’, were conducting experiments with hallucinogenics to explore the mysteries of the human consciousness. The use of these drugs to enhance intellectual and creative pursuits began with Aldous Huxley, who took mescaline under Osmond’s guidance and wrote up his experiences in his book, The Doors of Perception. A Los Angeles psychiatrist Oscar Janiger introduced Hollywood to LSD; actors James Colburn and Jack Nicholson had a taste, while both Cary Grant and conductor André Previn declared how LSD had transformed their lives for the better.

Hollingshead pestered John Beresford for more LSD, convinced that it was the super-highway to personal enlightenment, and eventually the doctor handed over half a gram of finest Sandoz: enough for 5,000 doses each lasting eight to ten hours. Beresford then suggested Hollingshead visit an eminent professor of psychiatry at Harvard University who was also interested in the mind-expanding properties of certain drugs. Dr Timothy Leary was convinced that psilocybin mushrooms held the key to the great questions of the human condition, until at Hollingshead’s behest he tried LSD. It turned his life upside down and, within two years, Leary went from mainstream academic to international guru of psychedelia and the alternative society.

LSD became available, diverted from Sandoz and Czech labs. Newspapers, magazines and TV told gleeful stories of acid hedonism, people flying out of windows and going blind by looking into the sun. In the white heat of bad publicity, Sandoz quit manufacturing LSD. In stepped the grandson of a Kentucky senator — Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the world’s first underground chemist, the Henry Ford of acid who produced Rolls-Royce-quality product — including those supplies smuggled out of the Monterey Festival.

Meanwhile, the cultural landscape of London was changing. London in 1965 was all about Mod chic — amphetamine-driven ego and aggression, sharp suits, black-and-white colour schemes, angular hairstyles, targets and chevrons. It was crisp and clean and in your face. There was nothing alternative about Mod culture, a land grab for the best and coolest that the consumer society could offer. LSD began to dissolve those clean lines, offering a very different view of the world and, like most drug fashions going back to tobacco smoking and coffee drinking, it percolated through society from the top down.

It was during the filming of Help! that The Beatles first encountered LSD. A dentist friend threw a dinner party during which conversation turned to the subject of Timothy Leary. Only John Lennon had heard of him. The host passed round some of Hollingshead’s acid: his guests were not enlightened. John, George, Ringo and their partners left for a night club in a very strange state of mind, ending up back at George’s place having driven at 10mph, convinced they had gone insane.

Lennon, however, became a convert. Under the influence of LSD, he drew a childlike picture of Harrison’s house as a submarine in which they all lived, and the impact of acid (and cannabis courtesy of an introduction by Bob Dylan) began to infuse the music on Rubber Soul and Revolver.

In 1966, if you were part of the ‘in-crowd’ of musicians, designers, poets, sundry intellectuals and beautiful people, then acid was everywhere. Stash De Rola, part of The Rolling Stones’ inner circle, later commented, “Success on an unparalleled scale rewarded them with all the material trappings, but in a way it was treated as a bit of a joke. And there was constantly a worry and a quest: everyone sought a transcendental way to a paradise of some kind. There was this thirst of the soul.”

Gradually, psychedelia began to permeate the public consciousness. October 1966 saw the inaugural issue of International Times (IT); in the same month LSD was banned in the UK. And from there, everything moved very fast. The underground’s most significant mover and shaker, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, together with record producer Joe Boyd opened the UFO club in London’s Tottenham Court Road. Richard Neville launched the satorical Oz magazine in February 1967, designed by Martin Sharp whose signature artwork defined the psychedelic poster.

The music was changing and the business had to adapt. Just as R&B had swept trad jazz from London venues in the early ’60s, so those same musicians ditched suits for kaftans. And as Mods gave way to hippies, there were the bells, beads, fripperies and fineries, Afghans, kaftans and mirrored waistcoats, the Hendrix-afros, military jackets, painted guitars, walls and cars. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide dissembled into Pounds, Shillings and Pence. Acid culture — harsh sounding and a corrosive threat to society — was sanitised to become the less dangerous-sounding Flower Power. Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair sang Scott McKenzie. The underground was now well and truly out in the open.

While the press salivated over drugs, free love, naked hippy chicks and barefoot weirdos with long hair, the police focused on rock stars’ burgeoning consumption of illegal hallucinogens. Drug laws became the weapon with which the Establishment took on the acid toffs. Following on from the Stones bust at Keith Richards’ house, the World Psychedelic Centre was raided and Hollingshead served a jail term for possessing an ounce of cannabis. UFO was subjected to police harassment and had to move out of its premises.

In response to the Stones bust and the imprisonment of John Hopkins (again on cannabis charges), two students, Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris, came together and over the summer formed Release. Set up as a charity, Release soon became an invaluable source of legal advice for the increasing numbers of ordinary kids being busted for personal possession of cannabis and LSD.

IN AUGUST, PINK FLOYD released The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Psychedelia had been good for the Flloyd. Like many bands of the time, they started out playing R&B, but as drummer Nick Mason later admitted the band weren't up to it musically: “If the Summer Of Love and the underground had never happened, I don’t think we would have passed the starting point.” Their frontman Syd Barrett’s appetite for cannabis and LSD would soon prove to be his undoing. By the end of the year, the singer was appearing onstage in a disorientated state.

By then, Brian Epstein had committed suicide, The Rolling Stones had released their own misguided attempt at psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request and by the summer of ’68, flower power had been replaced in the headlines by student revolts, ghettos riots and political assassinations.

And what of LSD? Its popularity in Britain grew in the 1970s, with UK labs supplying the world through a network of chemists and entrepreneurs with links back to the US where the acid pioneers were on the run. It all came crashing down in 1977 with the success of Operation Julie, a massive police sting operation that smashed acid production in the UK. The drug enjoyed a minor renaissance in the early days of rave culture, and still has its fans today.

Albert Hofmann, now aged 101 (as this article was written — he eventually died in April 2008, aged 102), said that “LSD is the closest, the most dense, the most mysterious link between the material and the spiritual world. A hardly visible trace of LSD is capable of evoking heaven or hell.”

While most came through their acid travels unscathed, there were some who should never have touched it. Everyone from the psych era seems to have a tale of one ‘space cadet’ who reached for the stars and never quite made it back home. Some danced with angels, others struggled with demons, but for sure, wherever acid rained, no turn was left unstoned.

[phil82]

Wasn't the Beatles hit "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" all about LSD? I tries a 'weed' once in Rotorua, and it had no effect whatsoever, and as I've never been a smoker I didn't like it anyway! I have enough trouble with my Single Malts frankly!

[ngatimozart]

I read somewhere recently Phil that Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was written about either the daughter of a friend of Paul McCartneys, or a his sister. Can't quite remember all of the details, so I could be mistaken. Quite an interesting article.

[Luther Moore]

As Kiwi's comment says at the start Paul McCartney did his fair share of LSD.In a 2004 interview, Paul McCartney said that the song is about LSD. Surely people didn't do drugs in the 60's? ;D

[phil82]

Oh, I get it! LUCY in the SKY with DIAMONDS: LSD

I missed the 60's especially all that free love and flowers in the hair stuff, though I did spend a week or so in San Francisco in 1963 and they didn't miss much there I can tell you!

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Jul 7, 2012 15:16:06 GMT 12 phil82 said:

Oh, I get it! LUCY in the SKY with DIAMONDS: LSD

I missed the 60's especially all that free love and flowers in the hair stuff, though I did spend a week or so in San Francisco in 1963 and they didn't miss much there I can tell you!

You were obviously in San Francisco four years too early! ;D

---

Hello, I Love You...

In January 1967, the kids of San Francisco gathered for a celestially anointed day of beat poetry, sun-kissed rock and powerful LSD. Even the local Hells Angels turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Joel Selvin relives the legendary Human Be-In.

ALL THROUGH THE previous year, word filtered out of San Francisco about remarkable happenings and a strange new community of youths gathering around the city's Haight-Ashbury district. In March 1966, the vastly influential Life magazine featured a cover article on LSD, titled ‘The Exploding Thread Of The Mind Drug That Got Out Of Control’. It was the best publicity the new movement could've had.

In October 1965, everybody who attended A Tribute To Dr Strange, the first ever acid-rock dance/concert, held at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, was surprised to find as many as a thousand like-minded, long-haired, thrift-store-clad miscreants there. By January 1967, 15 months later, organisers of a Haight-Ashbury community celebration they were calling the ‘Human Be-In’ happily predicted a crowd of between 25,000 and 50,000.

Michael Bowen, an artist and what would become known as a community organiser dreamed up the event — A Gathering Of The Tribes. A dope dealer called John The Ghost knew about the Polo Fields, a gargantuan meadow at the west end of Golden Gate Park, large enough to encompass the entire six square blocks of the Haight-Ashbury. The people behind the event consulted with Gavin Arthur — grandson of the 21st US President, Chester A. Arthur — who was the city’s leading astrologist and something of a well-known local eccentric. He selected January 14 as the most likely date for positive communication. An application for a permit with the Park Department was approved.

Two days before the event, Bowen, beat poet Gary Snyder, Berkeley politico Jerry Rubin, Haight-Ashbury Oracle publisher Allen Cohen, and Jay Thelin, one of two brothers who ran Haight Street’s Psychedelic Shop, met the press in a room behind the Print Mint, a popular Haight Street store selling posters.

“Berkeley political activists and the love generation of the Haight-Ashbury will join together,” read the press release, “with members of the new nation who will be coming from every state in the nation, every tribe of the young (the emerging soul of the nation) to pow-wow, celebrate, and prophesy the epoch of liberation, love, peace, compassion and unity of mandkind. The night of bruited fear of the American eagle-breast-body is over. Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”

An unseasonably clear, bright sunny day dawned on Saturday, January 14, 1967. Wind chimes marked the paths leading to the Polo Fields and the thousands came, bearing blankets, flags and flowers. At noon, poet Snyder blew a conch shell to open the rite, its bleating whine lost on the far reaches of a crowd that already extended across the vast meadow. The Pow-Wow — A Gathering Of The Tribes For A Human Be-In — was underway.

Poet Allen Ginsberg chanted mantras. Lenore Kandel read from her slim book of poetry, The Love Book, a current cause célèbre. Only a couple of months earlier, police busted the Psychedelic Shop for selling the tome, judging it obscene for a couple of lines about her giving her boyfriend a blowjob. Wearing yellow flowers behind his ears, LSD evangelist Dr Timothy Leary told everybody to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. “Whatever you do is beautiful,” he said.

Steve The Gemini Twin, wearing a mask, descended in a psychedelic-coloured parachute, landing just as The Grateful Dead finished a song. When the power cord came unplugged during Quicksilver Messenger Service’s set, members of the Hells Angels took it on themselves to guard the line. The Angels, who had menaced peace rallies in the area before, took over the job of security, while the San Francisco Police watched on horseback from a nearby hilltop. Chocolate George of the Oakland chapter, a brutish man with a thick beard and a fur hat, organised the lost children operation. The day was so beautiful, so without incident, that Freewheeling’ Frank, one of the most notorious Angels, spent the afternoon watching from the top of a bus, high on LSD, banging a tambourine on his leg. He burst into tears when his brethren reverted to form and kicked the hell out of some poor bastard who messed with their bikes.

LSD was everywhere. The latest from notorious local acid manufacturer August Owsley Stanley III was White Lightening, but there was plenty of his Orange sunshine still running around. Country Joe McDonald came over from Berkeley, painted his face and dropped a tab. Dino Valente, fresh out of jail on a pot bust, played Pan, tootling his wooden pipes on the edge of the crowd. All the bands played. The Jefferson Airplane invited jazzman Dizzy Gillespie onstage and jazz flautist Charles Lloyd joined The Grateful Dead for the Pigpen blues specialty, Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. The Sir Douglas Quintet and Loading Zone played (Big Brother And The Holding Company, often reported as performing, were out of town). Poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read, and there were speeches by Timothy Leary, his associate Richard Alpert, comedian Dick Gregory and an anti-war rant by Jerry Rubin that Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, high on acid, thought something of a bringdown.

But the speeches couldn’t be heard that clearly in the audience anyway, and the crowd were far more intent on grooving on the music and each other. The gathered were a colourful array of happy young people, sharing joints and bolta bags of wine. There were no fights, no trouble. It had been an extraordinarily peaceful, joyous day — probably one of the highpoints of the whole San Francisco hippie adventure. When it came to a close, six hours after it started, the Human Be-In had made its point.

As the day ended, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason thought he heard the voice of Buddha — it was the poet Ginsberg — boom through the loudspeakers asking everyone to turn, face the sun and watch the sunset. He chanted a few more mantras and asked everybody to pick up the trash when they left. Snyder blew on the conch shell and, as fingers of fog snaked through the trees, everybody got up and left.

And they picked up the trash!

[Luther Moore]

Man I wish I grew up in the 60's! Best music era ever,So much going on,although not all of it was good.Imagine how good Woodstock would of been,even though half the people there weren't really there they were in the sky with diamonds.

[Dave Homewood]

Ken Kesey, who wrote the classic novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, was one of the US soldiers who had LSD trialled on them - withough any proper warning or consent. They were used as Giunea Pigs and for most the results were not goon. he ended up in an asylom, and that is where his book was inspired, and a long time readjusting back to normality.

I think the military officers who sanction and plan such experiments on their men as drug tests, nuclear tests, and in the case of Russia the deliberate leak of radiation into a river without telling a village downstreasm so they could study the gradual effects, should be brought to account like war crimes. They're no better than Joseph Mengeles.

The Japanese Kamikaze pilots used to take methamphetamine before they went to their deaths, and I have been told the British gave it to their men in the WWI trenches before going over the top too. no wonder so many had haunting flashbacks, it was likley as much the drugs as thewar.

[robbo]

My Dad was involved in these trials during his national service. He didn't say much about them apart from being made to climb in and out of lorries in full kit under the influence of LSD and carrying out a series of exercies that proved absolutely diddly squat. The authorities have admitted to administering LSD but I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg. All of the family noticed a profound change in my Dad after he'd gone through these trials. The effects were already known at that point but it didn't stop the boffins messing peoples lives up.

[Luther Moore]

I cannot believe they gave it to your Father..LSD is such a dangerous drug.I had a friend who took it while we were on holidays a few years ago, the next day he packed up his stuff, jumped on a train and I have seen him twice in the last four years.He went all wierd and is no longer talks to any of us.

[flyjoe180]

[kiwithrottlejockey]

• www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1923615/pdf/canmedaj01241-0036.pdf