Can you understand the LSD issue
without having had ‘The Experience?’
To paraphrase Jimi Hendrix: Well, have you ever been Experienced? An impulse visit (ok, planned, but don’t tell my wife) to a flea market got me this period piece publication the other day:
“LSD — In the midst of a raging national controversy two authorities speak out on the dangers, merits, legal regulations and control of the revolutionary psychedelic drug.”
Written by Richard Alpert and Sidney Cohen, with photographs by Lawrence Schiller. Something for the stamp collection …
While with the air of a science publication, debating the pros and cons of the chosen path to lysergic enlightment, this is by all means a product of the era of turn on, float downstream etc … Complete with a short dictionary of the neccesary slang needed to communicate with any hep user. Even ‘the Grateful Dead’ made it into the dictionary …
"For half an hour she played the flute"
Leary.
Richard Alpert should be known to anybody with a little knowledge about Timothy Leary and the pro LSD movement. Sidney Cohen, however, is somehow the counterweight to the counter culture in this setting: Being a physician, the once LSD friendly Cohen had by 1966 found the off-lab recreational use of the drug being dangerous. His 1960 medical article on the benefits of LSD was by then being used both by sceptics and enthusiasts for either’s view. Eleven years of research had, by means of popular culture, had it’s conclusion spun around. This book, in it’s own right, is a debate between two cultures — for once leaving the man in the street out of it.
On the visual side, Schiller delivers priceless and very “into it” photographs from case studies of both good and bad trips. My favourite at the moment being this one: ‘For half an hour she played the flute’ (an innocent passer-by would probably fail to see the beauty of this introvert musical forest experience) …
Quoting Hunter S. Thompson: With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life – forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.
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A swede has made the book, sans pictures, available on scribd.com:
