Drugs and Popular Culture

1. Drugs and Popular Culture Notes on Acid Dreams And other sources Compiled by Dr. Nerio

2. The Media on Drugs • The media create the “reality” of drugs • Are the media “biased”? • Who decides what is “biased”?

3. Two Types of Bias • Factual bias • Selection bias

4. No story can present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth • Selection bias is more or less inevitable… • There is no such thing as “the whole truth”

5. Stories about drugs ebb and flow

6. 1930s – hundreds of sensationalistic articles about marijuana

7. Special Role of Harry Anslinger First head of Bureau of Narcotics, friend and ally of William Randolph Hearst

9. LSD in the 1960s • Before 1967, press described LSD as a “nightmare” drug, whose effects produced insanity (perhaps permanent) • NJ Narcotic Drug Study Commission: “greatest threat facing the country” • Almost no media subsequently corrected the story = LSD is an extremely safe drug

10. Media could neither understand nor communicate the nuance of set and setting • Manufacture of LSD was outlawed in 1965… by 1968, sale of LSD was a felony and possession a misdemeanor

11. Battling the Media over Drugs Example: PBS’s Tales of the City, 1993

12. 1967 and after: panic over LSD and chromosome breakage

13. Sensationalism • The intent to thrill, amaze, excite... By focusing on exaggerated, superficial, or lurid details

15. Sensationalism and Media Theory • Ruling elite theory – sensationalism distracts from structural problems in society • Money machine – sensationalism sells papers • Grassroots theory – public loves excitement • Professional subculture – journalists seek “human interests stories”

16. Jay Stevens: Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream January 1965: Time declared that the sixties generation = conformity • Seymour Martin Lipset had declared the “Triumph of the West”

17. Jay Stevens claims: “To put matters bluntly: the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration…they were a laboratory experiment that had either gone awry or succeeded brilliantly—a difference of opinion” that still persists (xiii)

18. The story begins…

19. Albert Hoffman’s Bicycle Ride (1943):Not unlike a Salvador Dali painting

20. Ergot Fungus

21. Earlier: Peyote Cacti

22. Weir Mitchell’s 1896 peyote Experience was “somewhat reminiscent of… Maxfield Parish…” (6)

23. Mitchell told the BMJ how “thousands of galactic suns had streamed across his vision, how a gothic tower gleaming with jewels had shot up to an immense height” (6)

24. Havelock Ellis’ Experience withPeyote was more reminiscent of Monet

25. William Butler Yeats saw “delightful dragons, puffing out their breath straight in front of them like rigid lines of steam, and balancing white balls on the end of their breath.” (7)

26. Ellis called peyote “a new artificial paradise” • He wrote that “most educated gentlemen” should try it once or twice

27. THE BMJ Called it a New Inferno

28. The West’s Reservations about Sensations Protestantism, Calvinism, Puritanism

29. Avoiding the Question • “By opting for the moralizing tone, the BMJeditors skirted a more interesting area of argument: what were legitimate drugs of use and what were dangerous drugs of abuse?” (8) • “Was a substance used to promote nonpathological symptoms such as ecstasy, visions, even terror, a danger to the public if it wasn’t a danger, physically or psychologically speaking, to the individual?” (8)

30. Acid Dreams • 1977: “LSD: A Generation Later” • LSD: • A boon to psychotherapy • An enhancer of creativity • A religious sacrament • A liberator of the human spirit

31. Two Views RICHARD ASHLEY STANLEY KRIPPNER The culture is not ready yet The culture does not have the framework/the closeness to God • Acid is a “chemical messiah” • A way to short-circuit the mental straight jacket imposed by society • Acid helps people resist “thought control”

32. CIA • “As it turns out, nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s—marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrate, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed, and many others—had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists” (xxvi)

33. Ch 2: Psychedelic Pioneers • Captain Al Hubbard – the first to emphasize LSD visionary/transcendental possibilities • The “Johnny Appleseed” of LSD During his first trip, in 1951, he claimed to have witnessed his own conception. “It was the most mystical thing I’ve ever seen” (45)

34. Aldous Huxley • 1953: Mescaline • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbI4f1WvN9w • The Doors of Perception • Mind and brain are not the source of the cognitive process, but a screening mechanism or “reducing valve”

35. Huxley tried LSD for the first time in 1954: • “What came through the closed door,” he stated, “was the realization…the direct, total awareness, from the inside…of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact” (48)

36. “Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still” (50) • A Catholic priest recommended the experience to members of his parish

37. Hollywood • “LSD was the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the late 1950s…” • “All my life,” [Cary] Grant stated, “I’ve been searching for peace of mind. I’d explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment” (57)

39. “That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non-drug factors play an important role in determining the subject’s response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature” (58)

40. Science, Objectivity and LSD • “According to Osmond, the most important features of the LSD experience—the overwhelming beauty, the awe and wonder, the existential challenge, the creative and therapeutic insights—would inevitably elude the scientist…” (63) • http://www.cosm.org/art/sacredmirrors.html

41. “The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet” (65)

42. Alex Grey: LSD as Religious Sacrament

43. Ch 3: Under the Mushroom, Over the Rainbow • “LSD was fine by Mrs. Luce as long as it remained strictly a drug for the doctors and their friends in the ruling class” (71) • “Oh sure, we all took acid” (she said). “It was a creative group—my husband and I and Huxley and Isherwood” (71)

44. The Magic Mushroom • Life had run a story on the “magic mushroom” by Gordon Wasson

45. Leary Conducts the Psilocybin Experiment • 32 inmates at Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord • Found lower rate of recidivism (25% vs. 80%) • Leary, Walter Pahnke, and the Good Friday Experiment

46. Spring Grove Experiment, 1966 • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIOysM1briU

47. Not Everyone Agreed • Arthur Koestler to Leary after mushrooms: • “This is wonderful, no doubt… but it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism… There’s no wisdom here. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was” (81) • William Burroughs also had some “ominous premonitions”

48. 1963: Leary and Alpert Are Fired • The first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the 20th century • “Some day it will be quite humorous,” (Alpert) told a reporter, “that a professor was fired for supplying a student with ‘the most profound education experience in my life’” (88)

49. Ch 4: Preaching LSD • Leary and Alpert relocate to Mexico • International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) • 5,000 applicants • Relocate to Millbrook (gift of Billy and Peggy Hitchcock)

50. Millbrook