The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’
Remember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.
“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are.” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).
He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?
He started his career taking photographs…
Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research
Beware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:
Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!
THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!
To be fair, Alex didn’t make…
National Geographic Puts LSD Under The Microscope
That's enough acid to send an army insane!
(Via Sitting Now), National Geographic’s Explorer series examines the myths and effects of LSD:
LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.
Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness.
Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future.
Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD…
Got Acid? I’m Tripping Out. The Return of Hofmann’s Problem Child: LSD
Gary Stix writes in Scientific American:
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.
For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became…
