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…
The Incredible Krystle Cole Trip
Vice presents the wild trip of Krystle Cole as part of its Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia series:
There is no facile synthesis of the events that transpired at the Wamego missile silo between October 1 and November 4, 2000. The available information is a viscous solution of truths, half-lies, three-quarter truths, and outright lies, the fractionation of which yields no pure product. The dramatis personae are many and varied. The chemicals in question often obscure and untested…
Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’
Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:
But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s…
1950s Housewife Tries LSD
A “stable, well-balanced” housewife describes her experience after receiving a 100 gama dose of LSD-25 as part of government research — she served as a voluntary participant in clinical trials of the drug. She tries to express what she sees but unfortunately “can’t talk in technicolor.” She sums the journey up with, “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty…this is reality.” Luckily, people who attempt such encounters now are jailed.
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…
The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs
I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:
Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.
Drugs And The Meaning Of Life
Does the altering of consciousness, through means chemical or otherwise, lie at the very heart of existence? Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, usually known for ripping religion to shreds, delves into the meaning and value of drugs in an essay via SamHarris.org:
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment — and even in our dreams — we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous — though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like…
Did The CIA Test LSD On An Entire French Town?
For a short, nightmarish period in August 1951, dozens of residents of Pont-Saint-Espirit suffered from extreme hallucinations, leading to five deaths. A newly-unearthed memo hints that it was a CIA experiment, the BBC reports:
On August 26, 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.
“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.
Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon. He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.
Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms. Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot,…
From LSD To Cyberculture Legend
The legendary editor behind Mondo 2000 magazine reveals how LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a high school underground newspaper all fermented into High Frontiers, Reality Hackers and eventually his famous cyberculture publication as part of the new “Mondo 2000 History Project”.
R.U. Sirius shares the introduction, where he remembers an avante-garde newspaper in college. (”We all have a roaring great time interviewing Timothy Leary… We’re all dazzled, feeling like the host of Planet Earth’s party had lifted the velvet rope and let us in.”) But he also describes how he came to edit the first “cyber culture” magazines (predating Wired) from 1984-1998, and announces a new “open source history project” – a collaboratively-edited electronic document with stories and perceptions from “All those who touched directly upon the history of the scene/magazine”.
At the age of 31, Sirius moves to Marin County with a California to-do list: “Start the Neopsychedelic Wave. Start a Neopsychedelic band. Start a…
Carey Grant: The First Star To Promote The Wonders Of LSD
Who was the first mainstream American celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs?
Carey Grant, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the ’30s through the ’60s, who had his “life transformed” by LSD and “arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.” The blog of New York’s WFMU radio examines the crazy saga of Carey Grant and LSD:
I learned many things in the quiet of that room … everything is or becomes its own opposite … You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream … I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship. — Cary Grant
When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing…
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…
The Mystery Of Cursed French Bread (A Secret CIA Experiment?)
Ted Goodman on PhyOrg recounts the strange events of August 16, 1951, when dozens of villagers in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds, from, what was described as by villagers, eating le pain maudit (”cursed bread”).
Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.
Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.
‘CIA Experiment’ Sends French Village Mad
From News.com.au:
A US writer has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA spiked a French village’s food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
The Sun online reports journalist H P Albarelli Jr came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of a biochemist who fell from a 13th floor window two years after a mystery illness that caused an entire French village to go temporarily mad 50 years ago.
Hundreds of residents in picturesque Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations on August 16, 1951.
At least five people in the southern French village died and dozens were locked up in asylums after witnessing terrifying hallucinations of dragons and fire.
In the horror scenes an 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs.
[Read more at News.com.au]
Mindfvck: Drawings Done Under the Influence of LSD
Interesting site callled MINDFVCK I just StumbleUpon-ed (below is an obvious before/after):
These nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s.
The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.
Read/See More: MINDFVCK
LSD Experiments: Soldiers On Acid
Posted on Environmental Graffiti:
What looks like a soldier having a bit of fun was actually a series of controlled experiments that lasted for decades. We’re talking about mind control or the use of hallucinogenics such as LSD as weapons used in warfare. Said to have been pioneered by the Nazis; Britain, the United States and others soon followed suit with their own experiments on unwitting soldiers and civilians, the Vietcong and now terrorists…
Images say more than a thousand words; this video taken in 1963 of British soldiers under the influence of LSD surely does:
As the narrator aptly describes,
Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.
Can Mind-Altering Drugs have Mental Health Benefits?
From the Telegraph:
New studies are testing whether psychedelic drugs such as LSD and MDMA can treat OCD, post traumatic stress and cancer related anxiety.
On September 19 this year, 12 people gathered in the suburban Hermsdorf district of Berlin for a group psychotherapy session that allegedly involved illegal drugs. A day later, two of the participants were dead and another in a coma. The substances used and exact cause of death have yet to be confirmed. Local newspaper reports have claimed that heroin and MDMA (ecstasy) were taken, but other drugs may have been in circulation.
Garri Rober, the therapist who led the session which included his wife, Elke, is facing possible charges in connection with the deaths and on suspicion of supplying illegal drugs. The other nine participants were released from hospital the next day.
This tragedy, which received international coverage, threatens to derail a fledgling renaissance in legitimate research using psychedelic…
Animation: Pitcher Dock Ellis’s No-Hitter while on LSD
From BoingBoing:
We’ve posted before about Dock Ellis. He was the baseball player who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping balls on LSD. Ellis died last year. In his honor, James Blagden and Chris Isenberg animated Ellis’s retelling of his acid adventure on the mound. “Dock Ellis’s Legendary LSD No-Hitter animation“
[Read more at BoingBoing]
UK Drugs Chief: Alcohol and Cigarettes More Dangerous Than Ecstasy, LSD and Cannabis
The Belfast Telegraph reports:
The British Government’s chief drug adviser has sparked controversy by claiming ecstasy, LSD and cannabis are less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.
Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, attacked the decision to make cannabis a class B drug.
He accused former home secretary Jacqui Smith, who reclassified the drug, of “distorting and devaluing” scientific research.
Prof Nutt said smoking cannabis created only a “relatively small risk” of psychotic illness. And he claimed advocates of moving ecstasy into class B from class A had “won the intellectual argument”.
All drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should be ranked by a “harm” index, he said, with alcohol coming fifth behind cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, and methadone.
Tobacco should rank ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy.
Prof Nutt said: “No one is suggesting that drugs are not harmful. The critical question is one of scale and degree. We need a full…
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…
