Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (35 page)

In early 1968 the Diggers changed their name to the Free City Collective and issued a manifesto calling for a citywide coalition of “free families” to pool their resources and form survival networks that could sustain a long-term revolutionary effort. They forged alliances with street gangs from the Latin and Chinese ghettos in San Francisco and also worked with the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther party. In response to the intense police harassment that was crippling their community, Free City advocates staged a
protracted open-air salon on the steps of City Hall. Every day for three months, they gathered to read poetry, give out copies of the
Free City News
, and carry on outrageously. One of their last events before calling it quits on the summer solstice of 1968 was a Free City Convention (a parody of the upcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago), complete with banners and fanfare and a theme: “A Vote for Me Is a Vote for You.”

Beyond the Free City the Diggers were among the first to raise the issue of ecological balance as a political concern. A handful of the original San Francisco activists would resurface in later years as the Planet Drum Foundation, a grassroots organization devoted to articulating biospheric values appropriate to postindustrial society. From city to planet, bioregions instead of nation-states: a politics of living-in-place, reinhabiting where you are. The drum beat could be heard even when the Haight was at its heyday. Listen to a Digger rap it down:

LSD hand-holding is not the end. . . . We’re going to view what we’re doing as the best we could come up with. It’s only the best, scratch it. Scratch sixty-seven. Summer in San Francisco has been the first Be-Together for Escapees and Refugees. . . . Our part now coming up is to communicate in direct spinal language. . . . To push as hard as we can. . . to move past the Civil War in the United States to our planetary concerns, the forms and modes of which we are now developing. . . . The species on the planet has to get past the non-living of the last century, that most barren sterile time. The time when men died for wages, when lives were counted against profit-sharing coupons. . . when coupons and clip-outs became days and nights, when sunup was time to go to work and sundown was exhausted relief or an alcoholic night out. . . . We’re trying to move our minds as sensuous instruments. . . to move the school of fish we swim in. . . to move onto the next place that we’ve got to go because if we don’t move from where we are now, the barracuda are going to hit us. And they do. Everytime the tide turns, the barracuda turns. Everybody turns when the tide turns.

8
Peaking In Babylon

A GATHERING STORM

There is the story of the Zen master who tells his student, “Don’t think of a carrot.” Naturally a carrot is the first image that pops into the student’s mind. So, too, the establishment media constantly decried LSD and warned in shrill tones of an epidemic of drug abuse sweeping the nation. The net effect of the immense publicity, even though much of it was negative, was to arouse intense interest and curiosity, leading to ever-widening patterns of use. For in an era of generational disaffection the quickest way to spur adolescent action is to say, “Don’t do it!”

The evolution of the psychedelic scene was intimately bound up with the media coverage it attracted. Prior to the big publicity barrage, those who lived in the Haight, New York’s East Village, and other hip redoubts did not necessarily think of themselves as belonging to an overarching “counterculture.” The quantum leap from community to counterculture was precipitated by the first major media event, the San Francisco be-in of January 1967. The organizers of the be-in consciously sought to use the media to send a message throughout the country. On its own terms the event was an astounding achievement: the psychedelic butterfly fluttered through the TV cameras directly into the hearts and minds of America’s restless youth. But the ramifications of this sudden exposure were ambiguous, double-edged. As a result of the be-in, Haight-Ashbury became a national symbol. Shortly thereafter the original fabric of the hip community began to unravel as young people responding to the “hippie temptation” (examined in a CBS documentary of that title) inundated the Haight. In fact it was the media doing the tempting, and the acid ghetto was trampled to death during the Summer of Love, leaving a social sewer in its place.

A similar pattern was repeated in the East Village, where a combination of runaways, tourism, and Mafia heroin destroyed a creative scene that had been many years in the making. The psychedelic pioneers in New York were an informal group of beats, students, and pacifists who frequented an arcane bookstore on East Ninth Street run by Eric Loeb; it sold peyote buttons that were on display in the storefront window in the late 1950s. Street acid was available by 1963, and as more people turned on, the gathering places became more explicit: Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, the Electric Circus performance space on Saint Mark’s Place, Fillmore East on Second Avenue, Tompkins Square and Washington Square Park. There was also an array of coffeeshops, including the Psychedelicatessen, and other conspicuous hangouts offering copies of
Inner Space
, a psychedelic newsletter published by Lynn House. The topography of New York City made the situation all the more intense, and there was plenty of street action leading up to the be-in at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Easter Sunday 1967. The New York be-in, organized by Abbie Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and others, was inspired by its San Francisco prototype. Thousands of glassy-eyed youths smoked pot and gobbled acid while suspicious cops and TV cameramen surrounded the site. The psychedelic community quickly degenerated after this event, and a series of brutal drug murders in the fall of 1967 marked the end of an exotic social experiment.

The decimation of the East Village and the Haight might have been the final chapter of a unique phase in cultural history if not for the profound impact these communities had on American society as a whole. Like a cueball scattering the opening shot, the media laserbeam broke open the energy cluster that had coalesced in these hip enclaves and spread the psychedelic seed throughout the country. Soon there were love-ins and be-ins in nearly every major city in the US as hippie colonies sprang up across the land. Wherever LSD appeared on the scene, it announced itself in obvious ways: long hair, way-out clothing, funny glasses, and overall freakiness. (Frank Zappa, leader of the Los Angeles-based rock group, the Mothers of Invention, defined “freaking out” as “a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express
CREATIVELY
his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.”) People who turned on were entertained and enlightened by distinctive
modes of art, film, dance, poetry, and, perhaps most important, music. The new electric sound, at once lyrical and dissonant, had broad appeal without losing any of its rebellious bite. For the first time in history young intellectuals and the young masses were not only grooving to the same beat but getting high on the same drugs.

“No corporate leader can afford to ignore the changing social, political and intellectual standard summed up in the phrase ‘the generation gap,’” lectured David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, to a group of executives at the University of Chicago’s annual management conference in early 1968. By this time Madison Avenue had appropriated hip lingo to sell consumer goods, and snatches of popular songs could be heard in various advertising jingles. Opel promised to “light your fire,” while a new brand of laundry detergent was touted as “out of sight.” (The hippies, meanwhile, adapted the motto of the megacorporation: “Better living through chemistry.”) The mystique of the Haight was ripped off by the bell-bottom salesmen and the promoters of
Hair
, a box-office triumph that took Broadway by storm in the fall of 1967. “LSD, LBJ, FBI, CIA,” sang the cast of this widely acclaimed “tribal love-rock musical” which featured nudity, draft card burning, and an AM chart-buster hailing the day when peace would rule the planet and love would steer the stars. America may not have approved of its flower children, but commercially it ate them up.

The styles associated with psychedelic drugs achieved widespread cultural diffusion throughout North America and the Western world thanks to the ubiquitous reach of the mass media. Even those who did not actually sample LSD were apt to wear their hair longer and partake, however indirectly, of the psychedelic groundswell. But LSD had a much deeper effect on those who actually experimented with the drug. The media fanfare surrounding Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love catalyzed the sudden explosion of the acid scene. Four million North Americans are said to have tried acid in the late 1960s, and the average user, according to an extensive survey by Dr. Sidney Cohen, Richard Alpert, and Lawrence Schiller, was taking a dose every three or four months. Seventy percent of the turned-on set were of high school or college age, and many of them were involved in radical politics at one time or another.

The burgeoning acid scene raised more than a few eyebrows within the intelligence community, and a number of CIA-connected think
tanks, including the Rand Corporation,
*
analyzed the broader questions relating to the social and political impact of LSD. Based in Santa Monica, California, the Rand Corporation played a crucial role in designing strategies for counter-revolution and pacification that were implemented in Vietnam. In the mid-1960s the think tank approach was expanded to include domestic issues; along this line Rand personnel examined the short- and long-term effect of LSD on personality change. A Rand report by William McGlothlin refers to “changes in dogmatism” and political affiliation: “If some of the subjects are drawn from extreme right or leftwing organizations, it may be possible to obtain additional behavioral measure in terms of the number resigning or becoming inactive.”

While Rand Corporation specialists pondered whether LSD might be an antidote to political activism, the Hudson Institute, another think tank with strong ties to the intelligence community, kept tabs on shifting trends within the grassroots psychedelic movement. Founded by Herman Kahn,
†
one of America’s leading nuclear strategists, the Hudson Institute specialized in classified research on national security issues. Kahn experimented with LSD on repeated occasions during the 1960s, and he visited Millbrook and other psychedelic strongholds on the East Coast. From time to time the rotund futurist (Kahn weighed over three hundred pounds) would stroll along Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, observing the flower children and musing on the implications of the acid subculture. At one point he predicted that by the year 2000 there would be an alternative “dropped-out” country within the United States. But Kahn was not overly sympathetic to the psychedelic movement. “He was primarily interested in social control,” stated a Hudson Institute consultant who once lectured there on the subject of LSD.

The psychedelic subculture and its relationship to the New Left and the political upheavals of the 1960s was the subject of an investigation by Willis Harmon, who currently heads the Futures Department
at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Located in Palo Alto, California, this prestigious think tank received a number of grants from the US Army to conduct classified research into chemical incapacitants. Harmon made no bones about where he stood with respect to political radicals and the New Left. When Michael Rossman, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, visited SRI headquarters in the early 1970s, Harmon told him, “There’s a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose.”

Harmon was turned on to LSD in the late 1950s by Captain Al Hubbard, the legendary superspy, who took a special interest in his new convert. Shortly thereafter Harmon became vice-president of the International Federation for Advanced Studies (IFAS), an organization devoted to exploring the therapeutic and problem solving potential of LSD. IFAS was the brainchild of Hubbard, who undoubtedly leaned on his political connections in Washington to insure that Harmon and his colleagues would be allowed to continue their drug investigations even after the first big purge of above-ground LSD research by the FDA in the early 1960s. During this period IFAS charged $500 for a single session of high-dose psychedelic therapy—an arrangement that led some critics to accuse IFAS of bilking the public.

Adverse publicity forced IFAS to disband in 1965, whereupon Harmon, who considered himself a disciple of the Captain, became director of the Educational Policy Research Center at SRI. In October 1968 he invited Hubbard, then living in semiretirement in British Columbia, to join SRI as a part-time “special investigative agent.” As Harmon stated in a letter to his acid mentor, “Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug usage prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of long-range educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available.”

Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant’s fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for SRI. “His services to us,” explained Harmon, “consisted in gathering
various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at schools and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature.”

Hubbard was the ideal person for such a task. He boasted a great deal of experience both in the law enforcement field and in the use of psychedelic drugs. As a special agent for the FDA in the early 1960s, he led the first raids on underground acid labs, and a number of rebel chemists were arrested because of his detective work. The Captain was particularly irked when he learned that LSD in adulterated form was circulating on the black market. To Hubbard this represented degradation of the lowest order. The most precious spiritual substance on earth was being contaminated by a bunch of lousy bathtub chemists out to make a quick buck. The Captain was dead set against illicit drug use. “Impure drugs are very dangerous,” he explained, “and the Law takes a dim view of it.” He kept a sample of street acid for “comparative purposes” each time he busted an underground LSD factory during the 1960s; most of these outfits, Hubbard maintained, were run by the Mafia.