Albert Hoffman died today at 102, and the dwindling tribe of Deadheads, already devastated by Jerry’s death (umm, over a decade ago now), turn their sorrowful eyes toward Terrapin Station (and, one assumes, the technolibertarian utopia assured by John Perry Barlow, whose new agey marriage of Milton Friedman and George Gilder has spawned thinking most monstrous). Hoffman was the generally unhappy father of rambunctious offspring lysergic acid diethylamide-25, simultaneously displeased by both the medical establishment’s failure to fully explore its beneficient powers, and pop culture’s seemingly all-too-ardent embrace.
Many others disagreed, and American culture was inarguably enriched by blotter acid art, Aldous Huxley’s influential essay The Doors of Perception, Tom Wolfe’s dazzling account of Ken Kesey and the Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and of course, Sergeant Pepper, a record which Time Magazine, quoting “an editor of a London magazine,” pronounced ” “drenched in drugs” back in 1967, while admitting “it is not clear whether their songs are meant to proselytize in behalf of drugs or simply to deal with them as a subject of the moment.” Yeah, I ask myself that too every time I crank “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”
(All that and not a word on the actual effects? See below in re “the bus”).
Hoffman’s interested in psychedelia was longstanding; like Dr Andrew Weil, who got his start studying entheogens, Hoffman became expert in the psychoactive properties of more than a few diverse species, all the while hoping to see his discoveries put to use by the psychiatric establishment as opposed to being swapped for tofuburgers in the parking lot before Phish shows. He might have died with a sense of satisfaction; according to wikipedia, “In December 2007, Swiss medical authorities permitted a psychotherapist to perform psychotherapeutical experiments with patients who suffer from terminal stage cancer and other deadly diseases. Although not yet started, these experiments will represent the first study of the therapeutic effects of LSD on humans in 35 years, as other studies have focused on the drug’s effects on consciousness and body. Hoffmann supported the study, and continued to believe in the therapeutic benefits of LSD.”
Microdots, tabs, blotter, sloppy blotter—mmmm, sloppy blotter—liquid, shrooms; the subculture that could speak eloquently to the virtues of each vehicle took from the Pranksters and their famed bus Further the motto, “you’re either on the bus or off it,” a truism that pretty much renders any further discussion here moot; except to say, that Dr. Hoffman was definitely on the bus after all.
In tribute, here’s The Beatles, either–yeah, “proselytizing in behalf of acid or simply dealing with it as a subject of the moment.”
