The role of drugs in 1960's

• Wikipedia.com
• http://www1.dragonet.es/users/markbcki/wolfe.htm
• http://www.biography.com/people/timothy-leary-37330
• http://www.timothyleary.org/#1
• http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/timothy-leary-man-who-turned-on-america/
• http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/cst3010/drugs.html
• https://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/psychedelic-60s/

Forms/Types of LSD

Acid Tests

LSD was originally available in tablet form

• Parties with LSD-laced Kool Aid
• Used it to provide a communal trip
• The Grateful Dead was a common place for these parties
• Black lights, strobe lights, and fluorescent paint

reacted solid allowed to crystallize: window pane acid

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

liquid acid (via oral, in the eyeball, or mucous membrane entry)

mixture with other drugs (such as dropping some onto marijuana before smoking)

liquid acid put on blotter paper

Trips festival

• Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco
• January 1966
• Ken Babbs - sound engineer
• Problem with sound, higher music sounded distorted
• Many bands played

• Published in 1967

• Provides a first hand account of Ken Kesey and his band called Merry Pranksters

• They traveled across the country in a colorful bus called "Further" or "Furthur"

1962

Ken and LSD

In the 60's

Psychedelic Art and Music

Obtaining inspiration throughout dreams and the psychedelic hallucinations brought into music

and art

This included style of dress, language and the way people spoke, art, literature and philosophy.

The amount of LSD needed for one trip is so small as to be barely visible

Music festivals and concerts were a prominent feature of the 60s landscape, and musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Janice Joplin were the super-stars of the day.

This included style of dress, language and the way people spoke, art, literature and philosophy.

As LSD use became more widespread the drug also became more hazardous. Many reports appeared of large numbers of LSD users hospitalized, some of them for considerable periods, following LSD trips

• Gained a lot of money from publishing his debut novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Ken was seen as a "God" to his followers due to his state while on LSD and his ability to preach
• The band became famous for their use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs to connect with their fans
• This was a starting point for the hippies vocabulary and philosophy

people were trying to find new ways to explore pleasure/escape and ways of bringing it about

As late as 1967, only 11 cases of flashbacks were reported in the medical literature. By 1969, it is estimated that one out of every 20 hippies who used LSD suffered flashbacks of some kind.

Marijuana

smoking buds in pipes, joints, bongs, chillums, spliffs, etc.

making tea from leaves and buds

blending leaves and buds in with cooked foods (such as brownies!)

smoking of concentrated resin (hashish)

"Turn on, turn in, drop out"

Leary became an icon that was knwon for college lectures. young adults everywhere turned to leary for his "wisdom".

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

LSD

Criticized for extorting youth to take lsd.

Timothy Leary

Leary commented that he "learned more about... (his) brain and its possibilities... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing research in psychology."

His influence....

Born: October 22, 1920-May 31st, 1996.

The most common was LSD, a chemical discovered in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann

Richard nixon dubbed him "the most dangerous man in america"

LSD let people look at things with the different angle their psychedelic trance allowed them.

He started to lecture about lsd and the change of perception he recieved through his experiences with hallucinogens. He wrote books talking about different topics not normally talked upon such as "psychedelic prayers and the politics of ectasy"

Leary and His Prison Escape...

Leary declared his candidacy for governor of California in 1970 and later was arrested on marijuana possession charges and received a decade-long jail sentence. He escaped from prison with outside help several months later and traveled outside the country before being recaptured in Afghanistan in 1973. He was re-imprisoned and was ultimately released by a state government decree in 1976.

He continued to lecture and write books..

He later died of prostate cancer in 1996.

Said that LSD expands the mind and helps people to find alternative ways to solve problems.

Timothy Leary was a psycholgy professor and researcher that lectured at Harvard.

Leary experimented with psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico for experiments. (psilocybin was allowed for research)

He later started to use LSD in the 1960's, first on prison inmates and then on himself and his friends. (Harvard Psilocybin Project)

LSD was not illegal at the time.

Students from Harvard were caught in a scandal using his supply and Leary was discharged in 1963. Leary advoacted psychedlics and established the International Foundation for Internal Freedom. He latered converted to Hinduism.

Many young adults started to experiment with LSD themselves. One day a teenage girl who had experimented with LSD, jumped off a building and plummeted to her death and Timothy Leary did not feel that he was a cause even though he had been advocating LSD. Timothy Leary appeared on television and slammed by the talk show host and even the father of the deceased daughter.

Sources

The role of drugs in the 1960's