A Historical and Literary Analysis of LSD and the Dialectic of Mainstream and Oppositionary Cultures in the 1960’s

Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is a potent psychotropic drug that was first isolated by the late chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 while he was working as a researcher in the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel, Switzerland (Jordans). Since its synthesis, LSD has been used in a variety of scientific experiments, ranging from psychiatric research on the mental state of schizophrenic patients to studies concerning the compound’s affect in helping terminal cancer patients cope with the idea of dying and dealing with severe pain (see “Grof” below). However, the mind-altering substance is perhaps best remembered for the role it played in the formation and discourse of the “hippie” countercultural movement that embraced the use of LSD and other psychedelics throughout the 1960’s as a means of achieving consciousness expansion. As a result, the hippie culture of “free love” and communal living has become forever inseparable from the influence of LSD, which largely contributed to the substance’s controversial standing in American society during that tumultuous decade.

From the onset of the countercultural movement, so-called members of “straight society” distrusted hippie values because of their strong socialist undertones, categorized by a rejection of the materialist ideals that were coming into the forefront of American society after the end of World War II. But the thing that really made the hippies worrisome to members of mainstream society was their ability to mobilize as a group with a distinct identity, and that identity was forged around the unapologetic indulgence in drugs such as LSD. The anthropologist John H. Weakland supports this principle in his essay, “Hippies: What the Scene Means,” as illustrated by the following selection:

Although the movement’s aim may be stated as each person ‘doing his thing’ as an individual, the doing occurs mainly on a group scale and whatever it is, it is pointedly different from usual American behavior—even before the sensation-minded mass media points this out further. … Identification with the American Indians, just as with Eastern mystical experience and wisdom, equally involves a clear rejection of the culture of origin in favor of foreign models—regardless of whether these are really understood or not (352-3).

Hippie values were viewed as strange and unusual by members of mainstream society who could not understand the motivation behind their concerted rejection of conventional culture for an alternative lifestyle structured around ritualistic drug use. Because of this, the hippie movement, which Weakland also synonymously refers to as the drug movement, “is viewed mainly as an aberration, in a fashion that is typical of our society’s viewing of other behavior considered as aberrational, such as mental illness or extreme religious behavior” (351). The important distinction in this quotation is that Weakland does not attempt to define the movement as an aberration in objective terms, but states that it is merely viewed as such by members of mainstream society.

An August 27, 1967 New York Times article, entitled “Hippies Find Ways to Avoid Working: Some Panhandle and Some Get by with No Money,” further reflects mainstream society’s common feelings of bewilderment regarding hippie culture. The article states: “An indication of the hippies’ lack of concern with things monetary is the sign on the door of the Pacific Ocean Trading Company on Haight Street. The sign says: ‘Open 10-12 Sometimes.’ On three consecutive days it was not open at 3 P.M.” This perceived lackadaisical attitude toward commerce was particularly off-putting to many older Americans, in whom the values of punctuality and hard-work had been deeply instilled. The article offers the straight society reader another example of the strange world of hippie economics in the following selection:

One hippie used to be paid to conduct religious cymbal services in the calm center of the Psychadelic Shop. Three weeks ago he told the owners that he did not want any more money for this. His girl friend now works in a night club, he said, and this is enough money.

The hippie, Richard Webster, said he wanted to help the store, which was deep in debt, and did not need to take money from it.

This selection illustrates two key points of difference between the hippie culture and the mainstream world. The notion that an individual would freely concede to work a job for no money is strange enough to most Americans of the time, but Richard Webster’s willingness to fall back on his girlfriend’s salary for sustenance is in direct opposition to the extremely gendered structure of American society, in which the male partner is generally assumed to be the bread winner. This example of hippie culture challenges the profit-driven ideals of the materialist society that had been intensifying since the end of World War II, but it also undermines the fundamental moral value of entrenched patriarchal gender roles.

The hippie tendencies toward communal living and an extreme disinterest in the money-driven culture of America was particularly worrisome to members of the mainstream society in the 1960’s, with the Cold War in full swing and memories of the previous decade’s Red Scare fresh in the public memory. With these conditions in mind, it is unsurprising that Tony Esparza would write in an August 20, 1967 New York Times article, entitled “A is for Acid, B is for Boo,” that “their live-and-let-love philosophy disturbs more than a few parents and even Washington types, some of whom believe that beneath every hippie lurks a potential commie.” Someone reading this article from a contemporary perspective might express befuddlement at the seemingly contradictory statement. Why would a philosophy of “live-and-let-love” be construed as a potential veil for a communist agenda?—and perhaps more importantly, if this is the case, why was it demonized? The condemnation of their philosophy as potentially subversive seems quite counterintuitive, as values such as love, and live-and-let-live have long been central parts of Christian doctrine upon which much of American society has supposedly been based.

It seems then, that mainstream society’s oppositionary criticism of the hippie counterculture was less focused on a legitimate analysis of the actual philosophy and practices of its members than it was with mainstream America’s own perception of what this movement “meant” socially. In a way, straight society can be seen to “Other” members of the hippie movement in a process that the literary and cultural critic Edward Said would later define as Orientalism in his 1978 book bearing the same title. His argument, summarized and adjusted for the purposes of this specific situation, was that a dominant culture’s writings, thoughts, and discourse concerning a subordinate group are inherently suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. This is because the mainstream culture’s strongly held values are likely to distort their perception and understanding of groups that are “Other” than mainstream, in this case, the hippie counterculture.

The concept of Orientalism moves into the forefront of our analysis of the dialectic of mainstream and hippie societies most prominently in the case of Tom Wolfe’s milestone work of creative nonfiction, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968. The novel is represented as an example of New Journalism, the creative style Wolfe is famous for having created, that records, as accurately as possible, the journey of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in their day-glo painted bus, Furthur, which they drove across the continent, spreading LSD awareness along with The Grateful Dead, and generally “freaking out” members of mainstream society. This work was the topic of an August 12, 1968 New York Times book review, written by Eliot Fremont-Smith, and was described as follows: “It is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book.” However, though the book is billed as an accurate representation of hippie culture, it would strike many readers as surprising that Tom Wolfe did not himself indulge in LSD. The book review calls our attention to this, lionizing Wolfe for achieving “what Ken Kesey could not quite manage, an ‘acid graduation,’ a great turn-on without drugs,” and praising the book’s overall writing style for delivering “a genuine raz-daz high, courtesy of Tom Wolfe. And it’s done with words.” It’s done with words and not with drugs.

But if the unabashed indulgence in LSD for the purposes of consciousness expansion was literally the central thing separating Kesey and his Merry Pranksters from the mainstream, how can Wolfe presume that he was able to accurately capture the spirit of this movement—to have truly understood what these people were all about—without conceding to experiment with LSD on a similar basis? This is a true example of Orientalism of the post-modern variety, emphasized by the simple fact that most critics of LSD were categorically unwilling to experiment with the drug themselves before coming to this conclusion. Said writes that Orientalism plays on the assumption that the typical Western consumer “is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being” (108). Although this selection is specifically criticizing the Eurocentric world’s tendency to downplay the humanity of Islam and its followers, this same rhetoric can be made, without too much extrapolation, to fit the model of mainstream society’s views in respect to the subaltern hippie culture. Assured by their own self-righteousness, straight society had no ethical qualms in their categorical condemnation of LSD and the culture with which it became almost synonymous. It is the unwillingness of the conventional society to accept consciousness expansion via LSD use as a legitimate social goal that is in large part responsible for much of the friction and misunderstanding between these respective cultures.

Richard Blum confronts this problem in a more clinical format in the introduction to his essay, “The Research Enterprise and its Problems,” taken from the book Utopiates, a collaborative rumination on the impact of LSD and other hallucinogenic compounds on modern society, published in 1964. Although it is not the greater aim of his research, there are parts of his essay that can be used to make the argument that the LSD experience is impossible to fully comprehend outside of direct personal experimentation. He writes:

Many persons who have taken hallucinogens make the statement that their experience is ineffable; that is, what has gone on in their minds cannot be communicated to others that no words exist to describe these internal events, and, even if there were such words, they would be devoid of significance unless the listener had himself gone through the same experiences (15).

If this is the case, then it would be truly impossible for anyone who has not personally experimented with LSD to claim any objective understanding of the hippie culture. When viewed from this perspective, Eliot Fremont-Smith’s review of The Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test is misguided to the extent that it praises Wolfe’s supposed ability to translate the Prankster’s acid tests for straight society readers “with words.”

The most obvious problem with Fremont-Smith’s review is that it avoids comment on a crucial feature of the book, which is the fact that Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were engaged, on their journeys across the continent, with the project of creating a new kind of movie—a rhapsodical, impossibly long video documentary portraying the LSD experience. Had Fremont-Smith taken the time to read Wolfe’s book more carefully, he might have noticed that Kesey—though he was an author himself—was engaged in an experiment with a post-modern desire to achieve a standard of aesthetics that would literally transcend the written word. To be fair to Fremont-Smith, Tom Wolfe arguably downplayed the significance of this fact in his text as well. However, when this point is clarified and placed next to Richard Blum’s explanation about the ineffable nature of the LSD trip, Fremont-Smith’s notion that such a complicated experience could be translated into written English, even the loose vernacular that Wolfe employs throughout his novel, loses a great deal of its persuasive power. Because of this misconception, it is difficult to take Fremont-Smith’s greater criticism of the hippie generation seriously, as it stems from an incomplete understanding about the culture’s central values and practices.

With this in mind, we ought to turn to an author with a greater breadth of experience with drugs such as LSD if we shall ever hope to find a truly valuable, which is to say objective (so far as is humanly possible), portrayal of the counterculture. For this, we have Hunter S. Thompson’s magnum opus, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, a critical retrospective analysis of the 1960’s counterculture published in 1971. In its most methodical moments, the novel seriously questions the notion, popularly espoused by hippies and “squares” alike, that there are significant structural differences between the counterculture and mainstream society. He critiques Ken Kesey, whom Wolfe’s playful rhetoric painted as a kind of innocent LSD prophet. From here, Thompson makes the connection that the acid culture’s organization and rhetoric, although markedly different from the mainstream in many of its values and practices, still employs “the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries” (179).

Hunter Thompson’s basic problem with all ideological groups, including Kesey’s Pranksters and other hippie groups, is that they generally fall victim to “the military ethic . . . a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister . . . all the way up to ‘God’” (179). While this way of thinking binds group members together, offering them a sense of inclusion, it seriously hinders the expression of autonomous will, as these members must remain responsible to the collective through deference to the proper chain of command. The acid culture, in this case represented by Kesey and his Pranksters, offered an alternative to mainstream society that was attractive in its otherness, but did not offer the essential structural components that would guarantee its members freedom from a kind of cult hierarchy. By calling direct attention to this systematic problem, Thompson tears asunder the reader’s illusions about the existence of grand organizational differences between the mainstream and the counter-culture, stressing that even in the Freak Kingdom, conformity and toeing of the line are still very much components of everyday life.

Sadly, the point of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was probably lost upon a great number of its original readers and critics, for reasons due to the paradox that Richard Blum illustrates in the following selection from “The Research Enterprise and its Problems,”: “One is scientifically contaminated if one does take [LSD], one is guilty of insensibility if one does not” (17). The quality of one’s work on the LSD phenomenon will likely be determined in popular opinion by whether or not one is advocating for the direct, personal experimentation with the substance. Because the greater majority of Americans in the 1960’s could not morally tolerate the sociological activity of recreational LSD use, they were likely to treat “hippie” authors with a certain degree of distain.

Tom Wolfe distanced himself from the hippie movement in his later career, while Hunter S. Thompson stagnated and turned into a largely “cult” icon. That is truly a shame, in the end, for his earlier writings on the counterculture deserve a much closer look than they ever merited in the mainstream society. The nuances of Thompson’s text are arguably more insightful than Wolfe’s book. This is not to say that Acid Test should be considered devoid of all merit, for it is in itself a true literary achievement. It is merely intended to suggest that Wolfe’s better success as a writer later in his career may have been partially due to his greater tendency to appeal to the “straight society” American citizen, who were less likely to trust books written by authors who openly admitted to habitual drug use.

This nicely illustrates, via the intrusion of “Orientalist” reasoning into most social discourses, one of the key point: when it comes to the issue of drugs and social policy, public opinion generally comes to associate drugs with subaltern groups, and then push for increased legislation and restriction based upon the presupposition that the drugs themselves must have an inherent demoralizing quality.

Works Cited

Blum, Richard. “The Research Enterprise and its Problems.” Utopiates. New York:

Atherton Press, 1964. pp 10-21.

Esparza, Tony. “A is for Acid, B is for Boo.” (1967, August 20). New York Times

(1857-Current file), p. D17.  Retrieved May 1, 2008, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2004) database.

Fremont-Smith, Eliot. “Books of the Times.” New York Times (1857-Current file); Aug

12, 1968; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2004)

pg. 33. Retrieved May 1, 2008 from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2004) database.

Golden, Stephen A. O. “Hippies Find Ways to Avoid Working.” New York Times

(1857-Current file); Aug 27, 1967; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New

York Times (1851 – 2004) pg. 31. Retrieved May 1, 2008 from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2004) database.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1994.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York: Randomhouse Press,

1998.

Bibliography

Grof, Stanislav and Joan Halifax. The Human Encounter With Death. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1977.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.