Nothing is more amusing than a mainstream publication introducing the masses to an unsettling subculture, especially if we’re talking about the 1960s. The May 9, 1966 issue of Newsweek did just that with a sprawling piece about LSD, which alternates between interesting writing and a basic primer of the emerging youth revolution. There are quotes from British-born psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the term “psychedelic,” and the article does wisely comprehend the coming of a pharmacological culture. Most of the article can be read here and here and here, though the last part is missing. The opening:
“As I was lying on the ground, I was looking up at the sky and I could sort of see through the leaves of the plant and see all the plant fluids flowing around inside of it. I thought the plant was very friendly and very, very closely related to me as a living thing. For a while, I became a plant and felt my spine grow down through the bricks and take root…and I raised my arms up and waved them around with the plant and I really was a plant!
“But toward the end I was watching Lois and I thought I saw the drug take hold of her in a bad way…Suddenly I was afraid. I looked down and Lois was miles and miles beneath me sort of as if I were looking at her from the wrong end of the telescope.”
The man who thought he was a plant is a 29-year-old Yale graduate. And he was looking at his wife through the wrong end of a telescope; his perceptions had been altered by a chemical called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.
‘Inner Space’: Largely unknown and untasted outside the researcher’s laboratory until recently, the hallucinogenic drug LSD has suddenly become a national obsession. Depending on who is doing the talking, it is an intellectual tool to explore psychic “inner space,” a new source of kicks for thrill seekers, the sacramental substance of a far-out mystical movement–or the latest and most frightening addition to the list of mind drugs now available in the pill society being fashioned by pharmacology. “Every age produces the thing it requires,” says psychiatrist Humphry Osmond of the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Princeton. “This age requires ways of learning to develop its inner qualities.”
The new LSD subculture, for the moment at least, is mainly American and young. It has its own vocabulary: on college campuses, in New York’s Greenwich Village, Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District, the drug is called “acid” and its devotees “acid heads.” Users “turn on” and go on LSD “trips.” Some of the trips are contemplative affairs; but on others, hippies take off their clothes and turn on orgiastically. And as the young world turns on, the adult world–shocked and bewildered–turns off.•