Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (45 page)

When Sinclair first turned on in the early 1960s, there was a prevailing sense among hip pioneers that acid should be used for initiation, in the way that Huxley implied when he spoke of opening the doors of perception and widening the area of consciousness. Sure, getting high could be loads of fun, but it was rarely a matter of just kicks, a pure recreational buzz; the era demanded more than that. “Drugs had a lot to do with placing people in a historical context—of placing people in a radical position,” wrote George Cavaletto for the Liberation News Service. “Using drugs was the revolutionary first step a lot of people took.”

By the late 1960s, however, so many people were getting high that the identification of drug use with the sharper forms of cultural and political deviance weakened considerably. Instead of being weapons in a generational war, marijuana and LSD often served as pleasure props, accoutrements of the good life that included water beds, tape
decks, golden roach clips, and a host of leisure items. High school kids were popping tabs of acid every weekend as if they were gumdrops. And much of the LSD
was
like candy—full of additives and impurities. The physical contamination of street acid symbolized what was happening throughout the culture. “The pill was no longer a sacrament,” said Michael Rossman, “but a commercial token, stripped of its essential husk of love, ritual and supportive searching community.”

Many people who tried LSD for the first time during this period indulged their appetite for altered states in a confused, unfocused, and self-destructive manner. This was certainly the case when a horde of young people flocked to the Altamont Speedway in Liver-more, California, in December 1969 for a free rock concert featuring the Rolling Stones. With the crowd came the dealers, selling every type of drug, including large quantities of LSD. Mick Jagger floated over the stoned throng in a helicopter with the High Priest himself, Timothy Leary, who was then awaiting trial for his marijuana bust in Laguna Beach the previous year. Even with the long arm of the law preparing a stranglehold for him, Leary still flashed that giant lighthouse of a smile wherever he went. His effusive demeanor gave no hint of a man destined for prison as he and Jagger landed at Altamont. They emerged together, with Leary grinning and waving the peace sign.

Security for the festival was entrusted to the Hell’s Angels, who busied themselves guzzling their allotment of beer and eating acid by the handful. Fights broke out near the stage while the Angels faced down a crowd of a quarter to half a million. To make matters worse, there was some contaminated LSD circulating among the audience, but the scene was so violent that people were freaking out regardless of what type of acid they took. The paramedics and physicians from the Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley free clinics treated so many bummers that they ran out of Thorazine in half an hour. Thousands of others suffered cut feet, broken bones, head wounds, and worse as the Angels went on a rampage.

Into this maelstrom walked the Rolling Stones. Leary sat at the side of the stage brooding over a vast sea of bad trippers as they launched into their set. The violence reached its inevitable climax while the Stones did “Sympathy for the Devil,” their song about everyone being implicated in life’s evils, the sinner and the saint as two sides of the same coin. An eighteen-year-old black named Meredith
Hunter was knifed and stomped to death by a gang of Hell’s Angels. He was one of four people who died at Altamont. But Jagger couldn’t see anything more than swirling shapes and shadows, and the Stones continued to play, at times with amazing beauty and urgency, even as fights erupted in front of them.

Things went from bad to worse as the decade drew to a close. The week of the Altamont fiasco Charles Manson and his “hippie” followers were arrested and charged with the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends. The glamorous young film actress, wife of director Roman Polanski, was eight months pregnant with her first child. She was stabbed forty-nine times with a butcher knife in July 1969, and the walls of her mansion in Bel Air, California, were smeared with slogans written in the blood of the victims. Sensational tales of black magic, hypnotism, and intimidation by spell-casting were played up in the national media, which fastened on the Manson case as if the entire youth culture were on trial.

The newspapers made much of the fact that Manson had once been a familiar figure in Haight-Ashbury and that he and his family used acid and chattered about revolution. The lawyers for the defense tried to blame the slayings on the deleterious effects of hallucinogenic drugs—an argument that had about as much credence as the notion that LSD was responsible for generating the good vibes at Woodstock. If the Tate killings showed anything, it was that acid has no implicit moral direction. The Manson affair was a vivid refutation of the sixties myth that anyone who took LSD would automatically become holy or reverential or politically conscious or anything else except stoned.

The canonization of Manson by certain segments of the counterculture was a measure of how desperate and bitter people had become in the final days of the 1960s. Jerry Rubin confessed that he fell in love with Manson’s “cherub face and sparkling eyes” when the accused murderer appeared on television.
Tuesday’s Child,
an underground paper in Los Angeles, named him Man of the Year and ran his picture with the word “hippie” as the caption. The Weathermen went a step further by lauding Manson as a heroic, acid-ripped street fighter who offed some “rich honky pigs.” “Dig it!” exclaimed Bernardine Dohm. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” The Weatherpeople proclaimed 1970 “the Year of the Fork” in Manson’s honor.

Dohrn’s remarks, which she later came to regret, were made at the drug-crazed Wargasm conference, otherwise known as the National War Council. Held in Flint, Michigan, over the Christmas holidays in 1969, this meeting was the Weathermen’s last public fling before dropping out of sight, a farewell to the shattered remains of SDS and the old Movement, and a final appeal for comrades to join their underground crusade. There was general agreement that armed struggle was necessary to smash the “imperialist motherfucker,” and much of the discussion focused on possible terrorist actions. Someone proposed attacking the Strategic Air Command base outside of Dayton, Ohio, to knock out an H-bomb. “It’s time to get down,” the Weather Bureau declared. “Any kind of action that fucks up the pig’s war and helps the people win is a good kind of action.”

At the close of the four-day conference the Weatherpeople dropped acid and danced all night long while Sly Stone sang “Thank you for letting me be myself” over and over again on the phonograph. A terpsichorean frenzy filled the room as everyone burst into Indian war whoops and spirited chants: “Women Power!” “Struggling Power!” “Red Army Power!” “Sirhan Sirhan Power!” “Charlie Manson Power!” Some had dressed in hippie garb, with headbands, beads, and capes, while others wore leather jackets and chains for the wargasm climax. “It was like a collective puberty rite,” one participant recalled. There was heavy laughing and heavy fucking until the wee hours of the morning, and then they all dispersed. Before long approximately one hundred of the Weather cadre were living clandestinely with the avowed objective of making war on the state.

10
What A Field Day For The Heat

PRISONER OF LSD

Timothy Leary was brimming with confidence as he strolled into an Orange County courtroom in February 1970. He predicted he would be acquitted of all charges stemming from his drug bust in Laguna Beach the previous winter. The trial lasted ten days. On the morning the case went to the jury, newspaper headlines in Orange County read, “
DRUG CRAZED HIPPIES SLAY MOTHER AND CHILDREN
.” An army medical officer named McDonald reported that a gang of longhairs descended upon his home and murdered his family, leaving the words “Acid is Groovy, Kill the Pigs” scrawled in blood on the wall. Several years later McDonald himself was convicted of the crime. Initially, however, it seemed like a replay of the Manson affair, and LSD got a lot of negative publicity once again.

It was a bad omen for Timothy Leary. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and Judge Byron K. McMillan sent him to jail immediately without appeal bond. Leary spent five weeks in solitary confinement awaiting sentence. During the interim a US district court in Houston gave him ten years for the Laredo bust in 1965. And then Judge McMillan, calling Leary a “nuisance to society,” added another ten to run consecutively with the federal penalty, which meant that Leary, at forty-nine years of age, faced a virtual life sentence.

Leary’s friends were outraged. It wasn’t just drugs, they charged, but Leary’s role as cynosure of the youth movement that incurred the wrath of two vindictive judges. In the activist spirit of the day legal defense committees sprang up on several campuses. Stoned-out hippies shook their heads in sympathy for Leary’s plight while Movement politicos decried yet another example of the establishment’s assault against the values of the younger generation. But the
LSD doctor wasn’t about to rock the boat. He gave no press conferences and refrained from making public declarations that might in any way be construed as inflammatory. At one point Leary was asked to take a commonly used prison personality test that he had helped to develop many years earlier while serving as a research psychologist at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland. His answers were purposely calculated to make him appear normal, docile, and conforming.

After a few months Leary was transferred to a minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo. He passed the time writing, doing yoga, working out in the yard, and generally keeping a low profile while his lawyers prepared to appeal his case before the Supreme Court. On one occasion Leary tried to prevent an altercation between a guard and an inmate; for this he was chastised in his cell by an SDS militant who claimed that confrontations between “the people” and “the pigs” were inevitable and that by stopping them Leary was only delaying the revolution. The High Priest (who stayed high thanks to a stash of LSD smuggled into prison) contended that a revolution in consciousness had already occurred. He was disturbed that acidheads were now “using violent tactics which were light-years removed from the accelerating and rapidly evolving realities of our space and time.”

But the acid militants had a long way to go before they posed a real threat to the governing class. This became apparent when a dynamite blast destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, killing three Weatherpeople who misconnected a wire while constructing an antipersonnel bomb. It was an ominous curtain raiser for a group of tripped-out urban guerrillas. Shortly thereafter the Weather Underground initiated a wave of dramatic bombings against corporate headquarters, government buildings, and military installations. They always chose symbolic targets that would attract a lot of attention, and nearly every incident was accompanied by an advance warning and an explanation so as to minimize the loss of life and raise the public consciousness. These attacks set the tone for similar actions by small bands of quasi-Weathermen operating in different parts of the country—the New Year’s Gang, the Proud Eagle Tribe, the Quartermoon Tribe, the Armed-Love Conspiracy. After a series of explosions on the West Coast a secret guerrilla unit issued a communiqué that stated, “As the beast falls, a new culture of life arises: our families and gardens, our music and acid and weed, their Bank of America burning to the ground.”

The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations cited 4,330 bombings in the US from January 1969 to April 1970—an average of more than nine a day. These attacks managed to annoy and embarrass the American government, but violence ultimately was not a winning strategy. Such incidents tarnished the image of the antiwar movement and alienated many mainstream Americans who might otherwise have supported the radical opposition. That was exactly what the Nixon White House wanted; hence the extensive use of provocateurs, who provided weapons and drugs to revolutionary cliques in an effort to discredit the New Left as a whole.

The invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970 and the subsequent killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State sparked another round of demonstrations throughout the US. Over five hundred colleges canceled classes and some shut down for the rest of the semester while four million people vented their rage and frustration by spilling into the streets. But the mass uproar quickly dissipated, for there was no organization to coordinate and sustain the protests. SDS had disintegrated and nothing emerged to replace it. Most activists found themselves suspended in a dizzy political space: between the dogmatic Marxist crazies and the militant acid crazies there was nowhere “left” to turn.

Time and time again the young radicals had put their bodies on the line, but the war kept grinding on. For all their efforts, it seemed like they were getting nowhere. (No one knew that President Nixon secretly kept American B-52S on full nuclear alert in the summer of 1969, but decided not to drop the big one on Hanoi because of what Kissinger described as “the hammer of antiwar pressure).” After years of frenetic struggle, Movement veterans were exhausted and demoralized. “Somewhere in the nightmare of failure and despair that gripped America in the late 1960s, “recalls Hunter Thompson,” the emphasis on beating the system by challenging it, by fighting it, gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to flee, or to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.”

In their wistful swan song, “Hey Jude,” the Beatles offered a musical palliative to a generation of sixties burnouts: “Take a sad song and make it better.” The breakup of the Beatles symbolized culturally what Kent State symbolized politically—the end of an era. What followed, according to rock critic Albert Goldman, was “the new depression.” Instead of rebellious lyrics there were brooding melodies
for those who needed a bridge over troubled waters. A number of rock festivals during the summer of 1970 sought to rekindle the Woodstock feeling, but they were little more than occasions for aimless milling and random violence, with most people turning on simply to turn off.