by David Farber

"Them first kicks are a killer, Jim."

Among the cognoscenti in the history-of-the-1960s business, the fashion has been to denude the so-called Sixties counterculture of its bright feathers and to piece it well inside the puzzle of the (ever) burgeoning consumer culture of the twentieth century. Thomas Frank argues in his book The Conquest of Cool that "the counterculture may be best understood as a stage in the development of the values of the middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of subjectivity." Business guru of the 1950s, Ernest Dichter, has said "One of the basic problems of prosperity, then, is to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to . . . life is a moral and not an immoral impulse." Party hearty, dude, says the ad man to the hippie.

Characterizing the Sixties-era counterculture as nothing more than an exotic variant of twentieth-century Americans' hunting commodity without limits is not just a post hoc argument, reflective of the near mass global commercialization of youth lifestyles." During the 1960s, politicos from Tom Hayden to Michael Harrington bemoaned a lack of political vision and dismissed the counterculture as a way station for middle-class white youths between prosperous suburban childhood and pros prosperous corporate adulthood. In this version of the Sixties counterculture a paragraph or two narrating the Jefferson Airplane's easy back-and-forth between their roles as rock sirens extolling the wonders of the psychedelic experience in "White Rabbit" and as celebrity pitchmen for "White Levi Jeans" becomes a sneering sort of "enough said.''s

No doubt what some have called the counterculture was just a lifestyle up for sale.6 And, no doubt, even that most daring of countercultural consumer choices, the purchase of illegal drugs, fits--albeit, uneasily--into a picture of a cornmodifying nation nervously playing around with the boundaries of supermarket sweepstakes: WeB, dear, we can buy Hustler at the Rexall, Smirnoff at the Walgreens, Snoop Dog at the K-mart, a Walther at the Big Five, SuperLotto at the Giant, nipple rings at The Alley, and Marlboros at the Safeway, but I say let's make sure they never sell (fill in the blank. And yet, I will argue in the next few pages, reducing the Sixties counterculture to its commodified components, to its relatively indifferent politics and its separate peace with the free market, is to miss the point.

The illegal drugs of choice in the 1960s complicate the reductive exercise. In the '60s, white middle-class youths restocked the medicine chest. In particular, they added marijuana and LSD. What some of them took and why some of them took what they did challenged the meaning most Americans had uneasily attached to the intoxicated state. The difference between legally medicated, legally intoxicated, and illegally high did sometimes signify a new cultural orientation, even a cultural rebellion, in the United States both because some of the young white middle-class drug users insisted that it did and because legal and legally designated authorities ensured that it did. The way some people used some drugs in the Sixties era facilitated their purposeful exit from the rules and regulations that made up the culture they had been poised to inhabit.

The difficulty in separating countercultural aspirations from youth culture commodifications begins with the plausibility of individual will in the over-determined, structurally hegemonic capitalist universe of the late-twentieth-century United States. In the encapsulating base of market production and consumer-driven lifestyles, the boasts of pot-smoking, acid-dropping

heads that they really meant it and that they had something else in mind might seem a minor eddy in the tide of history that was soon enough brought back into the main current of the river of time. But if we consider culture not as a simple bruiting of relations of production but as an active arena in which categories of meaning are produced, tested, and renegotiated, then some actors in the life drama summed up as the Sixties counterculture have earned a re-hearing.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has argued that "culture is . . . a gamble played with nature. He means--to stretch and update the remark a bit--that old ways and means sometimes do and sometimes don't work acceptably in new situations. William Sewell, in his essay "A Theory of

Structure," clarifies this line of thought by arguing for "the polysemy of resources." He explains: "Any array of resources is capable of being interpreted in varying ways and, therefore, of empowering different actors and teaching different schema .... Agency, to put it differently, is the actor's capacity to reinterpret and mobilize an array of resources in terms of cultural [schemata]

other than those that initially constituted the array. In this essay, I will explore how some people used LSD (also commonly known as acid) as a "resource" that enabled them to hunt out, recombine, and produce cultural schemata that changed their trajectory on the social map of

space and time. I have left out the broad middle ground of LSD users who found their trips personally useful if not broadly life-altering. I have used this essay to tell the tale not of LSD use in general but of LSD use as an agent in the production of cultural reorientation. As a result, I have retold a kind of canonical tale of the struggle to place LSD use in a suitable social frame: medicine, sacrament, "hard kick," or illegal narcotic. My central purpose, herein, is to show how some took the medicine/illegal narcotic and used it as a sacrament/hard kick. Their story compels our attention, I think because it reminds us of the power not just of structure but of agency; not just of the spectacle but of the human spectacular.

To begin this compressed and selective narrative of getting high in the Sixties, I first offer a critical context: drug use was endemic in the United States by the mid-1960s, well before any Summer of Love. Americans lived in a society in which powerful substances were metabolized to change mental processes and bodily functions. To put it bluntly, by the early 1960s, Americans had officially decided that consciousness-changing drugs worked and that they should be massively deployed to change people's consciousness. Americans accepted an intoxicated state as either medically or recreationally necessary--at least for some Americans, some of the time. With very little challenge, doctors--with psychiatrists in the catbird seat--ran the heavy end of this enterprise. In 1965, doctors wrote 123 million prescriptions for tranquilizers and 24 million prescriptions for amphetamines.

Overwhelmingly, these drugs were taken by people considered normal functioning citizens. Doctors prescribed "uppers" and "downers" to help everyday people cope with their everyday dudes. Of course, many citizens abused these drugs in a manner not recommended by their physicians. In 1965, some three thousand Americans died from overdoses of their legally prescribed drugs (for a popular account of this problem, read the 1966 best-seller Valley of the Dolls)? Even more ubiquitous, though by the mid-1960s not recommended by doctors, was the use of tobacco. In 1960, roughly 80 per cent of men between eighteen and sixty-four used tobacco, most of them by smoking cigarettes, which was the most powerful means of introducing the user to tobacco's dangerous addictive agent, nicotine. Alcoholic beverages, to say the least, were equally commonplace. As the U.S. Brewers Foundation celebrated in the "conservative" 1950s: "In this friendly, freedom-loving land of ours--Beer belongs... Enjoy It! Whether mellowed out on Valium, hyped up on speed, socially drunk, or gently buzzed on nicotine, Americans in the 1960s had seemingly accepted the intoxicated state as part and parcel of the American way of life. I stress this somewhat obvious point because some politicians, historically ignorant pundits, and loads of contemporary youths seem to forget/not know/walk around this truth for a variety of reasons ranging from the mendacious to the ideological to the ignorant. It is how and why certain kinds of people use certain kinds of drugs that makes the 1960s "the Sixties. Given this larger history of medical or recreational intoxication, this short history aims to recuperate the intention early proponents of LSD use brought to their drug taking.

While no single factor figured the emergence of claims of an altered consciousness in the 1960s, LSD played a fundamental role. LSD was supposed to be just another profit-producing tool in this American pharmaceutical cornucopia, another means by which doctor's patient would get well on a fee-for-service basis. But LSD would not remain so confined. Instead, LSD tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York. and most every other burg on the planet.

D-Lysergic acid diethylamide was first used by the Swiss chemist Albert Holmann at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basle, Switzerland, on August 19, 1943. He was not trying to "turn on" a new generation; he was hoping to find a profitable analeptic that might, perhaps, cure migraines. Holmann dosed himself with his synthetic drug and discovered that it did little for headaches

but much for his head. He hallucinated. Sandoz had a problem: headache medicines had a clear market, but what was the market for a hallucinogenic drug? Since they had no clear answer, Sandoz executives gambled on Say's Law, the economic principle that holds that supply will create demand. Sandoz began shipping LSD to America's exploding population of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and hoped they'd find some use for it

Here another framing context in this wayward story of cultural change and rebellion needs to be summarized. Only after World War II did "mental health" and mental health practitioners become a fully legitimated, well-funded enterprise in the United States. The mental health business's takeoff point can be dated precisely). In 1946 Congress passed, and President Truman signed, the Mental Health Act, which, among other things, created the National Institute of Mental Health. In large part due to the solid performance of a small coterie of psychologically trained experts during World War II (their duties ranged from testing military inductees to patching together psychiatric battle casualties), both military and political elites had come to believe that psychiatry and the behavioral sciences should play a critical role in the liminal world of national security. In part due to federal funding, psychiatry boomed in post-World War II America. In 1940 only three thousand psychiatrists practiced in the United States; by 1956 over fifteen thousand were in business. Part of this scientizing of humans' internal mental processes

included medication. By the mid-1950s brand-name drugs such as Thorazine had become proven tools in the fight against mental illness and mental instability. A multitude of other pharmaceuticals were being tested for their utility in promoting a more productive, healthy citizenry. LSD was one of those drugs.

As legend and the historical record have it, one of the humans involved in government-funded research was a young writer named Ken Kesey. Kesey had volunteered for the study (as he later recounted: "I mean the first acid I took was Sandoz, given me by the federal government in a series of experiments... what now, Uncle? Don't give me that anti-American drug field bullshit: you turned me on . . . And it was beautiful"). Another of the early government-sponsored researchers into the properties of LSD was the Harvard University scientist Timothy Leary. A horde of other credentialed types, ranging from Hollywood therapists to CIA spooks, had also hooked into LSD research by the cusp of the 1950s and the 1960s.

By the early 1960s, mass media accounts praised LSD as a cure for psychological problems. Cary Grant told his fans that LSD administered under the supervision of his psychiatrist had helped him learn to love women more fully and truly. In 1963, My Self and I was published and widely reviewed; in it, the author, Constance Newland, detailed how LSD cured her frigidity?

California psychiatrists were parceling LSD out to writers, artists, actors, and movie directors to combat various creative blocks. Therapists were recommending it to one another as a means of self-inducing an extreme mental state akin to psychosis. The experience would enable doctors to better understand the emotions of their disturbed patients. LSD inventor, Albert Holmann, had

explained that the "creation of new remedies is the goal of a pharmaceutical chemist's research activity."" Seemingly, problems were being discovered for which LSD was a suitable remedy, and LSD was on its way to being another pharmaceutical in the doctor's kit bag. But the drug did not stay in the bag? Why and how LSD became party favor, sacrament, and mind blower of the masses is not an easy story to tell quickly. Albert Holmann states the obvious when he confesses: "It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science .... I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine--performers, painters, and writers--but not among people in general.'' LSD's breakout from the discourse and practice of "medical science" to alternative frames of meaning and use first occurred in the very realms to which LSD was narrowly prescribed: mental health test sites.

Dr. Timothy Leary played a critical role in the unleashing and reconceptualizing of LSD. And while Leary participated in the historical casting of his own comic persona--to the extent that by the late 1960s he came across as more of a huckster than a visionary--what he chose to do was extraordinary. By 1960, Leary had moved away from the academic expertise in personality testing that had brought him a Harvard professorship, pursuing instead a scientific investigation into the effects of mind-altering drugs, a research agenda that had begun in behavioral science circles in the immediate post-World War II years on both sides of the Atlantic. In early 1961, a young British writer named Michael Hollingshead, who'd been informed by Aldous Huxley of Leary's research into the personality-altering effects of psilocybin (a synthetic form of the psychotropic agent found in "magic mushrooms"), introduced LSD to the Harvard academic. Hollingshead possessed a gram of Sandoz LSD, Lot number H-00047. Sandoz had sent him the perfectly legal product after he wrote the company on the letterhead of a New York City hospital requesting a supply for "a series of bone-marrow experiments.

Leafy took LSD and came quickly to believe that the drug was not just another pharmaceutical product. And he was in a socially authorized, credentialed position to make his personal feelings matter both to elite and mass audiences. Leary would spend most of the 1960s as an "LSD prophet." His efforts to promote LSD use helped to frame the drug in the 1960s not as just another recreational intoxicant but as a psychedelic sacrament that would lead individuals to a higher consciousness.

Fellow researchers at Harvard began to publicize their LSD trips. In 1962 they noted that LSD "may produce dramatic changes in personality leading to unprecedented peace, sanity, and happiness." In a 1963 Harvard Review article entitled "The Politics of Consciousness Expansion," Leary (and his colleague Richard Alpert) argued: "The social situation in respect to consciousness-expanding drugs is very similar to that faced sixty years ago by those crackpot visionaries who were playing around with the horseless carriage. Of course, the automobile is external child's play as compared to the unleashing of cortical energy, but the social dilemma is similar." Leary's evocation of a "social dilemma" reveals the professor's knowledge of his predicament: What exactly is LSD for? Should it just be unleashed upon the people as the auto was? Who should control the new technology of the mind that Leary believed LSD presented? What would/could/should LSD do? Leary believed that LSD allowed individuals to test their realities. LSD allowed individuals to explore the inner workings of their minds. LSD-induced visions developed people's spiritual capacities. Leary's studies showed, he believed that LSD rearranged the thinking process" and allowed new "imprints to be made." LSD, in other words, through its reality-bending properties, challenged people to rethink social norms and life pat-

terns. In a 1961 experiment with prisoners at the Concord State Prison in Massachusetts, Leary claimed to have shown that convicts, under proper guidance--and the guidance, Leafy believed, was crucially important—had used psychedelics to stop the mental "game" that made them criminals.

LSD, Professor Leary decided, allowed people to rethink what they had become and reinvent themselves according to a deeper, truer, drug-produced set of understandings. From 1961 onward, Leafy would promote, in increasingly dramatic ways, the power of the LSD trip to change individual lives and, by extension, society. Despite Leary's prison experiments, he was not

primarily concerned with those deemed mentally ill, sociopathic, or at least neurotic, by themselves or by credentialed authorities. Instead, Leary's circle understood LSD as a life-enhancing, spiritual-inclining tool. Productive, happy people should use LSD to evolve.

Leafy and his associates proselytized for LSD as an agent of spiritual growth. To best achieve that growth, they experimented, controlling for what Leary called "set" and "setting." Their investigations into how best to structure an individual's LSD experience led them to a variety of esoterica. They searched out past masters of the spiritual quest, turning "Eastward" for guidance in using visionary experiences. In particular, they came to believe that the Tibetan Book of the Dead offered a remarkable guide to the LSD experience; its authors seemed to be working with the same visions that structured the LSD experience. In addition, inspired by the sacramental use of peyote by certain North American Indians, Leary and his associates attempted to ritualize the taking of LSD.

All of these efforts pointed LSD use away from the behaviorists' emphasis on clinical control and rational remediation and toward a far more pointed search for spiritual awareness. These nonscientific efforts and the Harvard group's increasing lack of interest in maintaining rigid control over the distribution of LSD resulted in the dismissal of Leary and the removal of the

Psychedelic Research Project from Harvard. What Leafy was doing—as Harvard's administrators proved with a vengeance--was not behavioral science, was not academically appropriate, and was not the business of America's premier university. Leary's use of LSD to explore inner space as a means to promote spiritual growth did not fit established cultural parameters.

Leary had begun by taking a product invented by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals to make a profit. He had experimented with it as a credentialed behavioral scientist under the auspices of Harvard University. By 1963, he was somewhere else: out of a job, out of Harvard, and searching for a new set of categories to fit the LSD experience within, be it secular spirituality, inner space, expanding consciousness, or "renewal by the discovery of new mysteries." He and a growing circle of fellow believers set up headquarters at Millbrook, a mansion in upstate New York. Leafy later said: "On this space colony we were attempting to create a new organism and a new dedication to life as art.''

Across the continent, at roughly the same time (as the canonical story of hallucinogenic history goes), another band of intrepid trippers explored what LSD was for. The writer Ken Kesey and his compatriots, the self-styled "Merry Pranksters," also believed that LSD--or, as they called it, acid-- should not be restricted to doctor's prescription for those deemed neurotic or be locked away as a pharmaceutical awaiting the discovery of an applicable illness. Unlike Leary's Harvard crowd, the Pranksters took acid not so much to explore inner space as to re-negotiate social space. Whereas the Leary circle of adepts believed that "set and setting" should be carefully controlled to create an individual LSD experience pointed toward maximum inner exploration, the Pranksters insisted on "freaking freely." They went out adventuring, seeing what the world looked like while tripping and--critically--what they could do in that world to make it comply or at least be complicitous with their acid vision.

In 1966, the Pranksters began a series of "Acid Tests" in the Bay area: public LSD parties. The Grateful Dead (first known as the Warlocks) was the house band. LSD was parceled out freely. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia described the scene as "thousands of people all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a roomful of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic, far out, beautiful magic. The Acid Tests were far from the Leafy-inspired, carefully guided and structured, individual and contemplative LSD experiences aimed at inner truths. At the tests--and at Kesey's compound at La Honda, California--costumes, electronic feedback devices, Day-Glo paint, film loops, and strobe lights were all geared toward maximizing psychic, sensual input, loading up the mind and pushing trips toward a vast collective experience. The Acid Tests pointed toward the creation of enclaves, social spaces in which visionaries played out new collective games. Instead of individuals competing for resources in a socially prescribed marketplace and then retreating into private households to consume goods with a tiny set of loved ones, the Pranksters took their acid visions as a sign of the immensely entertaining, challenging, and occasionally enlightening free spaces people could create if they cared to.

"Music was what gave us our energy and our drive, but it took the magic sacramental acid to give us the ideology which could direct that energy. Marijuana, which had come to us directly from black people and black musicians, in particular, had given us a start in this direction, but LSD opened the road into the future as wide as the sky and we were soaring! Acid blasted all the negativism and fear out of our bodies and gave us a vision we needed to go ahead, the rainbow vision which showed us how all people could live together in harmony and peace just as we were beginning to live with each other like that .... LSD brought everything into focus for the first time in our mixed-up lives .... [U]ntil we started eating all that acid we couldn't figure out what was happening--we knew things were all wrong the way they were but we didn't know how they could be different, which meant we really didn't know which way to move. LSD cleared all that up

Allen Cohen, who co-rounded the first underground psychedelic newspaper in 1966, the San Francisco Oracle, saw the role of LSD similarly. He described LSD as "the rocket engine of most of the social or creative tendencies that were emerging in the 19605. It sped up change by opening a direct pathway to the creative and mystical insights that visionaries, artists and saints have sought and experienced and communicated through the ages .... ' The availability of LSD, Cohen believed, meant that "The rebellion, insight and visionary experiences of the artists of the 505 would now come wholesale to anyone who wanted or needed to get out on the edges of the only frontier left in America--their own mind and their own senses.

The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco became a critical nexus for this acid possibility, in part because of its decades-old bohemian trajectory, in part because acid was more easily available there than anywhere else in the world (due to the efforts of the underground acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III and his compatriots). In 1965, Ron Thelin, the son of the man who managed the Woolworth's on Haight Street, dropped a sugar cube dosed with "Owsley" acid. In January I966, he opened up the Psychedelic Shop at 1535 Haight. He and his brother stocked "everything an acidhead might be interested id'--incense, esoteric books, Indian paisley prints, brass bells, dope pipes, posters, bamboo flutes--anything that moved the eye or touched the ear or tickled the body in an unexpected way. It was a "head shop.'' Other acid-driven enterprises ensued. The district became a place to try out the reality-bending trips acid offered

As LSD use rippled through the United States and Europe, authorities worried. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Sandoz, which had been the sole commercial supplier of LSD, decided to pull the plug in 1965. In an official letter released August 23, 1965, Sandoz stated: "All the evidence... carried out in the Sandoz research laboratories pointed to the important role this substance could play in neurological research and in psychiatry... [but] cases of LSD abuse have occurred .... The flood of requests for LSD . . . has now become uncontrollable. While a Czech lab would later take up commercial production for research authorized by various government bodies, LSD users became almost completely dependent on so-called underground chemists and dealers. As a result, "pure" LSD became essentially unavailable; "street" LSD often deliberately contained speed--some producers believed this was a useful aid in tripping--or impurities accidentally introduced in the underground production facilities. The massive turn from pharmaceutical to underground made LSD possession and distribution illegal.

Three major congressional hearings were held on LSD in 1966.3~ The hearings were driven by the increasing unauthorized use of LSD and the spectacular mass media coverage that use produced. The mass media began covering LSD use with a vengeance in early 1966. The expanded coverage was due, in large part, to doctors' reports of LSD-induced psychiatric breakdowns. As Time magazine reported in March 1966, "The disease is striking in beach side beatnik pads and in the dormitories of expensive prep schools; it has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus at Berkeley." The federal Food and Drug Administration contributed to the media attention by briefing reporters on LSD-induced breakdowns and violent episodes. Local police departments followed the FDA lead and told local reporters of similar incidents they had investigated. The Los Angeles police described such incidents as two young men chewing tree bark under the influence of LSD; a man screaming "I love you! I love you!" while kneeling in the Pacific Ocean; and two teenagers having sex in the hall of an apartment building. LAPD had arrested only four youths for LSD-related incidents in the first four months of 1966.

more alarming than death in a way. And that is the loss of all cultural values, the loss of feeling of right and wrong, of good and bad. These people lead a valueless life, without motivation, without ambition... they are decultured, lost to society, lost to themselves. Cohen asserted that most people who used LSD did not gain radical new insights into their own lives or society. They just became unproductive, amoral citizens, lost in empty dreams that led nowhere. National and local authorities overwhelmingly agreed that LSD use was dangerous both to individuals and to society. LSD was made illegal in 1966; possession and distribution were criminalized. LSD advocates' claim that acid opened the mind's eye to new possibilities was deemed delusional, or an outcome not worth the risks, by those who had the power to arrest and jail people.

The onslaught against LSD resulted in a counterattack by the nation's best-known advocate, Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary had been ambivalent for several years about the utility of LSD among unsupervised, spiritually disinclined individuals. He and his Millbrook colleagues were suspicious of the Merry Pranksters' promiscuous distribution of LSD. But in the face of the mass media, congressional, and legal attacks on LSD, Leary launched into LSD promotion. He met with the reigning mass media expert of the times, Marshall McLuhan, and brainstormed. McLuhan, according to Leary, suggested the following: "You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce--beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence and mystical romance." As spokesman, McLuhan continued, Leary must-always smile when photographed, never appear angry and radiate courage." Leary understood the risk: "I was pushed from scientific detachment and scholarly retirement into public opposition to the policies of the ruling regime." Soon after, Leary came up with an advertising slogan: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out," by which he meant, "Activate your neural and genetic equipment ... interact harmoniously with the world around you... [pursue] an active, selective and graceful process of detachment from involuntary or' unconscious commitments." Leary also saw, quickly enough, that "the press took it to mean 'get stoned and abandon all constructive activity. Many among the LSD-attuned scene were dismayed by Leary's huckstering, even if they understood why he was doing it. His use of a 1966 Playboy magazine interview to promote LSD use by claiming, among other absurdities, that women stoned on LSD might well have hundreds of orgasms during a single sexual encounter further distressed and angered LSD compatriots.

Taken together with the mass media attention and the government's decisions to criminalize LSD, Leary's promotions indicated that the meanings attached to LSD use were multiplying and were hotly contested. Federal and state authorities had weighed in. "Medical Science" was fighting for re-control. Learyites, Keseyites, Diggers, White Panthers, and other acid visionaries were no longer speaking to small circles of fellow travelers. Increasingly, a curious mass was hearing the LSD conversation refracted and spread through the mass media. Underground chemists were making acid, and street dealers were selling it around the country. LSD, as a cultural artifact, was in play. Its possible uses/abuses were by no means restricted to Leary's spiritual discourse, Kesey's notion of intrepid tripping, the Diggers' pursuit of hard kicks, or the musings of underground newspapers like the Oracle that promoted acid as an entryway to a new collective youth culture.

As the number of LSD users and the drug's cultural manifestations multiplied, some individuals struggled to build lives attuned to their acid visions. In the midst of nineteenth-century industrialization, Karl Marx had argued that consciousness emerged out of material conditions at the point of production (i.e., at the workplace). By the mid-twentieth century, LSD advocates--in sync with a host of ad men and corporate marketers--had turned that thought on its head. Consciousness, they would argue, came at the point of consumption. But those committed to turning their acid dreams into ongoing experience--not the majority of users--understood that the Marxian focus on production was dead-on. Even if the origin point for their cultural departure was not built from some factory floor epiphany, they understood that the reproduction of their acid-based identity would take more than staying high. They had to figure out how to live the vision acid proffered, and that took effort built on the material plane.

Jerry Rubin, a leading Berkeley antiwar activist in the mid-1960s, saw the potential political meaning of the turn toward illegal drug use in the late 1960s by young people. Talking about the criminalization of marijuana use (and marijuana was the mildest and most popular of the illegal highs sought in the sixties era), Rubin wrote: "Grass shows us that our lives, not our consciousness, are at stake. As pot-heads we came face to face with the real world of cops, jails, courts, trials, undercover narcs, paranoia and the war with our parents. An entire generation of flower-smokers has been turned into criminals .... Grass teaches us disrespect for the law and the courts. Rubin, a decent political tactician, was trying to increase his radical constituency by enfolding anyone who'd taken a toke into his cause. He and another "turned-on" political radical, Abbie Hoffman, teamed up in 1968 to form the Yippies in an attempt to bring drug-using "hippies" into the political movements of the era. The Yippies and the State, strange bedfellows, were claiming/making a counterculture, so to speak, out of a great many people who were, in effect, no more radical than speakeasy patrons in the 1920s or underage nicotine addicts in the 1990s.

Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day' shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes [of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before lst. The politics & ethics of ecstasy.... Tune in, turn on, drop dead? One wonders?'

By the late 1960s--and thereafter--getting high could result in jail time but did not necessarily mean you believed in peace and love. The Illegal Nation of drug takers was populated by a citizenry without one overarching higher purpose. Exotic drug use and such encoded accoutrements of the acid flash as tie-dyed clothes, strobe lights, and psychedelic posters had made their way into the great American shopping mall. Youth culture and the counter-culture blurred on network television shows and major label record promotions. Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead became iconic representations of just another variant of celebrityhood. The structures of the marketplace did consume much of the sublime, raw visions of alternative realities that LSD had flashed inside the minds of individuals. (Another essay could and should explain that just because the marketplace, in some ways, was able to consume aspects of the LSD experience does not mean that nothing significant happened, post-Sixties, as a result of that hegemonic incorporation, to that process we call the market or to us in our social roles as consumers and producers of that market; consider a close reading of Ben and Jerry, Outside magazine, the Santa Fe Flea market, and yesterday's pot luck at the Zen Center.)