Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one. Federico Fellini
It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people should have this experience. Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary
LSD, 100 micrograms IM. Aldous Huxley, note to wife
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. Jerry Garcia
I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it. Harry Nilsson
I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it’s so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they’re afraid that there’s more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they’re afraid to go in, and they don’t want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don’t know. And that makes us a little out of their control. Ken Kesey, The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD
Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that LSD can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly. Robert Kennedy, 1966
LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I’m recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me. Alan Moore
LSD floods the brain ... It’s so potent that two gallons would be enough to take the entire US population on an acid trip. The Stoned Ages, H2 2015
This can be psychological dynamite. Fyfe Robertson
I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low grade, cartoony, tawdry carnival visions. There was a nightmarish mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered, so fragmented that it didn’t get in the way during what was the most unself-conscious period of my life. I was kind of on automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters – Mr Natural, Flaky Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, The Snoid, The Vulture Demonesses, Av’ n’ Gar, Shuman the Human, the Truckin’ guys, Devil Girl – all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. Amazing! I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me somewhere else. I wasn’t sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I’m not sure. I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. Robert Crumb
LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry ‘Wow!’ all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects. Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot, 1997
William Leonard Pickard: Together they [Crystal & William] began to assemble what would have been the world’s largest LSD lab … it was destroyed by the DEA. Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia: Underground LSD Palace, Vice 2012
Crystal: a variety of informational Youtube videos which have garnered much attention. ibid.
During the time when I was pitching the no-hitters at San Diego I didn’t see the hitters. All I could tell was that they was at the left side or the right side … The opposing team and my teammates they knew I was high but they didn’t know what I was high on. They didn’t see it but I had acid in me. No No a Dockumentary, Dock Ellis, 2014
The CIA has just authorised the purchase of ten kilograms of pure LSD25, enough to dose over half the population of the United States. Secret War on Drugs, History 2017
Over the next ten years the Agency doses a cross-section of the American public. ibid.
Psychedelia: the realm of ancient rituals, and a place where space and time bend for recreational drug users. LSD: the most infamous of all the hallucinogenic drugs once thought to be a magic bullet for curing mental disease become a catalyst for social change. Psychedelics are banned but the chemists don’t stop. Psychedelic Underworld, National Geographic 2017
LSD: Insight or Insanity? ibid. 1968 documentary
Psychedelics became a Schedule 1 drug. ibid.
[Nicholas] Sand: manufactured a 300 micro-gram hit of LSD said to have special karma: Orange Sunshine … ‘10 million doses per kilo x 14.’ ibid.
DMT trip lasts just 15 minutes. ibid.
LSD25, a legal substance introduced to Britain by America in 1965, began ripping through the Bohemian underground in 1966. Psychedelic Britannia, BBC 2017
And did the American government poison an entire French town to test a new LSD super-weapon? Conspiracy s1e10: Pearl Harbor Cover-Up, Channel 5 2015
Point-Saint-Esprit: In 1951 it witnessed a bizarre and terrifying event. With no warning 250 of its inhabitants were hit by an outbreak of madness. ibid.
One such weapon being considered was LSD. ibid.
‘Our aim is to transform American society. In the next five or ten years we expect between twenty and thirty million Americans will be using LSD regularly in their spiritual development and psychological growth. Reputations s8e7: Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned America On, BBC 2001
In the 1960s Timothy Leary brought psychedelic drugs out of the laboratories and on to the campuses of America. ibid.
Leary’s affairs and Marianne’s suicide were two more sorry episodes in the Leary family history. ibid.
Leary won [Harvard] approval for a research project exploring the potential benefits of the active ingredients in magic mushrooms … popular with undergraduate students. ibid.
Leary revelled in his role as psychedelic spokesman. ibid.
Pont-Saint-Esprit: The story of what happened here in August 1951 when an episode of mass hysteria broke out: over a period of several days people fell victim to wild hallucinations, intense stomach pains and sensations of being consumed by fire which led some to leap from windows. Five died and dozens more were hospitalised for weeks … I have a document supplied by an American writer … that it all could have been the result of a secret experiment by the CIA using the hallucinogenic drug LSD. Document: 23/08/2010: BBC Radio 4
In the late 1960s two outlaw chemists [Sand & Scully] were being hunted by the US government for making Orange Sunshine – the LSD that fuelled the psychedelic revolution. The Sunshine Makers, Netflix 2017
I wasn’t interested in personally making money. I thought that what we were doing was really important – trying to change the consciousness of the world in a positive way. ibid. Tim Scully
Dr Leary leased one of the houses on the property. We would have a population fluctuating between ten and twenty people working with hallucinogenic drugs, doing research and experimentation. ibid. Billy Hitchcock, Millbrook estate New York
The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug That Got Out of Control: LSD. ibid. Life magazine cover
It was too fucking much. The law said it’s no longer legal to make LSD so we finished it all up [1966]. ibid. Owsley Stanley
Orange Barrels called Sunshine was one of the most popular forms of LSD. The Festival that Rocked the World, Sky Arts 2019