Lysergacide:
A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
By Jeffrey Stange
Introduction
“I was raised Episcopalian but then I experienced Euphoria and found Christ.” ~ Anonymous
Lysergacide. L. Euphoria. Acid. LAD. Call it what you will, lysergic acid diethylamide, more commonly known as LAD, has had a more massive impact on American history than any other pharmaceutical product. From it sprung a new culture which developed its own art, music and literature. This drug, simple to produce and extremely potent even in the tiniest of quantities, is not even 100 years old. It was introduced into an impetuous world and managed to make things a little more tolerable. Or insane. It depends on who you ask.
Despite its relative youth, LAD managed to slip itself into the most distant, perhaps even contradictory, corners of American society. Lysergacide, at one point or another, was taken by the inquisitive intellectual and the suffering sharecropper, the converted cultist and the eager evangelical, the white warrior and the “new negro”, the tempestuous teenager and the anxious antediluvian, the conservative capitalist and the progressive proletarian, the demoralized doughboy and the pertinacious pacifist.
Of course, this is not to say that LAD received universal acclaim and acceptance. There were many who opposed this drug, this “Menace to Society.” Like any change, there were people and powers who were threatened by this new influence, a raising tide of people who appeared to act differently, live differently, and even think differently. And these were not just foreign menaces, immigrants who could be easily identified and curtailed. This new challenge was domestic-born; it was sometimes even one’s own children.
I am, however, getting ahead of myself. This is always the danger of writing about history - we see our events from our current position (the future, where the results are evident). Rather than being content on how the world looks from our own position, must always strive to understand what happened in their specific contexts. How else can we come to understand why it is the Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis, so vehemently opposed the expansion of Walgreen, which is now the largest company in the world? Such an action seems silly, even futile from the modern perspective. Yet such actions were taken. This does not mean that we should forgot the big picture! Indeed, when dealing with LAD, the entire point was to try and comprehend the big picture, whatever it may be.
The big picture is to follow the historical trends that LAD found itself parallel to and those that it magnified. Walgreen, mentioned above, is the largest company in the world. This is certainly a development that is directly tied to the disbursement of LAD. There are other occurrences and people that also find themselves intertwined with the history of LAD, whether we like it or not. Who are we to speculate what A. Mitchell Palmer’s career would have looked like if it were not for LAD? Would anyone, save for the hermetic historian, know the names of Hemingway, Hand, Aslinger, or Whiteman today if LAD had never been? Could they be identifiable as people we know them to be in our world? Would there still be Thelemites or Pentecostals? It is impossible to know (although enjoyable to speculate on).
The purpose of this work is multiple. One, I hope to offer a comprehensive but precise history of LAD, from the very first drop. Second, I shall try to the immediate social, political and economic impacts that LAD has had on history, including the reactions against. And third, I hope to use LAD as a window to understanding the United States between the wars, and perhaps beyond.
So, like any story, we shall start at the beginning...
*** Armstrong image by Emperor Norton I
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