Albion Dreaming (42 page)

The media hysteria surrounding Ecstasy culture and Acid House music was even more lurid than that which had attended the emergence of LSD in the Sixties. Tabloid newspapers ran with headlines such as: “Shoot these evil acid barons” “Ban acid cult that killed our girl” and “Hell of acid kids”. In their rush to judgement, the tabloids had ignored one crucial fact; the term “acid house” was not derived from the slang term for LSD, but referred to the style of music preferred by Ecstasy users. Its etymology in that context is vague but all commentators agreed that the acid in Acid House was not LSD.

Gradually Ecstasy and Acid House music took over the remnants
of the free festival scene. Monkey recalls the transition: “I took a mini sound system to Glastonbury in 1989 and played acid house music. We got a lot of complaints from the Gong, Hawkwind fans etc. A few people liked it and some had heard it before. We were on Es all that weekend. By 1989 several larger sound systems had taken to house music and were playing at free festivals. Also the acid house parties had moved outside and took over the free festivals.”
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Free festival and rave cultures, despite their differences, merged. This was a marriage of convenience, two tribes flung together by the outlaw status imposed on them by society and a shared liking for music, dance and drugs, especially LSD and Ecstasy. Most Ecstasy users were perfectly happy with the drug’s effects and didn’t want more. It was an easy drug to take at the weekend, have a fantastic time and be back at work on Monday no worse for wear. Nevertheless, suggesting that individuals seek out the drugs that provide the experience they need, some people quickly tired of Ecstasy and wanted something more meaningful.

Mark Harrison, one of the prime movers behind the radical dance music collective Spiral Tribe, summed up this sense of dissatisfaction, saying: “MDMA has its place, but once you’ve taken it a couple of times, its lessons are learned very quickly and it becomes unnecessary ... From what I’ve seen, I don’t think it has very much to show you, whereas I don’t think you can go wrong with LSD and magic mushrooms. They are much more important ... LSD and magic mushrooms have a much more creative influence, not just on raves, but on life, on one’s understanding of oneself and the world around.”
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Harrison’s shift in perspective from Ecstasy to LSD took place at the 1991 Longstock free festival. Harrison continues: “Up until that point I thought ley lines, solstices and all that mumbo-jumbo was just hot air, I had no belief in it. Suddenly all that changed.” Spiral Tribe had rediscovered the native British spirituality, the impetus behind the free festival movement that LSD had once revealed to the earlier hippie travellers.
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Spiral Tribe went on the road, a techno version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, providing relentless hard core techno for raves
in woods, quarries and empty buildings. Now dance and drug evangelists they turned people on to their wavelength using the Spiral method, defined as the “rewiring of neural circuits through the use of LSD-25, a reconditioning of consciousness as old notions dissolve in the acid surge”.
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LSD, now having an effect on the organisers of raves, also still exerted its influence over musicians. Bands such as Psychic TV and Coil had always hinted acid was their drug of choice and in 1991, Coil released their
Love’s Secret Domain
CD. The initials of the CD were, perhaps, a clue. One of the singles from the CD, “Windowpane”, was named after a powerful form of LSD that came on small gelatin squares.

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, gave police a slew of new powers. The right to free speech was eroded and Section five of the Act brought in laws criminalizing previously civil offences including the ability of police to prevent gatherings that featured “repetitive beats”. Clearly aimed at the Acid House rave, squat, road protest and other outdoor counter culture activities, free festivals became even scarcer and even more risky. This Act led to a series of primarily London based club nights springing up to cater for the vestiges of hippie culture. Megatripolis – the name speaks for itself – was begun in 1993 by psychedelic veteran Frasier Clark. Its festival-like ambience together with a series of guest speakers such as Allen Ginsberg, Terence McKenna, Howard Marks and Baba Ram Dass made it a popular venue for users of LSD and other psychedelics. Rave and dance music mixed with tribal drumming and light shows reminiscent of the Sixties. Although many just went for the dancing, others saw Megatripolis and others like it as part of a developing psychedelic movement.
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The cultural impact of Acid House spurred novelist Irvine Welsh to write a book of the same name, containing an eponymous story that played with ideas of how LSD can affect concepts of identity. Coco Bryce, the story’s protagonist, perhaps unwisely, takes two doses of LSD alone at night in the middle of an electrical storm. Cosmic serendipity steps in; Bryce is struck by lightning as an ambulance containing a pregnant woman passes by and his consciousness switches places with her newborn baby.
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That LSD was now beginning to appear in mainstream fiction in 1994
was testament to the depth to which it was embedded in British culture. And it was still massively popular, for instance in October 1995 over 41,000 LSD tablets were discovered by police under a street in Darwen, Lancashire.

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, was now retired and an elderly man. At the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Germany, he reflected on LSD and the steps in his life that led him to discover it. Age appeared to have mellowed his views about LSD and he now seemed to be espousing many ideas about LSD initially held by the counter culture.

Firstly he expounded the idea that LSD had not been synthesised by accident: “... considering the discovery of LSD in the context of other significant discoveries or our time in the medicinal and technical field, one might arrive at the notion that LSD did not come into the world accidentally, but was rather evoked in the scope of some higher plan.” Hofmann contrasted the discovery, in the 1940s, of the tranquillisers, which covered up psychic problems whereas LSD revealed them. Were these the comments of a scientist whose mental faculties were deserting him or of someone who now had no professional reputation to maintain and who could say exactly what he wanted about the substance he had discovered? Hofmann also referred to the “coincidence” of the effects of LSD being discovered at the same time as the atomic bomb was under development, echoing a belief held by many in the early counter culture.
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The advent of blotter acid, with its brightly coloured, culturally relevant images, caused misunderstanding among the authorities. The prevalence on blotters of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse generated the unsubstantiated belief that blotter manufacturers were somehow targeting children. They weren’t, but in the early Eighties, the authorities’ ignorance led to an LSD urban legend sweeping America and eventually taking root in Britain.
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In a typical example, a public institution such as a school, hospital or police station would receive a photocopied flyer warning that LSD “tattoos” are being given to local children. The police referred to blotters as a tattoo because they resembled
children’s stick-on tattoos, the New Jersey police issuing the statement, “... children may be susceptible to this type of cartoon stamp believing it a tattoo transfer.” The implication of these tales is that drug pushers are aggressively marketing these LSD laced tattoos to children in an attempt to get them hooked. The flyer often claims the LSD can be absorbed directly into a child’s skin merely by touch alone and that many children have already died from the tattoos.

Of course, the information on the flyers was rubbish; pushers were not marketing LSD to children and nor could LSD be easily absorbed through the skin from a blotter. LSD is not addictive and there is not one report of a child dying as the result of LSD use. Yet despite this, and despite some police forces refuting the hoax, the “acid tattoo” urban legend spread, promulgated by those who failed to heed official information or chose not to for their own ends. The legend gathered momentum as recipients of the flyers photocopied and distributed them to their friends, creating viral marketing for a product that did not exist. The acid tattoo urban legend joined the ranks of other LSD scare stories such as the students who took LSD and stared at the sun until they went blind.

“Peril of the LSD Cartoon Stamps” screamed the headline to an article in a November 1985 edition of tabloid newspaper the
Daily Star
. The legend had come to Britain! Joe Clancy faithfully reported how “stamps laced with LSD are being sold to schoolchildren – and just one lick could kill”. Clancy’s inability to separate fact from fiction was matched only by that of police at New Scotland Yard who warned: “The stamps are potentially lethal. A youngster could throw himself under a bus or off a building after taking this drug.”
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Just as it had in America, the urban legend took root in Britain and has circulated in one form or other ever since. In 1991 a major wave of the legend was seen with duplicated acid tattoo flyers being distributed in Merseyside, north Wales, Hampshire, Somerset and the West Midlands. One of the flyers was pinned to a notice-board at BICC Cables in Wrexham and claimed: “A young child could happen upon these tattoos and have a fatal trip.” Wrexham drug squad officer John Atkinson told the local paper:
“These are just stupid chain letters that cause nothing but alarm.” Other police officials weren’t as enlightened and in September 1991 West Midlands police actually issued a letter of their own, warning parents and schools about the evil tattoos.
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The acid tattoo urban legend once again demonstrated how little real awareness the police had about LSD culture. The story had been quashed several times but kept re-appearing, uncritically spread by the media and believed purely because it had appeared in print. In the new millennium, the paper flyer has been superseded by a hoax email message, ensuring the legend’s longevity as it mutates to keep up with changing forms of information distribution.

The acid tattoo scare was just one of a number of urban legends circulating in Britain. In 1997, Nestlé came up with an ingenious marketing strategy, selling the “holes” from the popular confectionary item Polo mints. The “holes” were small, round pieces of mint that vaguely resembled LSD microdots. Nestlé couldn’t possibly have imagined what would happen next. The
Daily Express
ran an article entitled “Hole Lot of Hassle”. “Teachers all over the country are alarmed by a new-look Polo mint. It’s not the mint with the hole that is worrying to them but the ‘hole from the mint’ produced by Nestlé Rowntree. The classroom menace is a small, white pill-shaped sweet, each marked with a P, L, or O. Teachers are confiscating hundreds of them fearing they might be drugs. One was convinced that the L on one ‘hole’ was short for LSD. So the new sweet has been added to toxicology identity lists.” Fortunately, this particular urban legend did not catch the public’s imagination and disappeared as quickly as it had arisen.
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LSD had heavily influenced art and design from the Sixties onwards, producing the characteristic multicoloured paisley and swirl patterns that were used in fashion, advertising and publishing. Now, LSD itself had become a vibrant form of folk art and exhibitions of sheets of blotter art began to appear. Individual sheets, free of LSD, obtained from the blotter manufacturers or specially designed purely as art became very popular and auction sites such as eBay offer many examples for sale to the collector.

The images printed on blotter LSD can be of anything, but often reflect the present culture or some aspect of LSD’s history. Albert
Hofmann, Walt Disney characters, film stars, music iconography, politicians and contemporary cultural images such as flying saucers, all have been used as LSD blotter images. “These are symbols of a secret society,” claims Mark McCloud, an American who has made it his life’s work to collect and chronicle the hundreds of designs produced. McCloud has been arrested, and his collection confiscated, several times by the Drug Enforcement Agency, but he only collects inert sheets of blotter, donated by LSD chemists and dealers.
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Blotter art collecting is now a rapidly growing market in the UK. One of the leading blotter art dealers is Paul Guest, who runs the BlotterArt.co.uk website. Sheets of blotter art signed by psychedelic luminaries such as Hofmann, Leary and psychedelic chemists Sasha and Ann Shulgin are highly collectable items. A sheet of blotter art signed by Albert Hofmann is currently valued in excess of £3000.
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As the millennium approached, people began to express serious doubts over the medical use of LSD in the Fifties and Sixties, when a group of former psychiatric patients announced they intended to seek compensation. Their action was driven by Wolverhampton MP, Ken Purchase who had taken an interest in claims that some of those who underwent LSD psychotherapy up to forty years earlier had subsequently suffered psychiatric problems as a result of their treatment.

“The more I looked into this, the more I was concerned about what happened to people,” said Purchase, who had compiled a dossier containing over seventy cases. The MP approached Alexander Harris solicitors, who took the case on. Any claim would be made against the health authority responsible for the hospital where the therapy took place. The crux of any claim would be for the claimants’ legal team to prove LSD was the cause of their problems and also that doctors were negligent in how they had administered the treatment.
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