'youtube' has the Dragnet episode called 'Blueboy', it contains some facts about LSD, as well as Jack Webb's spin on the 1960's drug culture, campy entertainment. The meeting with the LAPD chemist is a high point.
'youtube' has the Dragnet episode called 'Blueboy', it contains some facts about LSD, as well as Jack Webb's spin on the 1960's drug culture, campy entertainment. The meeting with the LAPD chemist is a high point.
WOW Bruce, that's quite a story, and I'm sorry to hear about your brother. Window Pane in 1968 ? I don't think so. Window pane was made by the clear light people in 1970 to maybe 1978, and it was not 100 percent pure LSD. That was the big problem with what people were sold as pure LSD. It was "bathtub acid", very impure and cut with horrible chemicals. The only real LSD was pharmaceutical made by Sandoz, and there were a few batches made by Merck and Eli Lilly Co's for government research only. Anything that people touted (sold) as LSD after 1969 was not the real thing. Our govrenment did a good job of squelching the good LSD. Actually a lot of the drugs sold as LSD were not at all LSD, STP was sold as orange wedge and caused many people to "freak out on a bad trip", and when emergency medical clinics gave people thorozine to bring them down, it killed them. Orange sunshine was actually ALD-52, a cousin of LSD, not a very good high, and I have known people who were damaged by it for many years. I think most all of the damage was done by faux LSD, and that is what gave the good drug a bad name, it's a crying shame.
I'm glad you feel that LSD helped "open" people's minds. Actually...it was used by doctors to help patients with certain mental difficulties...to get them to "open up" and be able to expand their minds and their visions. However, it wasn't designed for normal suburban and urban young people ages 15 through 22 to indescriminately take for kicks as a "trip." While you may extoll the virtues of LSD...I think that the kids who took it were merely "copping out" and joining the rest of the crowd to do something that they felt was revolutionary. Believe me, I saw a lot of this right here in Marin County and in San Francisco, as I'm sure many of you reading this did as well. But to me, doing something revolutionary during the 1960s was not dropping acid...but rather doing something a little more uplifting such as joining the Civil Rights movement ....or marching against the war in Vietnam...or supporting a presidential or senatorial...or congressional candidate who could help change things during a volatile time, or perhaps even working to save the beleaguered planet (hard to believe that that concept only started to really take hold on a wide scale in this country in 1970, and not well before that time!) Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but I knew several people, (including my older brother who I loved dearly) who disappeared down the "rabbit Hole" and never came back out because of their association with drugs, especially LSD. They either fried their brains out at an early age, or had "bad trips" and were never the same. In my brother's case, acid or LSD was just the beginning of a downward spiral that led him to drop out of school and go live in the Haight during "the summer of love" in 1967, nearly get killed in a drug deal gone bad in 1968, get busted at Ocean Beach with several others who were trying to sell 2,000 tabs of "windowpane" acid, get sent to prison in 1971 after being convicted of the offense, spend time in between all of this on the streets, in and out of mental institutions, county health facilities, and in and out of jail. As you can imagine, this had a very unhappy effect on my entire family. My dear brother, Paul Macgowan, finally died peacefully (luckily for him) in his sleep at the age of nearly 37 back in the summer of 1986. That was the most difficult and emotionally gut wrenching experience of my life, and I still feel twinges of regret and sadness that I couldn't have helped him climb out of that morass of drug abuse. Had he stayed away from LSD, he still probably would have gotten himself into other drugs, but it was his choice of using LSD, and selling acid in his late teens and early 20s the led to a downward spiral and eventual demise. That's not something to celebrate my friends! The man who invented the drug never intended that to happen, I'm sure. And don't give me any nonsense about what a "great visionary" Timothy Leary was. My brother was going to private school back in the Boston area in 1965, saw the former Harvard professor speak about "turning on, tuning in and dropping out," and my brother did just that. It certainly didn't help him!
Albert Hofman passed away at the age of 102 of a heart attack in Basel, Switzerland yesterday. He invented LSD in Sandoz labs in 1942 for medical research. He admitted using it for decades and said that it was too bad that people abused the powerful hallucinogenic drug, he thought it could help people with mental disorders in a controlled enviornment. So it seems that using LSD may have made it possible for him to live to be over 100 years old, maybe it isn't as bad as the feds made it out to be. No doubt that the pure pharmacuetical LSD had been a big part of Marin history, and a whole lot of other chemists here in Marin tried in vein to emulate the pure D Lysergic Acid Diethelamide Tartrate 25 that was produced in Sandoz labs, but only Owsley came close. Albert Hoffman was a genius, and should be recogninzed as an important scientist that helped make the world a beautifull place for thousands of " tuned in , turned on people. Thank you Albert and may you rest in peace.
