If it ever did come down to the glittering LSD, I have no doubts that most of us who were born in the amazing fifties, in the US, would confess in three words: ‘I have inhaled’.
I was less than ‘fortunate’, because I had been missing from the local scene.....far, far away, busy with my small world in Dhaka, and its serene surroundings. What mattered was of course, what went around, at St. Gregory’s High, my alma mater. Or, the hustle and bustle of the by lanes that hissed through this quiet city. It was much, much later that I had begun to enjoy the company of the ‘inhalers’ (I like to call them believers).
This was but an act of devotion, with so many other survivors of the 1960s and early ’70s, whether they actually took the drug or not. You inhaled because you couldn’t fail to inhale. LSD — its aura, if not its substance — was a component of the air we all breathed. This hallucinogen infused the grandeur, and with it, our sense of worship... of musicians, philosophers, advertisers and activists!
When the goings were great, there seemed nothing ‘counter’ or hazy about this culture; it was all too prevalent. At the time there were as many head shops in New York, or Chicago or LA, as there are Starbucks today; acid rock had played in those darkened spaces to acid heads, as beams of black light caused DayGlo Op-Art images, to shimmer, fleetingly.
Typefaces had ballooned and swooped, melting across posters and album jackets in drug-induced, giddy spells and swoons!
Guess what....Lucy was in the sky with diamonds, the rock band Byrds were eight miles high, the other band called Magical Mystery Tour had always remained overbooked; Carlos Castaneda, the Mexican author, had played out his ‘shaman’ fantasies.
And, this era’s hallmark drug was championed with as much hallowed fervor as the era’s countercultural politics. Seemingly everyone else I knew, including myself, had endeavored to ingest that culture, even though it was not the drug itself; without realizing how strange that culture was, or would have been so!
It had seemed even more bizarre, with the passage of time. So while the death in the year 2008, of the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann (who is accredited with the synthesis, ingestion and discovery of the psychedelic effects of LSD), may have tempted some to resurrect tales of spiritual adventures under the influence, or to invoke the now familiar quip that, if you cannot remember the ’60s you weren’t there. And, there were other flashbacks — LSD-induced or not — that do need consideration!
One may recall Dr. Hofmann to be an exceedingly brilliant, young Swiss chemist who had worked for Sandoz Laboratories; his job included identifying and refining the medicinal properties of various plants. In 1943, after synthesizing a chemical derived from the ergot fungus found on rye kernels, he had noticed some unusual sensations. He appeared to have entered ‘a trance of a dreamlike state’ of fantasy, as he described it; when the doctor had closed his eyes, he saw an ‘uninterrupted stream of fantasies, in pictures!’
Perhaps, Dr, Hofmann’s eureka moment would obviously come, a few days later, when he would deliberately ingest a minute quantity (0.25 milligrams) of that synthesized chemical — lysergic acid diethylamide — and experience the world’s first ‘bad acid’ trip.
Its components had included a horrifying bicycle ride, the frenzied drinking of two liters of milk, a neighbor who appeared as a symbol of ‘a malevolent insidious witch’.
Later, an emergency call to the family doctor had found, there was nothing wrong, even though, in his autobiography Dr. Hofmann has mentioned that he had felt like ‘a demon had invaded me, and had taken possession of my body, mind and soul’.
However, the next day, everything had gleamed in a new, fresh light: The world, according to him, seemed as if IT had been freshly created.
For the LSD era, it described as something that reminded of a fairy tale... or fabulous, about this induction. The underworld has always ‘experienced’ the gravitation of epic heroes into their fold, to emerge, however scarred, and bearing new forms of wisdom.
That was also the LSD paradigm that descended into madness and emerged enlightened, seeing the world totally fresh!
Like others, the demonic threat too, happened to be extremely fearsome, to have engaged or witnessed by many an injured traveler, who had kept on dropping, by the wayside. As for the promised enlightenment, this had also raised concerns. We were all wary of the trappings — the surface style and attitude that had developed around a substance, whose promise was that....., it would help you and me, and all, to see the essence of things...behind a curtain that blocked our vision!
Chicago-based Nazarul Islam works with institutions providing assistance to Special Children Needs. He had worked as an educator in the UK and Australia also headed a British charity’s focus in Bangladesh and Nepal towards organizing skill development youth programs.