Friday, Aug 29, 2008
It started causing trouble as a teen and has never really stopped. We can't name names, but its initials are LSD.
Apr 16, 2001 | A hundred and one years ago today, the first book of postage stamps was issued in the United States. Exactly 43 years after that, on a Friday afternoon -- April 16, 1943 -- Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world's first LSD trip.
We now know a lot. We know about the epiphanies, and the paranoia and the visions. We know that the CIA conducted secret LSD experiments on U.S. citizens, the military and its own agents for years. We know that there was briefly talk at the CIA of testing LSD on unsuspecting subway riders. We know that the public got its hands on the drug in the '60s and reconfigured it as a countercultural apparatus. We know that some users really did believe, at inopportune times, that they could fly. We also know LSD's dangers were often exaggerated by the government, and then the media.
We know acid's popularity waned in the late '70s and '80s, then picked up in the '90s. In 1993, 3.2 million Americans said they'd used it, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. We know it makes police and drug enforcement agents see red -- since 1981, they've busted only a handful of labs, and the majority of their arrests have just been middlemen.
Hofmann called LSD his "problem child." Soon enough, it was America's, and as with all problem children, we've yet to hone a good response.
On March 30, San Francisco artist Mark McCloud was acquitted of LSD charges in Kansas City, Mo. McCloud, 47, makes blotter art -- the prints found on sheets of LSD tabs -- minus the LSD, according to McCloud and a Kansas City jury.
Police seized 33,000 sheets of blotter paper, plus some framed samples, from McCloud's home, according to the Kansas City Star. He was accused of conspiring to distribute and distributing the drug near a school. But McCloud's lawyer pointed out that the blotter paper was untreated and therefore legal -- never having been impregnated with the d-lysergic acid diethylamide, it was like a pot pipe with no pot in it.
In the past, McCloud has joked that collecting blotter art is tricky, since it's tempting to eat it. A small, personal stash of the drug was found in his apartment during the raid. He says he hung out with Timothy Leary and tripped with '60s LSD pioneer Augustus Owsley Stanley III. McCloud likes acid. Nevertheless, given the well-established history of LSD hysteria -- recall, for example, the rumor that evil acidheads had wiped LSD on the buttons of pay phones across the country -- the prosecution argued with all the paranoia of a bad trip.
"Mark McCloud was the head of an LSD conspiracy that gained a new generation to the cause of LSD," assistant U.S. attorney Mike Oliver said. "It is a cause that creates in people the capacity to make life-threatening and life-stealing decisions."
When McCloud's reputation in the art world was trumpeted -- an editor from Paper magazine flew in to testify on the two-time National Endowment for the Arts grant winner's behalf -- Oliver turned it around, saying the artist used this reputation as a cover to disguise his countrywide distribution operations.
"This was about the circulation of blotter art as an art form," McCloud said, according to the story in the Star. "Thank God the people of Kansas City can tell the difference between art and LSD."
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Not so long ago, McCloud wasn't that keen on people telling the difference.
"Art is not a big enough word for it," the one-time art professor told the Los Angeles Times about his collection back in 1995. "It's magic."
But with a life sentence looming, "art" became the perfect word for it. McCloud had a decent lawyer, and the "magic" argument didn't surface once in the two-week trial. When it became clear that the prosecution could link him to the empty blotters but not the LSD, McCloud watched the case unravel.
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